Edited by Tobias S. Buckell
Hardcover, 368 pages
Published October 1st 2012 by Tu Books
ISBN 1600608876 (ISBN13: 9781600608872)


Blurb

In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful.

In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds. Take a journey through time from a nuclear nightmare of the past to society’s far future beyond Earth with these eleven stories by masters of speculative fiction. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malinda Lo, Cindy Pon, Daniel H. Wilson, and more.

The Good

  1. The characters.  The majority of the characters in this story were compelling, tragic, and well-developed. Their endings weren’t always happy, but they did feel honest, and the way the characters accepted their fates was noble. (I’m a fan of unhappy endings anyway. They’re more realistic.)

  2. The plots. The stories themselves, while not always the most well-written, were interesting, intense, and suspenseful. The only story that was the absolute exception to this rule was the final one, which felt entirely too long and drawn out in my opinion.

  3. The extrapolation. The stories were all based in the future and extrapolated on how future events might unfold in relation to events and technology that are developing today. I liked this aspect of the anthology because I felt like it made the stories feel more relevant.


The Bad

  1. Hit and miss.  While there are a few really really fantastically written stories in this collection, there are some that just miss the mark. For this reason, I couldn’t give the overall collection as high a rating as it might have deserved if some of the stories were removed.

  2. The violence.  The violence in many of the stories was very graphic. While this wasn’t a huge problem for me, it might be for some readers.


Overall Rating