annieb123
Written on Nov 21, 2019
The New Voices of Science Fiction is an anthology of new SF short fiction expertly curated and introduced by Hannu Rajaniemi & Jacob Weisman. Released 13th Nov 2019 by Tachyon, it's 432 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats. These stories (20 by my count), were originally published between 2015 and 2019 and are gathered here for the first time.
This is top shelf fiction. One of the reasons I like anthologies and collections is that they're often full of new-to-me authors for further reading. I've always had a particular fondness for collections/anthologies because short fiction is spare and technically challenging, so you get a better feel for an author's expertise with the form. Short fiction is less of a time commitment as well, so if one story is not working for you, there's another piece readily available in a few pages.This is a showcase of up and coming authors; it's a sister volume to The New Voices of Fantasy from 2017. The short introductions for each story are interesting and well written and add a lot of interest.
The quality of the stories is very high. They are well written, varied, well curated stories. Of the 20 included stories, only a few were from authors familiar to me.
It's unclear from the publishing info available online, but the eARC I received has a handy interactive table of contents. I hope the ebook release version does also. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately. Presumably that feature will carry through to the final release version.
I think this might be the first time I've given an anthology 5 stars. These stories are varied in tone, execution, length, subject matter, but they're all really good.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.