Locus reviewer Gary Wolfe looks at The Starry Rift in the April 2008 issue of the magazine. In his review, he says:

It’s probably of no particular significance than only ten of the 24 selections in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year are narrated in the first person voice, but it may be interesting that of the sixteen stories in his original young-adult anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, no fewer than eleven have first-person narrators. (The difference, for the stats-minded, is 42% vs 69%.) I should note at the outset that I profess no particular expertise is what is and is not considered effective YA fiction-our interest here is viewing these stories as SF-but what this suggests to me is that a central concern in these tales is reader identification. Even the most bizarre of these tales (and that would be, not too surprisingly, Margo Lanagan’s “An Honest Day’s Work”, which describes workers in a seaside village systematically disassembling an enormous humanoid body) have the capacity to draw the reader in fairly quickly, since telling any tale from the point of view of a participant-usually a young one-is a means of forming a compact with the reader that helps suspend the initial disorientation of the SF setting. The reason that’s important here-and one of the reasons this is an important anthology-is that for the most part these tales are uncompromisingly SF, and most could as easily appear in a venue not specifically labeled YA (which after all is a market segment, not a genre). Most of the contributors are major SF writers not particularly known for YA (Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Cory Doctorow, Alastair Reynolds, Ian McDonald, Tricia Sullivan, Walter Jon Williams), while others may have YA reputations along with their adult work (Lanagan, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Ann Halam-perhaps better known to the likes of us as Gwyneth Jones), and a few are hardly known for SF in any traditional sense at all (Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford). But since Strahan has been fairly constructionist in his approach-insisting that these literally be “tales of new tomorrows” and not fantasies-part of the fascination lies not in merely seeing what a fairly challenging author like Greg Egan might do with a YA mandate, but in seeing what a Kelly Link might do with a more traditional form of SF.

Any original anthology, of course, depends not only on whom the editor chooses to invite, but upon who responds and what they end up submitting. (Readers of Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, for example, may recall a headnote indicating that one of the stories there was originally written for this anthology, and later substituted by the one here.) As a result, we can’t really expect Strahan to offer a systematic guided tour of the major districts of current SF, but it’s surprising at how well that works out anyway. His opening selection, Scott Westerfeld’s “Ass-Hat Magic Spider”, revisits the classic hard-SF “Cold Equations” problem of weight limits on a spaceship, as the narrator desperately tries to reduce his own weight enough to permit him to bring along a favorite book and still make the combined weight cutoff; it’s an excellent opening not only because of its cool title and its accessible SF premise, but because of the ingenious way it both echoes and undercuts cosmetic concerns with weight. Other very traditional SF tales-the sort we might have seen an anthology like this fifty years ago-include Stephen Baxter’s “Repair Kit”, an avowed tribute to the comic engineering-problem tales of Sheckley and others; Alastair Reynold’s flat-out space pirate story “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice”, which offers the purest joys of the Robert Louis Stevenson adventure tale to be found here; and Paul McAuley’s “Incomers”, in which a couple of boys in a colony on Rhea become convinced that a local merchant is a spy. McAuley gets the prize for the most spectacular traditional SF setting, and the tale most likely to have earned a Chesley Bonestell cover had it appeared at the right time.

But there’s an argument to be made that the most familiar template for latter-day YA SF is not so much outer space as virtual space, though as Ender’s Game demonstrated, they need not be all that different. Ann Halam’s “Cheats” describes a sister and brother, expert at cruising virtual environments, who inadvertently stumble into an actual interstellar exploration program, while Cory Doctorow’s “Anda’s Game” (a deliberate reference to the card novel, and the only story not original to this anthology) describes a skilled VR-game warrior who finds herself entangled not with intergalactic war, but with real child-labor exploitation here on Earth. Tricia Sullivan’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” (the second-weirdest title in a book intended for teens) takes the Ender scenario a step further, depicting a suburban teenage girl in 1994 as secretly a champion in an interplanetary war in which her whole civilization is literally mapped onto her body-nerves as communication systems, blood as human lives, brain as government, etc.-so that when she engages in one-on-one combat with her rival, millions of lives are directly in peril. It may be the boldest concept in the book, even as it takes the superhero ethic to an absurdist extreme. Much closer to home is Walter Jon Williams’s “Pinocchio”, concerning an arrogant teen trendsetter on the web who suffers an identity crisis as his ratings begin to dwindle after a fight with his girlfriend, leading him to consider the possibility of living his life as a “real boy” (hence the title). It’s an effective cautionary tale about investing too much of your life online, but it’s not likely to make webgeeks any less suspicious about the idea of girlfriends.

Another group of tales reflects the more recent tendency of SF to move beyond its classic Anglo-American focus. Ian McDonald’s “The Dust Assassin” is part of the Cyberabad sequence of stories that included the novel River of Gods, set in a high-tech future India in which the failure of the monsoon leads to water wars between two powerful families, one of whose daughter becomes the only survivor of a violent attack on the family compound, though it ends with a familiar taste of Rapaccini’s Daughter. Greg Egan’s “Lost Continent”, one of the two least YA-flavored stories in the book (the other is Jeffrey Ford’s), is also one of his most human-scaled stories to date, reminiscent only of Teranesia among his earlier work; it concerns a Muslim boy from a war-torn Khurosan whose family tries to send him to safety through a kind of portal to an alternate world (depicted as a strange desert dust storm), only to have him end up in an overcrowded refugee camp. Kelly Link’s “The Surfer” takes place in Costa Rica where the narrator, a star soccer player, and his dad have traveled while a plague decimates much of the world; there they join a cult-like community which has grown up around the surfer of the title, a charismatic figure who had once been abducted by aliens and has promised their return. Without sacrificing the insouciant narrative voice that is characteristic of Link, it is indeed perhaps the purest near-future SF tale we’ve seen from her, and one of the most linearly plotted.

Of the remaining stories, Jeffrey Ford’s “The Dismantled Invention of Fate” seems to me both the other weirdest title and the other least YA-tinged tale; it’s a haunting and meditative piece on an aging astronaut consumed with guilt over an alien princess he had once loved, marvelous in its invention but almost oppressively somber in tone. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Sundiver Day” attains a similarly tragic tone in describing a young girl in Key West so overcome with grief at the death of her brother, a “kite scout” in a future Middle East war that she conspires to find a way of cloning him. The story’s strength comes from Sundiver’s confused yet determined voice, and the convincing setting. Garth Nix’s “Infestation” is easily the least science fictional scenario in the book-it’s about a vampire hunt in a haunted house, after all-but it’s a solid thriller, and as Nix points out in his afterword, it’s not all that big a deal to retrofit the vampires (and the supercompetent narrator vampire-killer) as aliens. Finally, Neil Gaiman’s “Orange” gains its charm mostly from its mode of telling-answers to a series of unstated questions which reveal a manic tall tale about a sister’s obsession with tanning creams, orange goddesses, and alien visitors. It’s the lightest piece in the book, but thankfully, along with the Nix, Baxter, and Westerfeld stories, it reminds us that there’s at least some room left in the YA consciousness for a bit of old-fashioned goofiness. I’m not at all sure what YA readers will make of some of these tales, but few SF readers are likely to be disappointed. –Gary K. Wolfe