The Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom

by Joanne Merriam (Editor), Khadija Anderson (Contributor), Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (Contributor)

The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom is an anthology of science fiction featuring blunt force trauma, explosions, adventure, derring-do, tigers, Martians, zombies, fanged monsters, dinosaurs (alien and domestic), ray guns, rocket ships, and anthropomorphized marshmallows.

It contains work by 40 authors: fiction by Jim Comer, James Dorr, Aidan Doyle, Tom Doyle, Kendra Fortmeyer, Nick Kocz, David Kopaska-Merkel, Ken Liu, Kelly Luce, Tim Major, Laurent McAllister, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Jerry Oltion, Ursula Pflug, Leonard Richardson, Erica L. Satifka, G. A. Semones, Matthew Sanborn Smith, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Lucy Sussex, Mary A. Turzillo, Nick Wood, and K. Ceres Wright, and poetry by Khadija Anderson, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Kristin Bock, Alicia Cole, Estíbaliz Espinosa (translated by Neil Anderson), Miriam Bird Greenberg, Benjamin Grossberg, Julie Bloss Kelsey, Katie Manning, Martha McCollough, Marc McKee, Richard King Perkins II, Christina Sng, J. J. Steinfeld, Sonya Taaffe, Deborah Walker, and Ali Znaidi.

Genres: Anthologies

267 pages, Paperback

First published July 26, 2016

About the author

Joanne Merriam is a writer, poet, and editor. Her poetry collection The Glaze from Breaking , was originally published by Stride Books and re-released by Upper Rubber Boot. Her first novel, Aether and Ego , will be released by Inanna in September 2026.

Her poetry and fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including Astropoetica, The Baltimore Review, Escape Pod, Pank, Per Contra, Pictura, and Strange Horizons . A complete list is at her website. Her novel, Aether and Ego, will be released by Inanna in autumn 2026.

From 2011 to 2020, she was the Publisher at Upper Rubber Boot Books, which is now on permanent hiatus and has only one book still in print: the first English-language anthology of solarpunk, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (eds. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland).

Reviews

[Niko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this anthology in a Goodreads giveaway. Mixed bag of stories, prose, and poetry. My favorite story was Laurent McAllister's "Kapuzine and the Wolf: A Hortatory Tale."

I also liked Ken Liu's fascinating "Nova Verba, Mundus Novus," Nick Kocz's chilling "The Last American Tiger," Sequoia Nagamatsu's modern kappa myth "Headwater LLC," Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam's tale of extraterrestrial visitors "The Wanderers," Deborah Walker's poem "Sea Monkey Mermaid," Leonard Richardson's hilarious "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs," and Jerry Oltion's thoughtful and bizarre "A Star Is Born."