Views from Crestmont Drive

This week’s Sunday novella is “Turquoise Days” by Alastair Reynolds. It was first published in a thin chapbook from Golden Gryphon Press (shown left in the photo above) in 2002, then in a two-novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, from Gollancz a few months later (and which is still in print). Then in the Dozois anthologies, first the 20th Annual and then this Best of Best Volume 2 volume under review. And that’s it; it did not, for instance, appear in the author’s Best of collection, Beyond the Aquila Rift in 2016, though “Diamond Dogs,” from 2001, did.

This is the last story in the Gardner Dozois anthology, The Best of the Best Volume 2,  that I’ve been reading along with a Facebook group called Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction. Continue reading →

This week’s Sunday novella is “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. It was first published on the (long-gone) website Sci Fiction on May 2, 2001. (The site, edited by Ellen Datlow, won a Hugo Award in 2005 and was disbanded by its owner, the SciFi.com website, a few months later.)

Subsequently the story has been published, aside from in these Dozois anthologies, in Breathmoss and Other Exhalations in 2004, and in a “Best of” ebook-only collection from Open Road in 2013.

The story is as much meditation as a story. Continue reading →