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Have you read or are you reading Solaris Rising 2? What did you think?

Here's the review I just posted:

As with any anthology, some stories are better than others -- or perhaps it's more fair to say that some stories will speak to particular people more than others. There are quite a few good stories (for me, "Whatever Skin You Wear" and "The First Dance" stood out), and the rest are okay, nothing I'd particularly call bad. There were a couple unfortunate missteps: the very first story ("Tom") uses "tranny", which I've come to see as a perjorative, and I'm not sure whether it's usage was supposed to be in character or whether it's simply poor word choice by the author; and a later story ("Ticking") has an unfortunate and glaring continuity error where a flashlight is dropped twice without being picked up in between. All in all, not a bad collection, but I didn't find it stellar; rather, the hit-and-miss you'd expect from just about any such collection.

Some further thoughts not included in my review: I'm iffy on a multi-author anthology being nominated for an award along with novels. It seems odd to me to try to quantify an anthology against a novel - they're two very different beasts, and an editor does a very different task than an author. I'm less iffy about single-author anthologies, but even then, it seems like it's an attempt to judge two very different things by the same criteria. For this reason, I can virtually guarantee that even had I found all of the stories in the collection to be award worthy (and I didn't), it's extremely unlikely that this would be my pick for the P.K. Dick award.

My review:

As with most short story collections, there are a wide range of styles and approaches to what is touted as “groundbreaking science fiction.�� Straight science fiction isn’t my first choice, so it was really nice to dive back into the genre with tastings of a wide range of subject matter and authors.

This is also a finalist for the Philip K Dick award, () though collections of short fiction don’t often win awards. With such a cross section, there’s bound to be mixed feelings throughout, the quite good alongside the okay, peppered with the occasional true dislike. Still, I walked away with my brain running and some new authors on my “to read�� list.