The Anderson Project

by Ken Liu, Judith Moffett, Kathleen Ann Goonan

The second in a series of story groupings based upon a pre-existing work of art, in this case a Richard Anderson painting. The first such group, The Palencar Project, was published by Tor.com in 2012.Ken Liu is among the most prominent new award-winning Science Fiction writers of the last decade, and in "Reborn" his vision of a really uncanny alien invasion set in Boston, MA, is a stunner, with echoing reverberations, of love, identity, resistance and revolution.Judith Moffett is a poet, biographer, and SF writer who somehow manages to blend all these passions in a story about a new art form involving the science of dreaming, and interpreting dreams, and art. Give a poet a painting to write a story about and you get "Space Ballet", in which students at the Center for Dream Research struggle to interpret a cryptic precognitive dream, a group effort that may avert a disaster.Kathleen Ann Goonan's stories and novels often evoke a deep desire for some form of utopian future, both better and somehow wilder that the present. Her story "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" is about an animal rights activist and a genius parrot, inter-species communication, and the dream of space, a great leap forward in several ways.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Science Fiction

104 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 29, 2014

About the author

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, as well as top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France, among other places.

Ken's debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work. The most recent projects include “The Message,” under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode of Netflix's breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC's Pantheon, which Craig Silverstein will executive produce, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories by Ken.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Ken worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Ken frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

Ken is also the translator for Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang's Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide, as well as the editor of Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese science fiction.

He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[S.A Reidman · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there's one thing the Anderson Project series did achieve successfully - it's put Richard Anderson's art in the spotlight. The cover, the actual painting is so eerie and prickly and almost weirdly familiar that I had to go and do an excavation on the world wide web and find his art. Turns out he is not some ancient from hundreds of years ago. So, I spent the better part of this exercise in getting rid of reading slump, studying so many pieces of art and then coming back to this painting.

REBORN
Thankfully, the book slump I was falling into earlier has subsided. Reborn jarred me right out of it with that entire sequence between the human detective and the Tawnin alien with two sets of arms, no mouth, and just sheer terror in the idea of standing next to one let alone coupling with one. The question of humans having multiple personalities as argued by the aliens is unsettling. If you exorcise the memories of a murderer and leave only the memories of normality, does it really make the person different and no longer a murderer? Well, whatever rage and intent led to murder is not tied to memories but inside the human mind and chemically inextricable, the murderer may not remember killing someone but that entire chemical explosion of rage or cold calculating intent will come together again and again and the human will respond memory or not - so the Tawnin are full of it. I mean, the police officer proved that point. No matter how many times he was reborn, he was still always lead by his thirst for vengeance.

SPACE BALLET
The science of dreams is explored and taken levels above with the second story and really goes in a direction I did not see coming especially after reading reborn, it made sense on the surface that the image depicted the obvious UFO and Alien backstory. This one is unique in that it is entirely human, and entirely. Precognition through dreams. Who hasn't had a dream that seems strangely if not frightfully prophetic? I enjoyed the scientific endeavor and the other "ultimate intimacy" in which students entered each other's dream to better understand the meanings it could hold.

BLAH BLAH .... THE LET DOWN
The trio of short stories would be a perfect encapsulation of the images were it not for number 3, which I have dubbed "Dawn of the Planet of the Parrots". There is something long-winded about the author that in 32 pages, I felt like I had read a 200 hundred page novel - not in the wow this is very informative and full of little nuggets of gold but rather in the ...god when will it end. We get it, the parrot is Caesar and the rest of the African Greys are the troop that take over the world. Or whatever.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short stories inspired by the painting seen on the front cover. Each writer has a separate vision from the painting with Liu exploring freedom, oppression, memory and guilt in a first contact story, Moffett looking to the possibilities of pre cognitive dreams, and Goonan seeing a tale of animal human genetic modification and the rights of each in such a world. All three hold interesting ideas to think on, though Liu's Reborn definitely resonated most strongly with me.

[Anny Barros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reborn by Ken Liu - 4.5/5
Space Ballet by Judith Moffett - 4/5
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Kathleen Ann Goonan - 4/5

[Carl V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Editor David G. Hartwell points out in his introduction that there is a long tradition in the SF field of stories being written to accompany existing art work, a tradition that has fallen by the wayside in recent years. Hartwell teamed with Tor.com to reinvigorate the idea with The Palencar Project, based on an image by artist John Jude Palencar. Hartwell and Tor.com return to the idea with The Anderson Project. This is a fantastic science fiction image that compels you to wonder what is happening with these people apparently tethered to some sort of space craft. Each of these authors does an admirable job in interpreting the painting through story and this experiment has produced three solid stories that are well worth reading.

The more detailed review of each of the three short stories is available here:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014...

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These three novelettes ("Reborn" by Ken Liu, "Space Ballet" by Judith Moffett, and "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" by Kathleen Ann Goonan) were inspired by a Richard Anderson painting. It's quite a fascinating exercise. Liu's very creepy story features alien invaders/occupiers on Earth and the disturbing things they do to humans to subjugate them. Moffett's and Goonan's stories actually feature the painting in question literally. I didn't think that would work well at first, but they both do it quite cleverly. In Moffett's story it is a painting that a precognitive did to aid in dream interpretation. In Goonan's it's of a spaceship that is being constructed at the time. And there's a supersmart parrot. It's a bit out of left field, but it works.

[Sara J. (kefuwa) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting triptych of stories based on a Richard Anderson painting.

What piqued me most though was: i) main characters named Josh/Joshua in story #1 & #2; ii) the word/element "ballet" and the actual painting appearing in story #2 & #3; and, iii) some sort of uprising/rebellion: humanity in #1 & animals in #2....

If the three authors wrote their stories indepenently of each other... then that is just really interesting considering the totally different premises of each of their stories...