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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An anthology of surprisingly good short stories, 28 May 1999
By A Customer
Let me preface this review by pointing out that I am a very unlikely owner of this type of book, mainly because I don't read much science fiction. In fact I can count the number of science fiction authors I've read in the past ten years on one hand. I went through a period in high school when I read a lot of Isaac Asimov, and I read a few Larry Niven novels. But other than that, the only science fiction I've been exposed to has come from Orson Scott Card, who has become one of my favorite authors in many genres. This is a collection of 18 stories by prominent science fiction authors in the 1980's. Before reading this book, I hadn't even heard of most of them. Honestly, I expected it to be similar to some of Isaac Asimov's anthologies, where there is usually one or two good stories and a whole lot of mediocre ones. But Card really surprised me. Out of 18 stories, two of them rank up there with some of my favorite short stories of all time (S.C. Syke's "Rockabye Baby" and Orson Scott Card's "The Fringe" -- both of which, ironically, dealt with severely handicapped characters). Almost all the others were also much better than I expected, especially George Martin's "Portraits of His Children", Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds", and John Crowley's "Snow". Unfortunately, as is the case in most anthologies, there were also two real stinkers in the book: Asimov's uninspired "Robot Dreams" and Lisa Goldstein's "Tourists". One the whole, however, I'd heartily recommend this book one to any fan of science fiction, but also to any open-minded reader who enjoys character-driven fiction with a twist of the imaginative. Orson Scott Card has also edited other anthologies, including FUTURE ON FIRE (1980 - a companion volume), TURNING HEARTS (1994), DRAGONS OF LIGHT (1980), and DRAGONS OF DARKNESS (1981). He also had a small role in co-editing BLACK MIST AND OTHER JAPANESE FUTURES with two other authors.
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