I was very excited to read this book after seeing the reviews and reading the synopsis on the back: "a professional friend hired to comfort a mentally unstable drone for a mission?" "Generation ships and new worlds?" "A living membrane around a star?" Sign me up! However, my excitement quickly died when I started reading it and it was a real slog to get through the majority of these, ending as an overall disappointment with a few silver linings in between.
The reviews that sing praises about the hard sci-fi in this book are definitely right: even in the poorer stories there's some great concepts. So if you're reading this collection for that and don't care so much about the characters and other story elements then you might still enjoy a lot of this. Otherwise, there were only a couple of truly great stories where every element was working well. Most often, when a story wasn't working it was due to poor characters, poor interactions, or not doing anything with the interesting concept or premise the story was supposed to be about.
Here's the breakdown:
The only stories I'd say were truly great that I enjoyed reading were:
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving into the Wreck
- Vandana Singh - Sailing the Antarsa
After that there were a bunch of stories that ranged from good to alright:
- Tobias S. Buckell - A Jar of Goodwill
- Ken Liu - Mono no aware
- Michael Swanwick - Slow Life
- Julie Novakova - The Symphony of Ice and Dust
- Sean McMullen - The Firewall and the Door
Then the rest were pretty "meh" for one reason or another, with a mix of what wasn't working for each. For example, Greg Egan's "Glory" had probably the best hard sci-fi opening I've ever read for how super-advanced aliens beat the speed of light andmove themselves across the universe, and how they build their ships when they get there. Immediately afterwards though, those same sophisticated aliens were supposed to be diplomats to a less-advanced civilization but they had the skill, temperament, and dialogue of spoiled teenagers.
The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact
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