Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* This collection of stories from up-and-coming sf writers is diverse in terms of plot and setting, yet all share an emphasis on creating a distinct tone and style for their imagined worlds. There are stories that perch on the borderlands between fantasy and sf such as Samantha Mill's Strange Waters, where a woman tries to navigate her way back to her family on literal timestreams while dodging historical records of her own future. There are stories that explore the ways in which the human mind can be changed by an alternate reality such as Alice Sola Kim's One Hour, Every Seven Years, about a woman continually attempting to revise her own childhood on Venus, or Amal El-Mohtar's Madeleine, an aptly titled Proustian story about a woman who is transported into intense visions of her past by an experimental medication. There are also stories that present unique dystopias such as the mist-haunted New York in Jason Sanford's Toppers or the mysterious outside world in David Erik Nelson's In the Sharing Place. Equally wonderful stories by Jamie Wahls, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Suzanne Palmer, and many others make this a must-read for anyone interested in the latest and most exciting sf writing out there. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
ForeWord Magazine Reviews
From the moment Mary Shelley took up her pen and a dare, science fiction has inspired, challenged, and entertained audiences. That legacy is alive and thriving in Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman's curated collection The New Voices of Science Fiction. Covering the last five years of rising stars and new arrivals, the collection is a breath of fresh, interstellar air.
Familiar genre themes appear—sentient AI, genetic modifications, virtual reality—but challenge their expected courses. Rebecca Roanhorse's "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM)" relays discomfort surrounding cultural appropriation and authenticity as tourists pay for virtual vision quests from spirit guides, who themselves feel pressure to be "the right kind of Indian." A mutinous band of maintenance bots rebel against their ship's orders to a benevolent end in Suzanne Palmer's "The Secret Life of Bots," a collection standout with its touching, original portrayal of friendship and camaraderie.
Some stories serve as cautionary tales, such as the dangers of becoming so engrossed in technology that we neglect our humanity evinced in Lettie Prell's "The Need for Air." Climate change forces people into floating cities in Sam J. Miller's "Calved," where a desperate father attempts to repair his strained relationship with his teenage son amid cultural tensions. Whether transfused through a post-apocalyptic New York City or a brittle, arctic planet, their warnings are prescient.
Though their far-flung worlds and speculative technologies are captivating, the stories are most striking in their quiet moments, where the universality of the human experience is allowed to breathe across time and space. Amal El-Mohtar's "Madeleine" portrays a young woman taking part in an experimental drug trial, but the true tension lies in her internal gridlock at the intersection of love and grief. Such moments provide a poignant stillness in the collection's breakneck sweep across the stars, tying even the most disparate of realms together with a common thread.
The New Voices of Science Fiction portends a bright future for science fiction and the universe at large.
© 2019 Foreword Magazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved.Kirkus Reviews
Stories from "a chorus of storytellers who are up to the task of capturing the essence of our world's present and future," according to co-editor Rajaniemi (Summerland, 2018, etc.). Anthologies are a tricky thing. When done well, a great anthology has both gripping short stories and a compelling overarching motif. At the very least, an anthology needs one or the other. Invisible Planets, an outstanding selection of Chinese short science fiction in translation edited by Ken Liu, hit both marks, and although the quality of stories in last year's A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, was deeply uneven, its concept of collecting near-future tales of marginalized people was thought-provoking. However, this collection, edited by Rajaniemi and Weisman (co-editor: The Unicorn Anthology, 2019, etc.), has a bland, vague theme—"new voices," although many were first published years ago—and exactly one impressive story. Alice Sola Kim, one of the few bright spots in the LaValle and Adams anthology, stands out again here. Like her previous story, "Now Wait for This Week," "One Hour, Every Seven Years" plays with the idea of time repeating and doubling back on itself, as a time-travel researcher struggles to save her 9-year-old self from her classmates' torment. The rest of the stories range from forgettable to genuinely terrible. Suzanne Palmer's "The Secret Life of Bots" takes the what-if-robots-were-sentient idea and does nothing especially new or interesting with it. Jamie Walhs' virtual-reality story, "Utopia, LOL?" is so full of cringe-y online-speak that one can feel it becoming dated as one reads it—"Charlie looks all skeptical_fry.pic." Yikes. The absolute nadir of the 20 stories is "Calved" by Sam J. Miller, in which a man struggles to connect with his son; the tale ends with an idiotically regressive twist. A useless sci-fi collection with a paltry 1-in-20 success rate. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Rajaniemi and Weisman have curated 20 stories from the last five years, by newer writers who have already started to make their names known for their prose. Sarah Pinsker's "Our Lady of the Open Road" is the genesis of Pinsker's first novel,
Publishers Weekly Reviews
In the introduction to this superlative anthology, Weisman (