Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction

This book is not Dangerous Visions. True, that is a tough standard for any book, and it is unfair to expect a book to hit that standard. Rather, if a review is going to start by comparing a book to Dangerous Visions it should only be if that is going to be a positive comparison.

But, the editor of this collection asks for the comparison. The introduction lays out the editor’s premise – to make a Dangerous Visions for the new millennium. The editor begs the comparison. The collection falls more than short. This collection has some vision, but no danger. And, maybe more importantly, there is little memorable in the stories.

I still vividly remember reading Dangerous Visions – each story impacting me. Sometimes it was a positive show more impact, sometimes negative. But every story left an image. I can still look at the titles and be thrown back into those memorable stories. With the pages of Redshift there is nothing memorable. I look back at the titles and recall….nothing. It is not that they are bad stories, they are just not memorable. And that is a great sin when you have set your sights so high.

Where it failed is hard to say. Was it that it takes an Ellisonesque approach to get the best out of people? Was it because this book seemed to lack new, groundbreaking authors? Was it that there just isn’t anything dangerous to be said anymore?

I refuse to believe the last is true. I think there are stories out there that shatter with skill. And I appreciate that the editor tried to do something more than collect new stories. But maybe the greatest failing of this collection is not that it didn’t live up to the hype of being the next Dangerous Visions. Maybe the greater failing is that it became a collection of stories that were just…okay. show less

Somewhat unimpressive anthology without much sense of coherence - certainly not 'extreme' in any meaningful way. Mammoth anthologies tend to do this sort of thing so much better.

This large book of short stories was subtitled "extreme visions of speculative fiction". For some reason I was hoping for Science Fiction, but got more fantasy and not much of it that extreme. Some of the stories were good, some were even interesting Science Fiction. I finally finished it after picking at it for a few months with an "eh." (August 30, 2005)

Great collection of speculative fiction.