outofworldSo Carl is hosting this mini challenge as part of his Sci-Fi Experience and to honour Dewey. The idea is to read at least one sci-fi short story and post about it on his official page. I read three stories from an old anthology that we’ve had kicking around the house for ages, namely The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13, which covers stories first published in 1999 (wow, last century, remember that?), and therefore cannot be found on Amazon for me to link to (sorry). I read:

1. Suicide Coast by M John Harrison – I found this quite difficult and bleak and I’m not entirely sure that I fully understood it; it’s about gaming and rock climbing I think, and what’s real and what isn’t. Perhaps I just wasn’t in a receptive frame of mind to understand the subtleties?

Anyway, I wasn’t put off, and moved on to:

2. How We Lost The Moon: A True Story By Frank W Allen by Paul J McAuley – I like McAuley’s work though I haven’t read as much as I should have. This story does what it says on the tin; Frank is a witness to and participant in the events that saw an experiment on the Moon go terribly wrong and we, sort of, lost the Moon. Very enjoyable.

3. Evermore by Sean Williams – a story of  crippled space-ship crewed by entitities based on the minds of real people on Earth but who technically don’t really exist, and in any case aren’t really speaking to each other. So what happens when something needs to change?

There are a couple of other stories in this anthology that I might save for another time, but all in all this was an interesting experience.