A review by davecreek
Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures by Kat Otis, Sam S. Kepfield, Julie Frost, K.G. Jewell, Eric Choi, Wendy Sparrow, Peter Wood, Tracy Canfield, Barbara Davies, Gregory Benford, Bascomb James, David Wesley Hill, Jakob Drud, Jonathan Shipley

4.0

FAR ORBIT, in the words of its editor Bascomb James, is an anthology of what he calls Grand Tradition science fiction. The emphasis, he says, is on adventure with an emphasis on the human element.

And this anthology succeeds. It's "old-fashioned" SF, concentrating on storytelling and not on the complexity of its prose. In other words, it's the pure genre stuff, with spaceships and aliens and unknown worlds and all the things that attracted many of us to the field in the first place.

For me, highlights included "Open for Business," by Sam S. KIepfield, about the attempt to fetch an asteroid worth at least $10 trillion for the iron and precious metals within it, and Gregory Benford's "Backscatter," one of the few reprints, about a woman who is about to die after crash-landing on an asteroid who makes an unexpected discovery, and, no doubt, a bit of history.

There are a lot of asteroids in these stories.

Best of all, a second volume is on the way. I'll be looking forward to it.