Review: All Sorts of Possible Futures
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 31, 2013
[Full disclosure: I have had a close working relationship with The Masquerade Crew and its leader, Mark Lee, for a year.  I was going to become one of the editors of this anthology until circumstances not under my control interfered and I had to drop out.  With that said, this review is, as always, honest.]I’m not a big anthology reader, but I really did love this one.  For one, I love science fiction and secondly I do love a good short story.  And believe me, there are some awesome short stories in here.I’ll be totally predictable and say that my personal favourite was the anthology’s namesake: Forbidden Future.  The main character was well-developed and interesting and the future he was thrust into was somewhat believable.  And the ending was tragic and yet hilarious, but I can’t explain too much or that would spoil the awesome surprise.  I won’t critique each short story, but on the whole I could relate to the characters and the futures were interesting.  It’s hard to fit a whole new future into just a short story, but these authors were pretty awesome and managed to achieve it.  Some futures were fantastic, others terrifying.  There was a good balance in the selection of the stories because no two really predicted similar futures.The one thing I had a gripe with was the editing.  This is The Masquerade Crew’s first anthology and some of the editing was, admittedly, a little rough.  There were basic typographical errors that should have been caught and I’m hoping they’ll be corrected in any subsequent editions.  I don’t think there were enough to really distract from the story, but they are there and they are noticeable.There’s a little something for everyone in Forbidden Future.  There’s stories that get very technical for those fans of hard science fiction, but there’s also more character-driven stories for people like me who don’t necessarily understand a great deal of science.  Yet in all the stories the main characters are interesting and characterization certainly wasn’t sacrificed in the world-building process.  Each author had an unique voice and so did their characters.Overall I’m pretty happy with the anthology.  It never really had a weak story that I just wanted to skip through; all of the stories here were pretty strong.  I look forward to future anthologies by The Masquerade Crew.  And with the anthology on sale on Amazon for $.99 until December 7th, where can you go wrong?I give this book 4.5/5 stars, rounded up to 5 stars for Amazon rating purposes.