Destination Future
I got my contributor's copy of Destination Future from Hadley Rille Press in the mail this weekend. Huge awesome, because my story "Alienation" is in it, and the fact that what I wrote, not exactly sure where I was going or why, but with the faith that it felt important, seeing those words in print is utterly lovely.
You know what else rocks? This anthology. It's like how I'm always trying to make the perfect mixed tape (CD? MP3 list? Doesn't tape just sound better? Yep, I must be in my thirties) and failing because the songs don't exactly flow, or they don't speak to each other and there's a bit too much chaos for it to really work. A lot of anthologies are like my mixes, full of great stories that don't communicate with each other.
Destination Future not only has solid, fascinating, mostly social science fiction tales, but if you read it in order, they really inform each other.
Like, there's a story about the strangeness of humans told from an alien perspective, then a story from a human perspective about being irreversibly changed by an unknowable alien species via sex, then a story about aliens forcibly and positively changing us.
I don't know if that description does it justice, but there's such a strong thread between the stories that make them each more interesting and complex than on their own.
I read a lot of short stories and anthologies. Heck, I read a lot of everything, and I've never read anything that has so much attention to the meta-effect of the aggregate experience for the reader. I feel like this is what anthologies should do, and probably try to do, but mostly fail. I feel like I've stumbled on a bit of narrative magic, and I love it.
You know what else rocks? This anthology. It's like how I'm always trying to make the perfect mixed tape (CD? MP3 list? Doesn't tape just sound better? Yep, I must be in my thirties) and failing because the songs don't exactly flow, or they don't speak to each other and there's a bit too much chaos for it to really work. A lot of anthologies are like my mixes, full of great stories that don't communicate with each other.
Destination Future not only has solid, fascinating, mostly social science fiction tales, but if you read it in order, they really inform each other.
Like, there's a story about the strangeness of humans told from an alien perspective, then a story from a human perspective about being irreversibly changed by an unknowable alien species via sex, then a story about aliens forcibly and positively changing us.
I don't know if that description does it justice, but there's such a strong thread between the stories that make them each more interesting and complex than on their own.
I read a lot of short stories and anthologies. Heck, I read a lot of everything, and I've never read anything that has so much attention to the meta-effect of the aggregate experience for the reader. I feel like this is what anthologies should do, and probably try to do, but mostly fail. I feel like I've stumbled on a bit of narrative magic, and I love it.