A brief review cannot discuss all the stories, but can only suggest the range of subgenres within. These include the hard SF of Alastair Reynolds's extrasolar murder mystery "Glacial"; the soft SF of Maureen F. McHugh's wise "Interview: On Any Given Day"; the testosterone-drenched adventure SF of Paul Di Filippo's "Neutrino Drag"; the doomed lesbian love in a future so distant it seems like fantasy in Ian R. MacLeod's "Isabel of the Fall"; alternate history about Philip K. Dick and Richard Nixon in Paul McAuley's "The Two Dicks"; the triple-timeline Trojan fantasy of Howard Waldrop and Leigh Kennedy's excellent collaboration, "One-Horse Town"; the scathing satire of Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Real Thing"; and the high-density postcyberpunk of "Lobsters," in which new author Charles Stross blends bleeding-edge infotech and venture-capital bizbuzz to create the standout SF story of 2001. --Cynthia Ward

Comprising:

New Light on the Drake Equation by Ian R. MacLeod;
More Adventures on Other Planets by Michael Cassutt;
On K2 With Kanakaredes by Dan Simmons;
When This World is All On Fire by William Sanders;
Computer Virus by Nancy Kress;
Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman;
Lobsters by Charles Stross;
The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick;
The Chief Designer by Andy Duncan;
Neutrino Drag by Paul Di Filippo;
Glacial by Alastair Reynolds;
The Days Between by Allen M. Steele;
One-Horse Town by Howard Waldrop and Leigh Kennedy;
Moby Quilt by Eleanor Arnason;
Raven Dream by Robert Reed;
Undone by James Patrick Kelly;
The Real Thing by Carolyn Ives Gilman;
Interview: On Any Given Day by Maureen F. McHugh;
Isabel of the Fall by Ian R. MacLeod;
Into Greenwood by Jim Grimsley;;
Know How, Can Do by Michael Blumlein;
Russian Vine by Simon Ings;
The Two Dicks by Paul McAuley;
May Be Some Time by Brenda W. Clough;
Marcher by Chris Beckett;
The Human Front by Ken MacLeod.

Few SF writers are as imaginative, energetic, or idea rich as Paul Di Filippo, and fewer still have as broad a knowledge of science and culture. And there's no contemporary SF writer who's more fun to read. --Cynthia Ward

From the depths of the Big Bang to a world where hippies rule; from a land of Amazons to one where life is a video-game; from a society where cooperation means everything to one where individual chaos rules-across these bizarre dimensions and many others, Paul races in the search for happiness, love, wealth, status... and the answer to the Ontological Pickle. Acquiring comrades and enemies along the way, our feckless alternaut reaches a cul-de-sac from which the only exit is death. And then his adventures really begin....

Di Filippo lets his imagination run wild, creating worlds in which Franz Kafka stalks the streets of nighttime Manhattan as a costumed avenger known as the Jackdaw, or in which Anne Frank, having been sent to live with relatives in America, becomes part of MGM's galaxy of stars. Science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, Alice (James Tiptree, Jr.) Sheldon, Alfred Bester, and Ted Sturgeon are given chances to save the world. In what turns out to be one of the most gimmicky and at the same time touching premises, Astounding Science Fiction is edited in its golden age by Joseph Campbell. Telling you any more would spoil the dozens of quirky surprises this collection has in store for you. --Ron Hogan

Fast Forward is offered in the tradition of Damon Knight’s prestigious and influential anthology series, Orbit, and Frederik Pohl’s landmark Star SF. Fast Forward marks the start of a new hard science fiction anthology series, dedicated to presenting the vanguard of the genre and charting the undiscovered country that is the future.

Contributors scheduled for the first volume include: Paolo Bacigalupi, Kage Baker, Tony Ballantyne, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear (Sarah B.E. Kindred), A.M. Dellamonica, Paul Di Filippo, Robyn Hitchcock, Louise Marley, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, John Meaney, Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper, Mike Resnick & Nancy Kress, Justina Robson, Pamela Sargent, Mary A. Turzillo, Robert Charles Wilson, Gene Wolfe, George Zebrowski.

In "Do You Believe in Magic?", the ultimate self-absorbed, '60s-obsessed Baby Boomer emerges from his New York apartment for the first time in 20 years and finds himself an icon and a joke, and his city fire-bombed and theme-parked. In "Flying the Flannel," one of the few Di Filippo stories to feature a female protagonist, an unknown garage-rock group is part of a cosmic battle of the bands, in which the fate of Earth itself is at stake. In the terrifying "Earth Shoes" (possibly the most unusual Philip K. Dick-inspired story ever written), a quantum-uncertainty-infected mood ring gives successive characters the power to remake reality according to their own often unacknowledged and dangerous desires. The remaining stories are as inventive, witty, entertaining, and well-written, making this another high-caliber collection from Paul Di Filippo. --Cynthia Ward

The promotional printing of Little Doors promises "seventeen new stories that represent his best work to date": this is not true. The anthology contains 16 stories and one poem. Also, the copyright page indicates that every work has been previously published, and some of the stories date back a decade or more, to a time when Di Filippo was a less skilled and versatile stylist. However, the early stories do display the wild imagination for which he is justly praised, and the later stories demonstrate his full creative powers, from the impressive surrealism of "The Death of Salvador Dali" to the jabberwacked-out magic realism of "Jack Neck and the Worry Bird" to the eerie e.e. cummings tribute "Mehitabel in Hell." --Cynthia Ward