2008 books

[peteryoung]

56) Julie E. Czerneda, ed., Packing Fraction & other Tales of Science & Imagination, 1999
A companion volume to Czerneda's No Limits (a resource book for developing scientific literacy using science fiction), and a stand-alone anthology of SF short stories, poetry, and specially commissioned art. Everything here is aimed at YA readers hence all stories have a scientific "what if?" component, the best being the strong title piece by Charles Sheffield which explores the consequences of being able to decrease inter-molecular distances. Other stories are by Czerneda, Carolyn Clink, Jan Stirling, Josepha Sherman and Robert Sawyer, whose upbeat alien contact story 'Stream of Consciousness' has his protagonists arriving at all the correct conclusions about alien biology in highly unlikely leaps and bounds, but it's all in the cause of popularising science, and science fiction, so that's quite alright by me.