Review: Starlight 1
I liked PNH's Starlight 2 anthology a great deal when I first read it a couple years back, and picked up volumes 1 and 3 on the strength of that. (I assume volume 4 will be out sometime this year?) I was less impressed with Starlight 3, I'm afraid, though there was certainly interesting stuff in it. It took me a while to get around to starting Starlight 1, and then after I did I got bogged down in a story that, though cool and interesting, was long and slow enough that I got distracted from it easily.
But eventually I picked up the book again and finished it. And I really like it. There's a bunch of really good stories here, and some very unusual ones—several of them are not the kinds of stories that I see often in sf. John M. Ford's "Erase/Record/Play: A Drama for Print" is fascinating and moving; I don't think I've ever seen anything like it before, in terms of presentation, and it has a fascinating sfnal premise. Susanna Clarke's faux-Austen fantasies are also unlike anything else anyone's doing, and I think I like "The Ladies of Grace Adieu" best of the three in the three Starlight books. Also in vol. 1 are a couple of charming stories, a couple of fun stories, a couple of thought-provoking and compelling stories.
And then the book closes with Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," which is superb. One of my favorite anthropologists-among-(quasi)-aliens stories; ranks up there with Le Guin and Arnason, though McHugh's approach is very different. Perhaps slightly too heavily pointed, but that doesn't bother me if it's done this well. The standard anthropologist sf story focuses on the anthropologist not understanding one fundamental fact about the people they're studying, which comes back to bite them; this one has more to do with the difficulty of understanding anything about another culture, and with the problems inherent in the interactions between a higher-tech society and a lower-tech one, even when the higher-tech one has the best intentions in the world. Recommended.