Should be the big book of extremely bad science fiction.
Seems the editor, and the authors, were more interested in the central concepts of the stories, and to hell with the rest. Things like whether whatever came next was sensical or not. Like a bunch of modern "action" movie scenes. Whatever goes on from one moment to the next doesn't matter except that each should be a big "ooh! Shiny!" Ball of something or other.
I made note to search through my Goodreads lists and remove anything else from any of these writers. ( )

First of all, it's ordinary scifi, not extreme. Good scifi, not bad (except some stories) but... nothing extreme here.
Second, out of 19 stories, I found only 5 to be 5/5s, with just 2 really memorable: Alastair Reynold's "Merlin Gun" (good story with amazing ending of galactic implications that caught me into a loop of "What should be done?") and Harlan Ellison's "The Region Between" (a great mix of different blends of scifi and an extremely original form). I also found stories I just couldn't finish (Doctorow, Cadigan, McDonald), not that good (Baxter, Gillet, Kelly) or really bad (Oltion's "Stuffing"), with plenty of middle-range (average) others.
The average is 3,5/5, but as a whole I felt the anthology is a 3/5. Not that bad, not that good. ( )

I rated the stories in this book that fell within 3 🌟 or above.

3 🌟 Anomalies by Gregory Benford
The moon skips forward a mile in its orbit, in a fraction of a second. There is a"cone of interference" behind its path, affecting the stars. Then, well, you have to read it.

5 🌟 Crucifixion Variations by Lawrence Persons
Quantum Physics is going to prove the existence or not, of Jesus Christ. The Christian Research Council is bankrolling the project. Given the 100-trillion electron super-collider in the basement of a major university, the physicist heading the project would use "a process based on complex energy transfer model to Trace E-particle energy loss back through history, and once you learn how to properly model, manipulate, and record E-particle energy states at that specific specified time, it is possible to "see" the past via a computer recreation based on E-particle positions." Thus, we could"see" the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ...."Without a truth...ANY truth... we're all alone in the dark."

5 🌟 The Pacific Mystery by Stephen Baxter
Bliss Stirling of the BBC is invited on a trip aboard the Goering, an "aircraft carrier" in the sky, in the days after the Phoney War, which Adolf Hitler won. (This is historical fiction.) Heading east, they pass the coasts of China and Japan, and head out over the Pacific, which noone has ever managed to cross!

4 🌟 Death in the Promised Land by Pat Cardigan (the only woman author in the collection!)
Artificial Reality (AR) is so real that some players will begin to confuse AR with reality. So real that if they are killed in AR their brain convinces them to die in real life? Following Detective Konstantine into Apocalyptic New Yawk Sitty, I actually began to visualize the AR.

5 🌟 Waterworld by Stephen L. Gillett & Jerry Oltion
A colonizing/exploring ship/ark, with a crew awake and colonists in SLO/Mo is hit with a bit of meteor, which punches holes through the hull, kills a bunch of the crew, and quite a few of the SLO/Mo-ers. They lose much of their organics and most of their water. Now, they urgently must find a source of water in order to survive and continue their voyage to find a planet that can support life. Great tension is felt between the four remaining crew members as they try, and fail, at one proposed solution after another.

5 🌟 The New Humans by B. Vallance
Have you read the story "The Country of the Blind" by H.G.Wells? This is a spoof of that story. Hilarious.

4 🌟 The Girl Had Guts by Theodore Sturgeon
We found a planet that was .9999 compatible with Earth. But the two survivors of the scientific expedition there were 40 lbs underweight and had to eat 15,000 calories a day and were losing ground fast.




( )

Mine is an RNIB edition for blind people that I got from my local library as a download. There are several readers, all good, & it's about 25 hours long.

Ashley & I don't agree on what makes a good SF short story. Most of these were far too long & not particularly interesting. If you like [a:Greg Bear|16024|Greg Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1223822211p2/16024.jpg]'s writing, you'll probably like this collection. He wrote one of the stories. For all his popularity, I've never found it worthwhile to wade through his prose, though. Too many words for too little return.

The last story was "Stuffing" by Jerry Oltion it was great. It was the only one that was, though. There were a few other good ones, so I'm glad this was free from the library. ( )

I am not certain how this is extreme. It does take all arguments to their logical conclusion, if we did this we would end up?