KSR is an author not afraid to experiment, which has led to some flawed, ambitious, highly rewarding novels and some flawed flops, too, but he saves his most extreme experimentation for his short fiction.

The Martians is a brave collection that goes from the depths of awfulness (baseball on Mars, "poetry") to radical genius (the discovery of Martian nanobacteria told through abstracts from scientific papers, the Martian constitution in full).

This collection is the same: dreadful (same bloody baseball on Mars story, in fact), awe-inspiring (how history works - or doesn't - as exemplified by several alternative histories of the first atomic bomb drop on Japan). But mostly excellent. KSR themes all present and correct - Mars, ecology, (anti-)capitalism, music, mountaineering, California, science and society, story telling through character, epiphanies, exaltations, revelations. Also some things rarely seen in KSR's work - aliens, interstellar travel.

All the more shocking, then, that I found it discounted to only three pounds!

Strongly recommended for lovers of KSR or the short story form. ( )

Some really good stories in this book but, overall, the collection was very disappointing. It may be that, for me, the best stories from this author are the novels. ( )

A very good best-of selection. One of the things that stands out in this selection of KSR's best short fiction is how he has returned to the same themes and character types throughout his career, finding different ways to address them. This collection would serve as an excellent introduction to this fine author. ( )

This collection of Kim Stanley Robinson's short stories, edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by Night Shade Books of San Francisco, is a delight to read. Those readers familiar with Robinson's Mars Trilogy already know he is a brilliant story-teller with an amazing mastery of detail in all the sciences, from physics to psychology. This collection of his short fiction is just as impressive as the novels and is a further demonstration of his versatility. His grasp of history, from the Spanish Armada of 1588 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to be as well-researched as his references to science. Thus, his fiction is always more than plausible and his tales, no matter how conjectural are quite believable. The reader is led to think, "yeah, it really could happen." Unlike the purveyors of fantasy, Robinson creates worlds that are extrapolations from reality. He understands that history is full of the seemingly fantastic yet factual doings of humanity. In his alternate history stories, such as "The Lucky Strike," in which the Enola Gay crashes before it can drop the Bomb on Hiroshima, he imagines a timeline that deviates dramatically from history as we know it, but which is no more far-fetched than the terrible reality of what did happen. Robinson is a superb craftsman of both the "what might have been" and "what could be" variants of speculative fiction. And wedded to his apparently Leonardo-like range of knowledge is his gift for empathy. A deep sense of compassion and understanding of the human condition pervades all his work. The worlds conjured by his imagination are not only believable on an intellectual level but also touch the reader's emotional core as only the "truest" of fiction can do. ( )