If I rate the anthology as a whole using my usual "as the average of the contributions" system, then Brave New Worlds gets a composite rating of 4.0303. But I loved what Adams did here, and it may have de-throned Wastelands to become my new favorite anthology.Individual stories rated as follows:"The Lottery", Shirley Jackson - one of the classic dystopian fiction stories; and the narrative's success is due (in large part) to how prosaic and unassuming it is--not "pastoral", but written like

The average of all ratings here is about 3.8, so I'll round it up to 4*. This was a pretty interesting anthology, with a great variety of dystopias. Some stories I really didn't care for, but others got me thinking and intrigued me.Below a rating for all individual stories in the anthology.1. The Lottery2* The story doesn't really make any sense. There's a monthly lottery to decide which of the villagers is going to be stoned (to death?). I hope it's not to death, as that would decimate a town's...

I read about three quarters of this and stopped & could go no further. It was dull and kind of depressing. Well, what was I thinking! Of course it was! That’s sort of the point, yeah? It’s an anthology of dystopian stories – that’s what it is! Doesn’t try to hide it, right there on the cover. Wellll…. No. I was depressed for a different reason. Almost every story in here is a variation of either the Handmaid’s Tale (lunatic religious repression of women) or 1984 (mad fascist government oppressio...

Even people who don’t usually read science fiction will often be familiar with a few classic titles in the “dystopian SF” sub-genre. After all, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and of course the famous Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World are some of the few SF titles that have entered the mainstream literary canon to such an extent that they’ve become assigned school reading for many students. However, novel-length dystopian SF didn’t stop with those venerable classics, and can even be said to be thriving

This is a very big book of very depressing stories. Read it in small doses. The stories themselves are mixed, and range from classics that I'm glad to finally have a legal copy of (like Ursula le Guin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas"--any thinking, literate, even moderately leftish person should read this story at some point in their lives) to duds (Orson Scott Card is not a bad writer but his story in this collection, about an unfixable plague that reduces human life expectancy to the e...

Wow. Where do I start? 30 of most of the best dystopian short fiction in the English speaking world's history. Nothing less.I normally like to review each story (or the key stories) in anthologies, but this is difficult for 30 of them, spanning nearly 500 close-printed pages. Also, I feel inadequate to comment on specific stories that are now legendary. The worst stories were still very good. The best are unmatched. Pure and simple. These stories were more than entertaining, they were thought pr...

I reviewed this book for tor-dot-com on January 25, 2011.

Some of science fiction’s most iconic authors and their most famous classic stories are included in this dystopian-themed collection, as well as new talents I had never read. As with most themed anthologies, I would recommend spacing out these stories. Many of the same ideas and motifs appear repeatedly, so reading them straight through can become monotonous.I would also recommend skipping the editor’s introduction to each story, as John Joseph Adams tends to give away too much and spoil some of...

See the rest of my review here: Brave New Worlds I'm only going to mention the shorts that I enjoyed. The first of that was the very first story: The Lottery by Shirley JacksonA haunting tale about a village that has a peculiar yearly ritual where all the members of the town gather to pick out a name, and whoever is chosen, well, is chosen. To what? Nothing pleasant. What I interpreted from the tale is that sometimes we get so caught up in the routine of it all that no one really questions if wh...

This is an unusually good short story compilation. It has some well known short stories I'd already read (The Lottery, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas) and one I'd been meaning to get to (Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman). And the rest of the short stories were all high quality. I didn't like all of them, but for reasons that have more to do with personal taste than quality. Basically, I think this is one of those compilations that is actually "Picked out and obtained permission to incl...

Some absolute gems in this collection. Pop Squad is the best short story I've read in years. Highly recommend reading this!

This is my third John Joseph Adams anthology, and I have to admit that I'm becoming somewhat of an addict. That said, I didn't like this one as much as the previous two. As I look at the stories individually, I don't think this is so much a selection issue as it is that dystopias are really depressing. I would recommend trying to read no more than 1 or 2 stories at a time and spacing this book out with other stories. I would say this is a solid 4.5 and after waffling a bit, I'm rounding up. I kn...

1984 came and went without Big Brother rearing his ugly head in quite the way he did in the book; though one could say things got a little hairy during George W. Bush’s eight years of the Patriot Act and Home land Security, and yet in today’s world can you really say that you are completely free to do as you please without feeling like anybody’s watching you? Perhaps you see this world in a different light: do you use a disposable phone, screen your calls, use “incognito mode” in all your online...

I've had this sitting on my TBR list for too long (bought it years ago) so I'm glad to have finally got around to it. It's a quite well done collection. It's definitely not one to read all the way through at once as this is just bleakness and terror with ebbing and flowing waves of harrow and hell. I'd read a few and put it down for a bit but I always wanted to read more. There are some very well done stories here and I didn't expect so many to center around terrible futures centring on gender,