Synopsis:
In Volume Two of the hugely successful Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy anthology series, editor Dustin Bilyk brings tales to you that will shatter your speculative fiction expectations while introducing some of the most hard-hitting and evocative short stories on the market today.
Dragons, space aliens, demons, AI, celestial sea creatures, gods, portals, or robotic locusts that feed on human flesh.
These are just a few of the things you can expect in this professionally curated collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. From one story to the next, you will have no idea what to expect.
In this volume, we have included 22 stories from 22 authors. Whether you have a hankering for a mountaintop melee between a barbarian and a fire-breathing dragon, a harrowing, horrific tale about one man’s account of the moon gone missing, or a lighthearted quest about a coward prince trying to prove to the King that he is worthy of the crown, we have something for everyone.
Included are epic, never-before-read short stories from Gustavo Bondoni, Elle Andrews Patt, Katherine Westermann, David L. Updike, William Schwarz, John Forrester, Eliza Langhans, Jeff Sullins, Blake Jessop, Keira Reynolds, Rob Butler, Aaron Beardsell, Dustin Bilyk, and Nick Clements.
PLUS, reprints by Mike Morgan, Paul Alex Gray, Marlaina Cockcroft, Avra Margariti, Sydney Paige Guerrero, Adam Jarvis, Austin Worley, and Sam Muller.
Review:
A few weeks back, I was lurking around on Reddit and found myself on the audiobook subreddit. Now, I do love me some Dungeon Crawler Carl, but Reddit is obsessed with the book, especially on the audiobook threads. Post after post about Carl and/or Donut, but then I saw someone offering some free audiobooks in exchange for an honest review. I’m a sucker for a free book, so I chimed in and received a copy of Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two. I’ll be honest and say my expectations were not super high for the collection of 22 sci-fi and fantasy tales.
But my expectations were met and exceeded — Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two was a treat and has more than a few hidden gems littered throughout. Editor Dustin Bilyk put together a fine collection that is worth your time. Now, before I go on, I need to note the narrator for the genre anthology, Kevin E. Green, really brought the stories to life, providing great variation to his tones and inflections, had a fantastic range of voices and accents, and really made the experience of 22 vastly different stories a joy to listen to.
I have not read the first volume of the Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy series, but I don’t need to and neither will you. The stories stand alone and in fact, many of the authors are different in one volume to the next (and there is a third volume out there as well — I’m hoping to get my hands on both in the next few months). I really love a good short story collection. I wrote many stories myself years back for the Future Chronicles sci-fi anthologies and find them to be a nice change-of-pace to the reading of massive tomes from authors like Sanderson, Abercrombie, and the like. But, as I’ve come to realize over the years, a good short story collection has so many things that can go wrong. One bad story can really derail a good book. The book needs an editor (in this case that’s Dustin Bilyk) with a keen eye and the ability to know what works and what doesn’t for the collection.
In this case, there is no set theme, so there is a wide variety of stories about dragons, time travel, fae, underground dystopian societies, and more. And honestly? I dug it. I had no idea what the next story was so the whiplash of going from a tragic human/robot romance to a humorous fantasy quest from one story to the next was part of the fun.
Now, when I review anthologies, I like to pick a small handful of stories to highlight, so here are my faves from Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two:
From Days Immemorial by Gustavo Bondoni
There is a lovely twist to this short tale, so I don’t want to give too much away, but the story starts with a man on a quest for revenge. He wakes with visions of fighting a dragon and knows the visions are of his future since he has never before fought a dragon. In the end, he achieves victory, but at what cost?
A Coward on a Quest by Sam Muller
This isn’t an original story to this collection, but it’s still super fun. We’re seen twists on the familiar Disney princess stories over the past few decades and this one has familiar tones to it as Fairy Medhavin is visited by a prince that she cursed as a baby years before. He is on a quest and his curse is hindering his path. But you might think he was there to reverse the curse, but instead the story turns out much different in a new and fun way.
Homecoming by William Schwarz
I was thinking about this one for a while after I read it. It’s an interesting story about power and martyrdom and who we put our faith in. The ending was great and creepy in a memorable way and made me think about some current events that definitely could be analogous to the small settlement Schwarz wrote about here.
And while that’s just three, I really struggled with that top three…I think there are another half-dozen that might be #4 for me at any given moment. I honestly had a great time and only a few stories didn’t strike my fancy, but even then the low points of the collection were shallow divots as opposed to deep canyons that you might find in other short fiction collections.
I’d definitely recommend Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two for your reading and particularly your listening pleasure.
Thank you to Worldstone Publishing for providing a book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
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