Alisha A. Knaff

The editors of this collection are friends of mine, and I was a Kickstarter backer of this book as well as their previous four collections, so perhaps I'm a bit biased. But I have to say I thought this is their strongest collection yet. The previous anthologies were themed by situation (apocalypse, haunted/weird locations, "monsters" in society, ...), but since this collection's theme is women leaders, there is a breadth of style and genre I haven't seen in these before, and it's delightful. All the stories keep to the first-person format of "Mad Scientist Journal", the quarterly zine the editors put out, but they range from mythological Ethiopia to Napoleonic France to revolutionary Mexico, and from fantasy to cyberpunk dystopia to generation ship. It made for a very fun read, which is why I'm excited to see that the editors have launched the kickstarter for their next anthology, I Didn't Break the Lamp. I'm looking forward to that one already.… (meer)