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Mary Robinette Kowal

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2 Paperback – February 26, 2008

by George Mann (Author, Editor)

2.5 9 ratings

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An eclectic collection of outstanding short fiction and novellas showcases the work of some of the world's leading science fiction writers, including Peter Watts, Kay Kenyon, Chris Roberson, Eric Brown, Paul Cornell, and Robert Reed, whose tales range from futuristic murder mysteries to stories of first contact, love, and war. Original.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Solaris
Publication date

February 26, 2008
Dimensions

4 x 1.25 x 6.5 inches
ISBN-10

1844165426
ISBN-13

978-1844165421
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Solaris (February 26, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1844165426
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1844165421
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4 x 1.25 x 6.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,531,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,729 in Science Fiction Short Stories
- #13,919 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #36,593 in Space Operas

Customer Reviews:
2.5 9 ratings

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About the author

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Mary Robinette Kowal

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Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Lady Astronaut Universe and historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers. She’s a member of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, four Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, several Year’s Best anthologies and her collections Word Puppets and Scenting the Dark and Other Stories.

Her novel Calculating Stars is one of only eighteen novels to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in a single year.

As a professional puppeteer and voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), Mary Robinette has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures, and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She records fiction for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi.

Mary Robinette lives in Nashville with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com.

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Cynthia Cheney

Meh

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2014

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Lack-luster stories, even those by well-known authors.

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Great read, but not as good as the first.

Reviewed in the United States on 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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Randy Stafford

An Original Anthology That Doesn't Disappoint

Reviewed in the United States on 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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batterscher

Kurzgeschichten JA - SciFi EHER NICHT

Reviewed in Germany on November 5, 2009

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Hi,

KURZ:
*****
Die Ankündigung von "Science-Fiction-Kurzgeschichten" stimmt nur teilweise!

DETAIL:
*******
Es sind definitiv Kurzgeschichten - kein Zweifel an diesem Teil. Aber das mit dem Science-Fiction ist für mich doch etwas zweifelhaft. Einige Geschichten erhalten auf den letzten Absätzen noch schnell eine SciFi-Note verpasst (<SPOILER> z.B. der Affe kann sprechen, weil er einen Chip implantiert hat; das ist gar keine mittelalterliche Agrargesellschaft, sondern eine Rasse die in einem großen Raumschiff vor dem Aussterben geschützt wird </SPOILER>).
Alles in allem also nur eine sehr dünne SciFi-Geschmacksnote.

Das mag durchaus dem Einen oder Anderen gefallen, doch ich kann mich leider nicht zu dieser Gruppe zählen.

Abgesehen von dem SciFi-Anteil, empfand ich viele der Kurzgeschichten als verwirrend. Verständlicherweise kann man in einer Kurzgeschichte nicht viel Hintergrund aufbauen usw., allerdings kann auch eine Kurzgeschichte Sinn ergeben. Hier war das leider weniger der Fall.

Eine Sache ist mir persönlich aufgefallen: Neal Asher ist mit zwei Geschichten vertreten, welche auch aufeinander aufbauen. Obgleich diese beiden Geschichten zu den Besseren des Buches zählen, habe ich das Ziel dieses Buches anders verstanden: Neue bzw. verschiedene Autoren kurz "vorstellen". Neal Asher braucht man eigentlich nicht mehr vorstellen...aber wenn, dann bitte ebenso wie die anderen Autoren.

FAZIT:
******
Mir hat das Buch und seine Kurzgeschichten nicht gefallen. Sie waren zum Teil verwirrend und kaum Science-Fiction bezogen.
Ich kann das Buch nicht empfehlen!

Hoffentlich konnte ich jemandem bei der Kaufentscheidung - ob pro oder contra - helfen.

Gruß
Batterscher

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