Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction [Paperback]

Let's highlight the excellent stories here. The three longest stories include two novellas and a long novelette. The weakest novella, surprisingly enough, is Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint," which is a gripping enough story, about a man given $100,000 -- if he can keep it while the government and ordinary people track him with the help of the media. It's a thrilling read, but it fails due to overly strident politics and a certain lack of plausibility. The other novella is Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone." This is beautifully written, line by line, but it is way too long (as Sarrantonio all but admits in his introduction). Still, it's a very pleasing read, about a woman, studying insects in college, who goes to London to recuperate from a rape, and finds that she has developed a curious sort of alter ego with a strange power. The story is absorbing throughout, but the thematic payout and the telegraphed twist ending don't really reward 20,000-plus words. Dan Simmons' long opening novelette, "On K2 With Kanakaredes," is a satisfying story of mountain climbing with an inscrutable alien guest. Simmons both tells a gripping mountain adventure, and tells an interesting SF story about contact with aliens.

Perhaps the strangest story in the book is the closing story, Neal Barrett, Jr.'s "Rhido Wars." It's difficult to precisely describe -- I'm not sure I understand it anyway. It seems to be the story of a group of humans under the control of some baboons, and a war between the main character's "tribe" and another "tribe," featuring "rhidos." The main focus is on the main character, a young man in charge of his four younger siblings. His love for his brothers and especially his sister, and his fatalistic acceptance of their position, are very well portrayed, in a bleak and moving tale.

I was also taken with a couple of more satirical pieces. James Patrick Kelly's brief "Unique Visitors" takes a look at a person awakened sometime in the future, and his slow realization of his condition. Paul Di Filippo is at his most all out viciously satirical in "Weeping Walls," about a near future businesswoman who markets the title products to help people deal with their grief fashionably. Also fine are "The Building," another of Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent essays in "anthropological" SF, with a subtle moral point; and Thomas M. Disch's "In Xanadu," an extended riff on death and cyberspace, built on references to Coleridge's poem. Another interesting take on death and the afterlife is P.D. Cacek's "Belief," which familiarly enough shows a soldier sent to the after-life to continue fighting -- but who he is fighting is a well-sprung surprise. And, finally, Stephen Baxter's "In the Un-Black" is a nearly incomprehensible but still evocative tale of the changes humans have inflected on themselves to fight their extended war with the Xeelee.

So, even if Redshift doesn't live up to the editor's hype, and even if it features quite a few stories that aren't really up to snuff, it is a long book, and the best stories in it are certainly worth the price of the book, and worth your reading attention.

My favorite stories in this anthology are 'In the Un-Black' by Stephen Baxter and 'Cleopatra Brimstone' by Elizabeth Hand. Hand's story is a novella about a student studying entomology who discovers she has supernatural powers while integrating the London goth scene. The student, who was a victim of a rape earlier in the story, takes her revenge on men by somehow turning them into butterflies. It's a haunting story that stays in mind long after it's over.

Baxter's contribution to the volume is set in his familiar Xeelee universe. This story concerns a race of drones who work the entirety of their short lives in slavery to a master race in the hopes that they can win passage out of their imprisonment. The story centers around two drones who flaunt their master's rules and fall in love. Less hard science than most of Baxter's pieces, which is why I enjoyed it so much.

Other good stories come from Dan Simmons, Harry Turtledove, P.D. Cacek, Kit Reed, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, David Morrell, and Rudy Rucker & John Shirley. There were only two stories in the collection that didn't work for me, those by Gene Wolfe and Neal Barrett, Jr. (particularly disappointing since both authors are among my personal favorites).

On the whole this was an enjoyable anthology. Nearly 550 pages of fiction from the biggest names in SF. This is a SF-lovers dream come true. It's a fat collection with good stories from favorite authors. Recommended.