For every one of these stories, I thought the opposite of the Eight Deadly Words (The Seven Virtuous Words?): I care what happens to these characters. Their needs were varied, but they were all immediate and visceral and I needed to know how they overcame... or how they didn’t overcome.My favorite story, though, has to be The Four Generations of Change E by Zen Cho. It’s about how immigrant families grow and change over the generations, in this case moving from Earth to the Moon. I thought it a

This was a great book, one of the best anthologies I've read. I liked the first and third books in this series, but the second book and this book are really great, I highly recommend them. I can get pretty impatient when I'm reading anthologies. I'm a character girl, and without longer stories to sink my teeth into I start to drag often around one-third or half-way through a book. But when the stories are grabbing me and holding on as much as there were I never had a chance to be bored. The new

Overall, a very mixed bag. Some of the stories were brilliant and moving. Some were okay, others completely passed me by, or I didn't understand many of the cultural references. My favorite story was The Symphony of Ice and Dust. Absolutely brilliant.

What works for this anthology is its diversity and breadth of stories and themes - as someone who barely reads SF, I enjoyed many of the stories tremendously, though not everything - particularly some of the very short stories - felt like they fit in. That is to be expected in an anthology though, and so would recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading science fiction and magical realism in shorter doses.

The Apex series of world SF provides a good snapshot of activity in science fiction from other locations than the USA. The stories range widely in quality, but show interesting variations from how 'classic' SF (which is mostly American) is presented. Some of the stories repurpose various mythologies or mythical creatures in fantasy or SF contexts.There are a number of efforts to promote SF from non-US sources, and Apex has been doing this for a few years now. They have showcased some exciting au...

Pros: wide variety of authors and subgenres, several excellent storiesCons: several confusing stories, no grouping together of similar storiesThe 28 stories in this collection are written by authors from around the world, covering a number of SFF genres. While most of the stories were good to excellent, I found a few to be rather confusing (a state which may have cleared up with further readings in some cases). There’s no theme connecting the stories and they’re not gathered in any order, which

A fascinating anthology of speculative fiction from around the world. Not all the stories may be to your liking but you will find interesting stories and new authors to discover. For me, I enjoyed the stories by Sabrina Huang, Chinelo Onwualu, Haralambi Markov, Yukimi Ogawa, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Saad Z. Hossain, Dilman Dila and Isabel Yap in this collection.- "The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family" by Usman T Malik (Pakistan): a tale of the horrors of living in Pakistan at the...

(Heads up: I received a free digital version of this book from Apex Books in exchange for my honest opinions and thoughts.)If I could only use one word to describe this anthology it would be: stunning. Volume four editor Mahvesh Murad starts us off with a wonderful thought about diversity, "Diversity...often seem to indicate that the inclusion of who or what the West sees as the exotic Other into Western mainstream literature is enough to make a difference. But it isn't...this isn't a book of di...

I received an ebook of this via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program.Apex is known for the quality work of their magazine; likewise, their World SF anthology series has a reputation for solid stories that represent cultures and authors from around the globe. The quality is clear, even if several stories left me confused or couldn't quite grab me. I was happy to see two stories here that I had read before--Thomas Olde Heuvelt's "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" and Usman T Malik's "The Vaporizatio...

This is probably one of the best collections of speculative fiction I have ever jad the pleasure of reading. There are so many aspects of the genre covered in a myriad of different cultural and stylistic perspectives. I can't remember the last time I was so thoroughly satisfied by a collection of short stories. I am definitely considering going back and buying the previous three collections. Simply wonderful and tantalizingly thought provoking. ♡

I picked up The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4 because I know Mahvesh Murad and I wanted to expose myself to new voices from around the world, hoping to find some new favorites. I've just come off a few months of reading slush for a magazine, which made it all the more clear to me that Murad's and my editorial tastes differ. Anthologies are usually a mixed bag because of personal taste, and I felt positive-ish about half the stories here, with very few if any stories fully satisfying me. Some w...

3.5 starsThe new volume of The Apex Book of World SF series is another solid and varied anthology. Although I knew around a third of the authors and I had already read six of the stories, I had never heard about half of the authors compiled here and I was looking forward to discovering some new interesting and promising writers. And although I didn’t really care about a third of the stories, the other two thirds were engaging enough to make this volume worth reading. The title is a bit misleadin...

<3! Such a great and varied set of stories. There were a few that didn't click with me, several that made me instant fans of the author, and an incredible display of the strength of the short story format. [return][return]I haven't had this much fun with short stories in a while (I think I prefer a collection of different authors - some of the fun is seeing the different ways they approach story telling in a small space) and I'm so glad I got the chance to read these.

An amazing book presenting the state of art of world SF today. A detailed review here: http://earthianhivemind.net/2016/01/2...

I enjoyed a few of these stories but I think I was looking for the wrong thing. Speculative fiction is pretty different from sci fi, which is maybe what I was expecting. Some were basically horror stories which I did not appreciate. Some I couldn't make head or tail of.

This anthology must be the most varied of all four. Still, I enjoyed it less than Volumes 1 and 2. My last note below will give you a hint why:https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...

Stuff I Read - The Apex Book of World SF 4 ReviewWhen looking at something like "World SF," it's rather interesting to see exactly what is meant. Stories written from writers living outside the US and UK? Stories written from writers born outside the US and UK? It's a complex question of what makes a story "World SF," and a question that gets a complex answer in this reprint anthology. The good news is that the stories are amazing, and those that I had read at the time they first make out were a...

I'll get on to the important stuff in a minute, but did anyone else notice the smell of their book? I don't know if it's something to do with the binding process used, or the glue, but it really doesn't smell like a book at all. In fact, it smells sort of unpleasant. Anyway, skipping over that, this was a bit of a mixed bag for me. It was very definitely speculative fiction, not science fiction. There was a reasonable amount of fantasy as well as SF and more horror than I would have liked.Highli...

**Full disclosure: I received this book in exchange for an honest review** This is the fourth volume in the Apex series of World SF. I have been having a hard time composing my review for this book, my issues are not with the quality of the stories, many of them were quite interesting and well written but they seemed more like folk tales, horror and fantasy then science fiction and science fiction was what I was really looking forward to consequently even though there were a number of strong s

I received a review copy from Apex. I saw this as a great opportunity to continue to broaden my horizons and get to know the works of international authors, many of whom I hadn't previously heard of. As ever with short story collections, not everything is for everyone and quality varied. A number of stories were positioned at the horror end of the spectrum, which is not to my taste, and a couple dabbled with concepts that I found squicky. That said, I expect SF to challenge me with difficult ide...