Working long nights at Kitt Peak National Observatory, I often get a chance to ask my fellow astronomers about their taste in science fiction. Some of these astronomers are young, just starting their careers. Many are still in grad school. I find the first authors many will name are people like Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, and Larry Niven—many of the same people I would have named when I was in grad school. Every now and then, someone else will pop up like James S.A. Corey of the Expanse series or Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian.
I find it interesting that so many of my peers in the astronomy world still gravitate to the classics of science fiction. When someone doesn’t mention newer works, I sometimes suggest some. Often I’m met with “I’ll have to look up that author!” It indicates to me that word about newer authors isn’t always spreading outside of writing or fandom circles.
Publishing does face a real challenge. There are many great writers and there are a lot of enthusiastic readers. However, there are limited resources to publish all the best writing and limited shelf space to display it. The internet helps the shelf-space issue, but it doesn’t always make discovering new fiction all that easy. Of course some of that shelf space should go to classics and people will gravitate to what they’ve heard good things about from peers and mentors. Perhaps it’s no surprise that people keep going back to the classics.
This is one of the reasons that I’ve always appreciated magazines and anthologies. They become a way for me to get a sample of what newer authors have done. Magazines, though, are struggling in the Internet age. Numerous magazines have ceased publication. An inherent problem for fiction magazines is that they carry a date, which as time goes by makes the fiction look increasingly dated. Of course, fiction doesn’t always age poorly as evidenced by all the classic authors who still influence young, contemporary scientists.
Good anthologies, though, do have staying power and I’m proud to have contributed to some great anthologies over the years. 
One of the anthologies I’m most proud of is Maximum Velocity: The Best of the Full-Throttle Space Tales. In that book, I got to work alongside talented editors Carol Hightshoe, Dayton Ward, Jennifer Brozek, and Bryan Thomas Schmidt to choose the very best stories from the Full-Throttle Space Tales originally published about ten years ago. I was especially proud that my fellow editors chose my story “Hijacking the Legacy” as one of the best stories from those books. It meant that I got to have a story alongside such authors as Phyllis Irene Radford, C.J. Henderson, Shannon Page, Mark Ferrari, Jean Johnson and Mike Resnick. I’ll note, Phyllis Irene Radford was also the editor of my novels Lightning Wolves and The Brazen Shark. Sometimes publishing is a small world.
I think Maximum Velocity: The Best of the Full-Throttle Space Tales has the potential to be a classic. I don’t say this out of ego, but out of the fact that I got to spend a lot of time with this volume as it was put together. I really got to appreciate the wide range of stoies that could be explored in a backdrop of space adventure. There’s humor, there’s adventure, there are scares, and there are cautionary tales. I lost track of how many times I read the book on the path to publication and I never got bored. There were many other stories from the original volumes that I wish we could have included, but I think this is a good sample.
I’ve often spoken of my love of classic space opera such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Space Battleship Yamato. I find the stories here excite me just as must as the best episodes of those series. If you’re looking to discover some authors, this is a great place to start. You can get a copy today at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074FHCJXG/
David Lee Summers' Web Journal 