This is an excellent collection of stories.
My favourite was the Patricia McKillip, Naming Day. I think McKillip is surely the only writer who could write about a teenager in a school for teaching magic and not have Harry Potter even cross the reader’s mind. (I read the seventh Potter the same day it came out, and re-read the previous 6 in the weeks before, but he certainly didn’t cross mine!) And Kage Baker’s The Ruby Incomparable came second – Baker manages to be comic and interesting, and also comment on parenting and growing up in this story about the children of a Dark Lord and his saintly wife.
This book has a high proportion of interesting ideas that are carried out well. My prize for most interesting goes to the Tad Williams story, The Stranger’s Hands, as I kept stopping and thinking about the situation.
I am not a fan of Gene Wolf at all, but I liked his story. I can take or leave Jane Yolen, but I thought Slipping Sideways Through Time was very moving. The stories by Peter Beagle, Orson Scott Card and Nancy Kress were all excellent.
I own several books of short stories with only one story in them I want to keep. There are 14 stories in this collection I want to keep, and three of the remaining four are well worth reading once.
Dark Alchemy was published in 2007, all stories not previously published elsewhere, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
My favourite was the Patricia McKillip, Naming Day. I think McKillip is surely the only writer who could write about a teenager in a school for teaching magic and not have Harry Potter even cross the reader’s mind. (I read the seventh Potter the same day it came out, and re-read the previous 6 in the weeks before, but he certainly didn’t cross mine!) And Kage Baker’s The Ruby Incomparable came second – Baker manages to be comic and interesting, and also comment on parenting and growing up in this story about the children of a Dark Lord and his saintly wife.
This book has a high proportion of interesting ideas that are carried out well. My prize for most interesting goes to the Tad Williams story, The Stranger’s Hands, as I kept stopping and thinking about the situation.
I am not a fan of Gene Wolf at all, but I liked his story. I can take or leave Jane Yolen, but I thought Slipping Sideways Through Time was very moving. The stories by Peter Beagle, Orson Scott Card and Nancy Kress were all excellent.
I own several books of short stories with only one story in them I want to keep. There are 14 stories in this collection I want to keep, and three of the remaining four are well worth reading once.
Dark Alchemy was published in 2007, all stories not previously published elsewhere, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
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