Joshua Viola

This group of new stories looks at the subject of psychic phenomena, that mainstay of science fiction from the earliest days.

The settings of these stories range from Atlantis to the far future. A nurse in World War I France uses her powers to care for the injured soldiers. But, it's not that simple. There is a secret war going on between psychic factions, a war about which the average present-day person is totally unaware.Another tale is set in Europe, during World War II, after the Nazis have taken the entire continent, and repulsed the D-Day invasion.

Individually, these stories are really good. Put them together, and this is a first-rate anthology. These tales are easy to read, and they are very much worth reading.… (més)

A collection of "modern" cyberpunk stories. The editorial premise is that our cyberpunk dystopia is already upon us, and most of the fiction plays to the theme of an almost immediate future but with much more advanced technology. The stories are extremely short, maybe four or six pages on average, and so they are almost all concept pieces. Like any anthology there is some variation in quality, and in the case of this particular collection I'd say the variation is a narrow band around meh, and not too bad. Nothing stood out as a particularly awful story, although many were kind of basic or not memorable in any way, and a few had interesting enough premises that I enjoyed them. About two thirds of the way through I started getting a little of the same stuff over and over again. A lot of war trauma, a little body horror, massive class divides, the sort of thing that is standard with cyberpunk, but not too much that was new. I enjoyed the voice and the characterization in The Faithful Soldier, Prompted, where an old soldier is driven through the desert by his optical node to find a cure for his wife, but the ending lacked much closure (a typical issue for these very short pieces). The Singularity is in your Hair was another short fic with a good voice and premise, and the open-endedness of the plot worked this time. The Bees of Kiribati was the story that addressed some of the more immediate social ills of our world the best, in my opinion, and gave voice to a sort of rage that wasn't really as believable in many of the other stories, even though they often dealt with disenfranchisement or struggle against establishment. But other than that I didn't feel like I was reading much that was new. There was obviously a go at more superficial diversity. Many genders, sexual orientations, nationalities and ethnicity were represented, and in a couple stories, like The Bees of Kiribati, for example, those elements play an important part of the story, but for the most part the names and languages and skin color was stage dressing, with a more homogeneous aesthetic and mindset sitting underneath. I would certainly not say that this was a bad anthology. It was worth the read, but the vision felt limited, possibly because of the average wordcount.… (més)