I always look forward to reading the Writers of the Future volumes because there's a chance of finding something new. These are new writers, and they aren't as harnessed to "the formula" as established writers are.
So, I hope... and sometimes my hopes are rewarded.
What follows is a short comment on each story. These are basically my thoughts as I read and finished the stories. (These comments presume you have read the stories.)
Keep in mind that when I read, I read from a technofiction perspective, the same as I do when I watch movies.
Have fun with these...
-- Roger
I was unhappy with the start of this story, but it got better as it went on. The disease seemed contrived, and at the beginning the pilot is a bit too braggadocio for an old, not bold, pilot. But, all-in-all, it turned out well. I liked the pilot being clever to solve his problems. This makes it my kind of story.
From the beginning, this felt like a "Down Under Western Meets Night of the Living Dead", and that feeling never left. The two biggest problems I had with this story were:
a) people "go West" to make a better life for themselves by taming the west. The key piece here is better life -- if the place sounds too hard scrabble, then why are these people here? Why don't they stay home? The people in this story don't seem to feel particularly optimistic about being where they are.
b) Why are the townsfolk so under-resourced for dealing with this problem? Why just a handful of proper bullets? The story teller makes it clear this problem they face is no surprise -- it's always been part of the landscape in this part of the world.
I liked the writing style, but, all-in-all, it's a classically formatted Western, and no surprise.
This story had an interesting concept, and it handled it well -- it talked about how peoples' lifestyles are changed by having easy availabilty of disposable personal androids. The biggest problem I had with the story was falling into the cleches of centering the story on the question of the humanity of the androids, and of having one of the problem solvers trying to solve the problem with rogue gangster-style thugs.
If the story had talked more about the surprise effects on how we live of having disposable androids, I would have been happier.
"Ho-hum... post-holicost." was my first reaction to this story, and it was never displaced. The writer didn't give me a compelling reason why these people didn't just pull up stakes and move somewhere else. This UN organization that was handing out goodies in return for bright kids, was keeping them alive where they were living, it could have moved them somewhere else more hospitable. The characters' existence where they were living didn't make sense to me, and for that reason, the angst about testing the kids didn't make sense, either.
This story came out well, perhaps because it came out a lot like stories I like to write. The "creation", as I call them, transcends its original purpose, and is rewarded for it.
The biggest problem I had with the story was its setting was too WWII aircraft carrier-like. Our creation's ship acted like an aircraft carrier, and the war acted like a war in the Pacific.
But, other than that, the story went down smoothly, I enjoyed it.
This story did not go down smoothly. There were some good concepts, but the contrivances kept getting in the way of my enjoying the concepts.
The contrivances that kept pulling me out of belief were mostly the delays in getting our POV character rescued. Given the hazard he was walking into, the rescue team seemed woefully unprepared. The "hotshot" also seemed a bit "hot", as in untested, for this kind of cleanup mission.
This story was a surprise to me, a fun one! The story elements were terribly cleched, but the writing style!... it went down so smoothly! Yeah, I had fun with this... even though I shouldn't have.
This story had some good elements. All-in-all, I liked it a lot. It's another story from a creation's point of view, and the creation is doing a lot of thinking and adapting to its environment. I like stories like that.
Here's what bothered me about it:
o the killer plague sounded contrived, what description we have of it makes it sound easily combatable. And worse, the writer keeps bringing it up again and again.
o once the planet builder arrived and confirmed intelligent life on this new planet, why didn't she just move on, and find a different planet to settle? If she's going to be terraforming, she's got a whole lot of power at her disposal, so moving to a new planet, or new star system, would be child's play.
I liked the description of her learning how to talk to the planet's inhabitants, and I liked that she finally worked out a happy-medium solution.
New concept, new point of view... yeah, I liked it! This is good technofiction.
A curious tale. I was impressed with the flying details. When I finished, I felt the story stood on its own, without needing time-traveling pilots to show the vacationer wannabe fighter pilots what to do. These master pilots could just as easily have been contemporary enthusiasts.
Likewise, the confrontation at the end was contrived -- these time traveling pilots were no longer facing the issues of their day. Like people coming to America from other lands, they should have let the old issues stay at home, and made a new life for themselves in their new land.
Nice atmosphere. There were some new elements in this story, but they were drowned out by the atmosphere, so, in the end, it was just a nice atmosphere piece.
This to me had a similar feel to Simulacrum's Children: it was a nice atmosphere piece.
This story left me dissatisfied. I felt I was reading about conventional domestic help problems with fairy dust sprinkled over the top, and the fairy dust was making no difference in how these people related to each other.
This is the opposite of technofiction -- the technology is making no difference to the lifestyle.
And there you have it: my mini-reviews of the stories in Writers of the Future Volume XXVI. All-in-all, it was a mix of good and bad, which is what I expect from a collection of new writers.
The important part for me was I got to read some stories that were outside the conventional formula box -- the box that produces Disney stuff and summer blockbuster movies -- and those kinds of stories are really hard to find these days. So, I'm happy, and I'll be getting next year's volume.
-- The End --