Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF
By Adam Roberts | June 16, 2009
Categories: Book News
Two contributor copies of Mike Ashley's new anthology, The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, arrived in the post yesterday. Lovely cover, and a splendid collection of stories from all the genre greats. Most are reprints (but what reprints! masterpieces!) although Mike also commissioned five new stories for the vol., from Steve Baxter, Eric Brown, Paul Di Fillipo, Robert Reed and me. Mine is called 'Anhedonia' and this is what it's about: nearish-future humans, on a Mars base, encounter aliens, who in turn promise to gift mankind the wherewithal to travel ftl to the stars. But the aliens have taken away the crew's ability to experience pleasure, and they're an elusive, weird set of entities, so it's not clear why they have done so, or why they're prepared to hand over this galaxy-opening tech, or what their hidden agenda might be. It's a good story, actually, though I say so myself; but the whole collection is chockful of great stories, and you really should buy a copy.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
The cover art looks like a cross between a Neal Asher and a Kevin J Anderson novel....
June 16th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
And you don't mean that as praise, I can tell.
It's actually an accurate visual representation of Eric Brown's story, 'The Rest is Speculation', a splendid Wellsian last-days-of-the-earth piece (see the Terminal-Beach-y crab, there? See the huge bloated sun?)
He's a very good, and criminally underrated, writer, is Eric.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
He's a very good, and criminally underrated, writer, is Eric.
Agreed.