Love and Rockets edited by Martin H. Greenberg – review

Love & Rockets is the latest entry in DAW’s series of anthologies.  I usually look forward to these books, because they are a great way to get a hold of some quality short fiction.  Martin H. Greenberg has been putting anthologies together for quite some time now, and they always have some really amazing pieces of fiction in them.

This particular anthology is an attempt to bring together the science fiction and romance genres.  While I’m usually all for genre-blending, it seems, sometimes, like some genres don’t mix for a very good reason.  Science Fiction and Romance at least have the common thread of being pretty reviled by people who don’t understand them or read them regularly.  There’s still a certain stigma attached to being a reader of either one, so pairing them does make a weird sort of sense.

This book has stories by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jay Lake, Sylvia Kelso and Lillian Stewart Carl, and Jody Lynn Nye, among others.  There are thirteen stories in all, along with an introduction by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed Bujold’s musings on the two disparate genres melded in this anthology. She talks about how it’s difficult to define either genre definitively because there is so much individual perception and taste involved in what makes “science fiction” and what makes “romance.”  I would have to agree with her.  She mentions a few of the tropes and the seemingly unwritten rules about what needs to occur in a particular piece to make it science fiction or romance.  She also writes about how easy it is to bend those rules and rework those tropes into something very new and exciting.

“Gateway Night” is the story Nina Kiriki Hoffman contributed to this book. It’s about a female nurse on a space station that has four different types of aliens on it (I include humans as an alien class).  The station is divided into quadrants, and special measures are taken to properly segregate each group from the others.  One particular race, the Shurixit, cannot touch humans because it puts them in a kind of thrall. One night, during the biggest festival of the year on the space station, the nurse finds out exactly why that thrall should be avoided.

“The Woman Who Ate Stone Squid” by Jay Lake is probably the oddest entry in the book.  It’s about a spacefaring race that has become entirely female.  They discover a planet and send one member down to explore it, because they have located clusters of ruins.  Against the advice of her crew, she pulls off her helmet to breathe the air before she goes into one of the buildings.  She discovers more than just unusual carvings.

“An Offer You Couldn’t Refuse” by Sylvia Kelso and Lillian Stewart Carl is about Darryl, a man who works for a pyrotechnics company in Australia.  His job doesn’t just involve setting up displays; he’s also supposed to act as a guard for Dora, the woman who is part of the family who owns the company.  A very strange man keeps showing up at their shows and trying to convince Dora to do something.  Darryl feels like it’s part of his job to get involved.  What he discovers is that the situation is far more complex than he could have imagined.

Jody Lynn Nye’s “Dance of Life” was one of my favorite pieces in the book.  It’s about a race of beings that are short-lived.  They have large folds of skin that are wing-like, but they’re unable to fly.  Part of their royal family decides to have their wedding on a space cruise, and they employ a human dancer as part of the spectacle.  The race bonds in a particular ritual in which the bride and groom gain the exact same life expectancy.  The younger brother of the royal family begins the story very envious of his older sibling, until the human dancer helps to change his mind.

Largely, this anthology seemed pretty successful.  There were a few stories that seemed a little bit strained because the authors were trying very hard to meld the story into a science fiction romance, and they were definitely working outside their comfort zones.  A couple of the stories seemed like they were constrained because the writer had a narrower view of what it meant to be a romance story.   None of the stories were total duds, though; they were all very readable.

I did enjoy this book and I would recommend it to women who might feel like trying something a little different in genre fiction, especially if they’d prefer science fiction stories that focus more on individuals and character driven stories than big concept science.  I’m not sure that most of the guys that I know would appreciate many of the stories in this book, aside from “Gateway Night” and “An Offer You Couldn’t Refuse,” but this might be a good way to see if some of them would enjoy a bit of romance.  All in all, it was fun to read and it went pretty quickly.  I’d definitely pass it on to friends who I think would enjoy it.