On the Virtues of Editing: a review of New Eves
I wanted to like New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, edited by Janrae Frank, Jean Stine, and Forrest J. Ackerman. It's a collection of a bunch of science fiction stories by women that I haven't already read in every other such anthology. With the exception of three stories (one being "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler), these stories were new to me.
However, most of the stories left me cold. The attempt to choose unfamiliar stories seems to have meant choosing less awesome stories. To my taste, the stories in the final section devoted to "The 80s and Beyond" were the best (including Lee Killough's "Symphony for a Lost Traveler," Maureen F. McHugh's "The Missionary's Child," and Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things"), but this is only a small portion of the book.
The biggest problem I had with this book, though, was not in the choice of stories included. The editing is just terrible. And it is terrible on multiple levels. The copyediting is terrible: there are so many typos, not just in the introductions to the stories but in the stories themselves, some of them even inhibiting the clarity of the narrative. The fact-checking is terrible: several stories are placed in one chronological section (say the 1960s and 1970s) but really belong in another, authors' names are misspelled or misrepresented, and some publication dates for stories are just wrong. And the writing is bad, too. On top of all of that, in a book devoted to women writers of science fiction, the presentation of feminism hews frighteningly close to negative anti-feminist stereotypes.
In short, I wouldn't recommend this book. If you are looking for less commonly anthologized science fiction stories by women writers, you might find something worth reading here (I don't pretend that my tastes in SF are the same as everyone else's), but beware: its myriad mistakes make this a sometimes frustrating read, an unreliable source on some points, and considerably less worthy of the time and effort required to read it than are most anthologies.
However, most of the stories left me cold. The attempt to choose unfamiliar stories seems to have meant choosing less awesome stories. To my taste, the stories in the final section devoted to "The 80s and Beyond" were the best (including Lee Killough's "Symphony for a Lost Traveler," Maureen F. McHugh's "The Missionary's Child," and Karen Joy Fowler's "The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things"), but this is only a small portion of the book.
The biggest problem I had with this book, though, was not in the choice of stories included. The editing is just terrible. And it is terrible on multiple levels. The copyediting is terrible: there are so many typos, not just in the introductions to the stories but in the stories themselves, some of them even inhibiting the clarity of the narrative. The fact-checking is terrible: several stories are placed in one chronological section (say the 1960s and 1970s) but really belong in another, authors' names are misspelled or misrepresented, and some publication dates for stories are just wrong. And the writing is bad, too. On top of all of that, in a book devoted to women writers of science fiction, the presentation of feminism hews frighteningly close to negative anti-feminist stereotypes.
In short, I wouldn't recommend this book. If you are looking for less commonly anthologized science fiction stories by women writers, you might find something worth reading here (I don't pretend that my tastes in SF are the same as everyone else's), but beware: its myriad mistakes make this a sometimes frustrating read, an unreliable source on some points, and considerably less worthy of the time and effort required to read it than are most anthologies.