by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2009
This is the best collection of SF short stories I've read in the last five years. I heartily recommend it if you are looking for stories that explore how new ideas and concepts affect how people will live. I would be very happy if one of my stories were included in the next edition of this.
I was delighted when I started reading this, and less delighted when I did research on it to see if there would be more books like this coming along. It turns out that Mike Ashley is a story-collecting buff, not a science fiction buff, so we are unlikely to see a sequel. Too bad.
That said, this is a collection of stories that break out of the mainstream story lines that so thickly clog most science fiction venues -- be they print, graphic novel, movie or whatever. This makes me so happy to see this collection! In my mind, this is the sort of stuff that should be clogging mainstream science fiction.
Here are some technofiction thoughts on the varioius stories.
A fun little story, half about how we might be living in a Matrix-like universe (which suffers a small glitch), and half a spoof of the UK university science social system. The ending was a disappointment as the writer gave into "the end of the world as we know it" cleche, but up until then it was original and a lot fun.
A neat exploration of how nanotechnology can be used to create intelligent appliances, and those can change how we live. A nice mind-opening piece.
A scientist uses a time viewer (a time machine that allows you to look, but not travel) to search for proof that Jesus really existed as the Bible describes him, and is frustrated by quantum uncertainty. The concept of using a time machine to search for Jesus is not new, but this time viewer approach was novel enough that I enjoyed the story.
The imagery in this story was fun and familiar, but the story itself was so contrived that I couldn't keep my belief suspended. The heart of the story is that the Earth is not actually round, but has a time-fold running through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The problem that kept bothering me was that if this world always had this "Pacific Anomaly" as the story calls it, it wouldn't be an anomaly of that world, it would be a given! Globes would not represent this world accurately, and the edges of Mercator projection maps would have "Beyond here be dragons", or some such, on the east and west edges where they fold into the Pacific. And if this geometry was a given, then using the huge airplane to "solve it" makes no sense. There are other similar contrivances all through this story.
Another exploration of nanotech becoming intelligent appliances with some cyberintelligence mixed in. It was as fun as the Dish story, and came out quite differently. I like it when that happens.
This one was a disappointment. It was contrived and predictable -- a Star Trekish technology level that mixed romance with save the universe. Ho-hum.
This one was neat and had a lot of foresight in it, especially given when it was written, which is just as multimedia was becoming widely distributed throughout the computer gaming world. It's about living in VR, and does a credible job of describing both the VR experience and the motivations of the people experiencing it.
This story writes about one of my favorite themes: slower-than-lightspeed (STL) space travel -- space travel without "warp speed" or any other faster-than-lightspeed (FTL) contrivance. The writer mixes in some nanotechnology and the outcome was a good read.
Another good STL universe story. This time the space travelers have to get back on the road after having an interstellar collision. The engineering problem they face is magnificently described. I loved it! I found the characterizations a bit too cranky given the crisis they were facing -- they were sniping at each other like this was a committee trying to organize an office Christmas Party. But other than that, I loved it.
See my story Pressure Point (in The Honeycomb Comet) to see something similar that I have written.
This one did not come across as well as I hoped. The environment was nicely alien, but the mystery ended up being too subtle for my taste -- the bad guy's nefarious scheme depended on too much precise timing. This is the same problem that really bothered me at the end of the 2009 Angels and Demons movie.
This one was an eye-opener! It was amazing to see that one hundred years of change in writing science fiction stories brought more change to the English language used to tell the story than it did to the story line being told!
The start was the same as the 1999 Blair Witch movie -- we discover a journal, but not the person who wrote it. From there it proceeds into a 1956 Forbidden Planet/Shakespeare's Tempest story where a handsome adventurer encounters a coldly analytical chief scientist with a beautiful, cloistered, naive daughter who wants to see the world. Add a comic relief character and voila!
This one is much like my story Searching For Angels (in Tips for Tailoring Spacetime Fabric Volume 2). It was spooky for me to read because the voice I wrote my story in was so similar to the voice this story was written in.
In this story two scientists work together to build a time/dimension traveling machine and use it to pop out of our universe and meet our universe's creator. All-in-all, it was a good story. It had some neat aliens and some nice time/dimension traveling concepts.
The weakest part of the story was not taking into account that if a creator of our universe lives outside of it, and looks upon it, he or she has to be a 4D/2T creature, not a 3D/1T creature as we are. And as a result that creator sees all of time as well as all of space. This point was missed by the writer, which screws up the ending for me. Other than that, it was an interesting story.
A story of alien parasite infestation. It was a nicely queezy story, with some credible-acting characters in it. My story The Witch of Devil's Rock (in Tips for Tailoring Spacetime Fabric Vol. 2)is about a similar theme.
This is the first Harlan Ellison story I have encountered in print. I have heard a lot about him. Now I have experienced his writing, and I feel I haven't missed much. I don't like the altered-mind style of writing. To me, what comes out is writing words for word's sake, and not something that is taking me into some new level of thinking. It got so annoying I stopped about a third of the way through. Ah Well... now I have learned about Harlan Ellison.
This was an interesting exploration of nanotechnology, virtual reality and resurrection all mixed together. I found the writing style was hard slogging through -- too much effort on describing things that are hard to describe -- but the story underneath the style explored some of the interesting differences that this mix of technologies can make in how humans live. I liked that part.
This story is another interesting exploration of mixing virtual reality and nanotechnology. This one centers on using VR to crew star-exploring ships and nanotechnology to build bodies and other necessary parts when the destination is reached. It's a first encounter with aliens story, but nicely different in perspective, both of the people and of the aliens they encounter. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
A curious story about time travel. The begining is quite contrived. There are bad guys and they keep the heroine from going back in time to fix her problem, but she can still go forward. But as the story evolves it gets better. The environment the author builds is fun and interesting, and by the end I was enjoying the story.
This one did not go down easy, which was disappointing.
First off, it was oversized. It's an end of the universe story, and an end which is now a bit outdated because it is the Big Crunch, which no longer looks like a real possibility.
Second, the writer spends a whole lot of his creative energy describing scenes which are allegory -- which means they just don't make any difference, but they take a lot of time for a reader to slog through.
Finally, the crux of the story is a doctrinal dispute about what information to pass through to the universe that comes after the Big Crunch. Doctrinal disputing isn't a particularly new concept, so, in the end, ho-hum.
This was a nice, light, end-of-collection piece, and it did its job nicely. The tale concerns heavily evolved people who now get most of their energy from photosynthesis. They decide to celebrate an old holiday a traditional way, and eat something, and eating is something they've never done before! All-in-all, it came out fun.
All-in-all, a good mix of stories. Ashley has done a good job of picking stories that go beyond conventional science fiction themes. I'd sure like to see more of this kind of writing.
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