Ann VanderMeer

Billed as the only time travel collection you'll ever need, this isn't far off. I spent 6 months dipping in and out, and I strongly recommend this approach as I think tackling it in one sitting would get a little samey in spite of the variation in authors, approach and style.

With 65 stories and 5 essays included, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy everything. That said, the overall quality is extremely high and there's plenty to admire if not always enjoy. Special demerits go to Harry show more Turtledove for Forty, Counting Down and Michael Moorcock for Pale Roses, both of which had me grinding my teeth throughout.

However, the majority were good to brilliant and I look forward to revisiting many of them in the future. My absolute best of the bunch:

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea - Ursula Le Guin
This Tragic Glass - Elizabeth Bear
The Mouse Ran Down - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Mileage will naturally vary, but most with an interest in scifi shorts and/or time travel should find plenty to like here. show less

Whew, this one was a tome! 72 short stories and nearly 950 pages, all on the theme of time travel. You'd think that after spending two weeks working my way through all of that, I'd be thoroughly tired of the subject, but somehow it never got old. Probably this is due to the fact that there's such a wide variety of different styles and different approaches to the subject here (including a few one could argue aren't really time travel stories at all, and yet still do feel as if they belong show more somehow). Some are pretty straightforward, as time travel stories go, and others are deeply, deeply strange. (And there are a pretty good percentage of the latter, as one might expect from any book with Jeff VanderMeer's name on the cover.) We've got tales that span billions of years and/or staggering numbers of alternate timelines; small, intimate stories about individual human lives; and a whole lot of stuff in-between.

The stories also span a pretty good stretch of ordinary linear time, from the 1880s through the early 2010s, when the anthology was published. Some are well-known, deeply influential works: Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" is here, as is an excerpt from The Time Machine. But there are also stories I'd never read by authors I'd never heard of. I hesitate to call it a definitive collection. Several of the first stories that come to mind when I think of famous time travel tales are notably absent, although perhaps for good reasons, one of which is that there seems to be no room here for stories that only exist to go, "Oooh, look, a paradox!" In any case, there are a lot of time travel stories in the history of SF, and I suspect if you asked 100 people to compile 950-page anthologies of them, you'd get 100 very different books.

As for the one we got in this particular timeline, unsurprisingly not every single story is quite to my taste. I can't really say that any of them made me sit bolt upright and go "wow!", either. But taken as a whole, there is something fascinating and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts satisfying about it. I do feel rather like I've just been on a big, weird, cool, kaleidoscopic timey-wimey journey. show less

This isn't my normal reading matter, but I really, really wanted to read Ursula LeGuin's Sur, and this seemed the easiest way to get it. Was that story worth buying the book? Yes. Would the book have been worth buying without Sur? Probably, but I would probably not have run into it.

No, I didn't like all the stories. There was one I didn't finish, and another I shouldn't have. A few that left me without any real feeling. And several that I didn't enjoy. But most of the stories, whether or show more not I enjoyed reading them, were worth reading, worth thinking about. show less

It’s not often that I find a short story anthology that works the whole way through. I think it’s only happened twice? No dud stories, no questionable narrative choices, stories that flow together, a good breadth of subject matter, and entertaining to boot! And this one came with illustrations. It made me all excited for steampunk again, and sad that both that the movement has fizzled and that few steampunk novels get to the same levels of depth and vibrancy and creativity, at least of show more the ones I’ve read.

This collection has a little bit of everything: steam-powered robots, fantastical cities, spies, socialist orphans, angry housewives, mad scientists, mad photographers, time travel, mathematical fish, steampunk blogging, horror, whimsy, humour, mysteries, metafiction, and everything in between. I’m not even sure I can name any favourite stories, they were all that good! (Also, it’s been nearly two months. The brain, she forgets things.)

So yeah: if you’re looking for a solid anthology or a lot of fun steampunk, this is a great book to pick up. I’m not sure I’m up for reading another one in the series (there are three total) but I am definitely going to have Vandermeer anthologies on my radar in the future. They’ve served me really well on this one.

To bear in mind: Contains stories that tackle racism, sexism, colonialism, and various other social problems of the 1800s, but in a punching-up sort of way.

9/10 show less