New Skies
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
275 pages
published in 2003
I didn’t know this was meant to be an “anthology of today’s science fiction” for a “new, younger generation of science fiction fans” until I got this home from the library, as I only got it because Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the editor and I was curious to see what his tastes were like. I thought New Skies was an anthology of new science fiction, but instead it’s a showcase of science fiction stories from the last twenty years, aimed at an audience new to the genre. Still, it’s as good a test of Patrick’s tastes as any, as not only did he have to select his entries from over two decades of stories, but he also had to select them to show off the width and breadth of the genre, be not too long and accessible to younger reader. A huge task indeed.
Since I’ve been reading science fiction for quite some time now, I’m not exactly the target audience for New Skies; I don’t know how some thirteen year old kid would like this book, but I enjoyed it. New Skies does a good job of representing how much different kinds of science fiction stories there are and how much fun they can be. None of the stories were the kind that makes your hair stand on edge, but they’re good representations of what you can expect in science fiction and they’re accesible.