Offered as a followup to Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Sol System, this collection of stories pushes the limits, taking its various protagonists to distant stars and farflung settings. Like the title suggests, the stories are weighted towards adventure tales and space opera, with plenty of action to go around. There’s only six stories, plus an accompanying nonfiction essay, to fill out the volume, which means most of the stories are novella length or even longer.
By far, my favorite of the six is Debra Doyle and James MacDonald’s return to their Mageworlds setting, in “On Suivi Point.” In it, we’re treated to a glimpse of Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s early adventures as a spacer, before she was recalled home by the events detailed in Price of the Stars. While on leave on Suivi Point, she and a companion are targeted as part of a shadowy conspiracy, but it soon turns out that Beka’s inadvertent enemies are the ones in trouble. It never pays to underestimate some people.
Also of interest is “Genie Out of the Bottle” by Dave Freer and Eric Flint, which looks at the setting introduced in Rats, Bats and Vats. Who ever thought combining the military and genetic engineering would be so unusual? A privileged young man joins the army to get out of a bad jam that’s not his fault, and ends up working with the dregs of an army created from genetically-altered elephant-shrews (commonly called “rats”). His unorthodox way of working with them turns out to have unexpected consequences. Fascinating, fun, and worth checking out, this story’s inspired me to go find the books it ties into.
Other stories in this collection are from James P. Hogan, Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, and Gregory Benford. In general, I was pleased with Cosmic Tales, and I hope we’ll continue to see more releases in this series, as so far, it’s been quite entertaining.