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Stellar Guild
New Under the Sun
A brand new book by master story-teller Nancy Kress"Kress at her best."-Publishers Weekly on New Under the SunSet in the near future, Nancy Kress’ story gives us a world increasingly hostile to new ideas as religious fundamentalism dictates social agenda and where the primary use of science is to bolster these very same uncompromising attitudes.This is a world we can imagine very easily since the author takes us down the sliding slope very gently. Years pass, and attitudes change a little bit here…and a little bit there till the cumulative impact of these cultural changes becomes a thought-controlling nightmare.Annabel Lee is a child of this society, but unique. She has been infected by a long-dormant alien parasite. But this “infection” may be the only hope for the world, if she can survive long enough.Therese Pieczynski’s companion piece predates the world Nancy Kress gives us and takes us to back to 1980s Nicaragua, where a strange demon lurks.
190 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 29, 2013
3 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Nancy Kress
453 books901 followersNancy Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella
Beggars in Spain
which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress is the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 31, 2014
The last Nebula-nominated novella I had to read before the deadline. As always with Kress, this is eerily plausible near future SF. It's centered on mostly-believable characters - the kid dialogue didn't always ring true - and some interesting and at times chilling extrapolation.
August 22, 2017
New Under the Sun contains two stories, Nancy Kress' excellent "Annabel Lee", a character-driven tale about symbiosis and Therese Pieczynski's "Strange Attraction", a sort of science fiction horror story set in 1980s Nicaragua.
Thanks to her encounter with an alien species as a young child, the title character in "Annabel Lee" represents a potentially new step in humanity's development. Her story is set against the backdrop of a near-future American society suffering economic hardship and giving in to irrationality and superstition. Considering the current state of America, that's a frightening possibility and Kress does an excellent job of establishing tension between the more rational elements of society and the irrational folks, all while keeping her story moving. She never lets the social commentary overwhelm the characters and those characters are well-defined and memorable.
Kress is one of the best science fiction writers out there, a great storyteller with consistently thought-provoking ideas and she's in fine form in this novella.
I found "Strange Attraction" less effective, although it was entertaining. It's an intense story centered around an intriguing idea but for me, it played out a bit like a good B-movie action flick. There's nothing wrong with that. I just didn't feel it paired well with "Annabel Lee".
Thanks to her encounter with an alien species as a young child, the title character in "Annabel Lee" represents a potentially new step in humanity's development. Her story is set against the backdrop of a near-future American society suffering economic hardship and giving in to irrationality and superstition. Considering the current state of America, that's a frightening possibility and Kress does an excellent job of establishing tension between the more rational elements of society and the irrational folks, all while keeping her story moving. She never lets the social commentary overwhelm the characters and those characters are well-defined and memorable.
Kress is one of the best science fiction writers out there, a great storyteller with consistently thought-provoking ideas and she's in fine form in this novella.
I found "Strange Attraction" less effective, although it was entertaining. It's an intense story centered around an intriguing idea but for me, it played out a bit like a good B-movie action flick. There's nothing wrong with that. I just didn't feel it paired well with "Annabel Lee".
March 17, 2022
I enjoyed the first part of the book by Nancy Kress, but the second part by Therese Pieczynski made me very uncomfortable. I think I will need some Jungian psychoanalysis. It has to do with my life experiences, Central America and the Iran Contra Affair. I should write a book.
June 20, 2021
Very human stories of alien intrusion into a human society in turmoil.
Publishing in 2013 Kress was already attuned to the trends that would give us post truth in 2016.
Publishing in 2013 Kress was already attuned to the trends that would give us post truth in 2016.
February 7, 2025
There is no writer like Nancy Kress and this novella is so perceptive of the near future dystopia, and smart that I enjoyed every second of it. Highly recommend.
May 14, 2014
This is a book in publisher Arc Manor’s so-called “Stellar Guild” series, in which a new work by an SF “superstar” is paired with one by an up-and-comer of the star’s selection. Here, the lead author is Nancy Kress, and her story, “Annabel Lee,” nominated for beset novella of the year by the SF Writers Association, begins when a little girl on a camping trip with her family is surreptitiously infected by an alien parasite. Kress traces Annabel’s development—and the parasite’s—from 2013 to 2030 against a background of social and economic turmoil as anti-scientific cultural forces complicate Annabel’s life, as well as her fiercely protecitve older sister’s. I found this story most appealing in the early going, up through the first half, especially after the advent of a CDC investigator and the progress of the parasite brought issues related to epidemiology and neurology into play—and when the plot had quite a few degrees of freedom still left available as potential trajectories. The story moved smartly (both meanings intended) through this material. I have to say that part of my enjoyment waa due to the novelty of reading real science fiction after two Hugo-nominated novellas that were not. But then, as the story became more narrowly directed, the science a bit more iffy, and the cumulative weight of Kress’s didacticism approached my tolerance for such, I found my attention flagging some. Overall, though, Kress deserves kudos for her careful structuring of personal and political elements, for letting her characters stay true to their own dreams and selves, and for recognizing the potential for different sources of truth.
The last quarter of the book is given over to a novelette by Kress’s “protégé,” Therese Pieczynski. The intent expressed by series editor Mike Resnick is that the star’s work is to be paired with “a sequel, a prequel, or a companion piece”—an intriguing concept that Pieczynski doesn’t follow. Her story “Strange Attraction” is only barely connected to Kress’s, which is much to Ms. P’s disadvantage, as, left to her own devices, she chases her tale of love and war into a no man’s land (and no woman’s, either) populated by good Sandinistas, bad Contras, and a giant vortex creature that homes in on the narrator’s, uh, passion, or something. If the author was going for an attempt to make personal sense out of violence, she would have been better off trying for something in the magic-realist vein. Her use of science-fiction, with its basis in physical cause and effect, gets her only nonsense.
The last quarter of the book is given over to a novelette by Kress’s “protégé,” Therese Pieczynski. The intent expressed by series editor Mike Resnick is that the star’s work is to be paired with “a sequel, a prequel, or a companion piece”—an intriguing concept that Pieczynski doesn’t follow. Her story “Strange Attraction” is only barely connected to Kress’s, which is much to Ms. P’s disadvantage, as, left to her own devices, she chases her tale of love and war into a no man’s land (and no woman’s, either) populated by good Sandinistas, bad Contras, and a giant vortex creature that homes in on the narrator’s, uh, passion, or something. If the author was going for an attempt to make personal sense out of violence, she would have been better off trying for something in the magic-realist vein. Her use of science-fiction, with its basis in physical cause and effect, gets her only nonsense.
May 12, 2014
I've only read Annabel Lee, not the other story. I'll get to it later.
Annabel Lee is about two sisters: Hannah, the elder, a brilliant and hard-edged rationalist;and the younger, Annabel, a more or less ordinary person. As a small child, Annabel is infected with an alien symbiont that hijacks her body through some pretty fancy-pants biochemistry. It's basically a collective of single-celled organisms that has a unique kind of intelligence. I loved this scenario, and everything about the attachment between the girl and the symbiont plays out.
I was less enthused about the near-future Boston in which this took place, in which veneration of the irrational gets out of hand, and thugs run around beating people up because of the fear of demons, witches, and other nasty phenomena. These thugs are organized into a group called the SLA (which doesn't stand for Symbionese Liberation Army, but must be a play on it). It just doesn't make sense. A brand new form of religious thought just isn't going to turn the majority of people into overnight fanatics, and if something like that happened, the more established religions in this country wouldn't take it sitting down. But the US government in this story is ineffectual, and organized religion nowhere to be found. The irrational fanatics are better organized than anyone else, apparently.
One character that really doesn't make sense is Mother Moran. She's with the SLA, which hates witches, but the way she talks and acts has all the markings of a neopagan. So while I couldn't help cackling at Kress' send-up of all the "thee"s and "thou"s in Mother Moran's speech, I didn't understand at all how she could have become part of the SLA, or why the others in the group let her alone have contact with an important captive.
It seems like every book I've read recently has something in it that makes me want to shout at the people in it. In this case, it was: "People! Go back and look in the crevasse!" Nobody ever takes my advice (hrmph!). But I bet if they did, they would have found a really cool space vehicle.
The ending of the story was kind of abrupt, and we find out what happened through an epilogue. It felt a little incomplete to me, and now I see this is part of a larger system of stories. I liked Annabel Lee well enough that I'll probably check them out one of these days.
Annabel Lee is about two sisters: Hannah, the elder, a brilliant and hard-edged rationalist;and the younger, Annabel, a more or less ordinary person. As a small child, Annabel is infected with an alien symbiont that hijacks her body through some pretty fancy-pants biochemistry. It's basically a collective of single-celled organisms that has a unique kind of intelligence. I loved this scenario, and everything about the attachment between the girl and the symbiont plays out.
I was less enthused about the near-future Boston in which this took place, in which veneration of the irrational gets out of hand, and thugs run around beating people up because of the fear of demons, witches, and other nasty phenomena. These thugs are organized into a group called the SLA (which doesn't stand for Symbionese Liberation Army, but must be a play on it). It just doesn't make sense. A brand new form of religious thought just isn't going to turn the majority of people into overnight fanatics, and if something like that happened, the more established religions in this country wouldn't take it sitting down. But the US government in this story is ineffectual, and organized religion nowhere to be found. The irrational fanatics are better organized than anyone else, apparently.
One character that really doesn't make sense is Mother Moran. She's with the SLA, which hates witches, but the way she talks and acts has all the markings of a neopagan. So while I couldn't help cackling at Kress' send-up of all the "thee"s and "thou"s in Mother Moran's speech, I didn't understand at all how she could have become part of the SLA, or why the others in the group let her alone have contact with an important captive.
It seems like every book I've read recently has something in it that makes me want to shout at the people in it. In this case, it was: "People! Go back and look in the crevasse!" Nobody ever takes my advice (hrmph!). But I bet if they did, they would have found a really cool space vehicle.
The ending of the story was kind of abrupt, and we find out what happened through an epilogue. It felt a little incomplete to me, and now I see this is part of a larger system of stories. I liked Annabel Lee well enough that I'll probably check them out one of these days.
October 27, 2014
New under the sun, the stellar guild series.
2 provocative short stories one by Scifi veteran Nancy Kress, the other by a young up coming writer Therese Pieczynski. Annabelle Lee by Nancy Kress takes place in a dystopian future in a time similar to our.The heroine of the story Annabelle Lee is infected by symbiotic alien hive mind at a young age. The story deals with how she and those around her discover and cope with it in a time where scientific rationale thinking is in the decline. The question story asks is was human evolution encouraged by such interactions? Are we just hybrids of many symbioses? It also presents an anti science culture that could become a scary reality, if as a culture we aren’t careful.
Strange attraction the story by Therese Pieczynski works with a similar theme but works it from a different angle. This story takes place in Managua Nicaragua during the war with Contra rebels. The story looks at the interaction between another woman and an alien presence in a war zone. A central question this story deals with can our emotional state influence how human alien symbiotic manifest themselves?
2 provocative short stories one by Scifi veteran Nancy Kress, the other by a young up coming writer Therese Pieczynski. Annabelle Lee by Nancy Kress takes place in a dystopian future in a time similar to our.The heroine of the story Annabelle Lee is infected by symbiotic alien hive mind at a young age. The story deals with how she and those around her discover and cope with it in a time where scientific rationale thinking is in the decline. The question story asks is was human evolution encouraged by such interactions? Are we just hybrids of many symbioses? It also presents an anti science culture that could become a scary reality, if as a culture we aren’t careful.
Strange attraction the story by Therese Pieczynski works with a similar theme but works it from a different angle. This story takes place in Managua Nicaragua during the war with Contra rebels. The story looks at the interaction between another woman and an alien presence in a war zone. A central question this story deals with can our emotional state influence how human alien symbiotic manifest themselves?
March 20, 2014
Wow. An incredibly, scarily plausible cautionary tale. The way she describes how society could devolve into pseudo-science and paranormal beliefs is frighteningly prescient, so much so that my hopes that it could never happen that way seem to pale in comparison to her (literary) insistence that it will. Like all of the best Kress, though, the more lofty ideals and thought experiments are always secondary to the people, the characters, US, that have to deal with these scenarios.
Kress is one of 10, maybe 12, authors for whom I'll take the chance, no matter how extreme or different the tale may seem to be. I've yet to be disappointed, and can't wait for the next challenge. Thanks, Nancy, and keep them coming,.
Kress is one of 10, maybe 12, authors for whom I'll take the chance, no matter how extreme or different the tale may seem to be. I've yet to be disappointed, and can't wait for the next challenge. Thanks, Nancy, and keep them coming,.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews