My Review: This is now my fourth review of the annual Writers of the Future collection, and I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. By that I mean sussing out the themes of the year’s collection. It’s not that the collection starts out having a theme - because it doesn’t. These stories were the top three in each of the quarterly Writers of the Future contests last year. But this is a Fantasy and Science Fiction collection, all of whose stories were written or at least finalized during roughly the same time period.

My Review: The “Writers of the Future” Contest sponsored by Galaxy Press has been going on for forty-one years now. Doing the time math, which runs straight into that whole mental thing that the 1980s feel like they were only twenty years ago when in fact they were FORTY years ago, dammit, means that this thing started in 1985. I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the whole thing, and short stories generally aren’t my jam, so I hadn’t paid much attention until the 39th collection two years ago.