There are a range of authors, with a heavy weighting towards the antipodes. There seems to be reasonable gender balance in the stories, not quite 40% women authors by my count which isn’t world’s best but still a lot better than many anthologies. Each story has a little author bio attached – it did feel like a diverse range of authors had been included.<\/p>\n
Can I get out of the way early that I loved the stories contained within this book. At the launch, my appetite had been whetted by three strong readings by:<\/p>\n
Given the strength of the readings, I was anticipating a good book. However, I was surprised at the strength of all the stories. While obviously I enjoyed some stories more than others, there wasn’t one that I didn’t enjoy on some level. I’ve mentioned a couple of stories specifically below that were particularly noteworthy or had some element I wanted to comment on.<\/p>\n
The opening story is Murmer<\/em> by Calie Voorhis<\/a>. I read one of Calie’s stories recently in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine issue #51<\/a> and really liked it. This was quite a different style of story exploring the nomadic lifestyle of intergalactic diplomacy and the desire to put down roots, in this case quite literally.<\/p>\n Beautiful<\/em>\u00a0by Cat Sparks<\/a> was memorable not just for the quality of the writing but also as one of the few stories that was completely human-less.<\/p>\n I enjoyed the world created in\u00a0Rains of la Strange <\/em>by Robert N Stephenson<\/a>. It had the feel of a larger universe only glimpsed – I liked the clockwork style of the protagonist and the action scenes felt well written to me. I was a little ambivalent about the ending, the pursuit of “real” emotions by emotionless\/controlled mechanical beings is a little overdone in modern sci-fi. But despite my hesitation at those kinds of story lines, I still liked this tale.<\/p>\n Continuity<\/em>\u00a0by Damon Shaw<\/a> had an interesting plot with a good interplay between a ship AI and what remains of the human crew.<\/p>\n Poor Man’s Travel<\/em>\u00a0by Patty Jansen<\/a> was a good story about mind swapping to escape the boredom of interstellar travel and the perils of offers that are too good to be true. I liked the ending of this one. And Ms Jansen was kind enough to sign my copy of the book at the launch.<\/p>\n I was partial to\u00a0By Any Other Name<\/em>\u00a0by Kim Westwood<\/a>. I won’t give too much away about the story, but the slow reveal was well executed and the nature of the inhabitants of the world described was good. I’m looking forward to reading Ms Westwood’s latest work (The Courier’s New Bicycle<\/em>) soon.<\/p>\n Space Girl Blues<\/em>\u00a0by Brendan Duffy<\/a> was another slow reveal story, exploring some interesting possibilities in cloning and warfare. The ending to this story appealed to me.<\/p>\n Messiah on the Rock <\/em>by Jason Nahrung<\/a>. Space marines fighting space vampires. Enough said.<\/p>\n As well as the stories mentioned above, there was also:<\/p>\n This is one of the better anthologies that I’ve read in some time. Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n I also reviewed this book on Goodreads.\u00a0View all my reviews<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n <\/p>Hi,\n Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[93,14,15],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-keith-stevenson","tag-review","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n