Customer Reviews

Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (Mammoth Book of S.)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unlike a previous customer review of the Extreme Science Fiction anthology, I'm writing this review after reading the entire book, every story, all 562 pages. First I'd like to address the fact that most of the stories have been previously published. (Although there are actually three new stories original to this book.) I've been reading science fiction on and off for nearly four decades and have been a subscriber to F&SF for almost all of that time, and there were only one or two of these stories I had read before. In a couple of cases the editor explains that the stories had never been reprinted since their original publication. Anyway, I did not find that aspect of the book to be a problem. In fact, I appreciated the editor's sequencing of the stories from least to most extreme (except for the final one). He possibly could not have done that so well without drawing from prepublished material, including several tales from the early days of the genre.

What I DID have difficulty with was the relatively uninteresting nature of the majority of the stories. There were too many that were either baffling - i.e., the author's striving to write an "out there" tale meant they left understandability behind - or densely scientific at the expense of good storytelling. To illustrate the latter problem, here is a quote from "Wang's Carpets" by Greg Egan: "Catalytic sites strewn along the sides of each unit trapped the radicals in place, long enough for new bonds to form between them. Some simple sugars were incorporated straight into the polymer as they were created..." There's a LOT of stuff like that throughout the various stories. Too much Scientific American, not enough FICTION in this SF.

I also found the degree of overlap or redundancy between stories to be a problem. Two separate stories had almost identical plots, and there was also a bad editing choice to put two stories back to back with each having a secondary character named Elena, each the lover of the main character.

There were really only two stories in this entire collection I liked a lot, the entries by Theodore Sturgeon and James Patrick Kelley. I was also grateful to the book for steering me clear of any writing by Pat Cadigan in the future - the Cadigan story is so awful I know I will never want to read anything by her ever again. Otherwise, the Extreme Science Fiction anthology was one of the least worthwhile books I've read this year.

I was looking forward to this as cutting-edge SF. However, despite the title "New Generation Far-Future SF," 11 of the 19 stories in this anthology are pre-2000. I dislike the experience of being halfway through something and realizing I've read it before, so I'm moving this from my high-priority-read to my whenever-I-get-around-to-it pile.

These days I grow so tired of never ending space opera, post-holocaust and save-the-world fantasy that it is a delight to see a collection of stories that talk about other kinds of science speculations.

This book is a nice collection of stories exploring other ideas.

Because the ideas are new, and because the writers sometimes get wrapped up in over-explaining their own ideas, the reading is hard slogging in some stories--the Harlan Ellison story was the worst offender in this way. But these writers were trying hard to bring us readers new ideas, and that I liked a lot, a whole lot.

Here are my thoughts on the individual stories.

Anomalies -- Gregory Benford (1999)

A fun little story, half about how we might be living in a Matrix-like universe (which suffers a small glitch), and half a spoof of the UK university science social system. The ending was a disappointment as the writer gave into "the end of the world as we know it" cleche, but up until then it was original and a lot fun.


The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon -- Paul Di Filippo (2003)

A neat exploration of how nanotechnology can be used to create intelligent appliances, and those can change how we live. A nice mind-opening piece.


Crucifix Variations -- Lawrence Person (1998)

A scientist uses a time viewer (a time machine that allows you to look, but not travel) to search for proof that Jesus really existed as the Bible describes him, and is frustrated by quantum uncertainty. The concept of using a time machine to search for Jesus is not new, but this time viewer approach was novel enough that I enjoyed the story.


Pacific Mystery -- Stephen Baxter (2006)

The imagery in this story was fun and familiar, but the story itself was so contrived that I couldn't keep my belief suspended. The heart of the story is that the Earth is not actually round, but has a time-fold running through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The problem that kept bothering me was that if this world always had this "Pacific Anomaly" as the story calls it, it wouldn't be an anomaly of that world, it would be a given! Globes would not represent this world accurately, and the edges of Mercator projection maps would have "Beyond here be dragons", or some such, on the east and west edges where they fold into the Pacific. And if this geometry was a given, then using the huge airplane to "solve it" makes no sense. There are other similar contrivances all through this story.


Flowers from Alice -- Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (2003)

Another exploration of nanotech becoming intelligent appliances with some cyberintelligence mixed in. It was as fun as the Dish story, and came out quite differently. I like it when that happens.


Merlin's Gun -- Alastair Reynolds (2000)

This one was a disappointment. It was contrived and predictable -- a Star Trekish technology level that mixed romance with save the universe. Ho-hum.


Death in the Promised Land -- Pat Cadigan (1995)

This one was neat and had a lot of foresight in it, especially given when it was written, which is just as multimedia was becoming widely distributed throughout the computer gaming world. It's about living in VR, and does a credible job of describing both the VR experience and the motivations of the people experiencing it.


The Long Chase -- Geoffrey A. Landis (2002)

This story writes about one of my favorite themes: slower-than-lightspeed (STL) space travel -- space travel without "warp speed" or any other faster-than-lightspeed (FTL) contrivance. The writer mixes in some nanotechnology and the outcome was a good read.


Waterworld -- Stephen L. Gillett and Jerry Oltion (1994)

Another good STL universe story. This time the space travelers have to get back on the road after having an interstellar collision. The engineering problem they face is magnificently described. I loved it! I found the characterizations a bit too cranky given the crisis they were facing -- they were sniping at each other like this was a committee trying to organize an office Christmas Party. But other than that, I loved it.


Hoop-of-Benzene -- Robert Reed (2006)

This one did not come across as well as I hoped. The environment was nicely alien, but the mystery ended up being too subtle for my taste -- the bad guy's nefarious scheme depended on too much precise timing. This is the same problem that really bothered me at the end of the 2009 Angels and Demons movie.


The New Humans -- B. Vallance (1909)

This one was an eye-opener! It was amazing to see that one hundred years of change in writing science fiction stories brought more change to the English language used to tell the story than it did to the story line being told!

The start was the same as the 1999 Blair Witch movie -- we discover a journal, but not the person who wrote it. From there it proceeds into a 1956 Forbidden Planet/Shakespeare's Tempest story where a handsome adventurer encounters a coldly analytical chief scientist with a beautiful, cloistered, naive daughter who wants to see the world. Add a comic relief character and voila!


The Creator -- Clifford D. Simak (1935)

This one is much like my story Searching For Angels (in Tips for Tailoring Spacetime Fabric Volume 2). It was spooky for me to read because the voice I wrote my story in was so similar to the voice this story was written in.

In this story two scientists work together to build a time/dimension traveling machine and use it to pop out of our universe and meet our universe's creator. All-in-all, it was a good story. It had some neat aliens and some nice time/dimension traveling concepts.

The weakest part of the story was not taking into account that if a creator of our universe lives outside of it, and looks upon it, he or she has to be a 4D/2T creature, not a 3D/1T creature as we are. And as a result that creator sees all of time as well as all of space. This point was missed by the writer, which screws up the ending for me. Other than that, it was an interesting story.


The Girl Had Guts -- Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

A story of alien parasite infestation. It was a nicely queezy story, with some credible-acting characters in it.


The Region Between -- Harlan Ellison (1969)

This is the first Harlan Ellison story I have encountered in print. I have heard a lot about him. Now I have experienced his writing, and I feel I haven't missed much. I don't like the altered-mind style of writing. To me, what comes out is writing words for word's sake, and not something that is taking me into some new level of thinking. It got so annoying I stopped about a third of the way through. Ah Well... now I have learned about Harlan Ellison.


The Days of Solomon Gursky -- Ian McDonald (1998)

This was an interesting exploration of nanotechnology, virtual reality and resurrection all mixed together. I found the writing style was hard slogging through--too much effort on describing things that are hard to describe--but the story underneath the style explored some of the interesting differences that this mix of technologies can make in how humans live. I liked that part.


Wang's Carpets -- Greg Egan (1995)

This story is another interesting exploration of mixing virtual reality and nanotechnology. This one centers on using VR to crew star-exploring ships and nanotechnology to build bodies and other necessary parts when the destination is reached. It's a first encounter with aliens story, but nicely different in perspective, both of the people and of the aliens they encounter. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

So, all-in-all, I was really happy to find this book. My biggest disappointment with it is that Rick Ashley is a story collecting buff, not a science fiction buff, so a sequel is unlikely, that's too bad.

I came to find others like this book, and now find myself writing a review because it's just that good. For fans of stories that push the envelope, go into the extreme future, and take you to other worlds, this is for you! This is my new all time favorite book of short sci-fi stories, and I've read plenty of compilations. In Gardner Dozois' annual compilations "best of xxxx (year)" I often find myself wishing for something a little more edgy, a little more hard, a little more extreme. This book delivers that. "Merlin's Gun" is simply an amazing story, and my favorite of them all.

Some of the stories in this book are great examples of extreme science fiction. They are well written, well thought out, and just a blast to read. Others, though, are not at all. They are contrived, boring, and don't really have anything in their subject matter that could be considered 'extreme.' If you can find it cheap, I'd still suggest buying it.

What with the decline and fall of SF/Fantasy into squishy science, if any, I was amazed and delighted by this book of solid SF. The stories are not like anything I've read in the last 50 years. Don't worry about mammothness. Books like this offer rare delights. Unless you like playing with sex and death in vampire stories.

Extreme Science Fiction is an anthology any sci-fi buff won't want to put down. Normally us sci-fi freaks have to be fairly forgiving with stories in this genre, but not this time :) I found even some of the more outlandish stories had enough of the correct conceptual "hard facts" to make them plausible, if not entirely believable.
In short, if you have a good imagination, can think outside the "square" etc. and want to taken to far flung levels of existence in a real universe of future science bordering on magic by an author who loves this genre and has really done his research meticulously... This is an anthology you MUST try

These days, the "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section in the bookstores (and here, in metaphor) is way to much fantasy and too little science fiction. So my rating of this collection may be affected by my nostalgia for the time when that section was less popular but was mostly SF.

Anyway, I enjoyed all of the stories except the one by Harlan Ellison -- I have never understood the reverence many give his writing. The ideas may not have been extreme, as other reviewers have pointed out, but they were all interesting, and all were science fiction.

If you like edgy SF or are interested in what lies near the horizons of SF thinking, then give this one a whirl. It's far from encycolpedic, just one editors view, but the selections are reasonable and stretch far beyond your standard space opera's.

The stories are engaging, by known authors and the science (where it's used) is effective and good enough to suspend belief for the duration.

Ashley has done very well here, putting together an excellent collection of stories (3.95 average), even including one he has resurrected from 1909. Nice work indeed on his extreme them.


Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Extreme Science Fiction - Mike Ashley
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Anomalies - Gregory Benford
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : ...And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon - Paul Di Filippo
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Crucifixion Variations - Lawrence Person
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Pacific Mystery - Stephen Baxter
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Flowers from Alice - Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Merlin's Gun - Alastair Reynolds
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Death in the Promised Land - Pat Cadigan
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Long Chase - Geoffrey A. Landis
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Waterworld - Stephen L. Gillett and Jerry Oltion
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Hoop-of-Benzene - Robert Reed
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The New Humans - B. Vallance
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Creator - Clifford D. Simak
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Girl Had Guts - Theodore Sturgeon
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Region Beyond - Harlan Ellison
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : The Days of Solomon Gursky - Ian McDonald
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Wang's Carpets - Greg Egan
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Undone - James Patrick Kelly
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Judgement Engine - Greg Bear
Mammoth Book of Extreme SF : Stuffing - Jerry Oltion


Error observation religion.

4 out of 5


Needy girlfriend and too much combined crap a very bad situation.

4 out of 5


Schrodinger's Christ.

4 out of 5


Alternate nazi monster zeppelin expedition shows Pacific that time forgot lives up to hyperbole.

4 out of 5


Post-human furniture with passions.

4 out of 5


Black hole shooter crucial in prevention of stellar duo's stupendous collapse and civilisation sterilisation.

4.5 out of 5


Digital deadly doings.

3.5 out of 5


Soldier's marathon space race conversion.

4 out of 5


Resupply when dry is a problem in O2 atmosphere fry.

4 out of 5


Planet nuking and nicking plotter captain finally undone by ritual.

4 out of 5


Malleable bunch not fond of miscegenation.

3.5 out of 5


Puny humans to save a universe or three.

2.5 out of 5


New planet exploratory team has basically a face-hugger episode, without the large monster phase.

4 out of 5


Fomenting anti-Succubus insurrection.

3.5 out of 5


Dead rebellion expansion.

4.5 out of 5


A conservative transhuman polis sets out to search for alien life on other planets. The planet they find surprises them in a bit way, as the carpetlike inhabitants seem to grow by a pattern described by an obscure mathematician. Their nature allows them to perform as a Turing machine, and they are running one pretty impressive simulation.

A story you might just have to read a bit of twice.

4 out of 5


Future escape a problem of many dimensions.

4.5 out of 5


Large scale libraries need some old fashioned teaching.

3.5 out of 5


Solar sustenance people's xmas dinner experiment ends with big farty-poo.

4 out of 5