Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm
Second paragraph of third story ("When This Peace Thing Blows Over", by John Skylar):For a black hole, there's a spot, the event horizon, where you can't escape even if you're a beam of light. Past that, the hole is totally black. Hence the name. But around that border, gravity focuses light from the other side of the hole. It creates a bright, bent corona around the emptiness. As if its beauty alone could suck you in through that brilliant iris into a pupil of oblivion. In Maryam's eyes, I slipped over this event horizon and was lost forever.
OK, a big peeve here: the title of the book as published is partly in mock-Cyrillic, STЯAПGE BEDFЗLLФШS. This kind of thing really annoys me. Я is a vowel, З and Ф are consonants, and П and Ш may be consonants but they sound nothing like N or W. Russian is a real language, as are Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Kazakh, etc, and these letters have real meanings. It seems odd for a book published almost a quarter of a century after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe to equate Cyrillic script with subversive politics.
This is a 2014 anthology of original stories with political themes. I may just have been tired when reading it, but the only one that really lingered with me was the opener, Eugie Foster's "Tried as an Adult", which takes the U.S. justice system and extrapolates it to a grim conclusion. Funny how the concerns of 2014 just look a bit different now. It's been a long seven years (especially the last one). You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book I had acquired in 2014, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Hurricane Fever, by Tobias Buckell and Zodiac Station, by Tom Harper.
OK, a big peeve here: the title of the book as published is partly in mock-Cyrillic, STЯAПGE BEDFЗLLФШS. This kind of thing really annoys me. Я is a vowel, З and Ф are consonants, and П and Ш may be consonants but they sound nothing like N or W. Russian is a real language, as are Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Kazakh, etc, and these letters have real meanings. It seems odd for a book published almost a quarter of a century after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe to equate Cyrillic script with subversive politics.
This is a 2014 anthology of original stories with political themes. I may just have been tired when reading it, but the only one that really lingered with me was the opener, Eugie Foster's "Tried as an Adult", which takes the U.S. justice system and extrapolates it to a grim conclusion. Funny how the concerns of 2014 just look a bit different now. It's been a long seven years (especially the last one). You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book I had acquired in 2014, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Hurricane Fever, by Tobias Buckell and Zodiac Station, by Tom Harper.