Solaris Rising 2

[Michael, NWC Goodreads Group Admin]

Have you read or are you reading Solaris Rising 2? What did you think?

[Michael, NWC Goodreads Group Admin]

Here's the review I just posted:

As with any anthology, some stories are better than others -- or perhaps it's more fair to say that some stories will speak to particular people more than others. There are quite a few good stories (for me, "Whatever Skin You Wear" and "The First Dance" stood out), and the rest are okay, nothing I'd particularly call bad. There were a couple unfortunate missteps: the very first story ("Tom") uses "tranny", which I've come to see as a perjorative, and I'm not sure whether it's usage was supposed to be in character or whether it's simply poor word choice by the author; and a later story ("Ticking") has an unfortunate and glaring continuity error where a flashlight is dropped twice without being picked up in between. All in all, not a bad collection, but I didn't find it stellar; rather, the hit-and-miss you'd expect from just about any such collection.

Some further thoughts not included in my review: I'm iffy on a multi-author anthology being nominated for an award along with novels. It seems odd to me to try to quantify an anthology against a novel - they're two very different beasts, and an editor does a very different task than an author. I'm less iffy about single-author anthologies, but even then, it seems like it's an attempt to judge two very different things by the same criteria. For this reason, I can virtually guarantee that even had I found all of the stories in the collection to be award worthy (and I didn't), it's extremely unlikely that this would be my pick for the P.K. Dick award.

[Michelle]

My review:

As with most short story collections, there are a wide range of styles and approaches to what is touted as “groundbreaking science fiction.” Straight science fiction isn’t my first choice, so it was really nice to dive back into the genre with tastings of a wide range of subject matter and authors.

This is also a finalist for the Philip K Dick award, (http://www.philipkdickaward.org/) though collections of short fiction don’t often win awards. With such a cross section, there’s bound to be mixed feelings throughout, the quite good alongside the okay, peppered with the occasional true dislike. Still, I walked away with my brain running and some new authors on my “to read” list.