David S. Garnett

I bought this about 3 years ago when I getting ready to run a Warhammer campaign. I thought it would help get me in the mood and give me ideas. BUT I never got around to it.

This is a very linear story with only one real main character and that character falls into the "blank slate with an epic destiny" cliche. I probably would have loved it when I was 12, with all the fighting and chaos warped mutants, but at 52 it didn't do much for me. I'm afraid I'll never find out who Konrad really "is", show more though by the end of the book you've got a pretty good idea. show less

As the saying goes, "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Certainly, as far as the iconic British SF magazine of the Sixties, Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, is concerned, that's very true for me. But I've read stories and anthologies since that originated from New Worlds, and in light of that reading, I think this collection from David Garnett seems to capture the spirit of the '60s New Worlds very well. That's because there are stories in it that felt to me redolent of the show more age, both for good and ill. Which seeing as this collection came from the early 1990s rather than the 1960s was something of an achievement, though I'm unsure whether that was deliberate. I also felt that this spirit of the earlier age is something that wasn't in the first of these collections.

Stories I noted were Innocent by Ian McDonald (one of my favourite writers, but this felt inconsequential); Ratbird by Brian Aldiss (a piece of 'indigenous peoples in touch with higher realities' fiction that referenced the Wallace Divide, something I'd read about in a book on Krakatoa only a few days before); Candy Buds by Peter Hamilton (a story set in post-global warming England, where Peterborough is now a thriving coastal port, and which went on to inspire some of the setting for his monumental Night's Dawn trilogy); and Jack Deighton's Face of the Waters (a sort of updated Bradbury-esque story about the high-tech colonisation of Mars and one old spacer's quest to build a real canal there).

Other stories were not so noteworthy. I also note that a number of them show attitudes now considered dubious at best.

The collection also includes a couple of previously unseen Philip K. Dick novel outlines which never made it into publication. They are both rather convoluted and baroque, and it's fairly easy to see why publishers looked at them and said "Thanks, but no thanks." show less

This third outing for the revived New Worlds dates from 1993, yet the grumbles from editor David Garnett in his Introduction on the parlous state of science fiction at that time still hold true today.

The stories are from Peter F. Hamilton, Graham Joyce, Brian Aldiss, Gwyneth Jones, Simon Ings and Charles Stross, Graham Charnock, Jack Deighton, Paul di Filippo and Paul McAuley. Quality (in my view) was not as variable as in the previous year's volume, though I did have issues with some of the show more stories. Immediately before reading this book, I'd read a Bob Shaw novel from 1968; picking this up and starting with the Peter Hamilton was something of a shock as there is no comparison between the two writers' prose styles; the Hamilton story came off worse on that particular judgement. The Simon Ings/Charles Stross collaboration seemed way too baroque for a piece of "modern" sf.

On the other hand, the story that worked best for me was the McAuley, Children of the Revolution, which although now thirty years old and focusing on a group of hip dudes hanging out and doing rock videos in a future Amsterdam, actually made sense. The outdated video tech merely felt quaint; the story really hinged on body modification via "fembots", which doesn't mean sexually feminised robots, but was short for "femtobots"; like nanobots, but two orders of magnitude smaller. McAuley would return to the setting (though neither the characters nor the location) in 1995 with his novel Fairyland, and the story would also be anthologized in his collection the following year, The Invisible Country.

Finally, there was a summation of the best novels of 1991 by John Clute. The big news at the time was the recent death of Isaac Asimov, and Clute reflected on that. Robert Heinlein had died some five years earlier, and Clute had some pertinent things to say about his late novels; Arthur C. Clarke was still alive, though he had started his series of collaborations with Gentry Lee. Clute was (to my mind) unduly lenient about their Gardens of Rama.

Overall, a good collection and worth keeping an eye out for. show less

One thing I've noticed as I dip into paperback SF novels from the mid-70's is how amazingly thin they can be in more than just length. This has a scenario of a future Earth with underground Watchers, above ground feudal kingdoms in constant war, and then it gets weird. How things got this way, how people live in it day to day, etc., is completely unexplored. Instead we have passages like the following: "But had the blacksmith really seen her? She could not be the only woman with red hair. show more And who, assuming it was she, was the rider accompanying her? They rode towards Verdun. What did she want there? And--the thought suddenly occurred to him--what if she would not come back with him...?" Question after question. This goes on with character after character, for pages, throughout the book. The effect is not transformative, the way some books with odd narrative styles are. It certainly is not a window into the 1-dimensional characters. It's just exhausting.

Not recommended. show less