There are many stories in this book about the people and technology. Some are great, most are kind of hohum. Worth it for the few gems, I suppose, as the gems are very shiny. ( )

I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers in the summer of 2017, but did not finish it until sometime in late autumn 2019. Perhaps 6 months of the delay was due to experiences with other Early Reviewer and free-on-Amazon titles; it had slipped my mind that this was a professional publication.

However, the rest of the delay was due to my reluctance to resume once I did start reading. Admittedly, anthologies are easy to put down, and few anthologies have more than three or four compelling stories--and there ARE some decent stories in this anthology. (I liked "In Memory Of" and "The Shadowed Forest," and "The Shoulders of Giants." Ironically, this last struck me as the only story that really captured the theme of Compostela as a pilgrimage and a field of stars, and it had been published in 2000!) But the not-so-great offerings in this anthology were not just unmemorable, but often downright painful. There was a great deal of mediocre poetry (do editors lose the ability to discern literary merit when confronted with free verse?). There were also some stories that resemble, well, the free stuff on Amazon or high-school literary magazines...down to the typos (e.g., epilates for epaulettes) and punctuation issues.

The anthology is not offensive, and I did get through it. I am glad that I did, because my favorite story was the last one in the collection. But...okay, so I read approximately 250 books *from the library alone* in between sessions with this anthology. Infer what you will. ( )

Some of the stories where beginnings making you want to read more, some were beginnings in which the suspense was lost b/c the likely ending was implied, others were complete short stories and there was some poetry included.
Overall it gives the read a feeling of the authors' style which should provide you insight as to whether or not you'd be interested in reading more of a given author.
There was a great variety of writing styles and genre to find something you like.

One pet -peeve-- a parsec is a measure of DISTANCE, not time: One parsec corresponds to the distance at which the mean radius of the earth's orbit subtends an angle of one second of arc. For conversion purposes: 1 parsec=3.086 × 1013 kilometers
Google dictionary ( )

This anthology, christened Compostela or "Field of Stars," is an aptly named collection of (mostly) new science fiction poets and short story writers. Many of the stories are brief and simply constructed. Their work is straightforward and sincere, deserving of attention for the possibilities ahead. Young adult and childhood themes and content abound, without the constraints of layered nuance. Standouts include Robert J. Sawyer's "The Shoulders of Giants" (reprinted from "Star Colonies," a DAW Books anthology from 2000) and Leslie Brown's "Trespass." Each of these new stars, forming out of the stellar nebulae, have a glow all their own. ( )

Collection of SF and speculative fiction/poetry with the general theme of technology. A lot of very short stories. Robert J. Sawyer is represented with a story about pioneers who show up at their destination planet to discover that tech, and thus colonization, has leapfrogged them. Nothing really stood out for me, though as Robinson writes in the afterword, if this is the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist is very very bleak. ( )