The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows by Jonathan Strahan

The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows Reviews

• 
  Lena

  
  The Surfer by Kelly Link ★★★★½
  “By then everything had changed because of a new flu scare.”
  
  “There were guards wearing N95 masks and carrying machine guns to make sure we all got on a bus.”
  
  “We got our luggage back, so that’s one good thing, although they’ve taken our passports away.”
  
  “... we were going through our supply of toilet paper too fast.”
  
  This was written in 2008 or earlier!!! Kelly Link has freaked me out. If I had read this in early 2020 I would have been expecting aliens too. Anyone remember that summer’s Apocalypse Bingo that just kept giving?
  
  
  
  Pinocchio by Walter Jon Williams ★★★★☆
  A surprisingly good story about a social media child star trying to figure out how to keep his followers as he grows up. This quote was legend:
  
  “No modern cultural phenomenon ever lasted unless there were great clothes that went with it.”
  
  You laugh and then… damn.
  
  Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome by Tricia Sullivan ★★★★☆
  This was one of the strangest stories I have ever read, I never really got a handle on what the heck was going on… or why. The best comparison is Enders Game, but it’s a weak one. There’s a Mortal Kombat warriors-that-represent-greater-interests aspect in Stargate-like ways. I liked it.
  
  An Honest Days Work by Margo Lanagan ★★★★☆
  A brutal story about how we objectize animals/nature into a commodity. The worth of a goose liver, an elephant’s tusks, a rhino horn... if you have the stomach for it you can look up Vietnamese bear bile farms. Humans are the worst.
  
  
  Anda’s Game by Cory Doctorow ★★★½☆
  Female empowerment via video games! It’s a nice idea but I am glad Doctorow underscores the issues of obesity related to just sitting around for hours pounding sugar and caffeine.
  
  
  The Dismantled Invention of Fate by Jeffrey Ford ★★★½☆
  This was a time loop story of intergalactic love that you need to follow closely. Still, I think only about 80% of that made sense.
  
  Infestation by Garth Nix ★★★½☆
  Scifi vampire alien insects and a reluctant alien hero. Not sure how religion still fit in but he gave it a go.
  
  Cheats by Ann Halam ★★★½☆
  That was choppy but I loved the idea of neuronauts and find it a better solution than colony ships or hypersleep.
  
  
  The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice by Alastair Reynolds ★★★½☆
  A hopeful story about a good man who signed up to a cybernetic surgeon to escape a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, his coworkers are evil but that does not mean he will give up on his patients.
  
  Repair Kit by Stephen Baxter ★★★½☆
  A low key episode of Star Trek.
  
  Ass-Hat Magic Spider by Scott Westerfeld ★★★☆☆
  That was a just ok story about how the only book on the whole colony planet made it there.
  
  Orange by Neil Gaiman ★★★☆☆
  I’m torn between thinking this is a clever way to write a story and thinking it an obnoxious way to write a story. It’s 70 answers to questions you never see.
  
  Incomers by Paul McAuley ★★★☆☆
  This was a YA about bored angry teens bothering a war hero. One of them grows up and becomes a better person.
  
  Lost Continent by Greg Egan ★★½☆☆
  What a mess! The backstory was clear as mud and the action sequence poorly written. It’s a dystopian time-and-dimension travel story clumsily pressed into highlighting immigration issues.
  
  Sundiver Day by Kathleen Ann Goonan ★½☆☆☆
  I disliked the way the story was written but the world building kept me hanging on. I wish I had DNF’d, nothing interesting happens, it’s just a story of a young teen dealing with death.
  
  The Dust Assassin by Ian McDonald DNF
  No no no no no piss drinking.
  
  I completed 15/16 stories for average of 3.3 stars. Although there were no five star stories several were unexpectedly memorable so I’m rounding up - four stars!
• 
  Sesana

  So what we have here is a collection of 16 short stories connected only by the fact that they're all science fiction. And... that's it. There's no other thematic overlay here. Which was perfectly fine by me, because it was a great lot of stories.
  
  My favorites: Scott Westerfeld's Ass-Hat Magic Spider (the perfect way to open the collection), Neil Gaiman's Orange (told through the answers to questions unrevealed here), Stephen Baxter's Repair Kit (gloriously classic sf), Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game (very plausible, very near story set in a MMO, and sounds thematically similar to his novel For the Win), Ian McDonald's The Dust Assassin (sad and beautiful, and set in a future India), Greg Egan's Lost Continent (refugees from alternate timelines, and the sadly plausible government reaction to them) and Pinocchio (wildly plausible story about virtual popularity).
  
  I liked most of the other stories a lot, and in another, weaker collection they might have ended up as favorites. The Surfer and Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome just didn't do it for me, and I completely skipped Margo Lanagan's offering. I've learned my lesson, she just doesn't appeal to me.
  
  So in a collection of 16 stories, I at least liked 13 of them. Pretty impressive.
• 
  gail ♛

  The first couple stories in this anthology were pretty good, but around the fourth story I started losing interesting. I tried skipping around to the other stories, but couldn’t get into any of them. I ended up just skimming them to get an idea of what they were about. I was really disappointed cuz I was really looking forward to reading this book. Time to find a different book to satisfy my sci-fi craving.
• 
  Michael Smith

  Some editors of science fiction anthologies (like Gardner Dozois) are very talented, and they have the shelves full of Hugos to prove it. Most of those who cobble together a thematic collection of short fiction by an array of different authors, though, are less dependable. Strahan falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. His stated goal is to ask again the classic question in the ongoing SF conversation: What’s happening in the world we live in and where are we going? It’s a serious question, and it’s certainly worth asking, but Strahan seems not to have kept it clearly in mind when he was commissioning some of the fifteen stories written specifically for this volume. The result is a very miscellaneous gathering of short pieces without much thematic coherence.
  
  There are no actual horrific duds here, but a few of them are much better than the others. One of the better efforts is “Cheats,” by Ann Halam, which starts fast in its exploration of virtual gaming in the near future, and then picks up speed. Kathleen Ann Goonan is one of the most original authors out there these days and “Sundiver Day” does a lovely job on the subjects of Key West and cloning. And while I’m not that much of a fan of Alastair Reynolds, “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” takes the clichéd space pirate in a whole new direction. On the other hand, while his work is usually well above average in the field, Greg Egan’s “Lost Continent” wanders through Islam in the past and in the future without ever really getting anywhere. And while Neil Gaiman nearly always knocks it out of the park, his story “Orange” is just confusing. I read it twice without ever quite figuring out what was going on. There are okay stories by Paul McAuley and Walter Jon Williams, plus a number of others by authors I confess I’ve never heard of, but none of those really made much of an impression. Given its intentions, this could have been a much better collection.
  
• 
  Robert Runte

  fully admit that I initially sprang for this anthology entirely on the basis of Stephan Martiniere's cover illustration. It's what SF covers are supposed to look like, and wrapped around a nice hefty volume (530 pages), seemed to hold out the promise of some good old fashion SF. Even the subtitle, "Tales of new Tomorrows" had a nice 1950's ring to it.
  
  I was not disappointed.
  
  Editor Jonathan Strahan has pulled together 16 of the top names in the field, which provides a great sampler of contemporary authors if, like me, you've been off reading in a particular subgenre, and would now like a quick sense of whose doing what on the main stage. I was delighted, for example, to discover Ian McDonald through the inclusion of "The Dust Assassin," a near future SF set in the Indian subcontinent. I can't believe that I hadn't heard of McDonald before and that no one thought to recommend him to me. I have since added all his titles to my Amazon.ca 'wish list'. For me, "The Dust Assassin" was alone worth the price of admission.
  
  But even where I was already familiar with the authors — names such as Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman — I was delighted that Straham had been able to solicit such consistently high quality stories. Gaiman's "Orange" for example, is a positive gem, for all that it was apparently dashed off enroute to the meeting with Straham; and Doctorow's "Anda's Game" is a wonderfully optimistic response to Ender's Game. And so it goes, with at least 12 out of the 16 stories rating an 'excellent'. That is an incredibly high ratio for a representative cross section of the field: almost by definition, one cannot expect that everything will be to one's tastes.
  
  Straham also contributes a brief but extremely intelligent introduction. Unlike most editors who seem compelled to laboriously — and redundantly — explain how each story fits into the collection, Straham instead provides an insightful overview of the field as a whole. This state-of-the-genre report benefits from Straham's Australian perspective, providing a thought-provoking corrective to our usual American-centric assumptions.
  
  Straham also allows each author a half-page afterward, along with a half page biography, to contextualize each story; again in sharp contrast to those anthologies that utilize forewords, which too often contain ruinous spoilers.
  
  So, was there a theme that united this collection? Was The Starry Rift indeed the 1950s-style 'sense-of-wonder' SF I was looking for?
  
  There's an old joke that asks "What is the Golden Age of Science Fiction" to which the reply is supposed to be "13"; the implication being that SF is best when discovered at that age, regardless of the actual period in which it was written.
  
  In that sense, then, this is indeed Golden Age SF. All but three of the stories feature protagonists aged 13-17. Identifying with these youthful protagonists made me feel 13 again. Reading this anthology, it is impossible not to reminisce about one's own discovery of SF, thus providing an extra layer of nostalgia on top of the stories' own build-in sense of wonder. I am not convinced that Straham set out to solicit stories of young heroes, but that's what he got, and it makes for an extremely successful themed anthology. Indeed, I wanted to find a 13 year old to read these to. But whatever the reader's age, this anthology is a sure bet.
  
  © 2009 Robert Runté Reprinted with permission from NeoOpsis Magazine, #19 (Winter, 2009) p. 70.
• 
  stephanie cat

  This collection of sci-fi stories by authors like Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, and Neil Gaiman shows what good science fiction can really be. These stories are brilliant, each with its own perspective and lesson.
  
  Science fiction isn;t about aliens and spaceships. It explores everything that never happened. Some of these stories take place in worlds where you put yourself into your game, or where it won't matter if you die, because they can just re-upload you mind into a different body. Whether read in space or on the earth, this book rocks.
• 
  Roseann

  This is one amazing compilation of stories.
  I especially loved 'AssHat Magic Spider" by Scott Westerfeld, which is "a homage" to a certain "Charlotte" and I won't spoil it for those of you planning to read it...
  I also liked Neil Gaiman's Orange for its "Outer-worldly" excellence. I am looking forward to more compilations of this kind which give uis snippets of shorts from people who usually write longer pieces. The cover art alone pulled me in.
  Overall, Bravo!
• 
  Violet

  If you want some good sci-fi, this book is it. It has all of what's good about sci-fi: interesting topics that just make you think, relations to the present, cool and new tech, aliens, different planets, star travel, and more. It even has a story about vampires for you vampire lovers. It's got everything for the everyday sci-fi lover.
  
  What's disappointing is the two authors that even made me buy this book (Neil Gaiman and Scott Westerfeld), had the shortest stories in the whole book. They were good but...you know kind of disappointing. I guess it was a good thing that the rest of the stories were so good.
  
  I agree with Jonathan Strahan when he said that sci-fi is "an ongoing conversation about what's happening in the world we live in and where we're going." Sci-fi is as much about today as it is about the future. It about what we think our society today is heading. It's basically a statement of today, through the use of tomorrow.
  
  Sci-fi also have a tendency to have sort of a collective unconscious, if you know what I mean. I found a lot of similarities between other sci-fi TV shows and movies I watch, and stories I read between the stories in this book. From Doctor Who to Avatar and on. In fact one of the stories in here was almost the same thing as another story in another sci-fi book of stories that my dad it reading. Its weird.
  
  Here's a few comments about each story:
  1)"Ass-Hat Magic Spider" by-
  Scott Westerfeld: Again a short story, but I rather liked it. It was an interesting way to think about space travel and the delicate systems that make space travel and how humans fit into the those systems.
  
  2)"Cheats" by-
  Ann Halam: It was an interesting thought to think about how gaming and space travel can be related, and how we're all really a string of data in the end.
  
  3)"Orange" by-
  Neil Gaiman: The shortest story of them all. That cheating Neil Gaiman...That's not to say that it wasn't good. It was cool how he wrote it. It was all the answers to unknown questions for some interview or something. It was cool.
  
  4)"The Surfer" by-
  Kelly Link: This was my favorite story out of all of them. It's basically about this American who is in quarantined in Costa Rica where this surfer lives who is the first person to have contact with aliens. It have everything. A collapsing America, flue plagues, plausible tech, first contact with aliens, skeptics, believers, loss of hope, and a hopeful future. And its all told through a normal teenager's point of view during this 4 day period he is stuck in this warehouse in quarantine. I LOVE it.
  
  5)"Repair Kit" by-
  Stephen Baxter: This is basically a tribute to classic sci-fi. Dangers in space. Ship heading to certain doom and the captain has to stop it in time to save everyone. Not to say that it wasn't good. I loved how he named the ship the Flying Pig. That was just perfect.
  
  6)"The Dismantled Invention of Fate" by-
  Jeffrey Ford: Another far future story. But it was an interesting one. At parts you had to go back and think, 'wait, what just happened?' It was a brain twister if you know what I mean. I still liked it.
  
  7)"Anda's Game" by-
  Cory Doctorow: Another story about gaming, but this one is different. Its your classic game played on a computer, and sounds like it could take place in the near future. It shows the consequences of gaming so much (getting fat of course). It also shows how third world countries and greedy rich people come into play, and it sounds very plausible.
  
  8)"Sundiver Day" by-
  Kathleen Ann Goonan: This was the most boring out of all of them. Yes, it had cool tech like cloning and stuff...but it was mostly descriptions about the Florida Keys. Hearing how the world winks or how blue the water is, is not what I want to read personally. Yep, its the worst out of all of them. But still okay.
  
  9)"The Dust Assassin" by-
  Ian McDonald: I like this one. It was sad and original. It was also based in India, where most of the culture is the same as it is today and the past. It was cool to see how the future is in other places other than Europe and the western world. I really liked this one.
  
  10)"The Star Surgeon's Apprentice" by-
  Alastair Reynolds: I like this one. It had cool tech matched with the classic gore. It also had aliens and a mystery, so of course I liked it.
  
  11)"An Honest Day's Work" by-
  Margo Lanagan: This was the story I was talking about was basically the same as another story by another author. It's basically about this community that takes apart and uses every bit of this gaint alien thing that is killed then brought to them, kind of like a whaling community. I liked it. I'm interested on how this story compares to the other one like it.
  
  12)"Lost Continent" by-
  Greg Egan: This was a close second favorite. Its about mysterious dimension hopping between other universes that are similar to ours and our universe, done by refuges of those other uinverses. Its just the mystery, combinded with the plausible reaction of our government, that just makes this story so good. I really like it.
  
  13)"Incomers" by-
  Paul McAuely: This story was okay. It had colonies on different planets, a past interplanetary war, ect. It wasn't unusual, but it wasn't bad either.
  
  14)"Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome" by-
  Tricia Sullivan: Now this story was interesting and original with the whole M-space (the 5th dimension), and then M-eq (how they control M-space) and M-ask (how they connect the human body with M-eq). It was also interesting how they use M-eq to space travel along with time travel, along with the fact that the two fighting parties in the current war build people that are connected through M-space to each of their planets and people and ships. So the two people fight and its a battle in the war, when one gets hurt something in that party's territory is destoryed or damaged. Simple. And then there's the virus like thing that lives in M-space (called Medusa) that wants people to stop using M-space. Overal it is an extremely interesting concept and I really like it.
  
  15)"Infestation" by-
  Garth Nix: This is the with the vampires. At first I was wondering how that would fit in with the sci-fi theme of the book, but it turned out to be the classic vampires are aliens thing (which I happen to really like the idea of). Overal it was a really really good story. And I'm now interested in reading more of Garth Nix's stuff.
  
  16)"Pinocchio" by-
  Walter Jon Williams: Now I have no idea how the title comes into play here, so don't ask me. I liked this story. Yes, it was sad but so true. It even could've taken place today if it wasn't for the cool tech they had. I like it.
  
  Wow, that was possibly the longest review I've ever written. I think my hands are starting to cramp up....I should stop...It was a good sci-fi book and I really think if you like sci-fi that you should read it. Until next time...
• 
  Chukwudi Barrah

  A collection of 16 unconnected short sci-fi stories by various fantastic writers, including one by Neil Gaiman. Some other great shorts in the collection are Pinocchio, the surfer, orange, dust assassin, post ironic stress syndrome, and the dismantled invention of fate. Not in any particular order. If you enjoy sci-fi, with ideas of what the future (if we still have one) will look like, you'll very likely enjoy this collection.
• 
  circle

  only the first story was good. the rest are unreadable and the author's notes were usually more interesting than the story!
• 
  Laurel

  Review of Lost Continent by Greg Egan
  
  The story starts with Ali in Khurosan, which I understand to be in the Pakistan region. Khurosan appears to be a target for tyrants from the future to provide arms to warring factions within the country, fuelling inherent conflict in the region - perhaps taking advantage of existing animosities. At the time the story begins, the Scholars have taken over, and they were meant to be bringing peace to the region. But where people had previously worked to keep their young men and boys safe from recruitment, whether Sunni or Shi'a, the Scholars exploit the differences between the two groups and revive old animosities.
  
  When the story begins, Ali is given by his uncle to a man with a Land Cruiser who promises a better life for him in the future; essentially, a paid smuggler. They travel for three days in the Land Cruiser, and then they reach a bridge - a whirlwind time vortex that enables travel to any and every time and place, by the sounds of things. The man finally selects a path through the bridge, and Ali lands up in, I'm assuming, Australia.
  
  What then ensues is a stark parallel to the treatment of illegal immigrants around the world. Essentially arrested, placed in camps indefinitely and having their stories disbelieved... Sound familiar? With the added twist of time travel and parallel realities, so that the future Ali lands in is not *his* future, which means that his past is not the past of the present, which makes it easier for his story to be disbelieved. Not very complimentary of the Australian government - not sure if that was the point, but that would have been bound to come out of such a story.
  
  Excellent story, and good insight into the plight of illegal immigrants around the world - especially those fleeing conflicts at home.
  
  
• 
  Walter Underwood

  Johnathon Strahan invited people to write short stories "with the same kind of thrill" as those written in the 1950's and 1960's. But because SF is always about today, the starting point for those rocket ships moved fifty or so years.
  
  This could have been a train wreck, but he chose very good writers. So it is fun reading a Garth Nix story about nanobot vampires instead of his YA fantasy. And Scott Westerfeld with a "boarding the colony ship" story that would have been at home in Galaxy.
  
  A few people can't quite get with the program. Cory Doctorow writes more Cory Doctorow stuff. Ian McDonald delivers another wonderful magical-SF piece in his India.
  
  Neil Gaiman's "Orange" is a twisted record, only the answers a girl gives to an investigation of her older sister's transformation, with paragraphs like, "33. The next morning, all of us." The author's note doesn't mention Paula Zoline, but it reminds me of her 1967 story "The Heat Death of the Universe". Intentional or not, it captures the experimental wing of SF in those decades.
  
  I often read anthologies to discover new writers. That doesn't quite work here, because most are writing out of their home territory. There are a couple of stories I like, though I have not liked those authors' novels. I might give Paul McAuley another try with one of his Quiet War books.
• 
  Jack

  Most of the stories in this collection center around young people, which leaves some reviewers labeling it a 'young adult' anthology. But that's not in editor Strahan's introduction, so I'm loathe to apply a tag with so much baggage attached.
  
  I don't think there's a standout story here, but even the least of the set are readable. Well, my impression of Stephen Baxter wasn't improved by "Repair Kit". Baxter says he was trying for humor in the vein of Robert Sheckley, but he has none of Sheckley's insight or subtlety. Jeffrey Ford does a better job of paying tribute to a master with "The Dismantled Invention of Fate", an homage to Michael Moorcock.
  
  As you would expect, Neil Gaiman provides the most stylistically interesting story with "Orange", told as a series of answers with the questions left to the reader to infer. Kelly Link's "The Surfer" uses an interesting albeit somewhat depressing future scenario to provide a portrait of a self-involved soccer prodigy's first realistic glimpses of who he is and who he might become.
  
  My favorite of the moment is Garth Nix's "Infestation", a vampire story whose "big ideas" aren't terribly original (as Nix confesses), but which works for this reader (as Nix hopes).
• 
  Christina

  This compilation of short stories all have a sci-fi theme to them. The stories all take place in the future and center around a young character and the problems they face in that time. One story is about a soccer player whose father "kidnaps" and takes to Puerto Rico in order to meet a man who is famous for being abducted by aliens, however, a flue pandemic forces them into isolation where he makes friends with Ticos. At the end, they all finally get to see aliens. Another story is about a girl in England who plays video games and is able to make money completing missions that other people will pay for. When she finds out that the avatars she is paid to kill are girls working on commission in Mexico to support their families, she realizes that she must take a stand. One of the short stories is about a boy who leaves his home planet to be a surgeons apprentice. The task is not something he enjoys, however, he prefers it to the situation he would be in if he had stayed back. He meets a girl who tells him that he needs to get off the ship because he is actually on a ship full of pirates who steal from other ships and will do bad things to him if he stays. I would recommend this book to teenagers ages 14 and up.
• 
  Becky

  
  Strahan, Jonathan. ed, 2008. THE STARRY RIFT: TALES OF NEW TOMORROWS. Viking. 530 pages.
  
  The Starry Rift is 'an original science fiction anthology.' Consisting of sixteen short stories (some really more like novellas), it features the work of some favorites new and old--Scott Westerfeld, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Cory Doctorow, Garth Nix, etc.
  
  There's no guaranteeing you'll like all sixteen stories--I sure didn't--but I'd almost guarantee that you'll absolutely love at least one of them. I'd even go so far as to say that I can guess which story will be your favorite. I feel so strongly about this one story, that I almost want to make it my mission in life to encourage--prod--YOU to read it! The story in question? Ass-Hat Magic Spider. By Scott Westerfeld. Best short story ever.
  
  Other personal highlights include "Lost Continent" by Greg Egan and Pinocchio by Walter Jon Williams. There were sixteen stories in this anthology; I finished fifteen of them. One I abandoned as a lost cause (for me).
• 
  Jennifer Wardrip

  Reviewed by Christina Tsichlis for TeensReadToo.com
  
  THE STARRY RIFT is truly a collection of stories about today's ideals, dreams, and philosophies. Strahan did an amazing job collecting stories written by modern science fiction masters. The authors write beautifully, uniquely, and intriguingly.
  
  This anthology is masterful in representing different worlds and conceptions of worlds, covering everything from the real world to gaming to dreaming. The exploration of themes in the book cover everything from philosophy to the growing epidemic of obesity, from what is truly important to a person to who is truly important to a person, and from world economics to love.
  
  It is a book that really looks at the human spirit with hope and sees the future as a reality. Each story draws the reader in and makes them a part of the tale. There is a story for virtually every mood and topic one can come up with. Overall, it is a beautiful anthology.
• 
  Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides

  This is a cool concept. I couldn't really get into about half of the stories, including some of the ones by authors whose work I'd enjoyed before. The ones I enjoyed:
  
  "Ass-Hat Magic Spider" by Scott Westerfeld (even though it was slightly twee); "The Surfer" by Kelly Link; "Anda's Game" by Cory Doctorow (despite being a bit message-heavy, it was an interesting take on video game war); "The Star Surgeon's Apprentice" by Alistair Reynolds (cool to read that he has a bunch of Word files on his hard drive that are titles waiting for stories); and "Pinocchio" by Walter Jon Williams (possibly the most interesting take on celebrity as virus that that I've encountered; for more on this, see
  2033: The Future of Misbehavior).
  
  "Orange" by Neil Gaiman was merely okay. The others I can be assumed to have made an effort to read but not been intrigued by, or been put off by.
• 
  Int'l librarian

  I like science fiction in small doses. And I like it when the stories can teach me something, either about how science works, or visions of the future, or what it means to be human. This collection meets all those criteria, and even more important, it’s fun to read.
  
  The stories encompass a wide range of settings and circumstance: I especially liked “Sundiver Day,” “The Surfer” and “Pinocchio.”
  
  There are some weak links, though. A few of the storylines seem either obvious or simplistic (“Repair Kit” and “Ass-Hat Magic Spider”), or too off-the-wall to take hold with me (“Cheats,” “An Honest Day’s Work” and “The Dismantled Invention of Fate”).
  
  Overall, however, this is a strong anthology
• 
  Alan

  A solid anthology full of mostly familiar names - many are the rising stars of 21st-century sf - but fresh and unfamiliar works, for the most part, stories not overly anthologized elsewhere. Strahan collects more upbeat works than is usual for modern-day sf, and the result is a substantial and entertaining read. Stories I particularly enjoyed here include the lead tale, Scott Westerfeld's "Ass-Hat Magic Spider", Kelly Link's "The Surfer" and Alastair Reynolds' "The Star Surgeon's Apprentice" but really, there's not a clinker in the bunch.
• 
  Carrie Rolph

  Pretty decent compilation of sci-fi short stories, including contributions by Scott Westerfeld, Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix and Cory Doctorow, among many others. Topics range from video games and virtual reality to adventures in the cities on Saturn's moons to time travel to pandemic flu with bonus aliens. There's also a sci-fi take on vampires and vampire hunters.
  
  As with most short story collections, there were a couple that I really liked and a couple I really didn't, but I was surprised by how many I wasn't sure about and really ended up liking by the time I was done.
• 
  freaking crazy ninja man83

  The "Starry Rift" is an anthology of many science fiction short stories which is written by jonathon strahan.The book though is not always dealing with space,and things of that sort, that people have come to know,but the stories in the book are very entertaining and are fun to read.The book makes you think what awaits the numerous characters at the end of every story.
  The numerous stories in this book are very enjoyable to read.I like the book because you never know what to expect what'll happen to the characters.
• 
  Elisabeth

  As always, it's hard to comment on a collection like this as if it were one thing. Overall, I liked it. Some of the stories are very good, none are terrible, some are more or less forgettable.
  Notable items include one of Neil Gaiman's weirder works (for him, that's saying something), a vampire story that's actually interesting and unusual, a lot of treatments of virtual reality and the modern digitally interconnected world, and a wonderful piece about life on a moon of Saturn. Worth reading, if you enjoy modern short SF. Interesting ideas, good stories, lots of humanity.
• 
  James

  For an anthology titled "The Starry Rift" there are only two stories that actually happen in space or on another planet. Somehow there are two stories that take place in determent camps. One a quarantine in a near future with flu scares and discussion of the first actual recorded UFO sighting. And the other where refugees from other time lines are placed while the government figures out what to do with them. Both interesting but both with just a circumstance that makes them science fiction. Not bad stories but maybe not what you are expecting from "The Starry Rift".
• 
  Kathy KS

  By and large, an interesting variety of science fiction short stories. Some were my cup of tea, while others definitely weren't. But this is probably the sign of a well-rounded collection; readers can discover new authors they like and read other authors without committing to a huge novel. My favorites were often those that were the closest to Golden Age science fiction and felt like an old Robert Heinlein. Others made me think that they'd be an episode of Black Mirror.
  
  Borrowed from my library.