Karen Burnham gives The Starry Rift a very good review at Strange Horizons, singling out Kelly Link and Greg Egan’s stories for particular comment. The introduction faired less well, but I hate writing those things, so that’s okay. It is interesting to see how much various reviewers response to the book is colored by how they imagine readers younger than they are will react to the book.

Farah Mendlesohn has a terrific critical blog that discusses children’s literature generally, and children’s science fiction in particular.   She has some nice things to say about The Starry Rift. I’ve asked Farah to recommend five books you could check out after The Starry Rift, which I hope to post here in the next few days.

Greg L.  Johnson gives The Starry Rift a good review at SF Site.  He says:

Another way The Starry Rift connects to science fiction’s past is in its size and variety of stories. The Starry Rift is just the kind of big collection that you used to find tucked away on the shelves of the local library, with each story a door into another universe of imagination and wonder. With any luck, that’s just the kind of experience that The Starry Rift will provide for the young readers of today.

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.

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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.

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The editors of Vector take a look at The Starry Rift over at Torque Control, discussing Kelly Link’s “The Surfer” in detail.

April Spisak has given The Starry Rift a very good review in the Bulletin of the Centre for Children’s Books. The review says:

STRAHAN, JONATHAN, ed. The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows: An Original Science Fiction Anthology.
reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12

Veteran compiler Strahan here brings together sixteen stories, all but one original, that envision a future world. The stories cover both the genre standards (virtual reality, cloning, and post-apocalyptic environs recur throughout) and the unexpected (futuristic vampires and end-time prophets). In addition, a dramatic range of writing styles is represented, from Neil Gaiman’s short “Orange,” where the reader is only presented with a set of answers to an interview about the respondent’s bizarre older sister, to “Anda’s Game,” by Cory Doctorow, which is a more in-depth exploration of a young girl’s rise to fame in a virtual reality environment. Even in their variety, however, these tales are all fairly sophisticated and traditional science fiction (in overall story structure, narrative perspective, and topics included); this is a collection clearly intended for fans of the genre. The inclusion of adolescent protagonists, environments in which teens could imagine themselves (schools, virtual reality spaces, or on spaceships as apprentices), and almost universally fast-paced, snappy narratives will all be particularly appealing to YA readers. In fact, SF buffs, long resigned to crossover adult compilations, will likely be thrilled by this extensive selection written specifically for this audience. Authors’ notes that offer intriguing insights into the inspiration behind each story accompany brief contributor biographies. AS

Karen Burnham over at SFRevu gives The Starry Rift a terrific review, making particular mention of Kelly Link’s “The Surfer” and Greg Egan’s “Lost Continent”.

The Romantic Times has reviewed The Starry Rift, and given it 4 stars!