A- #BookReview: L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 41 edited by Jody Lynn Nye

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 41: The Best New SF & Fantasy of the Year by L. Ron Hubbard, Jody Lynn Nye, Tim Powers, Robert J. Sawyer, Sean Williams, Tom Wood, Seth Atwater Jr., Randyn C. J. Bartholomew, Barlow Crassmont, Andrew Jackson, Ian Keith, Robert F. Lowell, Patrick MacPhee, Lauren McGuire, T.R. Naus, Joel C. Scoberg, Sandra Skalski, Jefferson Snow, Craig Elliott, John Barlow, Cam Collins, Haileigh Enriquez, CL Fors, Dwayne Harris, David Hoffrichter, Gigi Hooper, HeatherAnne Lee, Marianna Mester, Daniel Montifar, Breanda Petsch, Jordan Smajstrla, Tremani Sutcliffe
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories
Series: Writers of the Future #41
Pages: 448
Published by Galaxy Press on April 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Step into the extraordinary with L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 41—an anthology that promises the unexpected, the thought-provoking, and the unforgettable. Celebrating the best new voices in speculative fiction, this collection offers gripping tales of science fiction, fantasy, and beyond.

Discover Distant Worlds
Explore alien landscapes, futuristic technologies, and hidden realms. From time-traveling adventures to battles for survival in dystopian societies, these stories transport you far beyond the limits of imagination.

Meet Extraordinary Heroes
Follow protagonists who face impossible odds—from a young constable on a harsh alien frontier to a reclusive writer sharing a ride with a sentient car. These characters redefine courage, resilience, and what it means to be human.

Experience Visual Wonder
Every story is brought to life with breathtaking original illustrations. These commissioned works add depth, color, and vibrancy to the collection, making it a visual and literary masterpiece.

Learn from the Legends
Gain inspiration from essays by L. Ron Hubbard, Robert J. Sawyer, and Tom Wood, offering rare insights into storytelling and creative mastery.

Discover Tomorrow's Stars
This volume continues the legacy of Writers of the Future, the competition that has launched myriad bestselling authors. These rising talents are reshaping speculative fiction as we know it.

Whether you love heart-pounding action, thought-provoking “what ifs,” or stories that blur the line between science and magic, Volume 41 is your gateway to new dimensions. With tales and illustrations that linger long after the final page, this anthology invites you to take the leap into worlds uncharted.

My Review:

The “Writers of the Future” Contest sponsored by Galaxy Press has been going on for forty-one years now. Doing the time math, which runs straight into that whole mental thing that the 1980s feel like they were only twenty years ago when in fact they were FORTY years ago, dammit, means that this thing started in 1985.

I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the whole thing, and short stories generally aren’t my jam, so I hadn’t paid much attention until the 39th collection two years ago. I reviewed that one for Library Journal, and enjoyed it so much that I signed up to do the 40th collection last year and now the 41st collection this year.

Overall, I enjoyed this collection every bit as much as the previous two, but it was different in one particular way. Collections 39 and 40 were all over the speculative fiction map, pretty evenly divided between SF and fantasy and even sticking a toe or two over the line into outright horror. Those years didn’t have themes – although after finishing this one I have to wonder about whether the COVID years had a theme even if it was unintentional.

This year has a theme, or a lot of the writers were speaking to the moment, or a bit of both. Out of this year’s collection of fourteen stories (12 contest winners plus 2 new stories from established authors), five are SF featuring time travel in various ways – as SF does, and three are SF centered around robotics and artificial intelligence. Which doesn’t leave a lot of room for Fantasy, although the ones that are included were good to excellent if more than a bit dark and dystopian. Which speaks to the moment in its own way.

As I said in last year’s review, and I’ll repeat it because it’s still absolutely true, as with most collections, there were a couple of stories that just didn’t work for me, but for the most part the stories worked and worked well. I’d be thrilled to see more work from all of these award-winning authors.

While I will do some very fudgy math at the end to come up with an overall rating for the collection, that’s not fair to the individual stories, so I have brief thoughts of a review type and a rating for each of those new, individual stories so you can see which ones were the best of the best – at least in one reviewer’s humble opinion.

“Storm Damage” by T.R. Naus, illustrated by Haileigh Enriquez
I liked this but didn’t love it. The whole thing revolves – and does it ever revolve – around the naivete of scientists in regards to government contracts and that’s just a plot device that’s getting old, particularly in the current political climate. The idea behind the story is that humanity has gotten too close to extinction too many times through its own actions, so there’s a built-in failsafe to reset the situation JUST before it gallops past the point of no return. This is the story of a specific instance leading up to one of those resets. While the idea is interesting, the characters who have to carry its water feel like we’ve read them before. But then again, if the story is true, we have. Escape Rating B-

“Blackbird Stone” by Ian Keith, illustrated by Marianna Mester
From one perspective, this is Orpheus and Eurydice or pretty much any myth or fairy tale where one protagonist tells the other very specifically NOT to do something that relates to them personally – and they break the rule and the relationship is OVER. It’s clever that this time around things don’t end because someone is messing with time and causality, but the male protagonist in the romance part of this story just was not listening and assumed his not listening was a gift and in the end I couldn’t even with him although I did like the way it resolved. Escape Rating B-

“Kill Switch” by Robert F. Lowell, illustrated by Jordan Smajstrla
One of my absolute favorites in this collection. Robocop turns into Murderbot – and the other way around in this one, which also reminded me a LOT of the robot child in Luminous. This particular robot cop is on the scrap heap, believing that they are being awakened for one last righteous arrest. Which they both are and aren’t. It is righteous, but it isn’t an arrest. Their owner may intend for it to be their last, most definitely in the sense of the road to hell being paved with intentions of one sort or another. That the story is told from the robot’s first person perspective – and that they very much have a personality and desires of their own, while embodying the same desire that humans have to continue to have purpose in their chosen line of work, well, something in this one just really worked for me, and I needed one to after the first two which didn’t. Escape Rating A+

“Karma Birds” by Lauren McGuire, illustrated by Breanda Petsch
This dystopian short story creeps right up to the edge of horror and then steps across that line in a swirl of dark feathers. It also manages to speak to this moment in time even as though for most of its length it reads like a classic dystopian tale where we don’t know why “they” came or even who “they” are – we just know the devastation they left behind. But the title is a hint I didn’t catch up front, that this is a story about karma, and that we have met the enemy and he is us, even though part of the creepiness of the story is the way that the protagonist learns just how easily the enemy could be herself. It reminds me a lot of The Knight and the Butcherbird and not because of the birds. Escape Rating A.

“The Boy from Elsewhen” by Barlow Crassmont, illustrated by Daniel Montifar
At first I took this to be a fairly familiar story railing against our constantly plugged in society. And it certainly is that, along with a bit about how truly feral schoolchildren can be when someone refuses to conform, but there’s also a hidden message about the way that being plugged in allows people to get programmed by what comes down the pipe and how constant entertainment kills creativity and critical thinking. It’s all told from the perspective of another child who discovers the point in the aftermath not because it’s preached at her, but because she learns it for herself – because she’s chosen to unplug. Escape Rating A-

“Code L1” by Andrew Jackson, illustrated by HeatherAnne Lee
This reminded me of a combination of This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa and Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. It’s a horror story about a survey team biting off way more than they can chew in the search for habitable planets – and for creatures they can’t fight taking an even bigger bite out of them. Good, creepy story about the fallacies of finding so-called ‘golden worlds’ and the way that nature finds a way to overcome technology if you give it long enough. Escape Rating B

“Under False Colours” by Sean Williams, inspired by Craig Elliott’s cover art, Creature of the Storm
This was interesting, and I’m saying that because I can’t think of a better way to put it. I’m not quite sure we have enough for the story to really work, although the way it makes its point about the fallacies of AI and computer translation between languages and species that don’t have anything like the same frame of reference – and just how badly that can go really far astray – was a good one. The story just didn’t have enough meat on its bones to really shine. Escape Rating B

“Ascii” by Randyn C. J. Bartholomew, illustrated by Tremani Sutcliffe
If you combine Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden with The Passengers by John Marrs, you get something like this story – at least on the surface. The title character of this story is a self-driving taxi, which really means that “Ascii” has enough sentience to analyze their passengers to keep them happy, and has some free will, but can be reined in by an “Authority” if they get too far out of line. Which they regularly do, out of ungovernable curiosity. Which, in the context of this story set in a post-scarcity earth, leads Ascii to commit murder for reasons that look like, and possibly even are, for the ‘greater good’. The way that this story speaks to both the possibilities and excesses of artificial intelligence AND to the dangers of misinformation at the same time is well done. Escape Rating A

“Slip Stone” by Sandra Skalski, illustrated by Haileigh Enriquez
This turned out to be the best of the time travel stories. Even better, its tone reminds me a LOT of Jack Finley’s classic Time and Again. From one perspective it seems like young Carlos has either been the victim of a scam, caught up in a criminal conspiracy, or gone on a magic time-travel ride of adventure – or all of the above. That the result of this temporal cold war – or perhaps not so cold war – takes him back not to his own time but to a forever home in the past turned this romp into a bit of a heartbreaker in the best way. Escape Rating A

“The Stench of Freedom” by Joel C. Scoberg, illustrated by John Barlow
Big, dark fantasy in a small package that also comments on how people don’t see bigotry and other evils that seem to benefit them until their own ox gets gored. I’m not doing this justice at all because this one was incredibly haunting and just plain damn awesome. The story is riveting, the protagonist is evil but doesn’t know he’s evil until the forces that he has been aiding and abetting for so long come for someone he loves and the scales fall from his eyes but no one lets him forget that his road to redemption is long and he’s barely taken the first step and seemingly ONLY because he’s changing the focus of his self-absorbed self-serving. Escape Rating A+

“My Name Was Tom” by Tim Powers (c2025), illustrated by Gigi Hooper
This one was a fever dream of a story, which fits the author’s oeuvre rather well. I still have haunted memories of this author’s The Anubis Gates from a very long time ago. I think this story didn’t have quite enough resolution for this reader, but that’s a me thing. Those who love stories that travel far into strange eldritch places will love it. Escape Rating B

“The Rune Witch” by Jefferson Snow, illustrated by David Hoffrichter
This one is a heartbreaker, and also manages to be frightening in its implications on multiple axes. It’s both a story about how those who serve get ostracized and isolated and taken for granted because the service they perform is unthinkable – and it’s about a mother, a daughter and a terrible duty, and it’s about the temptation for retribution and the human need to be loved and cared for – along with several other things packed into a relatively short but awesome story. Escape Rating A

“Thirty Minutes or It’s a Paradox” by Patrick MacPhee, illustrated by Cam Collins
A lot of the stories in this collection play with time travel in one way or another. This isn’t the best of the lot but it certainly is the most bonkers. It does its damndest to deal with the inherent paradoxes of time travel, that the problem with changing things is that things change and then you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Except that in this case the time traveling doppelgängers do while the original doesn’t and it all goes terribly, horribly wrong until it doesn’t. In the end, it was fun but I was nearly as confused as the original protagonist. Escape Rating B

“A World of Repetitions” by Seth Atwater Jr., illustrated by CL Fors
This is a story about the pandemic – that isn’t actually about the pandemic – crossed with a takeoff on Groundhog Day that is not remotely played for laughs. It’s pretty much every SF story about time loops but without the big, terrible crisis that provides the dramatic tension in Edge of Tomorrow. Instead, it’s a very lovely story about the resilience of humans – as long as they continue to make connections with each other. Along with a bit about just how generous people can be once the profit motives get removed. This was a terrific ending for this year’s collection and I closed the book with a smile on the surprising and delightful happy ending. Escape Rating A+

Escape Rating A- for the collection as a whole, which fits as well as it did last year because I really did escape. Howsomever, and this is sort of a warning for any reader – if you’re reading from cover to cover don’t give up hope after the first two stories. The first two were my least liked in the whole collection and I started out a bit disappointed. Then that third story, “Kill Switch”, turned out to be one of the best in the whole thing and I was glad I persevered.

Which means that, again, I’m looking forward to getting the 42nd volume in this series, hopefully this time next year.

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