Gordon Van Gelder, Welcome to the Greenhouse. OR Books, 2011. Pp. 336. ISBN 978-1-935928-27-0. $17.00.
Reviewed by Eric Gregory
There’s a strange detachment to Welcome to the Greenhouse. The book, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, features sixteen original short stories by an impressive roster of writers including Brian Aldiss, Bruce Sterling, Alan Dean Foster, and M.J. Locke. The table of contents is exciting, but even as some authors approach the anthology’s theme of climate change as an urgent and dramatically rich reality, the book as a whole feels surprisingly aloof. Enough of the stories turn on jokey or weirdly irrelevant hypotheticals that the anthology often feels both distant and dated. Neither of these qualities are deal-breakers in themselves, but readers’ mileage may vary even more than usual for a theme anthology of this kind.
