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

The flow of good new original anthologies is becoming a torrent (see my short fiction column this issue), and Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift is one of the biggest boulders in the mighty onrush, a superb, generously proportioned selection of new Young Adult SF stories from an exceptional list of the masters of short fiction. A few of the contributors eventually fall into the occupational trap of YA fiction writing-the temptation to condescend to the audience with too easy and simplistic a moral-but even then the basic storytelling quality is high. This is surely a contender for anthology of the year; its theme, new tomorrows, futures plausible and pertinent from a contemporary perspective, guarantees rigor and relevance.

Four especial highlights deserve particular mention. Kelly Link’s novella “The Surfer” is a brilliant comic reflection on a central impulse of genre SF-the desire for wise, beneficent aliens to come down and sort out the mess we have made of our planet and our lives. Link focuses not on the aliens themselves, but on a cross-section of humankind, her logic presumably being that it is our own perverse natures that require study, not the character of our putative (and of course imaginary) rescuers. So a young soccer player, his medical doctor father, an overweight American university student, a Latino girl, and various others pass the time under plague quarantine at a Costa Rican airport, intermittently wondering whether the aliens who have visited once before will come again and in between being absurdly and confusedly human. Their antics and ruminations are funny in several senses of the word, and the aliens clearly will have a very complex species on their hands… Margo Lanagan also contemplates the sheer weirdness of the human lot in “An Honest Day’s Work”, all about gangs that, like whalers in a different era, must harvest the bodies of gigantic monopods hunted down in space and sent floating down to Earth for exploitation. A young boy with a (significantly) crippled limb joins in the activity, only for the leviathan being dismembered to come back to life, the consequences proving very messy. This is Lanagan at her teasing, paradoxical best.

The third major story is Ian McDonald’s “The Dust Assassin”, his latest Cyberabad tale, as usual full of the thrum of an India forty years from now threatened by drought and war but equal to the challenge, its sheer vitality consistently indefatigable. Two rival families control water supplies in a major city; one clan successfully attacks the other, only itself to succumb to a subtle, drawn-out revenge. The detail is opulent, full of powerful invention, couched in rich, rhythmic prose; McDonald deftly conveys the spiritual essence of a country always changing yet always the same. And the fourth nonpareil, “The Dismantled Invention of Fate” by Jeffrey Ford, is also exotic and timeless in feel, a dreamlike, circular confection about a great astronaut and his love for an alien woman, a relationship that becomes caught up in a battle between a great inventor and his non-human adversaries over the fabric of destiny itself. Hubris is thwarted yet wins out after all, and happiness somehow transcends its own extinction.

Quite a few other entries are rewarding too. “Pinocchio”, a novella by Walter Jon Williams, looks at lifestyle issues-how a young trendsetter is monitored constantly for the fashion tips he can provide an audience of millions of teenagers, how he loses favour with the demographic, and how eventually, like Pinocchio of old, he matures into something approximating genuine humanity. “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” by the zanily ebullient Tricia Sullivan involves two teenagers whose personal combat in Nineties suburbia resonates with a space battle being fought in the far future, a clever take on young adult responsibility. “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” by Alastair Reynolds begins with the old chestnut of a young man going to sea, or in this case to space, developing skilfully into a moral tale of piracy’s horrors and ennoblement by love and principle. Paul McAuley’s “Incomers”, part of his Quiet War sequence, sets a pair of prejudiced and over-adventurous youths against an innocent man they believe is a spy, with slightly predictable, but salutarily chastening, results. “Cheats” by Gwyneth Jones springs a genuine surprise on the reader in its tale of siblings gone astray in virtuality land; Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Sundiver Day” is a sensitive, incisive portrait of a teenage girl living a scapegrace existence while dreaming of cloning her dead brother; and “Lost Continent” by Greg Egan memorably allegorizes the regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan while reflecting on the plight of refugees in Australian camps, whose appeals for asylum may never succeed, no matter the strength of their cases. This story strongly reflects Egan’s own personal campaigning on the “illegal” migrant issue, and the matter is cast in a haunting light by the implicit observation that the debate may go on forever, leaving future fugitives, from tyranny elsewhere in time or in the multiverse, in the same hopeless situation as present-day refugees.

A few contributions are on the minor side. “Repair Kit” by Stephen Baxter is a rather old-fashioned and gimmicky joke story about miracle technology on a spaceship, in the vein of Robert Sheckley. Neil Gaiman lampoons teenage girls and their obsessive behaviors in “Orange”. Garth Nix’s “Infestation” describes a gory vampire hunt in terms perhaps insulting to organized religion. And “Ass-Hat Magic Spider” by Scott Westerfeld rather whimsically lets a boy off the consequences of exceeding his weight allowance prior to an interstellar colonization attempt. But even here there is amusement and the sort of wry observation of adult incapacity that YA readers presumably thrive upon. All in all, a magnificent, thoroughly entertaining anthology.