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Life Beyond Us (SF) - Ed. Julie Nováková et al ***

This is one of those attempts we quite often see from academic sources to combine science fiction and popular science education. It's probably one of the better examples in terms of the contents, and yet as is often the case, it falls between two stools, not being ideal for either purpose. What we have is 27 SF stories, each accompanied by a science essay, inspired by the fiction - all with an astrobiology theme.

Let's take the fiction first. A fair number of the stories do feel amateurish - the kind of thing scientists turn out in their spare time. Often this comes across in wooden dialogue or a lengthy series of descriptive statements from authors who've clearly not got the hang of 'show, don't tell'. There are enough good ones to make it worth reading, though - I really enjoyed Lisa Jenny Kris's Ranya's Crash (translated from German by Simone Heller), which features intelligent dragonflies, for example, while Heavy Lies by Rich Larson was imaginative in featuring eusocial intelligent aliens. But about half of the stories were a bit of a chore to get through and eminently forgettable.

Then there are the essays. These felt too academic for a popular science audience - some of them seemed to have more references than content. Again, there were some interesting contributions, though on looking back I've been unable to pick one out as outstanding - but more so than the stories there was a lot of overlap between the essays. It would have been better, perhaps, to have a single editorial voice, commenting on each story and the associated science, rather than the approach here with many different authors and text that quite frequently had very little to do with the story, but rather dealt with the author's area of interest.

Overall, there were a couple of problems. Firstly, it's far too long. You might think it's impossible to say you can have too many short stories in a collection, but apart from getting decidedly heavy on the wrists (in a hardback with an unpleasantly slimy feeling cover), the great thing about a normal SF story collection is the variety. Although the authors do their best, limiting the book to astrobiology topics means the stories aren't varied enough - and too many of the stories felt like padding. It would have been better to be a lot more critical in cutting down the content to, say, 15 excellent stories.

Secondly, it may be me, but I find the alternation between fiction and non-fiction really irritating. I'd rather read a set of stories or a popular science book (ideally with the same author(s) throughout - a set of essays from many different authors never pulls together as a proper book), but not a mishmash of the two. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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