Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Rating:
Summary: Changing perceptions through alien education
Review: Ellen Datlow has done it once again -- assembling disparate tales, spanning decades of writing and a multitude of writing styles, into an anthology that is thematically cohesive and offers a bit of something for everyone. Anthologies are often difficult to review because of the diversity of voices, but if the reader approaches this collection as a buffet (from which one may pick and choose) rather than a 12 course meal, there will be more than one can consume at one sitting. Classic stories by Robert Silverberg and Samuel R. Delany have been intermixed with more recent works by Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hand, and 17 more of today's leading writers. Off Limits includes provocative tales of close encounters -- love, sex and life -- and plays with your perceptions of what is truly alien. One piece of advice: skip reading the Foreward by Silverberg and the Introduction by Datlow as they unfairly offer judgements of what the reader will find between the book covers and tainted my desire to read further. I found much more depth and content to contemplate than Datlow and Silverberg gave the author's credit for

Rating:
Summary: Far too many weak stories
Review: The best stories in this collection are the short ones for the simple reason that they inflict less suffering on the reader than do the long ones. Seldom has a sequel fallen as far short of the standards set by its predecessor as does this anthology which is the follow up to the highly regarded Alien Sex. It contains 18 stories, 16 of which were new for this collection in 1996. The other four stories go back as far as the sixties. There are also two poems.

The dominant theme in this anthology is prostitution. Almost half of the stories deal with this topic in one form or another. By contrast, in the original anthology, there is a much greater variety of subject matter.

No more than half of the stories in here merit inclusion in an anthology and the others range from poor to utterly dreadful.

I can recommend Brian Stableford's "The House of Mourning" and Elizabeth Hand's "In the Month of Athyr" as standing out from the rest but of the other 18 pieces, I awarded more lower rankings than I have ever done for any other anthology that I have ever read.

If there is one way in which collection is like "Alien Sex" it is the fact that this is not a book of of erotic writing. I doubt that any reader will feel aroused by the content of the book. That is not a criticism, it's just that some of the write ups on the jacket are misleading.

If you like the general idea of a collection of stories about alien sex, you should buy "Alien Sex" from the same editor. That is a far better book.

Rating:
Summary: Far too many weak stories
Review: The best stories in this collection are the short ones for the simple reason that they inflict less suffering on the reader than do the long ones. Seldom has a sequel fallen as far short of the standards set by its predecessor as does this anthology which is the follow up to the highly regarded Alien Sex. It contains 18 stories, 16 of which were new for this collection in 1996. The other four stories go back as far as the sixties. There are also two poems.

The dominant theme in this anthology is prostitution. Almost half of the stories deal with this topic in one form or another. By contrast, in the original anthology, there is a much greater variety of subject matter.

No more than half of the stories in here merit inclusion in an anthology and the others range from poor to utterly dreadful.

I can recommend Brian Stableford's "The House of Mourning" and Elizabeth Hand's "In the Month of Athyr" as standing out from the rest but of the other 18 pieces, I awarded more lower rankings than I have ever done for any other anthology that I have ever read.

If there is one way in which collection is like "Alien Sex" it is the fact that this is not a book of of erotic writing. I doubt that any reader will feel aroused by the content of the book. That is not a criticism, it's just that some of the write ups on the jacket are misleading.

If you like the general idea of a collection of stories about alien sex, you should buy "Alien Sex" from the same editor. That is a far better book.