Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

This is a charity anthology in aid of getting more girls into STEM, which is something I wholeheartedly support. Like any anthology, it resembles Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, and some stories are more successful than others, but overall I recommend it.

I read a pre-publication copy which I received via NetGalley (in expectation of an honest review). Given that this is presumably still to have another editing round, it's remarkably clean, apart from occasional missing words in some stories--one of the hardest things for an editor to pick up. In particular, I spotted very few homonym errors, which are usually the bane of collections like this. There were a couple, but I noted that "discreet" was spelled correctly in the several places it was used, and getting that one wrong is very common.

Unfortunately, given the target audience of science-savvy young people, there are a few conspicuous science fails in some stories. Particularly noticeable to me were the solar-powered vehicle that was capable of reaching orbit, and the Mars rover which could be controlled with no speed-of-light lag. There are also a few examples of technobabble and technological handwaving which wouldn't fool an informed reader.

Still, as fiction, with few exceptions the stories worked well for me. I was worried when the first two both featured adults ex machina who appeared at the end and rescued the protagonist from an impossible situation, but after those opening stories, most of the protagonists solved their own problems using intelligence and persistence (occasionally with a generous helping of luck, but not too often).

The YA cliches were at an acceptably low level, too. I don't think there was a single love triangle. There was one story in which a protagonist (who was of Asian and Indian descent) had green eyes, as is traditional for YA protagonists for some reason, but otherwise that ridiculous cliche didn't appear.

The same story featured a large, undigested expository lump at the start, a fault most of the other stories avoided, though they did occasionally tell where showing would have worked better.

Overall, though, these are competent authors writing compelling stories of intelligent and resourceful young women solving difficult human problems with science and engineering. Anything which puts more of that into the world gets my support.