Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology by Sheila Williams

Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology Reviews

• 
  Joan

  A collection of seventeen stories culled from three decades of the multiple award-winning “Asimov’s Science Fiction” magazine, featuring an eclectic assortment of both classic and contemporary tales that originally appeared in the pages of the visionary magazine. Renowned science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Kim Stanley Robinson, Connie Willis, and Ursula K. LeGuin provided stories for this volume; also included are the Locus Award-winning stories “Robot Dreams” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” These visionary tales are a must-read for all devotees of the genre.
  
  Highly recommended.
  
• 
  Chelsey

  3 Stars
  
  We all know how much I love Isaac Asimov's writing. So, when I saw he had his own bimonthly publication of short stories in the sci-fi and fantasy genre I was super excited. However, this did not live up to expectations.
  
  I don't really have a ton to say about this. There were 2 stories in here that I LOVED (and one of them was written by Asimov himself). Everything else was just meh. I didn't hate any of the stories here I just thought they were all pretty average. I just expected more from a best of 30th anniversary collection.
  
• 
  Tim Hicks

  Good solid selection across the years. The editor admits that the Greatest Hits aren't here, but that's fine because I've read them elsewhere.
  
  These are mostly good, suitably different in style and tone.
  I may not be able to go to Oregon again without looking for Ether.
  
  And I wonder if "Air Raid" was the very first of the many similar stories on that theme. One of them had to be.
• 
  Łukasz

  Some stories were better, some were worse, but I gave up in the middle of "Ether, OR" by Ursula K. LeGuin.
• 
  Benjamin DeHaan

  Favorites were “Ancient Engines” by Michael Swanwick and “The Children of Time” by Stephen Baxter. Both with similar themes of planetary and human evolution over large sweeps of time. So good…
• 
  Mike

  The Happy Man reminded me a lot of my dreams: vivid, lucid, unbelievably real, but with much less brutal raping. The story involves a main character who's soul will randomly be transported back into Hell, not necessarily real Hell, but certainly Hell for him. While his soul is in Hell, his body continues it's day to day comings and goings it's just that he shows almost no emotion. Most people don't even notice, except his family where it is a painfully obvious reality that they must live with. His Hell is very interesting. It reminds me a lot of a video game where you have to move through different stages. For example, Hell always starts with him sitting at a picnic table with other children waiting for breakfast to be served in front of the Witch's house. However, the breakfast never comes and each visit to Hell starts the same way and time doesn't start until he gets up from the table. Then like clockwork he moves through various "levels" including a forest, a field, the Robot Maker, the garden of razor blades, a ghost town, and inevitably Colonel Eagerly aka "The Happy Man" who is unfortunately his only ticket home. He cannot leave Hell until he meets The Happy Man. Time doesn't seem to continue until he makes it to the next stage, and each time it is the same, but the faster he reaches The Happy Man, the faster he gets to return to his body and family on Earth. However, meeting The Happy Man totally sucks (insert brutal raping scene). I really enjoyed the author's descriptions of Hell because the scenery really reminded me of some dreams that I have where time seems to be stopped and everything around me seems real and fake at the same time. I would have given the story 5 stars except for the raping and I would have given it 4 stars because I thought it was very cleverly written and 100% engaging, but I thought the ending was weak-sauce so I gave it 3 stars. It ended in a tragically obvious fashion consistent with the build-up of the story yet with little depth or resolution. A totally crappy let-down of a finish. Do I recommend reading it? Maybe. Perhaps you should just read my dream blog instead and avoid all of the hardcore raping scenes sprinkled throughout The Happy Man.
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• 
  Edward

  The editor warns us in the introduction that the magazine’s award winning stories are not included, every year is not represented, many great authors are left out, and it is really just a sampling. Oh-kay...that explains why I had difficulty and why I gave up reading the pulp mags so many years ago. Too much inconsistency.
  
  The impulse is to read the next story to see if it’s better, but I hate wasting my reading time. It was a book group selection so I persevered and found a few better stories later on. The consensus of the group was pretty much the same. I learned that several of the stories grew into novels or became parts of series.
  
  My favorites:
  Itsy Bitsy Spider by James Patrick Kelly
  Ancient Engines by Michael Swanwick
  Lobsters by Charles Stross
  
  The group also liked:
  Air Raid by John Varley as Herb Boehm
  Eight Episodes by Robert Reed
  
  YMMV
  
  The title doesn’t say “Best of...” so don’t expect it to be, accept it as a historical sampling.
  
  I liked 3 stories out of 17 so based on percentage and rounding up, I gave it 2 stars.
• 
  Jared Millet

  I think this one set a record for the book that's been on my "currently reading" shelf the longest since I started tracking stuff on Goodreads. I've been dipping into this collection for about two years now whenever I was in the mood for a random short story. There's no unifying theme to this anthology other than it being a "greatest hits" of all the SF authors I've come to love over the last thirty years or so. It's taken me so long to get through that I can't honestly rate the individual stories, but standouts for me were "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler and "The Children of Time" by Stephen Baxter. The opening story, "Air Raid" by John Varley, should be strangely familiar to connoisseurs of
  80's B-movies.
• 
  Ketan Shah

  The title is a bit misleading as some of the stories are based more in fantasy than in SF. The opening story,John Varley's AIr Raid has been widely anthologised but most of the others were new to me. Jonathan Lethem's Happy Man was a standout,reminiscent of Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys. Lucius Shepard's rumination on 9-11,Only Partly Here is very well written and could have been published in a mainstream literary magazine.Some of the other stories didn;t quite hit the spot,especially Charles Stross's Lobsters and Kelly Link's Flying Lessons.THere's a few big name writers like Ursula Le Guin ,Robert Silverberg ,Octavia E Butler and Mike Resnick contributing ,but the stories represented here don't seem to rank among thier strongest.All in all,I expected better.
• 
  Kam Yung Soh

  A delightful romp through 30 years of "Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine with the opportunity to re-read some of the classics. My (biased) favourites are Varley's "Air Raid", Butler's "Speech Sounds", Asimov's "Robot Dreams" and Stross's "Lobsters".
  
  But the one I most vividly remember was Lethem's disturbing "The Happy Man" about a man who 'migrates' to and from Hell. His only exit from Hell is after an 'act' is performed on him - an act from his forgotten past that will come back to haunt him and affect his son (who is helping him to 'map' out Hell).
• 
  Johnny Carruthers

  I read the stories as they originally appeared in Asimov's. Most of them are all right taken individually, but taken as a whole, this particular batch of stories is kind of depressing. You could even call it something of a Debbie Downer. And I was extremely disappointed that, other than "Air Raid" (which appeared in the first issue), the first five years of the magazine was ignored.
• 
  GikiGalore

  This is a fantastic collection of short stories by some of the masters of the genre.
• 
  Hunter Johnson

  Another collection, and again mostly winners. My favorite was "Lobsters", by Charles Stross, so his novel Accelerando is on my to-read list.
• 
  Miranda

  I was disappointed...the collection featured one story that was captivating enough to keep my interest.
• 
  Betsy Dion

  This was an okay anthology. Some stories were very vivid, some were disturbing, but most were pretty neutral. There were only a couple that I found particularly moving.
• 
  Douglas

  Mixed bag, but overall an entertaining read.
• 
  Paul Bendall

  A nice mix of stories. One or two i wouldn't have classed as science fiction though.