Solaris and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Drowned Worlds. This is my honest opinion of the book.

Drowned Worlds is a themed anthology by various authors, with stories set in drowned futures or shattered worlds. Each story is the author's look at how we, as a people, would move forward in desperate times.

From Mike looking for elfstones in The Elves of Antartica, to Carlo entertaining tourists around an underwater city in Venice Drowned, to chaos ensuing in What Is, Drowned Worlds is a book full of speculation as varied as the authors themselves. I wish is could say that I was blown away by the creativity housed within its pages, but Drowned Worlds was mostly forgettable for me. None of the alternate worlds really grabbed my attention and, although the writing style of the authors collectively was good, I was not mesmerized by the stories themselves. Readers who like short story collections set in speculative worlds may find Drowned Worlds to their liking, but this book missed the mark for me.

S/F Sunday: Science Fiction anthology round-up

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Rebellion/Solaris, $19.99/$7.99 ebook).

Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Rebellion/Solaris, $14.99/$6.99 ebook).

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran (Prime Books, $19.95/$6.99 ebook).

The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton (Prime Books, $19.95/$6.99 ebook).

As I’ve noted before, the best way to catch up on who’s doing the most interesting things in s/f, fantasy and horror is to read the anthologies. Both annual and themed compilations pull together the best short stories from all the magazines, journals and zines (these genres are probably the last to succeed in periodicals, both print and online).

I’ll start with the themed anthology. Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan, brings together stories set in the sort of future imagined by J.G. Ballard in his novel, The Drowned World. Imagine Waterworld, if they’d actually paid for a writer.

For my money, the best stories are Ken Liu’s imagined future with the Eastern seaboard underwater (“Dispatches from the Cradle: Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts”), in which divers and seafarers try to salvage bits of usable tech for survivors of the inundation; Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Venice Drowned,” which has a stronger science element (as he always does); and Christopher Rowe’s “Brownsville Station,” a tale of future inequality in the submerged Gulf States where a fantastic train moves people from one city to another. The other stories, including from Charlie Jane Anders and Lavie Tidhar, are also worthy; because the ebook price is so low, that’s the way to go to add this to your library.

In terms of “best of” anthologies, though, it might be said that great minds think alike. While the two from Prime Books (the Year’s Best series) have only one overlapping story (the magnificent reimagination of Cthulu mythology, “The Deepwater Bride,” from Tamsin Muir is not to be missed), there’s a great deal of overlap between those two anthologies and Strahan’s tenth volume from Solaris/Rebellion.

I’d recommend skipping his The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Ten. That’s because stories like Neil Gaiman’s wonderful “Black Dog” (revenge, Celtic and Egyptian mythology, and a hero we must hope to see again); Vonda N. McIntyre’s “Little Sisters” (intriguing inter-galactic politics mixed with sexual/reproductive politics); and Kai Ashante Wilson’s reimagining of a future with Kaiju (“Kaiju maximus®: ‘So Various, So Beautiful, So New’”) are all included in the anthologies edited by Paula Guran and Rich Horton.

And Guran’s dark fantasy and horror anthology also gives us Angela Slatter’s new take on Jack the Ripper (“Ripper”), as well as stories from Seanan McGuire and Kelly Link.

What’s more, the best from the s/f side (“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club,” truly ingenious from Nike Sulway; Simon Ings’ “Drone”; and Geoff Ryman’s fascinating political story, “Capitalism in the 22nd Century, or AIr”) are all in Horton’s anthology.

And Horton adds one of the sweetest, scariest AI stories I’ve ever read, “Cat Pictures Please,” by Naomi Kritzer, which finally explains what happens on the Internet. Oh, and Horton’s selection of “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu, is an intriguing look at inequality and overpopulation in s/f from China.

Overall, these are a wealth of good reading, which is what we’ve come to expect from expert anthology editors like Guran, Horton and Strahan. Read on.

Marvelous. I liked the most, the selections of works. I believe this is one of the most accurate representations of the excellent health of the anglosaxon science fiction. A real must.

3.5 stars
A solid anthology, in which, although most of the stories were worth the time I spent reading them, very few were memorable. I had to alternate this book with a few others because I found some stories slightly repetitive and a bunch of them too moralizing for my taste. But as I said before, most of the stories were good enough, and my standouts were those by Kim Stanley Robinson and Sam J. Miller and, most of all, James Morrow’s ‘‘Only Ten More Shopping Days Left Till Ragnarok’’, maybe partly due to the fact that it’s sarcastic and funny, unlike most of the rest of the stories which are quite sad and depressing.