Full Spectrum 4

by Lou Aronica (Editor), Amy Stout (Editor), Betsy Mitchell (Editor)

"The most important original anthology series in [science fiction]."--The Washington Post Book World

With ten Hugo and Nebula award nominations and three consecutive Locus Awards for best original anthology, Full Spectrum is the most critically acclaimed original science fiction anthology series of its time. Now Full Spectrum returns with its fourth and most provocative installment to date, featuring the best speculative fiction being written today.

From David Brin's tale of scientific obsession and consuming loneliness on a space station in the farthest reaches of space to Ursula K. Le Guin's rich and mysterious evocation of the secret language of oppressed women to Ray Aldridge's haunting tale of a planet where love can be deadly, these twenty fables of the future truly represent the full spectrum of the imagination from the known to the unknown--and everything in between.

Brilliant, disturbing, visionary, and startlingly original, Full Spectrum 4 is quite simply the state of the art of science and speculative fiction.

Featuring: Ray Aldridge - Kevin J. Anderson - David Brin - Danith McPherson - Stephen R. Donalson - L. Timmel Duchamp - Jean-Claude Dunyach - Geogory Feeley - Elizabeth Hand - Howard V. Hendrix - Bonita Kale - Nancy Kress - John M. Landsberg - Ursula K. Le Guin - A. R. Morlan - Mark Rich - Bruce Holland Rogers - Dave Smeds - Martha Soukup - Del Stone, Jr.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Anthologies

496 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

I have been associated with the book publishing world since August 1979, when I started as an assistant in the Managing Editor’s Department at Bantam Books. Prior to founding The Fiction Studio, I served as Deputy Publisher of Bantam and Publisher of Berkley Books and Avon Books. During this time, I launched the premier science fiction and mystery imprints in the business, and also presided over the largest growth period to date in the history of the #1 single-title romance program.

My earliest publishing experiences were in the field of science fiction and fantasy. I started my first publishing imprint, Bantam Spectra, at the age of 27 and published my first New York Times bestseller with that imprint a year later. My first editorial acquisition, David Brin’s Startide Rising, won the field’s two highest awards, the Hugo and the Nebula. I subsequently published New York Times bestsellers with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, David Brin, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Raymond Feist, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, and others, while also acquiring five consecutive winners of the Nebula Award. In addition, I created the “Full Spectrum” anthology series, which won me a World Fantasy Award in 1994.

My biggest commercial accomplishment in the field of science fiction and fantasy was my acquisition and design of the Star Wars book publishing program. Started at a time when licensing interest in the movies was very low, the book publications consistently hit the New York Times list (as high as #1) while also jump-starting the entire Star Wars franchise.

In the nineties, I moved beyond science fiction. As Mass Market Publisher for Bantam, I launched the Bantam Crime Line mystery imprint and was closely involved in the development of several bestselling authors, including Elizabeth George, Robert Crais, and Diane Mott Davidson. I launched the Bantam Fanfare romance imprint, which led to the development of bestselling authors such as Amanda Quick, Tami Hoag, and Iris Johansen.

In 1994, I left Bantam to become SVP and Publisher of the Berkley Publishing Group. The two imprints I started there, Boulevard (a media imprint) and Signature (a literary imprint) had New York Times bestsellers within their first year. I also acquired and edited the bestselling futuristic mysteries by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts).

In 1995, I moved to Avon Books to spearhead a turnaround of that company as SVP and Publisher. I supervised significant changes to the company’s industry-leading romance program, which led to the largest growth period in the program’s history to that point. Committing the company to a profitable path of publishing for dedicated readers, I launched a series of imprints focused on science fiction, literary fiction, mystery, pop culture, health, history, and teen literature. Most of these imprints had bestsellers very quickly.

In 1999, I left Avon after the acquisition of the company by The News Corporation. The creative investment I made in that house continues to pay significant dividends, however, as writers whose publishing programs I developed became breakout bestsellers, including Dennis Lehane, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, J.A. Jance, Stephanie Laurens, Lisa Kleypas, Bruce Feiler and Peter Robinson.

In addition to my current role with The Fiction Studio, I am a novelist and nonfiction writer. My novels, The Forever Year and Flash and Dazzle appeared under the name Ronald Anthony. My nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller The Element (written with Sir Ken Robinson), the national bestseller The Culture Code (written with Dr. Clotaire Rapaille), Conscientious Equity (written with Neal Asbury), Miraculous Health (written with Dr. Rick Levy) and A Million Thanks (written with Shauna Fleming).

Finding myself missing the publishing side of the business, in 2008, literary manager Peter Miller and I started a small book imprint called The Story Plant. Right now, it’s a tiny opera

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his Introduction to Full Spectrum 3, the previous anthology in this award-winning series, editor Lou Aronica wrote,

We have only one regret. In each of the first two volumes of this anthology, we published five writers who had never published fiction before. In Full Spectrum 3, there isn't a single story by a previously unpublished writer. We read some very good submissions, but none were at the level of the stories which are included here. I find this unfortunate, but I think it would have been more unfortunate to lower our standards in order to keep our record intact. Nevertheless, it is something we will seek to rectify in Full Spectrum 4.
—Introduction, Full Spectrum 3, p.x

So... how did Lou (and his editing partners Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell) do this time?

Well... there is no Introduction at all in Full Spectrum 4, so we don't know what Aronica thought of his earlier promise. There do seem to be a lot more unfamiliar names here—although the very first work is by Ursula K. Le Guin, who was hardly an unknown even in 1993!

Le Guin's entry is very brief, though—"Fragments from the Women's Writing" is just five pages long, a linked article and poem about an ancient writing system secretly preserved by Chinese women in defiance of the first Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang's consolidation of scripts.

Le Guin's contribution also helps set the stage for the next piece, L. Timmel Duchamp's "Motherhood, Etc.", in which nineteen-year-old Patty (she goes by Pat) is in trouble with the government for not having sex with the man she'd been sleeping with. Pat's plight is something entirely other than what one might expect, and Duchamp's prose is full of trenchant observations.

She knows he must have figured out he's found one of her most vulnerable spots.
—p.9

Duchamp, by the way, would go on to found Aqueduct Press in Seattle, publisher of (inter alia) Nisi Shawl's collection Filter House, the subject of one of my very first reviews on Goodreads, back in 2008.

Next up is "The Saints," by Bonita Kale, an odd little tale of Eleanor, a bad-tempered missionary, and her dedication to saving the Quechua—although her holy work does not go exactly as Eleanor planned.

A. R. Morlan's "The Best Lives of Our Years" is one of those stories... a fertility plague sterilizes mankind in the far-off future of 2007, leaving women to rule the planet just about as badly as men ever did. It's terribly dated now, with "futuristic" slang that's difficult to take seriously (too many 'postrophes) and an unsympathetic character named Alan... but I was able to overcome these obstacles, ultimately, and get into the more universal themes Morlan explored.

No. You don't understand John M. Landsberg's "Embodied in Its Opposite" at all—which is, in a way, the point.

"Foreigners," by Mark Rich, is connected to Landsberg's story; its narrator is imprisoned for similarly inscrutable reasons. I did wonder whether the U.S. government would use "DEA" as an acronym for the "Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs" (p.94), though.

Del Stone, Jr. tells us that "The Googleplex Comes and Goes"—and even though this was years before Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched their little Palo Alto startup, Stone somehow managed to capture its essence:

The Googleplex came to the business district, where it stomped flat a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop, Alice Mason's Art and Framing Supply store, and the parking lot at Mr. Keplinger's funeral home, across the street from the Rexall drugstore. It stomped flat the people inside those places too.
Nobody was watching when the Googleplex came. Some people say they were, but they're the liars.
—p.99

After that dramatic opening comes a touching tale about a young woman who was there when the Googleplex came, and her rather dim boyfriend, whose reaction to the inexplicable—the mini-theme that ties together these last three stories—is typically testosterone-fueled.

Ray Aldridge's "The Beauty Addict" explores another kind of ineffability, one I've mentioned multiple times myself—the notion of superstimulus: on the remote planet Noctile live beings called sylphs,

who, though they are not human, are still the most beautiful women in the human universe.
—p.112

"In Medicis Gardens" (whose title seems to be missing an apostrophe, somehow), by Jean-Claude Dunyach, gives us yet another—though still ultimately unattainable—object of desire. The woman on the bench in the Gardens has sold most of her memories, you see, and seems unable to retain any new ones as a result. Yet her would-be lover persists...

Stephen R. Donaldson certainly caused a fair amount of controversy with his deeply-flawed protagonist (I won't say hero) Thomas Covenant—and I say this as someone who devoured The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, back when it was a mere trilogy—but "The Woman Who Loved Pigs" isn't much like Covenant's Chronicles anyway. This one starts out very tenderly (though it becomes less tender as it progresses). Fern, the protagonist, is a developmentally-disabled girl who becomes possessed by a powerful magician... and yet retains her own personality and will in the face of his powers and sophistication.

She seemed to take his fear from him; he seemed to leach all calm and quiet out of her.
—p.211

Martha Soukup's "The Story So Far" is accomplished meta-fiction, an introspective tale that could have been written by James Tiptree, Jr., although Tiptree had already left us behind by then.

I wonder why this story seems to define girls by what boys think of them.
—p.225

In defiance of its title, "Suicidal Tendencies" by Dave Smeds is a light-hearted story about the games people would play, when they have all the time in the world. This one also has a lot of local color for me now, although I missed that my first time around:

The Willamette Valley warmed to the rays of the newly risen sun. I'd lost sight of Portland as dawn had doused the lights of the city. Now it hid in the greens and browns of the continent, as if it didn't exist at all.
—p.256

Gregory Feeley's "The Mind's Place" was an interesting admixture of dream-logic and nanotech, set on a spaceship slowly outbound to the edge of the Solar System.

And then there's "Ah! Bright Wings" by Howard V. Hendrix—whoa. This one is cyber-trippy, maaaan... but in a way that is unfortunately no longer possible to find credible. Through no fault of his own, Hendrix's hermit hacker has become one of the most dated characters in Full Spectrum 4.

On the other hand, the hermit in Bruce Holland Rogers' "Vox Domini" remains believable—Gabriel Mohr finds that there's no better isolation, no better penance, than to plant trees on another world... although he may only be trading one addiction for another.

It struck me at this point that I remember almost nothing of these stories from my first reading of Full Spectrum 4, back in July 1994...

"The Erl-King," by Elizabeth Hand, is a rock-and-roll fairy tale, straight from the Factory where such things were made, back when Andy and so many others were still alive...

Nancy Kress observes in "The Death of John Patrick Yoder" that,

No one could remain an idealistic, faithful, socially motivated flower child forever. If you did, the world stomped on you. Hard.
—p.387

Yoder was lucky, though... lucky as the Dickens. Heh.

I think it's interesting to imagine an alternative timeline where Kevin J. Anderson kept writing stories like "Human, Martian - One, Two, Three" (and like "Fondest of Memories" in Full Spectrum 3)—an original story, not set in anyone else's universe. Involving Martian colonists and a damaged aqueduct, this one could almost have come from Kim Stanley Robinson, although it's somewhat more linear and predictable than Robinson tends to be.

As always, David Brin thinks big; in the penultimate story, "What Continues, What Fails..." Brin's subjects range from motherhood to cloning to nothing less than how whole universes get born.

Unfortunately, after the cosmic sweep of Brin's novelette, Full Spectrum 4's final short story felt like an anti-climax. Danith McPherson's "Roar at the Heart of the World" is oddly retrograde, a pre-post-colonial tale of worried whites in "Africa." Would humanity really feel the need to reproduce every one of Earth's ills so very precisely, so far away in space and time? I hope not...

***

In looking at the "About the Authors" section at the back of this volume, it appears that Aronica's pledge to publish new authors wasn't really fulfilled. Only one story, the one from Mark Rich, is listed as a "first professional fiction sale" (p.484).

Even so, by and large, I think Full Spectrum 4 was another solid effort, well worth revisiting a quarter-century down the line.

And credit is again due to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database for the Table of Contents information used in this review.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This tome is a standout entry in the celebrated anthology series known for spotlighting innovative, emotionally resonant, and stylistically bold speculative fiction. I read this in 2005 and again returned to it during the Covid lockdown times.

Edited by Lou Aronica, this volume continues the tradition of merging science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and genre-bending hybrids into a literary tapestry that pushes the boundaries of what speculative fiction can achieve.

It is not merely an anthology—it is a curated experience of human imagination at its most daring.

What distinguishes Full Spectrum 4 from many other anthologies is the seamless interplay of themes across stories. Each piece offers a different lens into the complexities of identity, memory, transformation, and the consequences of human choices, yet the collection feels thematically cohesive.

The editor’s touch is evident: the sequencing of stories creates emotional crescendos and contemplative pauses, allowing the reader to move from shock to wonder to introspection without dissonance.

The anthology features both well-established authors and emerging talents, creating a dynamic interplay of voices. Some stories explore near-future scenarios with startling plausibility—questions of surveillance, biotechnology, or environmental collapse—while others delve into mythic or dreamlike spaces where psychological truths outweigh realism.

This variety is not chaotic; it mirrors the fluidity of human experience, reminding readers that speculative fiction thrives not by rigid boundaries but by radical openness.

Highlights include pieces that harness speculative elements to illuminate deeply personal concerns. Stories of family, loss, and memory are woven with metaphors involving alternate realities, shape-shifting, or alien perspectives.

Others take grander approaches—cosmic-scale speculation or dystopian futures—but always return to the human element. This emotional grounding is the heart of the anthology.

One of the strengths of Full Spectrum 4 is its commitment to stylistic experimentation. Some stories adopt lyrical, poetic prose that blurs the distinction between fiction and prose-poem, while others employ sharp, minimalist language to heighten tension or create stark atmospheres.

The anthology becomes a showcase of the elasticity of narrative form. In this sense, Full Spectrum 4 serves both casual readers and literary scholars: the former are captivated by storytelling, the latter by craft.

The anthology also demonstrates the political potential of speculative fiction. Several stories grapple with issues of social justice, identity politics, ecological responsibility, and the moral ambiguity of technological advancement.

Yet none of these themes feel heavy-handed; they emerge organically from narrative circumstance. This careful balance of message and artistry marks the anthology as a mature work in the tradition of socially aware speculative literature.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Full Spectrum 4 is its emotional spectrum—from joy to terror, grief to hope, and absurdity to transcendence. Some stories leave the reader contemplative, others breathless, others unsettled. Together, they map a wide range of human feelings, creating a reading experience that feels complete and nourishing.

Anthologies are often uneven, but Full Spectrum 4 is remarkably consistent in quality. It invites rereading, not only because individual stories reward deeper analysis but also because the relationships between stories reveal new resonances each time. This is not a book to consume quickly; it is one to inhabit.

In the end, Full Spectrum 4 affirms the vitality of speculative fiction as a mode of exploring reality’s shadows, fractures, and possibilities. It stands as a testament to the creativity of its contributors and the editorial vision guiding them.

Readers seeking intelligent, emotionally rich, and diverse speculative storytelling will find this anthology unforgettable.

[Danith McPherson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great collection of stories! Give it a try.