Cracking the Sky

by Brenda Cooper

Award-winning author Brenda Cooper’s first science fiction only collection treats readers to human stories about the future. Meet a physicist who searches across timelines in a desperate attempt to travel across them herself, a young woman who tried to re-cover the magic of a trip on a river with her grandfather, a young couple who suspect their neighbor child is being raised by robots, and many more…

HUMAN FUTURES
PART ONE
The ROBOT’S GIRL
SAVANT SONGS
RIDING in MEXICO
The WAR of the FLOWERS
TRAINER of WHALES
STAR of HUMANITY
MY FATHER’S SINGULARITY

PART TWO
The TRELLIS
SECOND SHIFT
BLOOD BONDS

PART THREE
The HEBRAS and the DEMONS and the DAMNED
The STREET of ALL DESIGNS

PART FOUR
MY GRANDFATHER’S RIVER
TEA with JILLIAN
FOR the LOVE of MECHANICAL MINDS
ENTROPY and EMERGENCE
ALIEN GRAVEYARDS
A HAND and HONOR
MIND EXPEDITIONS

PART FIVE
FOR the LOVE of METAL DOGS
CRACKING the SKY

Genres: Science Fiction

295 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2015

About the author

Brenda Cooper writes science fiction,fantasy, and poetry.

Brenda's most recent novels are EDGE of DARK and SPEAR OF LIGHT from Pyr and POST from ESpec Books. Edge of Dark won the 2016 Endeavour Award for a notable science fiction or fantasy novel by a Northwest author.

Other recent novels include the duology THE CREATIVE FIRE and THE DIAMOND DEEP, also from Pyr.

Brenda released two collections in 2015. Her all science fiction CRACKING THE SKY came out from Fairwood Press and her all-fantasy ebook collection BEYOND THE WATERFALL DOOR was created through a six-author Kickstarter project.

Brenda is the author of the Endeavor award winner for 2008: THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, and of two sequels, READING THE WIND and WINGS OF CREATION. She has written a novel with Larry Niven, called BUILDING HARLEQUIN's MOON, and a solo stand-alone novel, MAYAN DECEMBER. She has numerous stories that have published in a variety of magazines, from Nature to Asimov's. Many of her stories have been selected for Year's Best anthologies.

By day, Brenda is the City of Kirkland’s CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, she’s a futurist and writer. She lives in the pacific northwest o the United States of America.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slurp. Gale force winds outside the hotel room but warm and cozy inside with a book. With any collection of short stories some appeal to you more than others. I am pretty happy with some of these and was able to forgive the mildly unsatisfying ones.

[Wendy S. Delmater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection. It’s set up in sections: “Future Earth,” “Space,” “Stories From Freemont’s Children,” “Short and to the point,” and “Military Science Fiction.”

Every last one of the stories in “Future Earth” is amazing. It’s hard to choose a “best of,” but I would have to say I’d lay money on “Savant’s Songs,” the tale of an elderly female physicist who tries to reach another dimension. The section also has a stories of a young girl whose guardians are robots, a researcher who rides the soul of another person in the Third World and realizes the complexity of poverty, an odd take on a possible outcome of the war on drugs, a story about sea aquaculture community living though a sea-quake with the help of semi-domesticated whales, a tale of whether or not to join an off-the-grid but high-tech alternative community with an agenda, and perhaps the most introspective piece of all: a young man who changes so drastically due to technology that he does not realize he’s become what his father foretold.

The section labeled “Space” has three finely-crafted tales: one of love across interplanetary distances, one of twins making a breakthrough in communicating with AIs, and one (co-authored with Larry Niven) about the perils of bioengineered life on the Pluto/Charon pair, changing as they were nudged closer to the center of the solar system.

“Stories from Freemont’s Children” is two tales of youngsters on a world called Freemont. There is some interesting world-building here. The first story is about dealing with the indigenous animals so they can survive. The second is about choosing genetic modifications to make life there easier: you choose as a child and you only get one mod. Which one, and why?

“Short and to the Point” is seven flash fiction stories; a very difficult length to write well, and Cooper is superb at it. I’d read the first sad and lovely tale of sensory memories of a dead river when reviewing the anthology River. “Tea with Jillian” is about an unexpected upgrade to an elderly woman’s robot companion. “For the Love of Mechanical Minds” is about a child who always wanted to be an AI and did the next best thing (and whatever you guessed that thing is, you’re wrong). “Entropy and Emergence” is all about a man in a hospice who has “birthed” an AI. Will his legacy be to let it live? Programmers always leave a back door . . . .

The flash-length “Alien Graveyards” is not about a place for dead bodies, but rather a place for living memories. “A Hand and Honor” is about a contest between enhanced and non-enhanced human athletes, but really more about what makes us human. “Mind Expeditions” was about virtual policing and security, its limits and benefits and horrors–all folded into an anecdote on Career Day, at a school.

The book ends with a two stories of “Military Science Fiction.” “For the Love of Metal Dogs” tells the story of a handler for a robotic military dog teamed with a handler for a flesh-and-bone military dog. The canines’ inherent strengths and weaknesses turn out to be . . . complimentary. The story that the collection named for is the last one, “Cracking the Sky” – a bit of military SF that’s as dramatic as it is intriguing.

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[SFReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing reviews can be challenging -- trying to talk about a story without giving it away is tough. It's a heavy responsibility too. There you are, reading something someone has slaved over for, offering your opinion. And that's what a review is after all, just an opinion. I like to think mine is an informed opinion, only because of the amount of reading I've done over the years, and my little bit of dabbling in writing, but maybe I'm deluded.

So, while writing a book review is hard, writing a review of a short story collection is even harder. Generally a book will have a handful of main characters, one or two main themes, a few minor themes, a handful of big events.... But when it's a story collection, you have this scenario repeated in a compressed form for however many stories are in the book. Yikes.

Should I write an individual review for each story? Or just sum up the whole collection? I never quite know what to do, so I guess I'll just dive in and start swimming (or sinking).

Read more at SFReader.com Cracking the Sky, by Brenda Cooper