David Garnett (2) (1947–)

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 The outdated video tech merely felt quaint; the story really hinged on body modification via "fembots", which doesn't mean sexually feminised robots, but was short for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

Hilarious diatribe on the state of science fiction publishing, set at a convention held during a bizzare war involving weapons that create time distortions.

Published twelve years after the demise of New Worlds magazine, this was the first in a series of science fiction anthologies. It contains an introduction by Michael Moorcock who once edited the magazine, a couple of articles about sf and 10 stories all dating from 1991.

My two favourites were:

"Heat" by J. D. Gresham - Heat does strange things to women . . . and men.
"Ubermensch!" by Kim Newman - It gave me a big start when I realised just who it was incarcerated in Spandau Prison in this show more German Expressionist version of Berlin.

After getting a bit damp in my bag during one of the recent rainstorms, sections started coming away from the spine and then individual pages started falling out. It didn’t even get wet enough to make the pages crinkly, so the binding can’t have been very good quality. Unfortunately it had to be binned. show less

Rather trite story of meeting a childhood nemesis...