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Rating: 
Summary: Stories from the dawn of history
Review: This book, with stories all set in the Bronze Age, will appeal to SF readers even though there's precious little SF about it. It is the authors themselves that are well-known to the genre. Co-Editor Harry Turtledove has an entry with an explanation for where the centaurs, fauns, and other mythological creatures went, which is one of the stronger stories in the book. Other big SF names are Gene Wolfe, with a time-traveler who finds himself aboard the Argo instead of the Mayflower; Judith Tarr, whose tale illustrates how a city's fortune can rise or fall based on its weapons rather than its deities; S.M. Stirling, with a short story from his Nantucket universe, where the modern island is transported back to the Bronze age to dominate trade and warfare; and Poul Anderson, closing the collection with another time-traveler who wants to study the Bronze Age but faces instead the rise of the Age of Iron.Tarr has previously collaborated with Turtledove in their novel "Household Gods." Laura Frankos ("The Sea Mother's Gift," a purely historical tale of the Orkney Islanders) is married to him. Co-editor Noreen Doyle is an historian, and her Egyptian tale, based on an actual inscription, is also straight history. All the stories are worth reading; there isn't a stinker in the collection. Doyle and Turtledove also included some useful introductory material before each story. This ought to be standard in books like these, where not every reader has a Ph.D. in that era, but in Turtledove's last stint as editor he neglected to give a setting for the stories in _Alternate Generals II_. I was pleased to see these necessary lead-ins when I finished their introduction to the book. Best stories are Turtledove's "A Horse of Bronze," featuring Meditteranean Sea-faring centaurs who discover humans in the British Isles; "Blood Wolf" by Stirling, which made me want to read the Nantucket novels, and Frankos' "The Sea Mother's Gift," which was the most evocative and had the best sense of character and place. The story that failed did so in an interesting way: Gregory Feeley's "Giliad" seemed like it was the result of a hard disk erasure gone awry. I think what he was trying to do was give the sense of an incompletely erased clay tablet that he uses as a metaphor for his Bronze Age literary stand-in, but this story that takes place right before and after 9/11/01, in Manhattan, never seemed to catch on with me. There is also a confusing segment with a possibly gay couple who is never mentioned again, while the erudite modern family (including an eight-year-old daughter who talks more like a 15 year old) and the Sumerian girl intertwine throughout the story. This tale is thus literary experimentation, and I commend Feeley for the attempt but this needs the love and care of a stronger editor.
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