21st Century Science Fiction (SF) - David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Eds.) ****

I saw this 2013 collection of twenty-first century SF short stories recommended as a way of discovering authors that are new to the reader - and it worked really well for me. It's an impressively meaty collection running to 576 pages featuring 34 stories ranging in length from a Nature sub-1,000 words short short to a novella.

Inevitably there were a couple of stories I didn't enjoy - but in a collection of this size, two was an impressively small miss list. For me Finisterra by David Moles never engaged me, while A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel by Yoon Ha Lee simply didn't work as a story - but those aside, while there was a mix of quality and style, every other story had something going for it.

If I were to pick out one favourite it was Cory Doctorow's novella Chicken Little which closes the book - I thought Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was excellent, and the contribution here reminded me that here's a writer that I want to revisit very soon. Chicken Little takes what could almost be considered a science fiction cliché - brains in a jar - and makes something remarkable of it by combining it with runaway capitalism and some genuinely interesting characters.

That's just one example of many I could pick out. What's excellent is I now have a whole catalogue of names I've not touched before - I'd read books by just three of the selection on offer - to explore further. And even if you don't use it in this way as a sampler, it remains an impressively solid collection of science fiction stories (especially good value on Kindle).

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Search This Blog