Shaykitteh's World of Books

This collection, put together by Open Road Integrated Media, is a sampler of Hugo Award winning stories. Like any collection, there are some samplers that really interested me, and ones that were just a little blah. The interesting ones were good enough that I purchased one of the full sized books immediately after I finished the sample, so I suppose the sample book did its job!

Blood Music starts out the collection and introduces you to a Vergil Ulam, a researcher at Genetron. Vergil is secretly doing unauthorized work on biologics: autonomous organic computers without the necessary safeguards to work on mammalian chromosomes. As you can guess, his boss isn't too happy when he discovers the extracurricular work.

The next story, Bloodchild, seems to be set on Earth (or another world where humans were originally dominant). It features an alien race that has ulterior motives for wanting to spend time and bond with children, especially as they reach maturity.

The next few stories I wasn't thrilled with, so I'll skip to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - this is a freaky AI-type story where a group of humans are trapped inside a sadistic computer.

Swords and Deviltry seems to be, from the sample, you standard thieves and magic type story. It may have promise, but the sample was too short to let me determine if it proves itself to be unique.

While I'm not sure if I would be interested in buying the majority of these books, it was neat to read a sample of some Hugo Award Winning stories that I hadn't had a chance to pick up before.