Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon

Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon
edited by Ian Whates

Novacon is a British science fiction convention that first occurred in 1971. Since 1980, most of the guests of honor at the convention have supplied original works of fiction to be distributed at the convention. This anthology collects many of them, alongside some original fiction (though I think all the suppliers of original fiction were also Novagon GOHs). As a result, this anthology features fiction from many luminaries of British sf: Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, Geoff Ryman, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and the late Iain M. Banks all have stories here, among many others.

Published: 2021
Contents: 1989-2021
Acquired and read: December 2021

It's the kind of sf anthology that one might cruelly describe as "perfectly competent." There are few terrible stories here; I found Iain Banks's "The Spheres" (2010) fairly inscrutable and Peter Hamilton's "Softlight Sins" (1997) a somewhat unlikely implementation of a plausible idea, but on the whole the stories here are well put together and certainly not terrible.

On the other hand, there wasn't much here that jumped out to me, nothing that really grabbed me or wowed me the way the best sf does. Everything here is... just fine. One kind of wonders if that's because if there's a story a big-name author if willing to give an sf convention for free, it's because it's not their best work.

The big exception was Ian R. MacLeod's "The God of Nothing" (original to this volume), a neat story about a government functionary forced to invent things like counting in order to satisfy the increasing demands of his king. Neat idea, well done, about technologies we take for granted. I did also like Jaine Fenn's "The Ships of Aleph" (2012), though it was one of those stories where one wants to know what happens next! (It's set in the world of Fenn's Hidden Empire series but I don't think it has any narrative links to any other stories.)

So an okay anthology, but you've almost certainly read better, and you've almost certainly read worse.