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Michael Ashley
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The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy Paperback – 5 Aug. 2008

by Mike Ashley (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 230 ratings
Here is the future of fantasy-25 short stories from top contemporary writers. This collection embraces all the newest forms of fantasy in vogue, from urban fantasy and extreme dystopian fiction, to alternate history and entire new fantasy worlds.
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  1. Print length
    512 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Perseus Books
  4. Publication date
    5 Aug. 2008
  5. Dimensions
    13.34 x 3.81 x 19.69 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    0762433833
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0762433834
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Perseus Books
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 5 Aug. 2008
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0762433833
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0762433834
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 431 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 3.81 x 19.69 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 230 ratings

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Michael Ashley

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4 out of 5 stars
230 global ratings

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • PaulM
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent ebay
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 August 2014
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    All went well - Excellent ebay
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  • Steve W
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good in most parts
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 July 2010
    As with many short story anthologies, not all these stories will appeal to you. The stories get more extreme the further on into the book you get. Towards the end, there are a few stories where the protagonist ends up being virtually god-like. The stories nearer the beginning are more your regular SF.

    There are a couple of historic stories here - by that I mean pre-1940 - as well as a couple that went on to be quite famous genres. The story that could (or did) inspire "Alien" is here, and also a story written in 1995 concerning virtual reality that almost seems like "The Matrix".

    There are a few very good stories indeed, including one where the U.K. capitulated to the Germans in 1940 and there was no World War Two; and another one concerns scientists who find a way of "looking into" the past, and one of them looks back to the Crucifixion and finds more than he bargained for...

    Towards the end, even the typesetting gets a bit extreme, in order to try to convey an atmosphere that mere printed words can't.

    I'd say yes, buy this book, you'll like it overall. And it is a good "taster" for the authors concerned - if you like the story featuring a certain author, you can go on to purchase other books by them. Each story is prefaced by an editorial summary of the author and other works they have completed to date.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Martin D
    3.0 out of 5 stars Some great - some plain bad.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 October 2014
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    All the books in the "Mammoth books" -series have an issue with varying quality. This one is the worst case so far. You have some really good stories like "The Long Chase" by Geoffrey A. Landis - or "The Region Between" by Harlan Ellison (my favorite in the book). But you also have stories that simply don't cut it by today's standards, such as "The New Humans" by B. Vallance (written over 100 years ago) and "The Creator" by Clifford D. Simak (written over 75 years ago). I bought this book in order to read some extreme modern scifi after all. If I want good, old SciFi I read Jules Verne (who's works - despite their age - are simply great).

    Overall I'm happy with this collection but I expected less stories of poor quality, and more modern extreme scifi I guess.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • P. J. Dunn
    3.0 out of 5 stars Padded Extremes
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 February 2012
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    Fine in parts - though somewhat padded with stories that simply are not Extreme Science Fiction as claimed by the anthology's title - and I am not just talking about the obviously out of place, predictable and forgettable story entitled Stuffing by Jerry Oltion.

    However the book is worth it alone for the excellent: The Pacific Mystery by Stephen Baxter, The Region Between by Harlan Ellison, Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan, and The Days of Solomon Gursky by Ian McDonald. In the next rank also well worth reading are The Creator by Clifford D. Simak, Merlin's Gun by Alastair Reynolds, and Judgement Engine by Greg Bear (the last if only because it is by far the most intriguingly extreme science fiction conception set out in the book).
    One person found this helpful
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  • RoyJ
    3.0 out of 5 stars Poor Read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 December 2013
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    My English Master described this type of book as 'pulp fiction', meaning many, many words but not very good story lines to the longer stories in this anthology.
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  • F. Taylor
    1.0 out of 5 stars Over my head
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 March 2014
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    Been an SF fan since my Mum bought me Captain Robert Space Kingsley in scarlet fever hospital in the 50s, There is one good story in Extreme SF:, Merlin's Gun, the rest I had to force myself to read to the end, otherwise waste the cost of the book
    One person found this helpful
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  • Bill TKD
    2.0 out of 5 stars Mostly tedious
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 September 2016
    The Foreword says that ‘there’s nothing experimental or avant garde’ but Harlan Ellison’s rambling ‘The Region Between’ is full of typographical silliness—text that is tiny or large, circular or rotated, white on black, all to little purpose. It tries to be stream-of-consciousness but really just rambles.
    The same goes for Landis’s ‘The Long Chase’ which wanders all over space, with no real point at the end. Still, it’s not as bad as Greg Bear’s ‘Judgment Engine’, the tedious musings of a self-aware piece of nano-technology.
    Lawrence Person’s entertaining ‘Crucifix Variations’ is spoiled on the second page by a stupid error (“…make Phil and I famous”). I could forgive that if the Clifford D. Simak hadn’t done the same thing in ‘The Creator’: “…but to Scott and I…”. The editor altered other text so why not fix this?
    The same editor managed to put American punctuation into an allegedly obscure short story from 1910 by a mysterious B. Vallance. The protagonist refers to being ‘repulsed’ by something unpleasant: a British character or author of the period would have said ‘repelled’. I have doubts about the provenance of the story.
    Several stories used the lazy device, too common in science fiction, of invented ‘futuristic’ slang. This is tedious when you have to get a dozen pages into the story before you understand what the characters are talking about.
    SF writers are often pretty science savvy by Alastair Reynold’s ‘Merlin’s Gun’, from 2000, refers to Angstroms, obsolete when I was at university in the 70s! Similarly, finally, the renowned Theodore Sturgeon (in the boring ‘The Girl Had Guts’) should know better than to say that it is harmful to transfuse AB people with type O blood.
    The only fault with the best story (Gregory Benford’s ‘Anomalies) is that it was very short.
    One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Cory Vernon Davis
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent stories!
    Reviewed in Canada on 4 August 2024
    Verified Purchase
    I love hard science fiction, and this book is an excellent source.
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  • Steve
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent mix.
    Reviewed in Germany on 21 November 2011
    Verified Purchase
    Entertaining. An excellent mix of Space Opera, High-Tech, and amusing. It's not really a Taschenbuch as it is bulky and heavy. So, not really one for travelling.
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  • Joseph
    3.0 out of 5 stars Average condition
    Reviewed in India on 5 February 2024
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    Too high priced
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  • Roger B. White Jr.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Hot Dog! Something different!
    Reviewed in the United States on 10 November 2009
    Verified Purchase
    These days I grow so tired of never ending space opera, post-holocaust and save-the-world fantasy that it is a delight to see a collection of stories that talk about other kinds of science speculations.

    This book is a nice collection of stories exploring other ideas.

    Because the ideas are new, and because the writers sometimes get wrapped up in over-explaining their own ideas, the reading is hard slogging in some stories--the Harlan Ellison story was the worst offender in this way. But these writers were trying hard to bring us readers new ideas, and that I liked a lot, a whole lot.

    Here are my thoughts on the individual stories.

    Anomalies -- Gregory Benford (1999)

    A fun little story, half about how we might be living in a Matrix-like universe (which suffers a small glitch), and half a spoof of the UK university science social system. The ending was a disappointment as the writer gave into "the end of the world as we know it" cleche, but up until then it was original and a lot fun.

    The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon -- Paul Di Filippo (2003)

    A neat exploration of how nanotechnology can be used to create intelligent appliances, and those can change how we live. A nice mind-opening piece.

    Crucifix Variations -- Lawrence Person (1998)

    A scientist uses a time viewer (a time machine that allows you to look, but not travel) to search for proof that Jesus really existed as the Bible describes him, and is frustrated by quantum uncertainty. The concept of using a time machine to search for Jesus is not new, but this time viewer approach was novel enough that I enjoyed the story.

    Pacific Mystery -- Stephen Baxter (2006)

    The imagery in this story was fun and familiar, but the story itself was so contrived that I couldn't keep my belief suspended. The heart of the story is that the Earth is not actually round, but has a time-fold running through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The problem that kept bothering me was that if this world always had this "Pacific Anomaly" as the story calls it, it wouldn't be an anomaly of that world, it would be a given! Globes would not represent this world accurately, and the edges of Mercator projection maps would have "Beyond here be dragons", or some such, on the east and west edges where they fold into the Pacific. And if this geometry was a given, then using the huge airplane to "solve it" makes no sense. There are other similar contrivances all through this story.

    Flowers from Alice -- Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (2003)

    Another exploration of nanotech becoming intelligent appliances with some cyberintelligence mixed in. It was as fun as the Dish story, and came out quite differently. I like it when that happens.

    Merlin's Gun -- Alastair Reynolds (2000)

    This one was a disappointment. It was contrived and predictable -- a Star Trekish technology level that mixed romance with save the universe. Ho-hum.

    Death in the Promised Land -- Pat Cadigan (1995)

    This one was neat and had a lot of foresight in it, especially given when it was written, which is just as multimedia was becoming widely distributed throughout the computer gaming world. It's about living in VR, and does a credible job of describing both the VR experience and the motivations of the people experiencing it.

    The Long Chase -- Geoffrey A. Landis (2002)

    This story writes about one of my favorite themes: slower-than-lightspeed (STL) space travel -- space travel without "warp speed" or any other faster-than-lightspeed (FTL) contrivance. The writer mixes in some nanotechnology and the outcome was a good read.

    Waterworld -- Stephen L. Gillett and Jerry Oltion (1994)

    Another good STL universe story. This time the space travelers have to get back on the road after having an interstellar collision. The engineering problem they face is magnificently described. I loved it! I found the characterizations a bit too cranky given the crisis they were facing -- they were sniping at each other like this was a committee trying to organize an office Christmas Party. But other than that, I loved it.

    Hoop-of-Benzene -- Robert Reed (2006)

    This one did not come across as well as I hoped. The environment was nicely alien, but the mystery ended up being too subtle for my taste -- the bad guy's nefarious scheme depended on too much precise timing. This is the same problem that really bothered me at the end of the 2009 Angels and Demons movie.

    The New Humans -- B. Vallance (1909)

    This one was an eye-opener! It was amazing to see that one hundred years of change in writing science fiction stories brought more change to the English language used to tell the story than it did to the story line being told!

    The start was the same as the 1999 Blair Witch movie -- we discover a journal, but not the person who wrote it. From there it proceeds into a 1956 Forbidden Planet/Shakespeare's Tempest story where a handsome adventurer encounters a coldly analytical chief scientist with a beautiful, cloistered, naive daughter who wants to see the world. Add a comic relief character and voila!

    The Creator -- Clifford D. Simak (1935)

    This one is much like my story Searching For Angels (in Tips for Tailoring Spacetime Fabric Volume 2). It was spooky for me to read because the voice I wrote my story in was so similar to the voice this story was written in.

    In this story two scientists work together to build a time/dimension traveling machine and use it to pop out of our universe and meet our universe's creator. All-in-all, it was a good story. It had some neat aliens and some nice time/dimension traveling concepts.

    The weakest part of the story was not taking into account that if a creator of our universe lives outside of it, and looks upon it, he or she has to be a 4D/2T creature, not a 3D/1T creature as we are. And as a result that creator sees all of time as well as all of space. This point was missed by the writer, which screws up the ending for me. Other than that, it was an interesting story.

    The Girl Had Guts -- Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

    A story of alien parasite infestation. It was a nicely queezy story, with some credible-acting characters in it.

    The Region Between -- Harlan Ellison (1969)

    This is the first Harlan Ellison story I have encountered in print. I have heard a lot about him. Now I have experienced his writing, and I feel I haven't missed much. I don't like the altered-mind style of writing. To me, what comes out is writing words for word's sake, and not something that is taking me into some new level of thinking. It got so annoying I stopped about a third of the way through. Ah Well... now I have learned about Harlan Ellison.

    The Days of Solomon Gursky -- Ian McDonald (1998)

    This was an interesting exploration of nanotechnology, virtual reality and resurrection all mixed together. I found the writing style was hard slogging through--too much effort on describing things that are hard to describe--but the story underneath the style explored some of the interesting differences that this mix of technologies can make in how humans live. I liked that part.

    Wang's Carpets -- Greg Egan (1995)

    This story is another interesting exploration of mixing virtual reality and nanotechnology. This one centers on using VR to crew star-exploring ships and nanotechnology to build bodies and other necessary parts when the destination is reached. It's a first encounter with aliens story, but nicely different in perspective, both of the people and of the aliens they encounter. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

    So, all-in-all, I was really happy to find this book. My biggest disappointment with it is that Rick Ashley is a story collecting buff, not a science fiction buff, so a sequel is unlikely, that's too bad.
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  • MARK Lang
    4.0 out of 5 stars Fit the title
    Reviewed in the United States on 7 November 2015
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    All of the stories were good and a few were exceptional! I have read this twice and have enjoyed both this!
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