Mimesis by Martha Wells (Books of the Raksura Series)Short story about a mimetic new creature in the Reaches.

I discovered The Other Half of the Sky in 2014 when the controversy regarding long time hate blogger and new author WinterFox aka RequiresHate aka Benjanun Sriduangkaew . As I was reading up on all of the drama, I noticed there were some decent looking authors being mentioned (the authors were being harassed by Requires Hate and her group of friends). The Other Half of the Sky - with its clear feminist themes AND the promise of Space Opera - caught my eye and I decided to give it a try.I purc...

All in all, a very enjoyable anthology. As with the other Athena Andreadis-edited anthology I've read, this had a lot of excellent, woman-centered stories. Again, some of my favorites were by authors I already know and love - "The Waiting Stars", by Aliette de Bodard is possibly the best story in the entire book, although Vandana Singh's "Sailing the Antarsa" was also incredible. Unfortunately the last two stories were some of my least favorite, so it didn't end on a great note, but overall I th...

I wasn't sure if I would read this, but the editor's introduction packed the literary equivalent of fist to gut. I was the reader Athena spoke of, who enjoyed typical science fiction stories, many of them with particular and dated visions of women. Women as wives, mothers, weak. Screw this, Athena says, women "can be heroes not merely heroines." I consider myself, without really applying labels, an broadly accepting person and I found this bit about myself disturbing. It's nothing wrong to like

This was an uneven collection. After a wonderful introduction, in which the editor explained what she wanted to do differently, we get two original and exciting stories with a strong female viewpoint.Unfortunately the next stories were less impressive. It's always a matter of taste, especially when it comes to short fiction, but I felt a strong disappointment to hit one mediocre story after the other. Things got better when I reached two of my favourite contemporary authors (Aliette de Bodard an...

A really excellent collection of short science fiction featuring female main characters. It reminded me of why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place.

A strong collection of feminist sci fi. A few stand outs, but also a few that fell flat for me. I encourage you to also read the second anthology in the series, which I happened to read first, that I thought was even stronger.

Sometimes I miss the old days when you read a science fiction story and could figure out what was going on before you were halfway through.

Ok, I admit, I actually skipped some of the stories, especially in the first part of the book. But I persevered and read enough, imo, to count as read and to rate.So, if Vandana Singh weren't in this, I probably wouldn't have gone to the trouble of ordering it from out-of-system ILL. Her story here was not disappointing, but not amazing, either.Other stories worth reading, imo, were Ken Liu's The Shape of Thought, which took a bit to get into but turned out to be rather brilliant about truly ali...

This anthology actually comes at a very appropriate time, with a lot of discussion happening at the moment about women in science fiction and fantasy, the problems facing female authors, and representation of women on the nomination lists for major genre awards. On a more personal level, I recently tried to put together a list of favourite characters in science fiction books and found that not only did I struggle to think of enough, but there were no female characters even close to making the li...

I'd heard a lot about this anthology while it was still in development, and loved the idea immediately; after reading the free Kindle sample, I was sold (and truly, Andreadis writes a very stirring introduction). Female characters in lead roles? Slice-of-life science fiction stories? Sign me up!And to some extent it succeeds, with two notable standouts:Vandana Singh's "Sailing the Antarsa" is beautiful and alien, and very well done. To say it's a story about a female explorer who rides in a spac...

Sci-fi is not really my genre, but there were some gems in this collection. Bad Day on Boscobel by Alexander Jablokov and Sailing the Antarsa by Vandana Singh were two of my favorites.There are sad stories, mysteries, adventures, and even some humor. The thread that holds the stories together is that in all of them, there are strong, smart, determined women exploring, having adventures, rescuing themselves, traveling between the stars, in other words, holding up their half of the sky.

Average: 3 StarsI didn't finish the anthology, but hope to come back to it eventually. So far, there was a lot of interesting ideas, but no story really stood out or was incredible.Favorites: "Finders" by Melissa Scott and "Missions of Greed" by Sue LangeWorst: "Landfall" by Joan Slonczewiski"Finders" by Melissa Scott4 StarsScavengers Cassilde and Dai must decide whether to risk all their funds and Cassilde's declining health when their untrustworthy ex-partner/lover returns promising a possible...

Like any short story compilation the reader will find some stories to their liking and some not. This book is no different, except that some of the stories read more like an excerpt from a bigger tale that has dropped you into the middle of the story. That being said, I enjoyed most of the tales in this book, with my particular favourites being Finders, Mission of Greed and Cathedral

The individual stories were all very good. I just have a hard time getting into anthologies.

This is a really good compilation of stories.

You can find the full review over at The Founding Fields:http://thefoundingfields.com/2012/12/...Shadowhawk reviews the latest anthology from Candlemark & Gleam, featuring stories that are primarily about female protagonists and how they fit into the wider SFF worlds.“A very thought-provoking anthology that forces the reader to realise that female protagonists can be just as incredible and compelling as their male counterparts in the wider SFF fields, particularly space opera. ” ~The Founding Fi...

4.5 starsMost of the stories in this anthology reflect the theme admirably, and are in the good-t-excellent category. And most of these are at a minimum very good.Both the introduction and the first story were excellent, and there were many other excellent stories throughout the volume. I'm giving it 5 stars on this account.There were 3 stories I had problems with: Cat Rambo's "Dagger and Mask" was an excellent story... but was almost 100% POV of a male character, which seemed to me to go agains...

This had been in my to-read pile since I first noticed reviews of it during its release, but reminder conversations online thankfully brought it out from the pile into my hands. First and foremost, this anthology is a reminder that women do write science/speculative fiction of all varieties and tastes, from the light side of the spectrum to the hard, no matter how one defines those relative terms (and those definitions really shouldn't include the view that one is inherently 'better' or 'easier'...

The Other Half of the Sky is one of several recent projects aimed at encouraging sff writing that includes women as diverse characters with all the range of characterisations, goals, abilities, occupations and agency that male characters have - in short, that write women as full humans. The title is taken from a Chinese saying (famously quoted by Mao Zedong) that women hold up half the sky - in sff, we have seen much of the half of the sky that men hold up, but relatively little of that held up