4.0 out of 5 stars
Australian SF Reader, July 31, 2007
This review is from: Wonder Years: The Ten Best Stories from a Decade Past (Paperback)
Wonder Years : The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead - Damien Broderick
Wonder Years : The Man Who Walks Away Behind the Eyes - Terry Dowling
Wonder Years : Land's End - Leanne Frahm
Wonder Years : World According to Kipling (A Plain Tale from the Hills) - Geoffrey Maloney
Wonder Years : The Fruits of Habit - Christopher Kenworthy
Wonder Years : White Time - Margo Lanagan
Wonder Years : Lucent Carbon - Russell Blackford
Wonder Years : Imagining Ajax - Simon Brown
Wonder Years : Jackie Chan - Chris Gregory
Wonder Years : Niagara Falling - Jack Dann and Janeen Webb
Wonder Years : A Map of the Mines of Barnath - Sean Williams
Wonder Years : Absolute Uncertainty - Lucy Sussex
Peter McNamara has chosen his favorite stories. An interesting collection, and I guess I wouldn't argue to much with Lucent Carbon, or The Man That Walks Away Behind the Eyes (both of which I have read before) and Imagining Ajax.
Artificial intelligence and poetry, a strange combination, but it is made to work well in the last mentioned story there.
Robots, time travel, the fall of a galactic empire, and a couple of bears. Some of it is supposed to be amusing, presumably, but doesn't quite get there, for me. Not quite enough one way or the other, perhaps.
3.5 out of 5
A man subject to alien punishment by way of personality erasure, tries a mental technique to do them.
4.5 out of 5
Australia decides it has had enough of how it has been treated, and decides to slough off the rubbish it is coated with.
4 out of 5
A secret agent man, Kipling era, investigates something that appears to be a cross between a Frankenstein experiment and something out of Hellboy.
He meets a woman, tries to find out what makes her tick, as well.
3.5 out of 5
Brain illness treatments give the recipients strange reality altering powers. In this case the woman goes a bit Swamp Thing.
3 out of 5
Work experience student gets into some tricky time travel.
3.5 out of 5
A cyberpunk tale of a future on the border between posthumanity and immortality, where the new generation is genetically modified by longevity and healthy, but strains of AIDS and other terrors inflict the old, enough for them to destructively scan and upload their personalities. A woman attends her friend and boss as he goes through this.
4.5 out of 5
A poetry professor is brought in to help with the intellectual development of a new artificial intelligence.
5 out of 5
A depressed rant, taking it out on Jackie is a bit weird.
2.5 out of 5
A couple must reconcile their new marriage relationship, both virtually and in reality, as well as their business situation.
3.5 out of 5
A man goes looking for his brother, but all is definitely nowhere even close to being remotely anything like it seems in a really large, very strange underground structure.
3.5 out of 5
Students in the future have a project to judge Heisenberg and decide on his fate.
3 out of 5
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