Nanotech

Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: A readable, thought provoking series of stories on the theme of nanotechnology. Eight short stories, one poem and a novella. No bad stories and one truely great one.

I liked this book a lot. I had only read one of the stories before in a magazine anthology. The others were new to me.

The highlight of the book is "We were out of our minds with joy" by David Marusek. This story has enough in the way of ideas and development potential to spawn a novel. The price is worth paying for this novella alone. Indeed, at the price, it seems like a bargain!

While Marusek is still an emerging talent, other authors featured here such as Bear, Egan, di Fillipo and Baxter will be more familiar.

At the end of the book, the editors add a list of further reading on the same subject. I will be following up a number of their suggestions.

Rating:
Summary: Stories could be more imaginative, but...
Review: I bought this book at a garage sale for dirt cheap cuz the owner recommended I read it since I was just getting into sci-fi. At the time I was really only familiar with Arthur Clarke, Asimov, Poul Anderson, Heinlein, and a few others, and this book was my grand introduction to the great "Hard SF" authors such as Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, and Greg Egan. The stories are concise yet detailed, and all have intriguing plots. SF short stories are great for when you just wanna lose yourself for a little while at a time and visit realms as yet unimagined. I read most of this book while videotaping a very long and boring court deposition, so you can see I was aching for some type of escape! My only complaint about this book is that I wish it had had more titles and authors to offer.

Rating:
Summary: Some stories are really great... some aren't
Review: There's a couple of stories in this book that make it worth the purchase price. Especially the first couple of stories and the last one. Some of the stories in the middle are fairly weak. I even ended up skipping over a couple after the first ten pages or so... However, the stories that are good are really good! I hope that the authors develop them into full novels.

Rating:
Summary: Great nano-stories
Review: This is a great series of stories dealing with nano-tech. As it true with all anthologies, they vary - some are really good, some not so good. I had already read Blood Music by Greg Bear and the first story is what he based that book on. Still good though.

Overall lots of good stories.