Justina Robson

Unusually for me, I bailed on Natural History at around the 30% mark - pedestrian world-building, pages and pages of expository text and we never stayed with a character long enough to get any idea of their motivations. Plus it's supposed to be the distant future with transhumanism, nanotech and virtual realities, and yet Earth and the unmodified humans seemed to be at about a present day plus fifty or one hundred years state of organisation, except for speech idioms, which were late 20th century.… (more)

Review of eBook

This collection of short stories is fourth in the publisher’s series of six books, each a collection of exceptional stories from a diverse group of women writers.

“Our Savage Heart” is a collection of eleven fantasy and science fiction tales, each chosen by the author for inclusion in this volume. Imaginative, intriguing, and thought-provoking, each story takes the reader into a new world where the unexpected is the norm and the characters are both believable and captivating.

Each story stands alone; each touches on the fantasy/science fiction genre in a unique way. Readers who enjoy science fiction and fantasy will find much to appreciate in this anthology of absorbing tales designed to transport the reader to far-flung worlds of imaginative intrigue.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Readers program and am leaving this review voluntarily.… (more)

This collection of short stories displays a good breadth of imagination, both in variety of sub-genres and in the concepts of the stories themselves. They range from fantasy to far-future science fiction. It was interesting to see what direction each new story would take, from the post-apocalyptic (but not depressing) “I Give You the Moon” to the strange insect-fantasy world of “Recipes For Good Living.”

For most of the stories, the tiny peephole we, as readers, had into the fully formed world in the author’s mind was a good thing. It made the world seem richer and deeper to have this sense of a larger picture lurking just out of sight.

Sometimes, however, it was a barrier to enjoyment. Too much of the world was hidden, which gave the resulting story a hard shell of impenetrability. For example, in “A Game of Clones,” so much was different than our world, but the story only skittered off the surface of one concept before leaping to another, and then another, and then another, and on and on. It never paused and explored. The result was a story less than successful for me.

Other than a rather surprising number of typos for a final draft, I’d say the book is put together well. The changeups in pace and genre keep things fresh.

It's somewhat serendipitous finding this on Early Reviewers. Justina Robson was on a list of female science fiction authors I was reading my way through, but I hadn't gotten there yet. This gave me the opportunity. Any collection of short stories is going to have those that appeal to a given reader and those that do not. There were only three that I really didn’t care for, and there were a couple that I really liked, so that’s okay.… (more)