My main takeaway from this anthology was that I need to read more stuff from Tobias S. Buckell.
My only prior experience with his stuff was a short story he’d written in the Africa Risen anthology, which was one of my favorites from that collection. This is a selection of things he’s written for other anthologies or magazines, as well as a few that were written originally for his Patreon subscribers. They’re all definitely sci-fi rather than fantasy, and fairly hard as far as these things go. They ranged from very good to excellent; there wasn’t a single miss amongst them.
My favorites include:
- “Pale Blue Memories,” a retro-futurist story about an American rocketship crash-landing on Venus, and the survivors being enslaved by Venusians.
- The titular “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” about a person (who was once a biological person who chose to have their brain decanted into a construct body) manipulated into helping a mass murderer escape justice through their being bound by the Laws of Robotics.
- “Sunset,” about a sentient starship that crash-lands on a backwater world and befriends a local boy.
- “The Longest Distance,” a bittersweet story about a man traveling at relativistic speeds receiving messages (every day or two from his perspective, every decade or so from hers) from the woman he left behind.
- “A Girl and her Rover,” about a girl on the Moon trying to find the golf ball that Alan Shepard hit during the Apollo 14 mission.
The stories are mostly completely separate from each other, with one cluster of exceptions. There are three stories (“A Jar of Goodwill,” “Chi’s Cargo,” and “DW”) that share a common universe where humanity is dominated by the ultra-capitalist Gheda. The Gheda, to give one example, carefully track how much oxygen each individual human uses on their stations, and charge accordingly. Get too deeply into debt, and you’ll be seized and put in cryogenic storage until they have a use for you or your debt (which will continue to increase, due to the costs of cryogenic storage) is paid off by someone else. These three weren’t any lower in quality than the rest of the anthology, but I can’t call them favorites because they were incredibly, incredibly depressing.
Still, late stage capitalism dystopias aside, this was an excellent anthology. Highly recommended.
Comes out on April 18th.
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