Science Fiction

July 31, 2006
Horton's elegiac anthology of 15 mostly hard SF stories illuminates a broad spectrum of grief over love thwarted through time, space, human frailty or alien intervention, from the gentle melancholy of Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," which posits tame Technicolored time-warped dinosaurs in Vermont, to newcomer Leah Bobet's "Bliss," an agonizing riff on near-future drug addiction. Several selections address current political-social issues, like Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine," which extrapolates today's technology to chilling, Big Brotherly results. The long closing story, Alastair Reynolds's "Understanding Space and Time," however, presents a ray of cosmic hope: the sole survivor of a plague that decimated humanity is rescued and healed by intergalactic entities and lives out millennia while seeking ultimate truths, returning to see mankind regenerated. This anthology reflects the concerns of the genre today—and the apparent inability of our society to do anything about them. Note that two of the same stories appear in a rival volume, Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Reviews, July 24).

May 28, 2007
Returning for his second stint editing Prime’s annual SF compilation, Horton is faced with a daunting task, at which he doesn’t entirely succeed. Out of a dozen stories, the few inspired selections include Robert Reed’s gritty “A Billion Eves,” where exploring an infinite number of parallel universes is a godsend for some polygamous pilgrims but a decidedly dire prospect for others; Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Okanoggan Falls,” in which a rural Wisconsin hamlet must fend off alien invaders, who have scheduled it for demolition; and Ann Leckie’s “Hesperia and Glory,” a witty homage of sorts to Edgar Rice Burroughs.