Scan barcode
A review by dr_matthew_lloyd
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women by Alex Dally MacFarlane
3.0
Ah, time to review this collection of short stories that I read over a period of two years. Let's see what I can remember.
Fortunately, I posted updates about most of the stories almost immediately after reading them, which helps. Looking back at the earlier stories, I remember "The Other Graces" by Alice Sola Kim most distinctly as a fascinating story that I would like to revisit; I enjoyed "Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor and "The Science of Herself" by Karen Joy Fowler, although I was already familiar with both of those authors. These were all very different stories across the science fiction genre, but all were interesting in different ways. For a volume such as this one, "interesting in different ways" must be the aim. I can't imagine it's possible to collect 33 stories by very different writers in very different styles and have many readers love all of them; there are certainly those that I would have left out (but which, I'm sure, are other people's favourites). Furthermore, as Alex Dalley MacFarlane writes in the introduction, this volume is intended as a challenge to the exclusion of women from the history of science fiction (although it focuses largely on the contemporary). I mention this, largely, as a warning that some bad reviews of this volume will be reflecting the fact that this volume is meant to be a challenge. Personally, my responses to these stories were wildly variable.
My average rating for the stories in this book is 3.30 recurring, so 3 seems about fair. However, looking back I notice that my tendency to give certain stories 3.5 ratings to indicate that they were better than fine but not great also seems to have affected stories that were excellent and probably deserved 5* (Zen Cho's "Three Generations of Chang-E", Hao Jingfang's "Invisible Planets", and Aliette de Bodard's "Immersion"). Essentially, there are stories in this volume that I would absolutely recommend, and some that I didn't enjoy, but you might. It might be worth you taking a look.
Fortunately, I posted updates about most of the stories almost immediately after reading them, which helps. Looking back at the earlier stories, I remember "The Other Graces" by Alice Sola Kim most distinctly as a fascinating story that I would like to revisit; I enjoyed "Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor and "The Science of Herself" by Karen Joy Fowler, although I was already familiar with both of those authors. These were all very different stories across the science fiction genre, but all were interesting in different ways. For a volume such as this one, "interesting in different ways" must be the aim. I can't imagine it's possible to collect 33 stories by very different writers in very different styles and have many readers love all of them; there are certainly those that I would have left out (but which, I'm sure, are other people's favourites). Furthermore, as Alex Dalley MacFarlane writes in the introduction, this volume is intended as a challenge to the exclusion of women from the history of science fiction (although it focuses largely on the contemporary). I mention this, largely, as a warning that some bad reviews of this volume will be reflecting the fact that this volume is meant to be a challenge. Personally, my responses to these stories were wildly variable.
My average rating for the stories in this book is 3.30 recurring, so 3 seems about fair. However, looking back I notice that my tendency to give certain stories 3.5 ratings to indicate that they were better than fine but not great also seems to have affected stories that were excellent and probably deserved 5* (Zen Cho's "Three Generations of Chang-E", Hao Jingfang's "Invisible Planets", and Aliette de Bodard's "Immersion"). Essentially, there are stories in this volume that I would absolutely recommend, and some that I didn't enjoy, but you might. It might be worth you taking a look.