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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).

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.

A fun collection - no real stand-out stories but I didn't skip any either.

Interesting story - imagine some source of large amounts of water buried under the crust which, fo reasons no one understands, suddenly bursts through to the surface and floods the Earth under about a kilometer of water. People get together, countries break down, oligarchs build special ships, and other people build rafts.
Some parts were too fantastic to be believable. In London, they only worry about sewage pollution when Greenwich flood barrier is overwhelmed, whereas we in the real UK suffer from sewage pollution after light rain due to lack of investment. I also thought the Middle East would be nuked long before it happens in the book, as each religion fights over Jerusalem.

a good collection (unlike more modern anthologies) - I only skipped a few stories. The film "Arrival" is based on one of the stories in here.

More like a fantasy collection, with spaceships replacing horses or ships. Some of the swords are replaced with energy weapons, but not all of them. I read the first story, started the second, then gave up. People somehow live in mid-2nd millennium conditions after the collapse of a galactic empire but still have spaceships left over by an alien civilisation.

Easy to read, as long as you can put up with the stereotypes. This was written when men were supermen and women were hysterical.

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