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.

Tricia Sullivan is the author of nine novels, most recently Double Vision and Sound Mind. Her story “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” appears in The Starry Rift.

1. When did you start reading science fiction? How old were you, and can you remember the first book or story that really excited you as a reader?

I read DUNE when I was around 12, but it was Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END that really impressed me when I was around 13 or 14. I’d read a lot of alternate-world stuff (Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Anne McCaffrey). But CHILDHOOD’S END was the first book that really made me think about our world from a completely new perspective. I also read Philip K. Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP because my parents said I was too young to see BLADE RUNNER (the movie based on the book). That was a major mindblower. I’ve never gotten tired of Dick.

2. What do you think science fiction has to offer young readers today?

Technology is changing our way of life so rapidly that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the leading edge. Science fiction is the literature that meets change head-on. It has a long tradition of exploring the boundaries of what it means to be a person. Young people are always testing those boundaries, and in particular young people today are facing possibilities and challenges that were never even imagined twenty years ago–except, maybe, in science fiction. Whether or not the technology in ‘hard’ science fiction stories ‘comes true’ doesn’t necessarily matter. Science fiction speaks directly to the blue sky thinking that older people tend to lose sight of. It’s about edges. That’s what being young is about, too.

3. Tell us about your story for The Starry Rift.

I had this idea of taking Greek champions and mapping star systems onto their bodies and then getting them to fight it out. Kind of a mental image of giant constellations battling one another. At first I thought it would be set on another planet, but whenever I sat down to write I ended up with…New Jersey, of all places. Go figure.

4. Did you find there was a real difference between writing for younger readers, or was your approach basically the same as when you’re writing for any other audience?

I realized I wasn’t going to get away with any postmodern hand-waving so I had to try to make the parameters of the story as concrete as I could. That was hard. Otherwise it was pretty much the same as any story.

5. What are you writing now? Is there something you’d recommend to readers who enjoyed your story in The Starry Rift?

I’m writing a science fiction novel called LIGHTBORN which is set in an American city where, thanks to a new self-improvement technology, all of the adults have gone nuts. I’d recommend my first novel, LETHE, to those who liked ‘Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome’.

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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A  free sample!  Well, almost.  In November 2004 Salon.com published Cory Doctorow’s novelette “Anda’s Game”.   The story was smart, clever, timely and perceptive. It was applauded everywhere, and ended up being collected in Michael Chabon’s Best American Short Stories.

When I was compiling The Starry Rift  I asked Cory if he’d like to contribute a story for the book. Unfortunately, because of his schedule, he couldn’t write an original, but he did suggest reprinting “Anda’s Game”, which was a terrific idea.

The version that appears in  The Starry Rift is different from the version that appears elsewhere - it’s several thousand words shorter - but you can still read the original version at Salon.   It’s a great story.

Ken Macleod is a terrific writer. He’s written some marvelous novels, and is increasingly showing up on awards ballots for his short fiction.  His story “Lighting Out” recently won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Story of the Year.  What’s not widely known is that it was originally written for The Starry Rift.  When Ken sent me the story I was delighted, but when I read it, I knew something didn’t work but I couldn’t put my finger on what.  We went round and round about it for a while, and ultimately agreed it just wasn’t working. Ken, however, sat down with the story, made some major changes (mostly changing the gender of everyone in the story), and made it work really well. It appeared in disLOCATIONS and you can read it here.

The road to publication for The Starry Rift was extraordinarily long and complicated. A book normally takes about two years from conception to publication: this one took four. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and it impacted on the final book in unexpected ways. One of them was that it changed the table of contents slightly.

Back in September 2004 I met Neil Gaiman at Noreascon. I think we had sushi with Jack Dann for lunch and, just before we headed out the door, I asked him if he’d write a story for a book I was doing with Sharyn November. Neil is a really nice guy, and he treated my request with far more kindness and graciousness than it deserved, and he said “Sure”. I was pretty happy.

A year or so passed and a story, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, dropped in through my email inbox. It was good. Very good. Good enough that I wanted to wait a couple days before responding to him - read it and read it and be sure. I told him I liked it, we did the contract thing, and we were all set. Time passed. Neil needed a story for his new collection, Fragile Things, and a lot of time had passed. The story needed to be in Fragile Things, and Neil would write me another story (which became “Orange”). The original story ended up on the Hugo ballot and was widely loved.

If you’ve not read the story, and want a taste of what The Starry Rift could have been like you can read the full text of it here.

The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows hits bookstores across the US next week.  It’s been four years in the making, and I’m really,  really excited to see how it goes.  I’ve seen a copy of the book, and it’s beautiful. I’ve read the book, and it’s terrific.  Over the next few days I’m going to add more stuff here as we move to publication.  There’ll be a competition to win free copies of the book, there’ll be short interviews with many of the authors, you’ll be able to download the terrific cover art by Stephan Martiniere to use as computer wallpaper, and I’m developing one or two other features.  Hopefully you’ll all enjoy it. Oh, and drop me a note in the comments to let me know when you first see the book ‘in the wild’.  I’d love to know where it is.

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