Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran SF editor Gardner Dozois, who selects stories for the Year's Best Science Fiction series, does it again, this time with an anthology focused on future incarnations of humanity, in Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Form. Poul Anderson, Joanna Russ, Roger Zelazny and Liz Williams contribute their visions of the next dominant life form. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another theme-centered SF anthology from the prolific Dozois: writers offer cautionary examinations of the dubious, horrific, and comic possibilities of human engineering. Though the scientifically tweaked human being goes at least as far back as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the \bermenschen in these 26 previously published stories reflect the more modern science fictional concern of what James Blish, in his own story "Watershed," calls "pantropy": the ability to use technology to alter human beings so they can thrive in new environments. Avoiding two familiar genre classics, Daniel Keyes's weepy "Flowers for Algernon" and Philip Jose Farmer's salacious "The Golden Man," Dozois makes selections that are mostly about how pantropic wish-fulfillment brings ironic results: Roger Zelazny's half-man, half machine in "Halfjack" finds interfacing with a spaceship more fulfilling than sex with a woman, while drug-enhanced, dueling supergeniuses learn to kill with a single word in Ted Chiang's "Understand." Gene Wolfe posits a nightmare race of feral human cannibals preying on the few survivors of planet-wide bio-catastrophe in "Werewolf as Hero," while the pantropically pumped-up mass murderer in Bruce Sterling's "Spook" loves his job because being normal is no fun. But being super is not fun to the alienated spacemen of Samuel Delaney's "Aye, and Gomorrah" or to the burned-out, technologically obsolete cyber wizards in Charles Stross's hilarious "Toast: a Con Report." Dozois ends with a trio of short social satires culminating in Robert Charles Wilson's "The Great Goodbye," where the human condition is defined as being content with the way things are. Entertaining and thought-provoking companion to Worldmakers, Dozois's collection of terraforming stories (p. 1460).
Booklist Review
Veteran, not to mention highly honored, sf editor Dozois now applies his knowledge of the field to rounding up stories on the next stage of human evolution. The results in toto rather emphasize humans genetically adapted for longer life, greater intelligence, and physical survival in extraterrestrial environments. Eliminating stories in which mutation "must be the result of atomic radiation," excessively long pieces, and ones he simply dislikes, Dozois presents 29 tales, originally published between 1955 and 2000. A cluster comes from the end of that time span, when the question of genetic manipulation of humans became a hot news topic, and Dozois displays a slight tendency to draw from the files of Asimov's Science Fiction, which he has edited for quite a while. But these are high-quality stories, impressively various, that altogether soundly cover a theme that is likely to increase in importance during this coming century. Put another feather in your anthologist's cap, Mr. Dozois. --Roland Green
