Warriors

January 25, 2010
For this mammoth collection, 20 award-winning, bestselling authors (including the editors) were commissioned to write original stories about warriors, with no other parameters. The result is an unpredictable assortment, where SF and fantasy rub elbows with mystery, historical, and military fiction, and even a western. The Vikings of Cecilia Holland’s “The King of Norway,” the secret community in Howard Waldrop’s WWI tale, “Ninieslando,” and the rogue AIs in Dozois’s own “Recidivist” provide a little something for everyone. Urban fantasy author Carrie Vaughn turns in “The Girls from Avenger,” a straight historical piece about female WWII pilots, while historical fantasist Naomi Novik’s “Seven Years from Home” is pure SF. There are a few clunkers, but on the whole, the editors succeed admirably in their mission to break down genre barriers and focus on pure entertainment.

March 15, 2010
The title of this massive anthology implies a binding military-sf theme, but actually the book is an essay in providing lots of different genres between one set of covers. Happily, its entirely successful. There really is something for everybody in it. Joe R. Lansdale has a straight history-cum-mystery about the Buffalo Soldiers, among other things. Naomi Novik eschews dragons in favor of bioengineering on a distant planettoo distant for the characters comfort. Steven Saylor goes back before Gordianus the Finders era to the fall of Carthage, regarded from the Carthaginian perspective. Lawrence Block forsakes Matthew Scudder to present a very odd young lady of easy virtue. Likewise, Carrie Vaughans character herein isnt really a werewolf but a member of the WWII WASP. Both S. M. Stirling and David Weber hew closer to standard military-sf than many others; both are complete masters of it, of course, who have ever so slightly pushed its limits. And both editors contribute, Dozois a classy last-survivor piece, and Martin a sidebar to his Ice and Fire saga.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)