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The Apex Book of World SF 2
An expedition to an alien planet; Lenin rising from the dead; a superhero so secret he does not exist. In The Apex Book of World SF 2, World Fantasy Award nominated editor Lavie Tidhar brings together a unique collection of stories from around the world. Quiet horror from Cuba and Australia; surrealist fantasy from Russia and epic fantasy from Poland; near-future tales from Mexico and Finland, as well as cyberpunk from South Africa. In this anthology one gets a glimpse of the complex and fascinating world of genre fiction – from all over our world.
Pre-order edition also includes Nir Yaniv‘s never-before-published-in-English novelette “Undercity” (8800 words) as well as Charles Tan‘s essay, “World SF: Our Possible Future”!
Table of Contents:
“Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“Mr Goop” by Ivor W. Hartmann
“Trees of Bone” by Daliso Chaponda
“The First Peruvian in Space” by Daniel Salvo (translated by Jose B. Adolph)
“Eyes in the Vastness of Forever” by Gustavo Bondoni
“The Tomb” by Chen Qiufan (translated by the author)
“The Sound of Breaking Glass” by Joyce Chng
“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz (translated by the author)
“The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon
“Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro (translated by Daniel W. Koon)
“Branded” by Lauren Beukes
“December 8th” by Raúl Flores (translated by Daniel W. Koon)
“Hungry Man” by Will Elliott
“Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan
“Nothing Happened in 1999” by Fábio Fernandes
“Shadow” by Tade Thompson
“Shibuya no Love” by Hannu Rajaniemi
“Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The Glory of the World” by Sergey Gerasimov
“The New Neighbours” by Tim Jones
“From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor
"The Slows” by Gail Hareven (translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green)
“Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia
“Electric Sonalika” by Samit Basu
“The Malady” by Andrzej Sapkowski (translated by Wiesiek Powaga)
“A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia
“Undercity” by Nir Yaniv
“World SF: Our Possible Future” by Charles Tan
Pre-order edition also includes Nir Yaniv‘s never-before-published-in-English novelette “Undercity” (8800 words) as well as Charles Tan‘s essay, “World SF: Our Possible Future”!
Table of Contents:
“Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
“Mr Goop” by Ivor W. Hartmann
“Trees of Bone” by Daliso Chaponda
“The First Peruvian in Space” by Daniel Salvo (translated by Jose B. Adolph)
“Eyes in the Vastness of Forever” by Gustavo Bondoni
“The Tomb” by Chen Qiufan (translated by the author)
“The Sound of Breaking Glass” by Joyce Chng
“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz (translated by the author)
“The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon
“Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro (translated by Daniel W. Koon)
“Branded” by Lauren Beukes
“December 8th” by Raúl Flores (translated by Daniel W. Koon)
“Hungry Man” by Will Elliott
“Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan
“Nothing Happened in 1999” by Fábio Fernandes
“Shadow” by Tade Thompson
“Shibuya no Love” by Hannu Rajaniemi
“Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“The Glory of the World” by Sergey Gerasimov
“The New Neighbours” by Tim Jones
“From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor
"The Slows” by Gail Hareven (translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green)
“Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia
“Electric Sonalika” by Samit Basu
“The Malady” by Andrzej Sapkowski (translated by Wiesiek Powaga)
“A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia
“Undercity” by Nir Yaniv
“World SF: Our Possible Future” by Charles Tan
375 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2012
11 people are currently reading
401 people want to read
About the author
Lavie Tidhar
393 books743 followersLavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.
Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.
Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.
Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.
He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).
Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.
His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.
Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).
Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).
He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.
He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).
Tidhar lives with his wife in London.
Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.
Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.
Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.
He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).
Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.
His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.
Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).
Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).
He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.
He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).
Tidhar lives with his wife in London.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 30, 2020
I liked the previous anthology better as a whole. Still, here're the passages and stories that caught my attention:
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https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
February 14, 2014
A well-above average set of 'world' SF tales gathered together by Lavie Tidhar. No theme unites the stories in this collect, apart from being written by writers from around the world and the stories being mostly based in an environment that does not feel like a version of the western world. The stories that caught my interest include those by Daliso Chaponda, Csilla Kleinheincz, Andrew Drilon, Shweta Narayan, Tim Jones, Samit Basu, Andrzej Sapkowski and Jacques Barcia.
- “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: in a world where mechanized beings live and yearn for a new life with 'organic' people, one Alternate Girl has choose whether to live the life she now has or perform an act for the person who built her.
- “Mr. Goop” by Ivor W. Hartmann: in a future where global warming has claimed much of the earth, most of the remaining population lives in very high rise buildings with genetically modified life-forms for survival. In one such building, a poor boy is teased about his modified life-form who answers to "Mr. Goop". But then a crisis arises and it takes a while for the boy to realise that while he may not like Mr. Goop, to Mr. Goop he means something.
- “Trees of Bone” by Daliso Chaponda: a well-written story set in the future in Burundi, where once again, the Hutus and Tutsis may be on the edge of conflict. In its midsts lives a medical worker with a gift to bring back to life memories of past events. Having lived through the previous genocidal strife between Hutus and Tutsis, he struggles to prevent a new conflict. But to do so, he may have to do an act that, in the context of the story, is both logical but shocking.
- “The First Peruvian in Space” by Daniel Salvo (translated by Jose B. Adolph): a short story spoiled by the deliberate hiding of information that would lead the reader to re-evalute just who the white people hated by the Peruvian really are.
- “Eyes in the Vastness of Forever” by Gustavo Bondoni: on a voyage to the end of the world, a native girl becomes enamored with one superstitious sailor. As the ship sails on, the sailor learns just what is means to be bonded with a native who lives at the end of the world.
- “The Tomb” by Chen Qiufan (translated by the author): as one man leads another through an underground prison, he tells a tale of a devastation illness that renders people blind in different physical and psychological ways. Towards the end, he reveals his apparently mad scheme to bring order and sight back to the world.
- “The Sound of Breaking Glass” by Joyce Chng: set in Singapore, it tells the tale of a old man who finds and frees a fairy one day, leading him on a journey to decorate his surroundings in a way that alarms his neighbours but delights the fairies.
- “A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz (translated by the author): a well written and translated tale of a woman whose father can see when people will die. She dares to try to change the future he sees for her lover but may have to accept the future as she sees it.
- “The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon: an interesting tale set in the Philippines about two siblings who are comic book addicts and like to imaginine wild tales about comic book superheroes. One day, a relative who is a comic book artist arrives and they make up a superhero, Spin-Man, for him to create. But events take an unusual twist one the younger brother asks to be Spin-Man's alter-ego in the comic book series; events that will test the older brother's sanity and view of the universe and make him determined to save both Spin-Man and his brother.
- “Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro (translated by Daniel W. Koon): a tale as told by a young girl who sees her mother leave on a near-lightspeed space ship. Relativity ensures that she would age faster than her mother, who returns to visit every few years, mostly unchanged by age.
- “Branded” by Lauren Beukes: in a future Africa, people can, and do sell their bodies. But not for prostitution, but to companies to be 'branded' in return for enhancements provided by the companies.
- “December 8th” by Raúl Flores (translated by Daniel W. Koon): a time traveller tries to save John Lennon from being shot. But, as he would find out, the future will not be so easily changed.
- “Hungry Man” by Will Elliott: a horror story about two boys who are pickpockets in a small town, who bump into an apparently harmless, mildly insane perverted man. But after an encounter with a pair of bullies, one of them will discover that the man has a more horrifying reason to follow them than the usual perversions.
- “Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan: in a place slowly vanishing into mist as people forget about its existence, two girls fight to keep it alive by singing, dancing, and making people remember it. But to do so is against the orders of the King and they have to live their lives on the run.
- “Nothing Happened in 1999” by Fábio Fernandes: a somewhat humourous tale about time travel being discovered in the future that appears connected to an event that is about to occur at the end of 1999. That event would have a link to another, unexpected discovery.
- “Shadow” by Tade Thompson: a story about a man without a shadow and his quest to find one. But as in most tales, finding what you want may not give you what you expect.
- “Shibuya no Love” by Hannu Rajaniemi: a tale set in a future Japan where the latest trend is in virtual romances; but one foreign girl is not quite ready for the emotional ride the latest virtual romance gadget has in store for her.
- “Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: in a Mexico where people are struggling to survive, one man hopes to sell an unusual beetle to a rich man in a bid to survive for just a little longer.
- “The Glory of the World” by Sergey Gerasimov: in a strange future, a 'saviour' is shown to a gangland boss who asks him to perform miracles. But in this age, miracles are a dime a dozen and the saviour has his work cut out for him.
- “The New Neighbours” by Tim Jones: set in New Zealand, a 'high value' neighbourhood prepares to welcome aliens as neighbours. But will the neighbours cope with the aliens' attempts to fit into the neighbourhood and defend their rights to live where they want?
- “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor: an interesting future story set as a set of diary entries about two explorers in a biologically networked forest who are searching for a fabled tree. But when they find it, along with its dangerous guardian, they discover that the tree may have a desire for information that may cost them their lives.
- “The Slows” by Gail Hareven (translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green): in a future where children can be matured quickly, a researcher is confronted with a member of the Slows (whose children grow naturally) and must try to put aside his discomforts to help her; if he can.
- “Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia: in a strange world where Lenin lives as a zombie, a girl must navigate the corridors of education while avoiding him.
- “Electric Sonalika” by Samit Basu: an impressive tale about a future where an AI being is in hiding after being nearly destroyed by humanity, waiting for the time to reveal himself. That time may be near as he sends a cyborg to seduce a Prince in this modified Cinderella tale with a rather different ending.
- “The Malady” by Andrzej Sapkowski (translated by Wiesiek Powaga): an interesting tale about two travellers journeying together in ancient Ireland on a quest to...fulfill or prevent a legend from coming into being, or to create their own legend?
- “A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia: an impressive tale set in a warzone and about an improbable love between a golem and a clockwork being who with to, well, have a child. But will their wish be fulfilled by an eccentric genius or will they have to sacrifice themselves to get what they wish for?
- “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: in a world where mechanized beings live and yearn for a new life with 'organic' people, one Alternate Girl has choose whether to live the life she now has or perform an act for the person who built her.
- “Mr. Goop” by Ivor W. Hartmann: in a future where global warming has claimed much of the earth, most of the remaining population lives in very high rise buildings with genetically modified life-forms for survival. In one such building, a poor boy is teased about his modified life-form who answers to "Mr. Goop". But then a crisis arises and it takes a while for the boy to realise that while he may not like Mr. Goop, to Mr. Goop he means something.
- “Trees of Bone” by Daliso Chaponda: a well-written story set in the future in Burundi, where once again, the Hutus and Tutsis may be on the edge of conflict. In its midsts lives a medical worker with a gift to bring back to life memories of past events. Having lived through the previous genocidal strife between Hutus and Tutsis, he struggles to prevent a new conflict. But to do so, he may have to do an act that, in the context of the story, is both logical but shocking.
- “The First Peruvian in Space” by Daniel Salvo (translated by Jose B. Adolph): a short story spoiled by the deliberate hiding of information that would lead the reader to re-evalute just who the white people hated by the Peruvian really are.
- “Eyes in the Vastness of Forever” by Gustavo Bondoni: on a voyage to the end of the world, a native girl becomes enamored with one superstitious sailor. As the ship sails on, the sailor learns just what is means to be bonded with a native who lives at the end of the world.
- “The Tomb” by Chen Qiufan (translated by the author): as one man leads another through an underground prison, he tells a tale of a devastation illness that renders people blind in different physical and psychological ways. Towards the end, he reveals his apparently mad scheme to bring order and sight back to the world.
- “The Sound of Breaking Glass” by Joyce Chng: set in Singapore, it tells the tale of a old man who finds and frees a fairy one day, leading him on a journey to decorate his surroundings in a way that alarms his neighbours but delights the fairies.
- “A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz (translated by the author): a well written and translated tale of a woman whose father can see when people will die. She dares to try to change the future he sees for her lover but may have to accept the future as she sees it.
- “The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon: an interesting tale set in the Philippines about two siblings who are comic book addicts and like to imaginine wild tales about comic book superheroes. One day, a relative who is a comic book artist arrives and they make up a superhero, Spin-Man, for him to create. But events take an unusual twist one the younger brother asks to be Spin-Man's alter-ego in the comic book series; events that will test the older brother's sanity and view of the universe and make him determined to save both Spin-Man and his brother.
- “Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro (translated by Daniel W. Koon): a tale as told by a young girl who sees her mother leave on a near-lightspeed space ship. Relativity ensures that she would age faster than her mother, who returns to visit every few years, mostly unchanged by age.
- “Branded” by Lauren Beukes: in a future Africa, people can, and do sell their bodies. But not for prostitution, but to companies to be 'branded' in return for enhancements provided by the companies.
- “December 8th” by Raúl Flores (translated by Daniel W. Koon): a time traveller tries to save John Lennon from being shot. But, as he would find out, the future will not be so easily changed.
- “Hungry Man” by Will Elliott: a horror story about two boys who are pickpockets in a small town, who bump into an apparently harmless, mildly insane perverted man. But after an encounter with a pair of bullies, one of them will discover that the man has a more horrifying reason to follow them than the usual perversions.
- “Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan: in a place slowly vanishing into mist as people forget about its existence, two girls fight to keep it alive by singing, dancing, and making people remember it. But to do so is against the orders of the King and they have to live their lives on the run.
- “Nothing Happened in 1999” by Fábio Fernandes: a somewhat humourous tale about time travel being discovered in the future that appears connected to an event that is about to occur at the end of 1999. That event would have a link to another, unexpected discovery.
- “Shadow” by Tade Thompson: a story about a man without a shadow and his quest to find one. But as in most tales, finding what you want may not give you what you expect.
- “Shibuya no Love” by Hannu Rajaniemi: a tale set in a future Japan where the latest trend is in virtual romances; but one foreign girl is not quite ready for the emotional ride the latest virtual romance gadget has in store for her.
- “Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: in a Mexico where people are struggling to survive, one man hopes to sell an unusual beetle to a rich man in a bid to survive for just a little longer.
- “The Glory of the World” by Sergey Gerasimov: in a strange future, a 'saviour' is shown to a gangland boss who asks him to perform miracles. But in this age, miracles are a dime a dozen and the saviour has his work cut out for him.
- “The New Neighbours” by Tim Jones: set in New Zealand, a 'high value' neighbourhood prepares to welcome aliens as neighbours. But will the neighbours cope with the aliens' attempts to fit into the neighbourhood and defend their rights to live where they want?
- “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor: an interesting future story set as a set of diary entries about two explorers in a biologically networked forest who are searching for a fabled tree. But when they find it, along with its dangerous guardian, they discover that the tree may have a desire for information that may cost them their lives.
- “The Slows” by Gail Hareven (translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green): in a future where children can be matured quickly, a researcher is confronted with a member of the Slows (whose children grow naturally) and must try to put aside his discomforts to help her; if he can.
- “Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia: in a strange world where Lenin lives as a zombie, a girl must navigate the corridors of education while avoiding him.
- “Electric Sonalika” by Samit Basu: an impressive tale about a future where an AI being is in hiding after being nearly destroyed by humanity, waiting for the time to reveal himself. That time may be near as he sends a cyborg to seduce a Prince in this modified Cinderella tale with a rather different ending.
- “The Malady” by Andrzej Sapkowski (translated by Wiesiek Powaga): an interesting tale about two travellers journeying together in ancient Ireland on a quest to...fulfill or prevent a legend from coming into being, or to create their own legend?
- “A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia: an impressive tale set in a warzone and about an improbable love between a golem and a clockwork being who with to, well, have a child. But will their wish be fulfilled by an eccentric genius or will they have to sacrifice themselves to get what they wish for?
September 1, 2012
...The Apex Book of Word SF 2 is bigger, more geographically balanced and, if possible, more diverse than its predecessor. I'm impressed with Lavie's selection and the work it must have taken to collect these stories from all over the planet. In his afterword Charles Tan points out the numerous problems with the term world SF. I guess that if a review wants to, they could have a field day picking this anthology apart based on the difficult to define concept. Personally I don't see the point of doing that. The Apex Book of Word SF 2 aims to show the genre in all its diversity and tries to show that it is much more widespread than the English language world. In that respect it succeeds admirably. Not all stories in this collection work equally well for me but collectively they make a statement. Even in the days of instant communication, the world is larger and stranger than any one of us can possibly imagine. This anthology gives us a taste of it and invites us to explore the world of science fiction in the widest possible sense of the word. Working with such a fuzzy concept as world SF can't have been easy but Lavie has managed to create an anthology that no fan of the genre should ignore. I suggest you go do some exploring of your own.
Full Random Comments review
Full Random Comments review
March 12, 2016
4.5 stars. I have to remind myself that this was a world SF anthology (SF = speculative fiction, not science fiction), not a best of something book. No one claimed these were the best stories of the year or the best from these authors. Yet I liked almost all of them more than almost all of the stories in the last few of Gardner Dozois's best science fiction of the year anthologies. Which either means the story pool was better when Tidhar choose these stories or Dozois isn't reading the right stuff. I'm pretty sure it's the second. A number of these stories were in the standard US magazines, so a lot of these authors are publishing in venues that Dozois and other "best of" books can access, and awards committees can pull from as well, since the best of books often look to their lists first. I don't know where the disconnect is. More of these names should be on award lists. This book was terrific, I loved almost every story and the book just flew by. I was sorry to get to the end, when usually I'm almost sick to death of an anthology by the time I'm nearing the final few stories. Tidhar did a great editing job and I'm definitely going to be keeping my eye out for many of these author in the future.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz - Alternate Girl's Expatriate Life - Philippines, now the Netherlands - No matter how contented and well-adjusted ex-pats seem, they often live with an underlying sorrow and ambivalent feelings. It isn't uncommon for them to wake up crying. That made sense to me. I always wondered how strange it would be to move to a place like Israel where the actual letters of the language was different, so even just glancing around everything would so foreign, much less the sounds, styles, culture. Just like your mother's food is a comfort for many people, whether you actually like the flavors or not, home is home, even if you left for the very best of reasons. Nothing else will ever quite fit the same way. She asked a lot of interesting questions.
Alternate Girl is not a superhero name. It's much more literal. It was an interesting story, but it suffered at the end from typical short story sucky ambiguous ending syndrome.
Ivor w. Hartman - Mr Goop - Zimbabwe - This story won the Baobab Prize in 2008/2009. The prize is for Africans who write stories for African children. The story had a strong global warming theme even in 2009. I can't remember, were a lot of stories about that then or was he on the forefront? It included major flooding, bad air enough to need oxygen masks and domes, and a one-child family law in Zimbabwe, which in the story is now a state and not a country.
It was a nice sweet story about family and growing up. It was one of those stories where the speculative fiction elements served to frame and lend interest to the real human interest story at the heart of it. It was very simply and elegantly done, and we all know that the easier and more effortless it seems, the harder it is to pull off. It was a lovely little story with a lot of levels to it beyond the surface tale, with elements dealing with colonialism (the windows that showed Remote European Countryside), economic and social issues, and many other subtle things going on.
Dauso Chaponda - Trees of Bones - Malawi - The story takes place in Burundi. A news story from fifteen hours before I read this was about more than 400 people being killed in worst violence since the ethnically charged civil war ended in 2005, and fears that much worse was to come. Ten years after Chaponda's story was written and nothing has changed. Clearly the story is all too sadly based in reality, and the author understood these dynamics all too well.
The ceremony of the Waking at the wedding, where Katulo was able to bring the images, scents, sounds of previous brides and grooms alive for a moment was really moving and beautiful. The contrast between the warmth and community engendered by the wedding and the anger and violence the men directed toward the Hutus was very upsetting. This story was desperately sad and tragic, and powerful. And old man tried so hard to make sure that history didn't repeat itself, he sacrificed everything he had and more. Why can't people ever learn? I'm starting to think what the character in ##Beyond Redemption was right after all, there really is/are gods, but they're insane and we're made in their image. How else can we be so self-destructive in so many ways?
Daniel Salvo - The First Peruvian in Space - Peru - That was a clever story, even more so in early 2016 than it would have been in when this was published in 2011 or written in 2005. A Peruvian is bitter toward the whites who invaded his land and oppressed his people for hundreds of years. A very short and very timely tale.
Gustavo Bondoni - Eyes in the Vastness of Forever - Argentina - Historical fantasy, very short, a bit of a spooky horror story about a crew of superstitious Spanish and Portuguese traders arriving at a small village of natives and their interactions with them. Is what went on supernatural or not, who knows? It wasn't terrible but it wasn't special.
Chen Quifan - The Tomb - China - I think it might have been very interesting if I'd understood everything. But Chinese stories often seem to be kind of oddly fascinating. This was a post-apocalyptic tale about the remained one-third of the people still alive after some sort of disaster that caused brain damage that changed people's entire perception of the world. This story was in the form of a tour given by a really odd guy around an underground building, introducing a new guest to a number of current occupants. Except it wasn't that after all, it was something else. I didn't get it. If I read it again I might almost get it. There were definitely some cool ideas there though. I'd be very interested in reading more of his stories.
Joyce Chng - The Sound of Breaking Glass - Singapore - A simple tale about an old widower who discovers a fairy in a bird trap. He'd been a glass smith, long before his days as a poor collector of recyclables for extra money to barely subsist on. So he used the pretty blue, green and red bottles (not brown) to make wind chimes to warn the fairies away from bird traps. It was a charming, gentle and slightly melancholy story with a weak ending.
Csilla Kleinheincz - A Single Year - Hungarian-Vietnamese - "I had learnt love with and for others, so when I met Iván, I almost knew what it was." That was the opening sentence, intriguing. It was a good story about a woman who's father was an oracle and the way it affected her family and her life, and most importantly, her current relationship when he predicted that her lover would die in one year. It was a skilled telling, it felt well-crafted and effective, a good story.
Andrew Drilon - The Secret Origin of Spin-Man - Philippines - A very good story about young brothers and their love for each other and all things comic book, and family and bewildering loss and determination to believe, and restore, when the whole world is against you. The kids felt very real, it was well done.
Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro - Borrowed Time - Cuba - I sometimes think no one can hurt each other more than mothers and daughters when they get it wrong. This again was one of those stories that used an SF element to tell a very human tale, in this case the relativity of space travel to explore a story between a mother who didn't want to be a parent and the daughter who was left behind. The mother returned at various junctures in the girl/woman's life thanks to the time changes, to greater and then lesser welcome. The emotions described felt right on. It wasn't an emotional story, it was told in a distanced way, but it made sense for the tale. It was another good one.
Lauren Beukes - Branded - South Africa - Of course she's well known in the U.S. now. I loved Zoo City and liked Moxyland a lot. This story had a scary idea of future marketing idea and what people will do for perceived short-term benefits. If this were possible many people probably would choose to self-destruct just like this, a corporate sponsored drug addiction that would make them stronger, faster, more coordinated in exchange for using nanotechnology to brand advertising space on their bodies, what a great deal, everyone wins. Except the blissed-out addicts perhaps. Beukes use of slang made the story feel more authentic than most of the very formal stories in the book.
Raúl Flores Iriarte - December 8th - Cuba - Just a silly little time travel fantasy. John, Yoko, Madonna, it was supposed to be a bit absurd and funny.
Will Elliott - Hungry Man - Australia - I didn't like this at all. The kids being bullied was fine, it certainly rang true. But the crazy guy and what happened to the kids didn't work for me, it didn't resonate at all, it totally fell flat.
Shweta Narayan - Nira and I -India and Malasia- A town with twenty-four castes and strict laws about proper behavior, where breaking the rules can very easily mean being stoned to death. Which is what happened to the girl in the story's aunt when the girl was six and the aunt was sixteen, because the aunt was accused of kissing a boy. Whether she did it or not, she was stoned by her sister and her husband within minutes of the accusation. The method, stoning, was supposed to keep her spirit from haunting them in the deadly mist that shrouds the town, transforming people, causing people and things in the mist to be forgotten and fade away forever and other frightening things. But the aunt's spirit did remain and helped the girl and her best friend discover how to beat the mist back, setting them and their growing band of friends at odds with the people of the town. Plus the girls fell in love, also very much against the law. I think there was a theme about people being unwilling to embrace change, even when clinging to old rules and ways is smothering their societies and their children. Fear, inertia, what? And maybe about the arts being able to bring light where it feels like none can possibly exist, since it was dance and music that broke through the mist. There was probably a lot more in it that I didn't manage to pick up on or write about.
Fabio Fernandes - Nothing Happened in 1999 - Brazil - It wasn't a story, it was a fake encyclopedia article kind of thing explaining how time travel was discovered about a hundred years from now because some long elevator, two hundred stories, suddenly took people back to 1999. So then people wanted to go to peaceful times in the past for vacations, not to change anything. And some stuff about if the locations people wanted to go to were too Anglocentric despite the team who discovered it being French, Indian and Brazilian. Then a calculation error in the space/time travel system let them discover interstellar travel, the end. It was three pages, it didn't say much and it was totally not memorable, I have no idea why it was in here other than the initial cute idea about the elevator.
Tade Thompson - Shadow - 2010 - Nigeria, living in the UK now - I liked this story for the cultural sense of it, the way it felt like a fable with the Mamman, the guy who lost his shadow, the regular guy who told the story. It didn't amount to as much in the end as I'd hoped, it left me with that too typical short story weak ending disappointed feeling. But that's not unusual and I'm still looking forward to reading his book that comes out later this year (2016).
Hannu Rajaniemi - Shibuya No Love - A Finn who lives in Scotland -I'm one of the few people who really did not like The Quantum Thief, it was confusing and too much work to try to understand the vocabulary, though my vocabulary is better than most people's (not on Goodreads probably, but in general). But this story was good. It was set in Japan not too terribly far in the future. The young Finnish student who isn't too great with Japanese language and culture yet was talked into getting the newest gadget by a local friend. It was a little quantum computer the size of a bracelet charm that is supposed to find your perfect match or some such. The young woman had no idea what to expect and was shocked and dismayed when it threw her and to a projection of her entire relationship with the first match she sees, from meeting to breakup. The story said a lot about the fast-paced world everyone seems to want, the instant gratification, maybe risk management, but maybe opting out of real interactions too. Her friend met someone and was planning her wedding moments later for the following week. Is that wise or crazy? The Finnish woman threw her gadget away, she was too overwhelmed by the whole thing, but was she too hasty? Wouldn't a sure thing be invaluable? But isn't there value in what we learn from doing it ourselves too? It would certainly be a different world with one of those things. With a lot less music with no broken hearts. Or books without people needing to dream about romances. TV and movies would have to be a lot more creative to be interesting without being able to fall back on romantic plots too. There would be a lot of ramifications.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Maquech - Mexico born and raised, living in Canada - Signal to Noise was very enjoyable, it's been getting a lot of well-deserved press. She's one of the hot authors on the SFF scene. This was another tale that was good at creating the time and place. It was very Mexican, not stereotypically, the way a real city should feel. It felt like a realistic projection of a Mexican city in the future, with not enough water, no one except the ultra rich able to afford cars, and many other things that created the atmosphere and the set-up for the story. The story was just fine though. A nod and a slight smile, not applause and a huge grin.
Sergey Gerasimov - The Glory of the World - Ukraine - This bizarre story about the Savior and the boss made no sense. It was actually nonsense. It felt like random words strung together or like a computer interpreter really messed things up majorly except that still would have had a sentence structure that followed. I didn't get it.
Tim Jones - The New Neighbors - New Zealand - The tale was familiar, screw poor refugees and settlers, but if they become traders and business partners it's another story entirely, prejudices nearly forgotten. Too bad that can't work got the Syrians. It had a light touch despite the frustrating material, it was well done.
Nnedi Okorafor - From the Diary of Treefrog7 - Born in the U.S. to Nigerian Igbo parents - A young couple exploring a jungle on another world, the story starts off, not bright exactly, jungles are full of challenges and they've been at it for two years but upbeat. But they're committed to their job and it's mostly positive, including the woman being eight months pregnant. The story gradually takes on a darker undertone as they realize they're being stalked by an unknown creature, but the woman who's narrating the story wasn't nervous, as they'd conquered many extreme challenges in their time there so far. They were getting close to the ultimate prize, the wild mature CPU plant with hundreds of years of information on it and they were determined to find it. The story was very creative in its use of journal entries and field guide entries about the local flora and fauna. And there was a building suspense was quite effective. The story did not suffer from crappy short story ending syndrome, even though it was not exactly a predictable ending. Or it was actually, lots of short stories go to this ending by default, but usually much less successfully.
Gail Hareven - The Slows - Israel - Culture clash after an accelerated offspring growth formula transforms human society but some people don't want to change and end up living in preserves like Native American reservations. About as successfully, with as many betrayals.
Ekaterina Sedia - Zombie Lenin - 2007 - Russian living in the U.S. - This story is Sedia up to her odd but interesting best. Instead of playing with mythology overtly, she played with the way society turns things into myth, like Lenin's tomb haunting this girl after they were taken on their school trip. The girl became obsessed with other death myths and literature. She even applied her education to an economics class she slipped into one day at the university. When asked what the free market was she replied, "'It's when you pay the right price,' I say. 'To the chthonic deities. If you don't pay you become a zombie or just stay dead.'" The lecturer stared at her and said he didn't think she was in the right class. It was a splash of humor in a driftingly gray kind of a piece. It was a weird story that made me wish I had someone better at analyzing literature to talk about it with, I know I missed a lot of it.
Samit Basu - Electic Sonalika - India - I knew his name sounded familiar! Somehow Goodreads screwed up and his book Turbulence was listed both in my Read and To-Read lists, which should be impossible. It's back on my top-priority To-Read now. This was a sad and bizarre Cinderella tale about the two remaining AI robot constructs after a war that caused them to be outlawed. The male is an abusive megalomaniac, the worst kind of evil fairy tale step-father you can imagine. After centuries of physical and emotion abuse Sonalika reached a breaking point when happiness was dangled in front of her then snatched away, and it was made clear that she and her children would never escape even worse treatment, and that their pain would be inflicted on the rest of the world as well. It was a weird but interesting story.
Andrzej Sapkowski - The Malady - Poland - He's Poland's best-selling fantasy author, creator of Witcher among other things. It was a good story despite not being my usual fare. Historical fantasy, Tristan and Iseult and the supposed truths behind the legend from the points of view of Branwen and Morholt. It appealed to the mythology-lover in me, once I figured out what was going on by researching the stories.
Jacques Barcia - A Life Made Possible Behind the Barricades -2010 - Brazil - Is this the only steampunk story in the book? I think it was. A robot/motolang named Fritz. And a golem named Chaya. The names were pretty stereotypical. Fritz reminded me of Metropolis and Fritz Lang. Maybe that's a stretch. Chaya is the feminization of the Hebrew word for life, the word that is written on the forehead of golems to bring them to life, so it's as generic as it gets. The story was fine though, not exciting but fine. About what people will do for a better life, for a family, what happens when a couple has different priorities, about the toll war takes. The usual!
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz - Alternate Girl's Expatriate Life - Philippines, now the Netherlands - No matter how contented and well-adjusted ex-pats seem, they often live with an underlying sorrow and ambivalent feelings. It isn't uncommon for them to wake up crying. That made sense to me. I always wondered how strange it would be to move to a place like Israel where the actual letters of the language was different, so even just glancing around everything would so foreign, much less the sounds, styles, culture. Just like your mother's food is a comfort for many people, whether you actually like the flavors or not, home is home, even if you left for the very best of reasons. Nothing else will ever quite fit the same way. She asked a lot of interesting questions.
Alternate Girl is not a superhero name. It's much more literal. It was an interesting story, but it suffered at the end from typical short story sucky ambiguous ending syndrome.
Ivor w. Hartman - Mr Goop - Zimbabwe - This story won the Baobab Prize in 2008/2009. The prize is for Africans who write stories for African children. The story had a strong global warming theme even in 2009. I can't remember, were a lot of stories about that then or was he on the forefront? It included major flooding, bad air enough to need oxygen masks and domes, and a one-child family law in Zimbabwe, which in the story is now a state and not a country.
It was a nice sweet story about family and growing up. It was one of those stories where the speculative fiction elements served to frame and lend interest to the real human interest story at the heart of it. It was very simply and elegantly done, and we all know that the easier and more effortless it seems, the harder it is to pull off. It was a lovely little story with a lot of levels to it beyond the surface tale, with elements dealing with colonialism (the windows that showed Remote European Countryside), economic and social issues, and many other subtle things going on.
Dauso Chaponda - Trees of Bones - Malawi - The story takes place in Burundi. A news story from fifteen hours before I read this was about more than 400 people being killed in worst violence since the ethnically charged civil war ended in 2005, and fears that much worse was to come. Ten years after Chaponda's story was written and nothing has changed. Clearly the story is all too sadly based in reality, and the author understood these dynamics all too well.
The ceremony of the Waking at the wedding, where Katulo was able to bring the images, scents, sounds of previous brides and grooms alive for a moment was really moving and beautiful. The contrast between the warmth and community engendered by the wedding and the anger and violence the men directed toward the Hutus was very upsetting. This story was desperately sad and tragic, and powerful. And old man tried so hard to make sure that history didn't repeat itself, he sacrificed everything he had and more. Why can't people ever learn? I'm starting to think what the character in ##Beyond Redemption was right after all, there really is/are gods, but they're insane and we're made in their image. How else can we be so self-destructive in so many ways?
Daniel Salvo - The First Peruvian in Space - Peru - That was a clever story, even more so in early 2016 than it would have been in when this was published in 2011 or written in 2005. A Peruvian is bitter toward the whites who invaded his land and oppressed his people for hundreds of years. A very short and very timely tale.
Gustavo Bondoni - Eyes in the Vastness of Forever - Argentina - Historical fantasy, very short, a bit of a spooky horror story about a crew of superstitious Spanish and Portuguese traders arriving at a small village of natives and their interactions with them. Is what went on supernatural or not, who knows? It wasn't terrible but it wasn't special.
Chen Quifan - The Tomb - China - I think it might have been very interesting if I'd understood everything. But Chinese stories often seem to be kind of oddly fascinating. This was a post-apocalyptic tale about the remained one-third of the people still alive after some sort of disaster that caused brain damage that changed people's entire perception of the world. This story was in the form of a tour given by a really odd guy around an underground building, introducing a new guest to a number of current occupants. Except it wasn't that after all, it was something else. I didn't get it. If I read it again I might almost get it. There were definitely some cool ideas there though. I'd be very interested in reading more of his stories.
Joyce Chng - The Sound of Breaking Glass - Singapore - A simple tale about an old widower who discovers a fairy in a bird trap. He'd been a glass smith, long before his days as a poor collector of recyclables for extra money to barely subsist on. So he used the pretty blue, green and red bottles (not brown) to make wind chimes to warn the fairies away from bird traps. It was a charming, gentle and slightly melancholy story with a weak ending.
Csilla Kleinheincz - A Single Year - Hungarian-Vietnamese - "I had learnt love with and for others, so when I met Iván, I almost knew what it was." That was the opening sentence, intriguing. It was a good story about a woman who's father was an oracle and the way it affected her family and her life, and most importantly, her current relationship when he predicted that her lover would die in one year. It was a skilled telling, it felt well-crafted and effective, a good story.
Andrew Drilon - The Secret Origin of Spin-Man - Philippines - A very good story about young brothers and their love for each other and all things comic book, and family and bewildering loss and determination to believe, and restore, when the whole world is against you. The kids felt very real, it was well done.
Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro - Borrowed Time - Cuba - I sometimes think no one can hurt each other more than mothers and daughters when they get it wrong. This again was one of those stories that used an SF element to tell a very human tale, in this case the relativity of space travel to explore a story between a mother who didn't want to be a parent and the daughter who was left behind. The mother returned at various junctures in the girl/woman's life thanks to the time changes, to greater and then lesser welcome. The emotions described felt right on. It wasn't an emotional story, it was told in a distanced way, but it made sense for the tale. It was another good one.
Lauren Beukes - Branded - South Africa - Of course she's well known in the U.S. now. I loved Zoo City and liked Moxyland a lot. This story had a scary idea of future marketing idea and what people will do for perceived short-term benefits. If this were possible many people probably would choose to self-destruct just like this, a corporate sponsored drug addiction that would make them stronger, faster, more coordinated in exchange for using nanotechnology to brand advertising space on their bodies, what a great deal, everyone wins. Except the blissed-out addicts perhaps. Beukes use of slang made the story feel more authentic than most of the very formal stories in the book.
Raúl Flores Iriarte - December 8th - Cuba - Just a silly little time travel fantasy. John, Yoko, Madonna, it was supposed to be a bit absurd and funny.
Will Elliott - Hungry Man - Australia - I didn't like this at all. The kids being bullied was fine, it certainly rang true. But the crazy guy and what happened to the kids didn't work for me, it didn't resonate at all, it totally fell flat.
Shweta Narayan - Nira and I -India and Malasia- A town with twenty-four castes and strict laws about proper behavior, where breaking the rules can very easily mean being stoned to death. Which is what happened to the girl in the story's aunt when the girl was six and the aunt was sixteen, because the aunt was accused of kissing a boy. Whether she did it or not, she was stoned by her sister and her husband within minutes of the accusation. The method, stoning, was supposed to keep her spirit from haunting them in the deadly mist that shrouds the town, transforming people, causing people and things in the mist to be forgotten and fade away forever and other frightening things. But the aunt's spirit did remain and helped the girl and her best friend discover how to beat the mist back, setting them and their growing band of friends at odds with the people of the town. Plus the girls fell in love, also very much against the law. I think there was a theme about people being unwilling to embrace change, even when clinging to old rules and ways is smothering their societies and their children. Fear, inertia, what? And maybe about the arts being able to bring light where it feels like none can possibly exist, since it was dance and music that broke through the mist. There was probably a lot more in it that I didn't manage to pick up on or write about.
Fabio Fernandes - Nothing Happened in 1999 - Brazil - It wasn't a story, it was a fake encyclopedia article kind of thing explaining how time travel was discovered about a hundred years from now because some long elevator, two hundred stories, suddenly took people back to 1999. So then people wanted to go to peaceful times in the past for vacations, not to change anything. And some stuff about if the locations people wanted to go to were too Anglocentric despite the team who discovered it being French, Indian and Brazilian. Then a calculation error in the space/time travel system let them discover interstellar travel, the end. It was three pages, it didn't say much and it was totally not memorable, I have no idea why it was in here other than the initial cute idea about the elevator.
Tade Thompson - Shadow - 2010 - Nigeria, living in the UK now - I liked this story for the cultural sense of it, the way it felt like a fable with the Mamman, the guy who lost his shadow, the regular guy who told the story. It didn't amount to as much in the end as I'd hoped, it left me with that too typical short story weak ending disappointed feeling. But that's not unusual and I'm still looking forward to reading his book that comes out later this year (2016).
Hannu Rajaniemi - Shibuya No Love - A Finn who lives in Scotland -I'm one of the few people who really did not like The Quantum Thief, it was confusing and too much work to try to understand the vocabulary, though my vocabulary is better than most people's (not on Goodreads probably, but in general). But this story was good. It was set in Japan not too terribly far in the future. The young Finnish student who isn't too great with Japanese language and culture yet was talked into getting the newest gadget by a local friend. It was a little quantum computer the size of a bracelet charm that is supposed to find your perfect match or some such. The young woman had no idea what to expect and was shocked and dismayed when it threw her and to a projection of her entire relationship with the first match she sees, from meeting to breakup. The story said a lot about the fast-paced world everyone seems to want, the instant gratification, maybe risk management, but maybe opting out of real interactions too. Her friend met someone and was planning her wedding moments later for the following week. Is that wise or crazy? The Finnish woman threw her gadget away, she was too overwhelmed by the whole thing, but was she too hasty? Wouldn't a sure thing be invaluable? But isn't there value in what we learn from doing it ourselves too? It would certainly be a different world with one of those things. With a lot less music with no broken hearts. Or books without people needing to dream about romances. TV and movies would have to be a lot more creative to be interesting without being able to fall back on romantic plots too. There would be a lot of ramifications.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Maquech - Mexico born and raised, living in Canada - Signal to Noise was very enjoyable, it's been getting a lot of well-deserved press. She's one of the hot authors on the SFF scene. This was another tale that was good at creating the time and place. It was very Mexican, not stereotypically, the way a real city should feel. It felt like a realistic projection of a Mexican city in the future, with not enough water, no one except the ultra rich able to afford cars, and many other things that created the atmosphere and the set-up for the story. The story was just fine though. A nod and a slight smile, not applause and a huge grin.
Sergey Gerasimov - The Glory of the World - Ukraine - This bizarre story about the Savior and the boss made no sense. It was actually nonsense. It felt like random words strung together or like a computer interpreter really messed things up majorly except that still would have had a sentence structure that followed. I didn't get it.
Tim Jones - The New Neighbors - New Zealand - The tale was familiar, screw poor refugees and settlers, but if they become traders and business partners it's another story entirely, prejudices nearly forgotten. Too bad that can't work got the Syrians. It had a light touch despite the frustrating material, it was well done.
Nnedi Okorafor - From the Diary of Treefrog7 - Born in the U.S. to Nigerian Igbo parents - A young couple exploring a jungle on another world, the story starts off, not bright exactly, jungles are full of challenges and they've been at it for two years but upbeat. But they're committed to their job and it's mostly positive, including the woman being eight months pregnant. The story gradually takes on a darker undertone as they realize they're being stalked by an unknown creature, but the woman who's narrating the story wasn't nervous, as they'd conquered many extreme challenges in their time there so far. They were getting close to the ultimate prize, the wild mature CPU plant with hundreds of years of information on it and they were determined to find it. The story was very creative in its use of journal entries and field guide entries about the local flora and fauna. And there was a building suspense was quite effective. The story did not suffer from crappy short story ending syndrome, even though it was not exactly a predictable ending. Or it was actually, lots of short stories go to this ending by default, but usually much less successfully.
Gail Hareven - The Slows - Israel - Culture clash after an accelerated offspring growth formula transforms human society but some people don't want to change and end up living in preserves like Native American reservations. About as successfully, with as many betrayals.
Ekaterina Sedia - Zombie Lenin - 2007 - Russian living in the U.S. - This story is Sedia up to her odd but interesting best. Instead of playing with mythology overtly, she played with the way society turns things into myth, like Lenin's tomb haunting this girl after they were taken on their school trip. The girl became obsessed with other death myths and literature. She even applied her education to an economics class she slipped into one day at the university. When asked what the free market was she replied, "'It's when you pay the right price,' I say. 'To the chthonic deities. If you don't pay you become a zombie or just stay dead.'" The lecturer stared at her and said he didn't think she was in the right class. It was a splash of humor in a driftingly gray kind of a piece. It was a weird story that made me wish I had someone better at analyzing literature to talk about it with, I know I missed a lot of it.
Samit Basu - Electic Sonalika - India - I knew his name sounded familiar! Somehow Goodreads screwed up and his book Turbulence was listed both in my Read and To-Read lists, which should be impossible. It's back on my top-priority To-Read now. This was a sad and bizarre Cinderella tale about the two remaining AI robot constructs after a war that caused them to be outlawed. The male is an abusive megalomaniac, the worst kind of evil fairy tale step-father you can imagine. After centuries of physical and emotion abuse Sonalika reached a breaking point when happiness was dangled in front of her then snatched away, and it was made clear that she and her children would never escape even worse treatment, and that their pain would be inflicted on the rest of the world as well. It was a weird but interesting story.
Andrzej Sapkowski - The Malady - Poland - He's Poland's best-selling fantasy author, creator of Witcher among other things. It was a good story despite not being my usual fare. Historical fantasy, Tristan and Iseult and the supposed truths behind the legend from the points of view of Branwen and Morholt. It appealed to the mythology-lover in me, once I figured out what was going on by researching the stories.
Jacques Barcia - A Life Made Possible Behind the Barricades -2010 - Brazil - Is this the only steampunk story in the book? I think it was. A robot/motolang named Fritz. And a golem named Chaya. The names were pretty stereotypical. Fritz reminded me of Metropolis and Fritz Lang. Maybe that's a stretch. Chaya is the feminization of the Hebrew word for life, the word that is written on the forehead of golems to bring them to life, so it's as generic as it gets. The story was fine though, not exciting but fine. About what people will do for a better life, for a family, what happens when a couple has different priorities, about the toll war takes. The usual!
July 4, 2016
With 27 stories and one essay that seeks to define “world scifi,” this anthology is a worthwhile purchase for anyone who enjoys short stories and literature by non-western authors. Notice I did not say you need to be a scifi aficionado. The variety in theme, structure and style amongst these stories practically guarantees that any serious reader of any genre will find something to like, not to mention something to ponder, within the covers of this book.
Among the stories that struck me as particularly good was one by Daliso Chaponda of Malawi. In this story of Hutus and Tutsis of the future, the importance of never forgetting the past is key. Daniel Salvo’s “The First Peruvian in Space” had a wonderful turnabout that made me sit up in my chair and nod ruefully at my own prejudices. Chen Qiufan posits a chillingly horrific time in which an event called the ‘filtration” literally changed how people saw the world. He goes on to describe several different people, each one with a different visual filter, for instance a man (formerly a sculptor) who can now only see in two dimensions (making me think of Flatland and The Gift of the Magi simultaneously). I loved “The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon of the Philippines, in which a boy becomes a bit too invested in creating a superhero to whom he can relate. Time travel from a new POV, that of a mother, was what made me give “Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro of Cuba a star in my notes. I liked “Branded” by South Africa’s Lauren Beukes, not only for its depiction of corporate sponsorship taken to the Nth degree, but also for its awesomely different use of language. I had just finished reading the latest bloated tome by a certain well-known U.S. author when I read “December 8th “ by the Cuban Raúl Flores Iriarte and my notes of appreciation say simply “11/22/63 in three pages ” The format and world of “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor, a U.S.-born child of Nigerian parents, were very original and kept me interested and guessing right up to the end. “The Slows” by Gail Hareven of Israel is a spot-on critique of anthropologists and really anyone who pretends to understand another culture. I have been wading through lots of same-old, same-old zombie books lately, so greatly enjoyed Ekaterina Sedia’s Russian take in “Zombie Lenin.” Jacques Barcia of Brazil created such an interesting steampunk world in his entry “A Life Made Possible Behind the Barricades” that I was convinced it was part of a larger novel or even series of novels, but apparently he has only published short stories thus far. The final story, “Undercity,” by Israel’s Nir Yaniv, was a haunting examination of how humans always seem to think things would be better if only . . . .
It can be said that many of the stories in this anthology are derivative of familiar concepts or science fiction tropes. I would not disagree, but the important thing is to notice how authors from different countries have taken those tropes, translated them into their own culture and added their own meanings. People who have grown up in the West, in the U.S. in particular, never give a moment’s thought to what it is like to grow up in a small African or Latin American country, constantly bombarded by Western culture. From movies to television to music to, yes, science fiction books, kids and adults in other countries are forever consuming media about other people (mostly white people) from other places (mostly the U.S). I base this observation on experiences I had during the three years I lived abroad (Spain and Chile) and also on insights I gleaned by reading the amazing Trinidadian-born, Indian by ethnicity, and British by citizenship author V.S. Naipaul. To quote from my own review of Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, “as a boy growing up in Trinidad . . . Naipaul was made to read Great Books of British literature. And he never saw himself or his world reflected in those books. How must it have felt to the young Naipaul when it dawned on him that if his life wasn’t written about in the so-called Great Books, perhaps his life was somehow unworthy, unimportant?”
The writers in this anthology, while not breaking new ground in scifi with each paragraph, have nevertheless made the genre their own by recasting familiar themes in new settings and from their own, unique points of view. This collection would be a welcome addition to the home library of anyone who is interested in walking in another person’s shoes, if only for the space of time it takes to travel to the future and back.
Among the stories that struck me as particularly good was one by Daliso Chaponda of Malawi. In this story of Hutus and Tutsis of the future, the importance of never forgetting the past is key. Daniel Salvo’s “The First Peruvian in Space” had a wonderful turnabout that made me sit up in my chair and nod ruefully at my own prejudices. Chen Qiufan posits a chillingly horrific time in which an event called the ‘filtration” literally changed how people saw the world. He goes on to describe several different people, each one with a different visual filter, for instance a man (formerly a sculptor) who can now only see in two dimensions (making me think of Flatland and The Gift of the Magi simultaneously). I loved “The Secret Origin of Spin-Man” by Andrew Drilon of the Philippines, in which a boy becomes a bit too invested in creating a superhero to whom he can relate. Time travel from a new POV, that of a mother, was what made me give “Borrowed Time” by Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro of Cuba a star in my notes. I liked “Branded” by South Africa’s Lauren Beukes, not only for its depiction of corporate sponsorship taken to the Nth degree, but also for its awesomely different use of language. I had just finished reading the latest bloated tome by a certain well-known U.S. author when I read “December 8th “ by the Cuban Raúl Flores Iriarte and my notes of appreciation say simply “11/22/63 in three pages ” The format and world of “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor, a U.S.-born child of Nigerian parents, were very original and kept me interested and guessing right up to the end. “The Slows” by Gail Hareven of Israel is a spot-on critique of anthropologists and really anyone who pretends to understand another culture. I have been wading through lots of same-old, same-old zombie books lately, so greatly enjoyed Ekaterina Sedia’s Russian take in “Zombie Lenin.” Jacques Barcia of Brazil created such an interesting steampunk world in his entry “A Life Made Possible Behind the Barricades” that I was convinced it was part of a larger novel or even series of novels, but apparently he has only published short stories thus far. The final story, “Undercity,” by Israel’s Nir Yaniv, was a haunting examination of how humans always seem to think things would be better if only . . . .
It can be said that many of the stories in this anthology are derivative of familiar concepts or science fiction tropes. I would not disagree, but the important thing is to notice how authors from different countries have taken those tropes, translated them into their own culture and added their own meanings. People who have grown up in the West, in the U.S. in particular, never give a moment’s thought to what it is like to grow up in a small African or Latin American country, constantly bombarded by Western culture. From movies to television to music to, yes, science fiction books, kids and adults in other countries are forever consuming media about other people (mostly white people) from other places (mostly the U.S). I base this observation on experiences I had during the three years I lived abroad (Spain and Chile) and also on insights I gleaned by reading the amazing Trinidadian-born, Indian by ethnicity, and British by citizenship author V.S. Naipaul. To quote from my own review of Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, “as a boy growing up in Trinidad . . . Naipaul was made to read Great Books of British literature. And he never saw himself or his world reflected in those books. How must it have felt to the young Naipaul when it dawned on him that if his life wasn’t written about in the so-called Great Books, perhaps his life was somehow unworthy, unimportant?”
The writers in this anthology, while not breaking new ground in scifi with each paragraph, have nevertheless made the genre their own by recasting familiar themes in new settings and from their own, unique points of view. This collection would be a welcome addition to the home library of anyone who is interested in walking in another person’s shoes, if only for the space of time it takes to travel to the future and back.
September 17, 2012
The Apex Book of World SF is quite a mixed bag. Some of the stories are excellent, some are mind-bending; others are uninteresting, gimmicky; some aren't even really science fiction or fantasy. The cross-cultural perspectives are... really not that different from what we're used to in mainstream SF. Honestly the ones that are most different feel unbearably parochial, like one story that's about Hutu versus Tutsi as though that's something that really resonates with the human condition (instead of being completely localized to a tiny area and literally one of the stupidest things anyone could possibly fight over). A few of the stories overrely on Tomato Surprise, though one uses the surprise reasonably well as a parable on prejudice.
There are lots of interesting ideas within, particularly, I thought, with regard to the sexuality and artificial intelligence.
It's worth reading, doesn't take long to get through, and if you write SF yourself it will give you a lot of ideas for new directions you might explore.
There are lots of interesting ideas within, particularly, I thought, with regard to the sexuality and artificial intelligence.
It's worth reading, doesn't take long to get through, and if you write SF yourself it will give you a lot of ideas for new directions you might explore.
July 30, 2012
Some really good stories in here.
I'll write a more detailed review at some stage.
I'll write a more detailed review at some stage.
April 20, 2013
Another very solid collection from Apex and Tidhar. No great disappointments in this volume. Particularly strong were Rochita Loenen-Ruiz's tale of expatriate marginalization and alienation, Daliso Chaponda's spirit-laden story coloured by the ethnic strife in Burundi, Shweta Narayan's ephemeral story of reality and illusion, Gail Hareven's exploration of dehumanization and Andrezej Sapowski's powerful upstairs-downstairs confessional rewrite of an episode in the Tristan epic.
There were three others I found strong, but could not enjoy: Okorafor's social-netoworking diary story and Jacques Barcia's steampunk odyssey because of the magicification of technology (a conceit I absolutely loathe), and I found Nir Yaniv's Undercity too much a rehash of his other work, but I should stress these are personal biases, and the stories themselves are really rather good.
Interspersed with these are several shorter stories, many carrying a culturally-tinged sense of humor. Zombie Lenin by Ekatarena Sedia reminded me of Hoban at his best, Samit Basu's Electric Sonalika wrote what Bollywood SF SHOULD be, and Salvo's play on race-politics was hilarious.
Three stories also stuck out for me as a reminder that technology is not tied to culture, and played with near-future adoption of technologies by very different cultures: Lauren Beuke's cyberpunkish multinational-serfdom piece, Ivor Hartmann's charming Mr. Goop, and Hannu Rajaniemi's story of tech-aid to speed dating in Chibuya.
There are several other small stories in the book, most of them quite good, and help to balance out the others, but I don't mention them because I don't feel they break much new ground, or are standard surrealist or horror stories.
Altogether, I'd definitely recommend, but I'd also say go back to volume one and read it first if you haven't read it either. The two volumes together give a more balanced view of this strange beast called "world sf" which is about as world as "world music" is.
There were three others I found strong, but could not enjoy: Okorafor's social-netoworking diary story and Jacques Barcia's steampunk odyssey because of the magicification of technology (a conceit I absolutely loathe), and I found Nir Yaniv's Undercity too much a rehash of his other work, but I should stress these are personal biases, and the stories themselves are really rather good.
Interspersed with these are several shorter stories, many carrying a culturally-tinged sense of humor. Zombie Lenin by Ekatarena Sedia reminded me of Hoban at his best, Samit Basu's Electric Sonalika wrote what Bollywood SF SHOULD be, and Salvo's play on race-politics was hilarious.
Three stories also stuck out for me as a reminder that technology is not tied to culture, and played with near-future adoption of technologies by very different cultures: Lauren Beuke's cyberpunkish multinational-serfdom piece, Ivor Hartmann's charming Mr. Goop, and Hannu Rajaniemi's story of tech-aid to speed dating in Chibuya.
There are several other small stories in the book, most of them quite good, and help to balance out the others, but I don't mention them because I don't feel they break much new ground, or are standard surrealist or horror stories.
Altogether, I'd definitely recommend, but I'd also say go back to volume one and read it first if you haven't read it either. The two volumes together give a more balanced view of this strange beast called "world sf" which is about as world as "world music" is.
March 4, 2018
Quizá por la comparación con la decepción que supuso el primer volumen, pero en este segundo Apex Book of World SF he encontrado lo que buscaba: una antología de género fantástico (a pesar del SF hay un poco de todo) contada en coordenadas muy diferentes a las mías. Quizá también se note la presencia de autores más consolidados (o al menos más consolidados hoy) como Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes o Hannu Rajaniemi, pero lo cierto es que el nivel medio (con alguna excepción) me ha parecido bastante notable. No será la antología que cambie tu percepción del mundo tampoco, pero sí una que se lee con agrado y produce agradables sorpresas en un mundillo que a veces adolece de demasiado estereotipo.
April 11, 2020
I love to read stories where the main character doesn’t operate on the same assumptions I do, and they aren’t necessarily explained, being assumptions. I also love to read stories where the main character has the same concerns as I do, but something else is different, whether it be beliefs or language or food or clothing. This volume abounds with such tales, and I’m happy I got a chance to read it.
There’s only one story in the collection that I didn’t care for. It’s by the author of The Witcher, whose writing always reminds me of the worst RPGs I’ve ever played.
Even with that one exception, I still recommend the book. It proved a great distraction during COVID-19 social distancing.
There’s only one story in the collection that I didn’t care for. It’s by the author of The Witcher, whose writing always reminds me of the worst RPGs I’ve ever played.
Even with that one exception, I still recommend the book. It proved a great distraction during COVID-19 social distancing.
September 28, 2012
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this anthology that brings much needed fresh perspectives and diversity of new voices into the Speculative Fiction realm. I'm honoured to be a part of it.
July 18, 2016
A collection of mostly good short stories.
July 30, 2023
An interesting compilation of speculative fiction (first I thought SF stands for science fiction, but it is actually speculative fiction - make sense as few of them actually qualifies as sci-fi) from all around the world. Quality of stories varies from "WtF" to "good", as expected from any compilation. But none of them were groundbreaking.
Localization attempts of non-western authors were interesting to peruse, I wonder whether it is editor's request or authors own preferences -some of them were strained and forced. Some others were genuine and well placed. My favourite piece was “A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia. “Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia was the craziest, “The Slows” by Gail Hareven was the most touching.
The compilation was a journey worthy to explore the voices from tenements of SF genre.
Localization attempts of non-western authors were interesting to peruse, I wonder whether it is editor's request or authors own preferences -some of them were strained and forced. Some others were genuine and well placed. My favourite piece was “A Life Made Possible Behind The Barricades” by Jacques Barcia. “Zombie Lenin” by Ekaterina Sedia was the craziest, “The Slows” by Gail Hareven was the most touching.
The compilation was a journey worthy to explore the voices from tenements of SF genre.
July 24, 2020
There are twenty-six stories in this book, all of them interesting. A few of the stories were baffling, and a couple were too much horror for my taste. A few had satisfying twist endings. One reminded me of Borges' writing, and another required me to brush up on Arthurian legend.
And a few of the stories were particularly funny, moving and/or fascinating.
The authors are from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and Australia.
And a few of the stories were particularly funny, moving and/or fascinating.
The authors are from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and Australia.
May 2, 2019
A bit hit and miss, but the good stuff is really good.
May 19, 2020
Disappointing. A few decent stories, mainly from writers I already knew, but most were dull and below average. No new finds here.
August 25, 2014
This collection contains some interesting speculative fiction.
My favorite stories were 'Tree of Bone' by Malawian author Dasilo Chaponda and 'The Slows' by Israeli author Gail Hareven. The first is a horror story that takes place in the future in a small village in Burundi in the future where racial tensions are high and the ghosts of the past revisit the people. The second also takes place in a research clinic in the future where a young woman seeks to defend her baby and many unexpected twists keeps readers guessing.
Stories I liked a lot were 'A Single Year' by Hungarian-Vietnamese author, a horror story of a woman given a horrible vision of the future. Csilla Klienheincz, 'The Secret Origin of Spin-Man' by Filipino author Andrew Drilon, which features a lot for comic geeks to like. 'Shibuya no Love' by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, a story about a popular new tech device making the rounds.
So those five stories you should definitely check out.
My favorite stories were 'Tree of Bone' by Malawian author Dasilo Chaponda and 'The Slows' by Israeli author Gail Hareven. The first is a horror story that takes place in the future in a small village in Burundi in the future where racial tensions are high and the ghosts of the past revisit the people. The second also takes place in a research clinic in the future where a young woman seeks to defend her baby and many unexpected twists keeps readers guessing.
Stories I liked a lot were 'A Single Year' by Hungarian-Vietnamese author, a horror story of a woman given a horrible vision of the future. Csilla Klienheincz, 'The Secret Origin of Spin-Man' by Filipino author Andrew Drilon, which features a lot for comic geeks to like. 'Shibuya no Love' by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, a story about a popular new tech device making the rounds.
So those five stories you should definitely check out.
August 23, 2012
This collection of science fiction stories from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe was a mixed bag for me. My favorite was "The Secret Origin of Spin-Man", about a boy, his little brother, and their love of comic superheroes, which turned out to be a tremendous and unexpected story. "Zombie Lenin" by Ekaterina Sedia has something to say, and I also enjoyed "A Single Year", by Csilla Kleinheincz, about a woman whose father can see glimpses of the future, a fact which pretty much ruins the family. I liked a couple of other stories as well, but only about half in all. I just don't go for the fantasy genre and there were a number of those.
January 27, 2013
This is another book club book. I get weird about anthologies because I generally don't like short fiction. Some of the stories in here were really good. Some of them were just kind of there. A couple of them weren't translated very well. Overall, I'm glad I read this, but there were too many stories that left me wondering, now what?
September 28, 2012
Only read Lauren Beukes' "Branded." Intro to Moxyland?
http://io9.com/5943053/a-brand-new-cy...
http://io9.com/5943053/a-brand-new-cy...
July 20, 2016
Great smattering of stories-- some more along the lines of "Huh?!" Fiction from the New Yorker than strictly SF-- but will definitely find some really intriguing bits that'll lead to checking out author.
October 30, 2012
pretty good collection, some stories from different cultural contexts. some were better than others, like with any collection, but it's easy enough to skip to the next story
November 29, 2012
Great collection of international science fiction... Looking forward to the next one.
November 7, 2012
3.5/5
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