Description:
In the decades since Michael Moorcock's magazine New Worlds and Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions shattered taboos and transformed science fiction, editors have yearned to do likewise. But science fiction and Western society have changed greatly since the 1960s, and though new taboos have been born, there aren't many left. They can still be shattered, but any taboo-challenging fiction that appears in the same year as the movie Freddy Got Fingered has a tough job, and Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction is hardly as extreme as promised. For example, nonwhite and homosexual characters are rare; the status quo goes largely unchallenged; and a few of the 30 stories are young-adult in tone and subject, with the others having little that would disturb new-millennium youth, a generation accustomed to wearing bondage/fetish gear to the dance clubs. The rare examples of taboo breaking include a black character with a disturbingly thick accent and a posthuman race that commits mass murder for policy; but the anthology's potentially most challenging story gets there as a result of publication after September 11, 2001: Harry Turtledove's well-written but traditional modern fantasy "Black Tulip" is sympathetic to Afghanis. Ignore the subtitle. Redshift is a very good anthology of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with some stories, like Gregory Benford's "Anomalies" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Commencement," that will become classics of speculative fiction. --Cynthia Ward
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