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Title: The Expanding Universe #1
Series:
Editor: Craig Martelle
Rating: 1 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 432
Words: 178K
Where do I even start? That’s the thought that kept running through my head as I waded through this pile of utter drek. Every new story would bring me hope that maybe “this” writer would write a good story and then the first paragraph would show me they were just as much a talentless hack as the previous writers.
I had seen Martelle’s name in the Larry Correia collection No Game for Knights. I am always on the lookout for SF anthologies of short stories and thought I’d give this a try. It was a big mistake.
My first clue to the impending disaster to come was the big fat inclusion of Michael Anderle’s name on the front cover. He wrote the introduction. If you don’t know, Anderle is a whore who writes bad space vampire fiction and will put his name on anything, written by anybody. He has no talent, no shame and no limits. But he just wrote the introduction I reasoned, I can’t blame the other authors for that. I do now.
This was published in 2016, and Martelle hadn’t written anything on his own before ‘16 as well. He’s one of those turn and churn authors. But even a mediocre author can be a decent editor, or so I thought. Martelle also belongs to an organization of Indie Writers who support each other. Apparently, what that means is that if one of them edits an anthology, they will automatically include stories from other writers in the organization, no matter how terrible or badly written those stories might be. Martelle could have gone to any Science Fiction forum on the internet, copy/pasted some of the fan fic on there and he couldn’t possible have done a worse job than he did with these stories.
Another issue was that almost all of these stories took place in existing universes or storylines of the writers and were not standalone stories at all. They were prequels, sequels, side stories, to already established storylines and were nothing more than advertisements by the writers waving their wares obnoxiously in my face. Over half of these had some sort of “and if you want to find out how the story resolves, read the writers other books”. That really got my goat.
Another issue is that many of these stories were not actually science fiction. They were modern dramas set on a spaceship or had some fantasy element. Putting a spaceship into a story doesn’t automatically make it a science fiction story. I’m afraid that all of these authors do not understand that very fundamental concept and I’m also afraid that they will never learn it. Because they are all chowderheads with no talent.
The lack of skill here was atrocious. I mentioned internet forum fan fiction early and this is that level of writing. These stories are the things you write when you are practicing to learn the very basic basic of writing. None of these stories should have seen the light of day. Some were definitely better than others, but not a single one of them deserved to be in print. There’s a reason these writers belong to that organization that Martelle belongs to.
Then you had the moral content. I knew going in that since this was published in 2016, that the chances of at least one of these authors would be some woke dill head pushing a perverted agenda was high. I made it almost to the end and was pleasantly surprised that perversion hadn’t reared its ugly head when bam. Sho’ nuff, one writer just had to add it to their story, for no apparent reason either. It was the literal expression of “check box” writing.
Finally, I want to highlight the worst two of the stories here.
Taken for a Walk describes itself thusly:
“The short story that follows is Justin’s teaser for a novel he hopes to one day write in what he thinks will be something like Alien meets The Matrix meets Braveheart. The short story is at times silly, but leads into a very serious moment and situation”
The only good thing about this story was that I think it was the shortest of the collection. It was just plain bad.
Worlds Revealed has this for its intro:
“This is a brand new story in the Alpha Alien Abduction Tales series. It starts out with the couples we know from the first two books in the series, Worlds Away and Worlds Collide. But it quickly goes back to the summer of 1947 when a spaceship crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Venay’s grandfather was the Commander of the ship that was involved in that nightmare. But it wasn’t the V’Zenians, or even the Zateelians, who crashed on Earth! You can expect to learn the true story of the Roswell Aliens, and who they really were.”
When I read that intro, I immediately made a note in my kindle along the lines of “Frak No!” Aliens abduct human women, use their mind powers to make them fall in love with them and then marry and mate them. Just for the record, the author is a woman. This is not some man’s fantasy, it’s a woman’s fantasy.
To end, I had several of these collections lined up, but after this Titanic level of reading disaster, I’m dumping them like a pile of nuclear waste.
★☆☆☆☆
Table of Contents
Click to Open
- Fear Peace – Craig Martelle
- Taken for a Walk Justin Sloan
- Fall to Earth TJ Ryan
- Blue Eyed Devil Spencer Pierson
- Those Who Breathe Under the End James Osiris Baldwin
- Pilgrim Andrew Dobell
- DROP Andrew Broderick
- Worlds Revealed J.L. Hendricks
- Within a Phrygian Sky Jim Johnson
- And the Kat Came Back RJ Crayton
- The Signal and the Boys Felix R. Savage
- Smuggler for Hire Bradford Bates
- Light in the Dark H.J. Lawson
- Origins of the Gemini Project E.R. Starling
- An Attitude Adjustment Taki Drake
- The Iron and the Mud James Aaron
- The Last Human: Fire of Truth E.E. Isherwood
- New Beginnings Paul C. Middleton
