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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great read, but not as good as the first., February 22, 2008
1) iCity by Paul DiFilippo: People live in cities that can change formation over night.
2) The Space Crawl Blues by Kay Kenyon: Now there is QT, quantum teleportation. People can be instantly teleported to their destination of choice. But when people re-emerge on the other side, are they still the same?
3) The Line of Dichotomy by Chris Roberson: A team invades a bacteria farm in hopes of rescuing those trapped within.
4) Fifty Dinosaurs by Robert Reed: Kelvin has just turned twenty-one. The last thing he recalls is being at a bar. Now he finds himself in the company of a T-rex that can talk.
5) Mason's Rats: Black Rat by Neal Asher: Farmer Mason trains the rats on his farm.
6) Blood Bonds by Brenda Cooper: One twin sister lives in a virt bed due to an act of terrorism. The other twin goes to Mars in hopes of earning enough to help her crippled sister get surgery.
7) The Eyes of God by Peter Watts: Before traveling each person must go through a check point that reads minds.
8) Sunworld by Eric Brown: Yarrek has graduated and he parents finally tell him the truth about himself. Afterward, he is sent to Icefast to enter the office of the Inquisitor General.
9) Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal: Sly may look like the other chimps, but he is much more.
10) Shining Armor by Dominic Green: A mining company prepares to invade the city. Their work will poison the water supply of the village. It is time to awaken the ancient Guardian.
11) Book, Theatre, & Wheel by Karl Schroeder: Lady Genevieve Romanal is under investigation to see if she is unlawfully educating her people or is a heretic.
12) Mathralon by David Louis Edelman: This mostly reads like a type of manual. It tells how to mine a mineral, Mathralon. This is followed by a few pages about the isolated people who do the actual mining.
13) Mason's Rats: Autotractor by Neal Asher: It is time, once again, for Farmer Mason to activate the Autotractor and send it out. The machine terminates vermin (except for his rat employees), ploughs, cultivates, and seeds the fields. Trouble arrives in the form of a suit from a health and safety agency. They want to exterminate all of Mason's rats.
14) Modem Timines, a Jerry Cornelius story by Michael Moorcock: In this story you will follow Jerry Cornelius (and sometimes see Mo). A bit of erotica is found in this tale as well.
15) Point of Contact by Dan Abnett: When a space craft lands and First Contact begins, will it be a historical event? Will our lives change for the better or for the worse? Or will we not really care?
*** Not as many good stories as the first volume, but this is still worth your time. None of the stories within are more entertaining than the two about a farmer named Mason and his intelligent rats. Like me, you will end this book with at least one new name in mind to search previous titles from. All-on-all, you will find this collection of stories a terrific way to spend a rainy night. There is simply no way to feel lonely when you are busy sampling the various treats from some of today's best BL sci-fi authors. ***
Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Original Anthology That Doesn't Disappoint, April 4, 2009
George Mann's Solaris anthology series is one of several recent attempts to revive market for original, unthemed anthologies. I don't know about the quality of the other series or even the first volume of this one, but, based on this installment, I hope Mann's series continues. None of the stories are bad or boring. All, with one possible exception, are truly science fiction, and three stories are noteworthy.
Extrapolate the instant feedback of popularity polls, add "sensate matter" which can be reprogrammed to assume any configuration, and you have the sport of "competitive urban planning" which is the subject of Paul Di Filippo's humorous "iCity". The hero of Kay Kenyon's "The Space Crawl Blues" is facing, like many a science fiction protagonist before him, technological obsolescence. Personal teleportation is on the brink of rendering starship pilots like him unnecessary. Teleportation converts the body to mere information, but whom do you trust to edit that information and based on what criteria?
Chris Roberson's "Line of Dichotomy" is part of his alternate history imagining the past and present dominated by the empires of Mexica and the Middle Kingdom. Here their struggle comes to Fire Star, our Mars. It's a classic story of a group desperately fleeing pursuit across hostile terrain. The unresolved ending tries too hard for something else, but, apart from that, the story was enjoyable. Robert Reed's "Fifty Dinosaurs" really only has three dinosaurs, some giant microbes, and one human. Their response to their peculiar origin has a charming, surreal quality to it.
Many of these stories mix humor and action. More on the humor side are two installments in Neal Asher's Mason's Rats series. Here the English farmer and the intelligent, tool-using rats on his farm have to battle pushy salesmen and bureaucrats in "Mason's Rats: Black Rat" and "Mason's Rats: Autotractor". The "Evil Robot Monkey" of Mary Robinette Kowal resents his freak status as neither monkey nor human and just wants to be left to his pottery. Martial arts, a giant mech fighting machine, a classic western plot, and a wry take on fathers, sons, and their expectations of each other make up Dominic Green's "Shining Armor". I'm not a fan of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series, but I did like the latest installment, "Modem Times". Maybe it caught me in the right mood or maybe I've just read enough to know what to expect - and what I'm not going to get - from this incarnation of the Eternal Champion. If you like the Cornelius series, you'll probably enjoy Jerry's quest for the lost spirit of the 60s even more than I did.
Slick and pleasant enough and not overstaying their welcome - but not sticking in the mind either - are Brenda Cooper's "Blood Bonds" about twins, one still living a normal life in the flesh and the other paralyzed and only living in a virtual reality, getting embroiled in a rebellion of artificial intelligences. Eric Brown's "Sunworld" is a rather standard tale of a young man in a medieval-like setting, complete with a theocracy, being initiated in a startling truth. The nature of that truth is somewhat interesting but not really that exceptional.
Karl Schroeder's "Book, Theatre, and Wheel" is the one oddity of the book. Arguably, it's not even science fiction. Set in Italy shortly after the Black Death, its hero, accompanying a member of the Inquisition, investigates a merchant woman with uncanny business success and some possibly subversive social ideas. The story revolves around a real idea, Cicero's Theatre of the Memory, though Schroeder, I think, extrapolates an improbable degree of efficacy for it. Still there is a science fictional air about the story, indeed it rather reminded me of some Robert Anton Wilson, with talk of using Cicero's memory training to reinvent ourselves and civilization.
Peter Watts' "The Eye of God" is one of the anthology's highlights. Set in a near future of ever more sophisticated brain scanning and hacking via electromagnetic radiation, it's narrator, on the way to the funeral of a possibly pedophilic priest, contemplates the dark desires of his own mind - and how they will soon be revealed to all.
The other exceptional stories of the book, David Louis Edelman's "Mathralon" and David Abnett's "Point of No Contact", both take two old science fiction cliches and use them to clever effect in stories that break rules of fiction. The first has something to say about economic forces becoming as mysterious and inhuman as natural forces with its account of the trade activity around the fictional element mathralon. Abnett's tale is about the startling insignificance of alien contact.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Free SF Reader, April 12, 2008
A considerable improvement on last year's anthology, average 3.43 compared to 3.34, with no disappointments.
An anthology of solid, mainstream science fiction (well, apart from Moorcock's bit part novella, but Jerry Cornelius ain't exactly a stranger).
A brief introduction explains the editorial reasoning and aspirations for this series, and tells us that there will be a third volume, so nice work.
No standout stories, with Kenyon and Roberson's the best.
On the whole, pretty well done for original work, with a nice balance of stories from serious to odd to light.
Solaris 2 : iCity - Paul Di Filippo
Solaris 2 : The Space Crawl Blues - Kay Kenyon
Solaris 2 : The Line of Dichotomy - Chris Roberson
Solaris 2 : Fifty Dinosaurs - Robert Reed
Solaris 2 : Mason's Rats Black Rat - Neal Asher
Solaris 2 : Blood Bonds - Brenda Cooper
Solaris 2 : The Eyes of God - Peter Watts
Solaris 2 : Sunworld - Eric Brown
Solaris 2 : Evil Robot Monkey - Mary Robinette Kowal
Solaris 2 : Shining Armour - Dominic Green
Solaris 2 : Book Theatre and Wheel - Karl Schroeder
Solaris 2 : Mathralon - David Louis Edelman
Solaris 2 : Mason's Rats Autotractor - Neal Asher
Solaris 2 : Modem Times - Michael Moorcock
Solaris 2 : Point of Contact - Dan Abnett
Civil Wikineering.
3.5 out of 5
If you have to take me apart to get there, I don't want to go. Don't care about the chicks.
4 out of 5
Stop the war? Woman, that's crazy talk.
4 out of 5
Casual Rex sex, Bazza.
3.5 out of 5
Sales picture a catapult for success.
3.5 out of 5
AI twin champion.
3 out of 5
The Shadow Knows what lurks in your heart you big ol' Chester.
3.5 out of 5
Inquisition loses control. Wouldn't be surprised to see Brainiac, Captain Marvel or the Silver Surfer, either.
3 out of 5
All fired up.
3.5 out of 5
Robot Khan rebuff.
3 out of 5
Memory pages.
3.5 out of 5
Rocky story.
3.5 out of 5
Public service meals.
3.5 out of 5
Cornelius news notes. Lots.
3 out of 5
Ordinary first.
3.5 out of 5
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