By sheer
coincidence that they were listed back to back in the short story collection I was
reading yesterday, today’s authors are both Australian. I occasionally bump
into online articles or a review focusing on Australian genre authors.
Apparently it’s a niche in genre publishing, a specific look at the writers
from down under. It’s nice to see praise thrown as a group of writers like
that. It helps with your perspective. Not all English language writers are from
the US or the UK. Overall, the Year’s
Best SF 16 has been pretty good for its diversity in writers. On to the
reviews!
“Under the Moons of Venus” by Damien Broderick
Read in Year’s Best SF 16 (2011), edited by
David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Originally
published in Subterranean (Spring2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan (guest editor)
Broderick has been
writing science fiction stories since the 1960s but this is the first time I
read one. It’s not a simple read, there is a lot of information thrown at the
reader and you have to be active in putting things together in order to
properly understand the story. I’m not sure I understood it completely, to be
honest. Who can blame me when the story uses advanced mathematics and
geomorphology to try and solve the mystery of the Moon’s disappearance? The
characters, all four of them, are straddling the line between insanity and
genius. One of them happens to be an intelligent talking dog (he was surgically
altered).
