Monday, August 01, 2005

Definitely Not The Year's Best Science Fiction

I'm reading a book called The Year's Best Science Fiction: 21st Annual Collection. It appears to be an anthology of science fiction put out each year. I was attracted to it because I like to read smaller name and more obscure authors. Something about reading small potatoes authors, I suppose like myself, seems more raw and real to me.

Anyway, so far, I am not at all even close to being impressed. The first story was not very good. It goes on and on and on and it takes 25 pages to even figure out what is going on. It is overly stylized, i.e., the author seems to be trying to be cool. There are way too many hard core-sci fi references, which may be interesting to hard core sci fi enthusiasts, they bog down the story and frequently snap you out of the reading flow. You feel like the author is really trying make a point about his tastes.

I read about 20-30 pages of the first story and abandoned it. I finally figured out what was going on but I had absolutely no interest in seeing how it ends. The second story seems a touch promising, so we'll see.

1 Comments:

Blogger Talmida said...

I don't know if they still publish the Hugo and Nebula short story winners, but they used to.

Nowadays, my Beloved downloads the list of nominees from the Hugo/Nebula websites and then has names to look for online.

7:41 AM  

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