Exo-review: Dave Hebblethwaite on The Solaris Book of New SF

Filed by: Darren on April 16, 2007 at 20:53
Filed In: Books

David Hebblethwaite, a fine fellow who used to contribute regular and always-thoughtful reviews to the old TAO site, has a review of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction - which I mentioned myself a while back - posted over at SFSite.com.

It's interesting to note that we seem to share pretty much the same opinion about most of the content; particularly in the case of James Lovegrove's 'The Bowdler Strain' and Stephen Baxter's 'Last Contact'. Although in the case of the latter, whilst Dave and I both agree that it was an extremely powerful tale from an emotional and cathartic point of view, he had problems with the inherent science of the story, which I had to admit wasn't something that even crossed my radar when I was reading it.

I confess, though: I do have an extremely un-scientific background and so I do tend to read short fiction - even short science fiction - much more for the interaction of the characters than for whatever speculative and / or extrapolative scientific elements might be used to support the narrative. To be honest, I'm generally quite happy if everything is black-boxed neatly away, just so long as the principle protagonists are interesting.

All-in-all it's a very fair and well-balanced review with some good, solid analysis from Dave; worth reading if you're contemplating
picking up the anthology (which you jolly well should be...)

Edit, 17.04.07 Via the always-excellent Velcro City Tourist Board, a link to a David Soyka penned Strange Horizons review that compares and contrasts the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction with Pyr's Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge. Interesting reading again, well worth a look.