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Often reads like an op-ed rant in the Daily Telegraph or Spectator. Odd claims that playing with Lego as an adult leads to frequenting adult champagne hostess bars and strip clubs, which I associate more with CEOs and investment bankers (but maybe they are like teenagers).
good collection
I think I only skipped one story and abandoned another - otherwise a good collection.
Sex transitions are easy in some stories, and it's made clear that sex and reproduction are separate. This leads to some intergenerational relationships that would make even Gentry Lee blush.
An anthology more than half a century in the making, The Last Dangerous Visions is the third and final installment …
I bought this to see if ParSec magazine could replace Interzone (after 2 lifetime subs then a 6 issue sub, I now find Interzone boring). The stories all seemed to be well written and quality stories, but mostly uninteresting. I finished 4 stories, and particularly enjoyed the Ken MacLeod and Gwyneth Jones contributions, which isn't surprising. The rest were fantasy/horror/adjacent genres which I am not interested in.
The once-utopian Chasm City -a doomed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet- has been overrun by a virus known …
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a policeman of sorts, and one of the best. His force is Panoply, and his …
The first short story collection by "ONE OF SCIENCE FICTION'S BEST AND MOST AMBITIOUS NOVELISTS"(SFX).With eight short stories and novellas, …
An okay collection - varied stories with the author's tongue in cheek style.
Great book. A fascinating look at how the concept of "Europe" was invented, and how most ideas of European exceptionalism before the colonial period are wrong (the relevant parts of Europe were on the periphery of where the real action was happening)
not a great collection, but easy to read, all in the author's usual humourous tone
It's obvious that I don't get on with modern short SF. I skipped about ⅔rds of the stories because they were so uninteresting. Modern short SF has become so bloated, long, earthbound, and domestic - often just ordinary fiction or fantasy with a minor science sheen. There was very little here that I could lose myself in.
I had read a few stories in other anthologies. Possibly the only stories that stuck in my mind were the ones by Alastair Reynolds and Pat Cardigan, plus the one that felt like a mash up of Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow (neither of whom were present).
The world is awash in civic decay, military coups and revolutionary governments, bands of believers …
Great story. The UK is suffering from Government Austerity and has become dominated by far right Christian groups who will kill anyone who is not white, Christian, heterosexual, and married to the person they are having sex with, whilst demanding tithes from everyone not in their group. The police side with the violent Christians so they act with impunity. Landlords are causing homelessness by evicting residents. WWIII is about to kick off, unusually started by an internal dispute within the EEC (the predecessor to the EU, not the Russia-dominated organisation). A research institute, about to be closed down, creates a biological culture (a virus?) that helps people become more empathetic whilst not letting them forget anything.
