The last few months have hit me hard for any number of reasons, so while I’ve been drowning in piles of lambs and not getting anywhere near enough sleep, blogging has taken an understandable backseat. If there’s one thing I can’t stop, however, it’s reading. I’ve been grabbing snatches of book time whenever I can, and short fiction has been keeping me sane through early mornings and late nights alike.

Today I’m going to run through the anthologies and collections I’ve been reading lately. I don’t have the time for a full breakdown, but I’ll give a rough overview of each, and maybe pick out a story or two that I find noteworthy.

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF, edited by Mike Ashley

This is probably the strongest of Ashley’s Mammoth anthologies, and lives up to its name with a hefty 500+ page count. Every story deals with time travel, and are roughly gathered together by tropes such as ‘paradox,’ ‘time loop,’ ‘reverse time,’ and so forth. This does lead to quite a bit of repetition, even if the stories themselves are all solid. One standout story is actually the first. ‘Caveat Time Traveller,’ which is far and away the best thing I’ve read by Gregory Benford.

SF Horizons 1, by Tom Boardman

In terms of hit/miss ratio, this is the strongest anthology I’ve read this month. Harry Harrison’s ‘Not Me, Not Amos Cabot!’ is that rare beast – a comedy piece that’s actually funny. Mack Reynolds’ ‘Subversive’ is more spy-thriller than science fiction, but hinges on such an interesting social experiment that it ended up being my favourite of the batch. In fact, there’s only one weak story in here, though it is also among the longest. There’s no real theme holding the stories together, but many lean more towards satire than traditional science fiction, which might be the British influence. Given the magazine that spawned this anthology, I would have liked to see more comments from Boardman, but this remains a great collection of stories. It’s a real shame that there doesn’t appear to be an SF Horizons 2.

A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Damon Knight

I don’t know much about Knight as an author, but he’s easily one of the more famous critics in the SF world. the stories in this anthology are all okay, but what I really enjoyed were Knight’s editorial inserts. There’s a fascinating breakdown of tropes from ‘robots’ to ‘supermen,’ and you can track the development of each theme through the stories provided. Those stories also stretch impressively far back into the nineteenth century, which is always interesting, even if some haven’t aged as well as others. As a bonus, there’s an appendix of recommended reading that has given me a real head start on some non-fiction about SF that I need to track down.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, by Ken Liu

Ken Liu is famous for three things. Translation, epic fantasy, and short fiction. He is of course the man who brought Cixin Liu (no relation) to the attention of the English-speaking world, and I’m always excited to see his name on a newly translated work. His short fiction, however, is more of a mixed bag. In his introduction, he states that he pays little attention to genre boundaries. That’s probably why this collection is so scattershot. The science fiction stories are brilliant. ‘Mono No Aware’ is a particularly touching tale, while ‘The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species’ is wonderfully evocative, and reminiscent of Hao Jingfang’s ‘Invisible Planets’ in the breadth of its imagination. There are some stories here that are more in line with literary fiction, and are as dour and worthy as you might expect. A lot of these stories are far from bad, but they don’t speak to me as a reader. That said, rereading this collection has not dimmed my excitement for his return to SF later this year with the novel All That We See or Seem.

The Casebook of Newbury and Hobbes, by George Mann

An entire collection about the same two characters runs the risk of growing stale. I love the Newbury & Hobbes series, but these shorter pieces do feel slightly lacklustre. They’re pulled from various annuals, special editions, and the like, but lack an real substance. They’re enjoyable enough, but Mann’s steampunk mysteries are better enjoyed at novel length. It was nice, however, to see the enigmatic Templeton Black make an appearance. Some day, I hope man writes the Templeton-centred series he has mentioned before, but until then these stories were enough to whet my appetite for the main series, which I’ll likely be rereading this year.