Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (ISBN 0451458591)

Amazon.com Review:
In the decades since Michael Moorcock's magazine New Worlds and Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions shattered taboos and transformed science fiction, editors have yearned to do likewise. But science fiction and Western society have changed greatly since the 1960s, and though new taboos have been born, there aren't many left. They can still be shattered, but any taboo-challenging fiction that appears in the same year as the movie Freddy Got Fingered has a tough job, and Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction is hardly as extreme as promised. For example, nonwhite and homosexual characters are rare; the status quo goes largely unchallenged; and a few of the 30 stories are young-adult in tone and subject, with the others having little that would disturb new-millennium youth, a generation accustomed to wearing bondage/fetish gear to the dance clubs. The rare examples of taboo breaking include a black character with a disturbingly thick accent and a posthuman race that commits mass murder for policy; but the anthology's potentially most challenging story gets there as a result of publication after September 11, 2001: Harry Turtledove's well-written but traditional modern fantasy "Black Tulip" is sympathetic to Afghanis. Ignore the subtitle. Redshift is a very good anthology of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with some stories, like Gregory Benford's "Anomalies" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Commencement," that will become classics of speculative fiction. --Cynthia Ward

Hit and miss, but mostly a hit:
A good collection of 'speculative' fiction. Mainly sci-fi, but some just 'what if' type scenarios. The one about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe was just boring, and there was one less than a page long that seemed rather pointless. Overall though, good to try out some stories like this that you might not come across in mainstream science fiction. I definitely recommend it.

Excellent Collection of Sci-Fi:
Great stuff, a little on the fantasy side at times. The title of the book "Redshift" apparently refers to the measure of planets and the solar systems moving apart from each other, and though I didn't see anything in the collection on that particular subject really, it's a great collection.

Recycled rejects?:
There are a few good stories here, but I strongly suspect that when Saratonio began pestering the authors for "cutting edge" material for this anthology that many of them sent in the first thing they could find in their reject piles.

No "Redshift" here:
While I am a big fan of several of the authors included in this anthology, this book was a disappointment. "Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction"? I'm afraid not. This is not hard sci-fi, or even good fiction. With stories like "what if Marilyn Monroe and James Dean dated, and nothing out-of-the-ordinary happened?" or "A girl who turns people into bugs", the tales in this anthology consistently fail to satisfy. All in all, I have to say that Sarrantonio did a very poor job of selecting stories, and then gave the book a title that sets completely inappropriate expectations.

7 good stories out of 30:
I really liked Baxter's "In the Un-Black", Moorcock's "A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club" and Wells's "'Bassador", and liked the stories by Whitton, Kelly, Rucker+Shirley and Niven. But 7 stories out of 30 is not a good yield.