Games Old And New

Just finished Future Games, a short story collection edited by Paula Guran.  I picked this one up because it had a cool premise of games of the future, and I was hankering for some good SciF, also I recognized a lot of my favorite authors names on the front cover.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I wanted more...new games, or altered games, or space games. While I did get a few of these, the vast majority of the stories were about traditional games, played in a fairly traditional manner with a couple minor tweaks, mostly the fact that they were played against aliens as a first contact.

Baseball was the dominating sport in this story with three of the stories being directly about baseball and another one it playing a decent roll.  There was also football and hockey played pretty straight across the board as well.  As I am not a baseball fan, and except for in Distance by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, the story was about the actual game, it got a little boring for me.  I guess with a title like Future Games I was expecting something a little more futuristic.  That is not to say there were not some great stories in here.

Will the Chill by John Shirley-The first story in this book was just like I expected.  A super athlete who hurls uninhabited planets against another competitor doing the same thing.  This definitely futuristic sport was cool enough to be a story in it's own right, but going inside this superstars head and learning about the results of his obsession with winning just put into the awesome category.

Man-Mountain Gentian by Howard Waldrop and Listen by Joel Richards-Both of these stories did a great job in taking something traditional (sumo and martial arts respectively)  and totally placing them in a different environment, one where the brain and mind were what won the matches for you vs the traditional brute strength.

Kip, Running by Genevieve Williams-This story was one of the few that really showed you a potential future Earth.  The story was fun, pacing was great and the fact that it was set in future Seattle didn't hurt at all.  I also liked the amount of character development the author managed to get into such a short amount of pages.

Name That Planet by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough-This one just cracked my up. An intergalactic game show complete with gooey aliens, a shiny toothed host and an intergalactic conspiracy.  I loved how familiar and alien this story felt all at the same time.  This is most definitely a future game :-)

Ladies and Gentleman This is Your Crisis by Kate Wilhelm and The Survivor by Walter F. Moudy-Both of these stories feature The Hunger Games like settings, long before that book existed.  In both of these stories the prominence of television, the callousness of the audience, and the government sanctioned murder/death all serve as chilling harbingers of a world not as far off as we would like.

Overall I found about every other story in this collection pretty great, which to me makes it totally worth it, but I have been known to buy collections for just one fantastic story.  I think that this book also shows that even if you are labeled (by yourself or others) as a SciFi Geek, Nerd, Dork or whatever that your interests can be wide and varied, that even that bespectacled Star Trek collector can be just as much of a beer swilling baseball fan as the next person. Overall I would recommend this book to SciFi fans, sports fans, or just people who like a glimpse of aliens playing baseball.