Michael A. Burstein

When I was a boy (cue nostalgic music and images of children skipping through flower meadows) I devoured the short stories of Isaac Asimov. Sure, he had his faults, the dialogue in particular was a bit dodgy, but for me these stories were the foundation (do you see what I did there?) for an ongoing love of SF. If there was one thing I loved even more than these stories though, it was the story notes. Within these short paragraphs Isaac Asimov would speak to me (thats right little old me), he show more would share his innermost thoughts and personal secrets. Not many authors these days bother with this (Neil Gaiman and Stpehen King are a couple of notable exceptions) but if you want to find Isaac Asimov's natural heir both in the art of short story writing but also in that connection between author and reader, look no further than Michael A. Burstein.

This collection is subtitled "The Award Nominated Stories Of Michael A. Burstein" and consists of 13 stories all previously published in Analog magazine and all nominated for various awards. In addition we also get two brand new stories and the extensive story notes mentioned previously.

The stories are very much in the "classic" style of Asimov and Clarke. Good solid hard science fiction. Starting with "Kaddish For The Last Survivor" which is a haunting lament on the holocaust, probably the least SF but one of the most emotionally engaging. We then get two stories focusing on future education and the use of virtual schools ("Teleabscence" and "Teleprescence"). "Broken Symmetry", "Absent Friends", "Reality Check" and "Empty Spaces" are a sequence of stories which deal with the operation of a particle accelerator, strangely prescient given recent debates on the large Hadron collider (but then that's SF's job). "Spaceships"

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