Manjana Milkoreit

In late 2015, the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative of Arizona State University opened a contest for short works of climate fiction. They received nearly 750 submissions and a jury pared the list down to 12 finalists. Kim Stanley Robinson was then tasked with determining a grand prize winner and four runners up.

All told, this is a decent collection of short fiction. Anyone familiar with Robinson and his work could have predicted that "Sunshine State" would be his pick for the winner, but it is a very good story. I did find some of the later stories not quite to my taste. There seems to be a trend of late in science fiction where stories don't really end, they halt on the cusp of the action or resolution, leaving the reader to decide how everything turns out. Three or four of the stories in this collection follow that trend, but at least one of them was quite good despite this device.

In any case, this collection is well worth seeking out for readers who enjoy current SF and climate fiction such as KSR's Science in the Capitol series.… (more)