Enter A Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov's Science Fiction [Format Kindle]

Sheila Williams has assembled ten stories which have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. This is her 26th collection, so she presumably has the process nailed down. In her introductory chapter, the editor enthuses about the removal of page constraints on an electronic anthology and very briefly describes her rationale for including each of the ten stories. There is a somewhat different reason for each story, rather than a unifying theme.

My favorite three of the ten:

Connie Willis' "Inside Job" is an old-fashioned detective story that might have been written in the first half of the twentieth century. Except there might be some science fiction in it. Rob and Kildy are reporters and professional skeptics trying to demonstrate that a popular medium (yes, the turban-wearing kind) is a fake. It should be easy.

Allen Steele's "The Days Between" is a new perspective on the hibernating-colonists-travel-to-another-solar-system story. Three months into the URSS Alabama's voyage to 47 Ursae Majoris, Leslie Gillis awakes from an unusually short hypersleep. He cannot return to sleep without help and he cannot wake any of the other crew. So he makes the best of it. This story is incorporated into Steele's 2002 novel, Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration.

Daryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense" is one of those teen identity stories with a bratty, first person narrator. Actually, it's the second person, in the first person. But the first person isn't in there anymore. Much. Anyway, she really hates her parents.

I liked some of these stories and was only moderately engaged by some of them. Gordon Sellar's "Lester Young..." story took readers on a tour of an interesting future solar system but didn't seem to have a point. I got a similar feeling from "Shoes-to-Run." Sara Genge explores a future tribal culture with a story that, ironically for its title, went nowhere. "Breeze from the Stars" had a point, but it didn't seem quite worth the journey.

It all shakes out to this seeming like only an "okay" collection to me. Your tastes may be different than mine. It seems that the editor's tastes differ, too. You may be in good company.

This anthology represents the state of the art of science fiction-- the way SF is written now, in the 21st Century. The overall quality of the writing is very high; there is none of the clunky prose and weak characterizations that plagued magazine SF in the "golden age," which in retrospect was perhaps not that golden. The tradeoff is that it is harder to evoke the "sense of wonder" that SF could evoke in the past; most science fictional ideas have already been used.

The best stories in this anthology do manage to come up with original ideas, or at least to play new variations on old themes. The standouts for me were Robert Reed's journey through the multiverse, "A Billion Eves"; Connie Willis's fast, funny "Inside Job"; Nancy Kress's "Safeguard," about mutant children; and Daryl Gregory's genuinely thought-provoking "Second Person, Present Tense." Robert Silverberg is always worth reading, and "Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another" is no exception.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Recovering Apollo 8" and Gord Sellar's "Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons Blues" are both alternate-history stories, the former elegiac in tone, set in a world in which Apollo 8 and its crew were lost in space, the latter a funnier piece set in a bizarre world in which aliens patronize American jazz musicians.

The weakest pieces for me were Allen M. Steele's "The Days Between," Mary Rosenblum's "Breeze from the Stars" and Sara Gense's post-apocalyptic "Shoes-to-Run." All are very well written, but none of them struck me as very original. But they are "weak" only by comparison to a very strong bunch of stories. Kudos to Asimov's editor Sheila Williams for a good survey of contemporary future-making.

I used to read Asimov's as a teenager and recently rediscovered it through a Kindle subscription. Enter A Future was a great way for me to catch up on some of the better stories I missed. The anthology is very engaging--I read it in a couple of (admittedly long) sittings--and each story has something to offer. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Recovering Apollo 8" was the highlight for me. The hope and gratitude expressed by the astronauts of Apollo 8 in the face of tragedy (obviously alternate history, as the title suggests) inspire a boy's quest to bring them home. The main character's respect for the Apollo program and the astronauts involved caused me to quickly back his quest, and I remained deeply invested throughout. I also thought the stories from Willis, Steele, Gregory, and Silverberg were particularly strong. The complete lineup is as follows:

"Inside Job" by Connie Willis
"The Days Between" by Allen M. Steele
"Shoes-to-Run" by Sara Genge
"Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons' Blues" by Gord Sellar
"Breeze from the Stars" by Mary Rosenblum
"Safeguard" by Nancy Kress
"A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
"Second Person, Present Tense" by Daryl Gregory
"Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another" by Robert Silverberg