
Geoff Ryman (ed.), When It Changed: Science Into Fiction. Comma Press, 2009 (UK): trade paperback.
My review of When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, edited by Geoff Ryman, is now online at the Strange Horizons website. I’m reasonably happy with this review as a piece of analysis, at not just stopping at judging whether the book does what it attempts to do but considering what in fact it does do. As a piece of writing, it was an experiment to be a bit more personal: I’m not sure if that worked. So be it. While I think I did justice to the book overall, it may be that I didn’t do justice to the individual stories as stories, as worthy of consideration in their own right and not just in terms of how they fit into my argument. Let me say here, then, that they were all at a minimum competently written: Gwyneth Jones’s “Collision” and Geoff Ryman’s own “You” struck me as the highpoints; Paul Cornell’s “Global Collider Generation: an Idyll” grew on me; and Sara Maitland’s “Moss Witch” was a clever concept deftly executed.
Selected past reviews at other venues:
- Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
- Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory
- David Louis Edelman, MultiReal
- Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting
- Brent Hartinger, Dreamquest
- Brent Hayward, Filaria
- David Marusek, Getting to Know You
- J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon
- Patricia McKillip, Od Magic
- Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
- Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
- Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
- Peter Watts, Blindsight
- Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and The City
- Zoran Zivkovic, The Last Book
- Zoran Zivkovic, Seven Touches of Music
- Zoran Zivkovic, Steps Through the Mist






