Capsule Reviews of Classic Speculative Fiction Stories

April 25, 2017 12:23 PM

Capsule Reviews of Classic Speculative Fiction Stories
For years and years, I’ve been collecting editions of the Annual World’s Best SF anthology series, which ran from 1972 to 1990. A couple of years ago I decided to commit to reading or rereading every single one of them, and to reviewing every single story in each of them on Goodreads. As of April 2017, I’ve gotten through 10 of them and reviewed a total of 107 stories.

This project has been super rewarding, because after a few anthologies I started to realize that there were a few authors, most of whom I’d never heard of before, whose work I consistently loved. So now I’m able to seek out more of their work. That’s made me even more excited to keep doing these reviews, and once I finish this collection I may start in on a new one. I’d love for someone to find a new author they love because of these reviews.

Role: Author

posted by showbiz_liz (3 comments total)

Short SF has been a problem for me for a while, just seem to need longer form as a, well drug, or not at all. The reminder of wacky 70's SF gives nostalgia, so perhaps. The Russ capsule (wow it'd be cool if they sorted by author) makes me want to dig it up. You really should go full on fanboi at anytime, what ever you said about "A Song for Lya" would be interesting.
posted by sammyo at 4:18 PM on April 29, 2017

Yeah I noticed going through these that the older reviews have less detail - I may go back at some point and flesh them out more.

I actually do also have a spreadsheet with all of this info, which I can sort by name and whether I liked it! I could probably figure out how to host it somewhere...
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:17 AM on May 7, 2017

I'm reading back through these now for reasons, and I think this may be the best and most succinct review of them all: "You'd expect a story called 'Catch That Zeppelin' which features alternate-reality Hitler not to take place almost entirely over the course of a conversation in a restaurant, but you'd be wrong."
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:07 PM on May 9, 2017