Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The third in PNH's original anthology series.
Each of the first two Starlight collections featured at least one stand-out, blow-you-away story. The first volume had John M. Ford's "Erase/Record/Play," and the second Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," among other excellent stories. With that track record, it's hard to say why I didn't run right out and buy this when it first came out, but a weird combination of cash shortages, job changes, and general distraction kept me from picking it up until recently.
It's a solid anthology, with quite a few good stories, but it lacks the literary "killer ap" that lifted its predecessors to another level. There just isn't a stand-out story to match the Ford or Chiang stories from the earlier volumes. There are a couple of stories that come close-- Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God" might be it for some people, but it doesn't really work for me, and Susan Palwick's "Gestella" is marred by being written in the second person, for no apparent reason. I liked Greg van Eekhout's "Wolves Till the World Goes Down," but it doesn't quite work, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, and the Geoffrey Landis and Brenda Clough stories are both very good, but fall short of truly excellent.
The bigger problem, though, is that this volume ends on a wrong note. Two of them, actually, a pair of ham-handed satires from Andy Duncan ("Senator Bilbo") and Terry Bisson ("That Old Rugged Cross"), from whom I'd expect better. Had I read the stories in a different order, I might have a higher opinion of this collection, but ending with those two consecutively left me in a bad mood, and it's hard to keep that from coloring my opinion of the whole anthology. At some point, I may re-read it in reverse order, and see what I think then...
And I do want to emphasize that this isn't a bad collection. To the contrary, it's a very, very good anthology-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden is one of the most reliable editors in the business, when it comes to picking books that I end up liking, and he and Teresa are the two best arguments for Tor's policy of listing the editor on the copyright page of their novels.
This is a very good anthology. It's just not quite as good as the previous two. But then, few books are.
(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Thanks for all these Chad, very fine and informative.