Winner of the 2020 Locus, World Fantasy, Ignyte and Starburst Awards!“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” proclaimed Octavia E. Butler.New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color showcases emerging and seasoned writers of many races telling stories filled with shocking delights, powerful visions of the familiar made strange. Between this book’s covers burn … book’s covers burn tales of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their indefinable overlappings. These are authors aware of our many possible pasts and futures, authors freed of stereotypes and clichés, ready to dazzle you with their daring genius.
Unexpected brilliance shines forth from every page.
Includes stories by Kathleen Alcala, Minsoo Kang, Anil Menon, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Alex Jennings, Alberto Yanez, Steven Barnes, Jaymee Goh, Karin Lowachee, E. Lily Yu, Andrea Hairston, Tobias Buckell, Hiromi Goto, Rebecca Roanhorse, Indrapramit Das, Chinelo Onwualu and Darcie Little Badger.
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I don’t read a lot of anthology collections in my reading life. However, I would like to read more of them and I had this New Suns anthology on my Kobo eReader app for quite some time. I started reading the solid first story, The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex by Tobias S. Buckell and I had to finish the anthology.
As with most anthology or short story collections, not all the stories will blow you away as a reader. However, I appreciate several other stories like Come Home to Atropos from veteran sci-fi writer Steven Barnes, The Fine Print by Nigerian-Canadian writer Chinelo Onwualu, & The Robots of Eden by Indian writer Anil Menon.
New Suns covers a broad range of stories from sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, and horror that opened me to new writers I had not heard before. If you looking for something to read as a palette cleanser between novels or a series of books, then I would suggest giving this anthology a try. Levar Burton provides a good introduction and editor Nisi Shawl writes an afterword that is a call for more anthologies like this one to be published. I agree.
Short stories, most of which are dystopian. I did not like it.
It was an anthology of different short stories by different authors. That makes it hard to rate because the stories were of different quality. I read some stories that made me want to look for more by that author. On the other hand I read some stories that I wouldn’t care to find any more of their works. But, I guess that is a good thing about the book too.
An excellent short-story collection by authors of color.
I read in great part to stretch my mind, and for that purpose, it helps if the writer doesn’t think like me. So an anthology of people of color with widely different backgrounds … why not?
As far as variety is concerned, I was not disappointed. Before I started reading, I was afraid the writers, rather than feeling free to express themselves, would all feel compelled to shove their ethnicity to the forefront, but no. Ethnicity is sometimes at the center of the story, sometimes at the periphery, and sometimes not an apparent part of the story. Of course, everything that is part of the writer is, to some extent, part of the story—otherwise what would the point be of such an anthology? But, in short, the stories don’t feel *forced*.
They’re also well written. Sometimes, beautifully written (Rebecca Roanhoarse’s “Harvest” is a jewel). But. Yes: but. There are reasons I gave this anthology “only” four stars (3.5 would have been closer), and the main one is that too many stories left me scratching my head (including “Harvest”). As I said at the start of this review, I read to stretch my mind; but when my reaction at the end of a story is “Uh?,” there’s been a communication failure somewhere.
I won’t comment on each story, but I’ll mention a couple of my favorites. (By the way: the table of contents of the Kindle edition doesn’t have hyperlinks, which complicates navigation.)
My favorite is Anil Menon’s “The Robots of Eden.” It is difficult to write SF *well* in the first person, because you constantly run the risk of being either too explanatory (thus betraying the writer behind the narrator-protagonist) or too allusive (thus confusing the reader). Anil Menon, in this story, succeeds perfectly: his writing is so convincing, his words are your world … until the very last sentence. The characters feel real in how they act and react, and there’s a lot to think about at the end.
Another favorite of mine is Minsoo Kang’s “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translation.” It breaks about every rule: it tells you the end at the start, it tells rather than shows, it is all narration, and it has a kind of “think about what you’ve just read” afterword. But it works. It is elegant, touching in parts, and several layers of clever. Consider my mind stretched.
All in all, I think you’ll find this anthology well worth your time.