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librarian_of_trantor's review
2.0
This was a selection of short stories, novellas, and novel excerpts, followed an interview with the author. A sampler by definition is going to have variety. Sadly what varied was the quality, and it went down fast A couple stories were good but the rest were mediocre. This obviously was not a best of the year collection.
One especially bad short story involved traveling 53 light years to mine diamonds from white dwarf. Because diamond was critical for nanocrystal technology in fuel cells. And diamond is more efficient than artificial zirconias for space travel. The story's narrator says, "Without diamond Earth would increase its carbon footprint." We already can create diamond big enough for any kind of "nano" application and making diamond is such a straightforward process that if we could build a starship I have to believe that we could create whatever kind of diamonds we need. And we won't even talk about the tungsten carbide alien who wants two of the crew to come have sex on his planet orbiting the dwarf star to "seed" mutation on it.
I didn't read any of the novel excerpts because I already have plenty of novels waiting on my book shelf and Kindle. None of the novel excerpts, or their authors looked like they would be worth reading then having to go get the rest of the novel. As for the author interviews, none of their first questions/answers were interesting enough to make me finish reading the interview. So for this one "read" means that I've read all that I'm going to read of this one.
One especially bad short story involved traveling 53 light years to mine diamonds from white dwarf. Because diamond was critical for nanocrystal technology in fuel cells. And diamond is more efficient than artificial zirconias for space travel. The story's narrator says, "Without diamond Earth would increase its carbon footprint." We already can create diamond big enough for any kind of "nano" application and making diamond is such a straightforward process that if we could build a starship I have to believe that we could create whatever kind of diamonds we need. And we won't even talk about the tungsten carbide alien who wants two of the crew to come have sex on his planet orbiting the dwarf star to "seed" mutation on it.
I didn't read any of the novel excerpts because I already have plenty of novels waiting on my book shelf and Kindle. None of the novel excerpts, or their authors looked like they would be worth reading then having to go get the rest of the novel. As for the author interviews, none of their first questions/answers were interesting enough to make me finish reading the interview. So for this one "read" means that I've read all that I'm going to read of this one.
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