Jasper Reviews: Is Anybody Out There?

Is Anybody Out There? 15 original stories about the quest to find intelligent life in the universe.

edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern

Since this book is one of those short story collections, I'll be giving my thoughts on each story individually.

The Word He Was Looking For Was Hello by Alex Irvine: This story follows a man who does not have his life together, as protagonists often don't, while the aliens arrive to take over the planet and subjugate humanity. It's fascinating because it reads more as if the aliens are something the man's mind is making up to feel something. I felt pretty neutral about this story, but it was well-written and kept me engaged anyway, so it gets a 6/10.

Residue by Michael Arsenault: Set up as two people in a close relationship laying on the ground beneath the stars, this is basically a dialogue-only story about different theories one speaker has about why alien contact has never been made. This story was fascinating, though I may have to go back and use a highlighter to color-code who's saying what so I don't lose track like I did before. 8/10.

Good News From Antares by Yves Meynard: The protagonist is such a pretentious douchebag that I skipped this one. 1/10.

Report From The Field by Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn: This story is told from the perspective of an alien discovering very normal human things that are terrifying if you don't know what's going on, like golf and Christianity. The narrator was so horrified this whole time that it was a little funny. 8/10.

Permanent Fatal Errors by Jay Lake: I got bored and skipped this one because I wasn't fascinated by it. 1/10.

Galaxy Of Mirrors by Paul Di Filippo: As far as I can tell, this is about a guy having a midlife crisis in space. I ended up skipping the last half of the story because I wasn't interested. 2/10.

Where Two Or Three by Sheila Finch: A story about a girl who's been made to volunteer at hospice and an old astronaut breaking a few rules and discovering that maybe, just maybe, the approach to listening to alien life is on the wrong track - seeking a symphony when all you need to find is a flute. 7/10.

Graffiti In The Library Of Babel by David Langford: The aliens are little shits who are highlighting online resources willy-nilly to communicate. This kind of makes me want to start communicating by quotations in my own books. 8/10.

The Dark Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: This story doesn't initially seem to be about aliens, instead taking a pseudo-paranormal intrigue approach. 9/10.

One Big Monkey by Ray Vukcevich: This story aged less well because it still refers to Twitter. Ah, the 2010s. How we miss you now in 2023. I ended up skipping this one because it just didn't seem interesting. The layout of this book doesn't work well with the idea of in-story Tweets. 4/10 for concept though, I'd definitely read a reworked version of this story with a better layout.

The Taste Of Night by Pat Cadigan: Local woman gets a sixth sense that fucks over her other ones, local man brushes it off but still acts like he's the grand arbiter of her health, I think local man is a moron. 7/10.

Timmy, Come Home by Matthew Hughes: Man has the worst day of his life. Hypnotism and past life regression. Wild as fuck. 8/10.

A Waterfall Of Lights by Ian Watson: We've finally made it to a first-person story. Also I get uneasy about eyeballs and this story features eyeballs a lot. I genuinely said "oh dear" at the end. 8/10.

Rare Earth by Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What: These characters are surprisingly chill about aliens popping up. Also, I didn't need to know what size breast the teenaged character had. And I don't think "oonched" is a measurement, so I'm going to assume that was a typo. At least Grandma got to go apeshit. 6/10.

The Vampires Of Paradox by James Morrow: Our only other first-person story in this volume. I skipped this one too because the narrator/protagonist was very...self-righteous in tone, and I'm put off by narrators like that. Pushing past the first page didn't help any with that. 1/10.

There's something to be said about compilations of shorter stories. The ability to just skip parts you don't want to read is something I quite enjoy being able to do. Perhaps I'll have to find out what they're technically called and find more of these.

8/10

Overall, quite the enjoyable experience reading. But I want more aliens now.