Book Review: The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

Since this is my first major blog, which I am writing because I am bored, I usually watch reviews on-line, and I decided because I am bored to write reviews on my own.  In this book I recently got.  It is a collection of short-stories and some of them are really bad.  Look, when I read a book called Mindblowing Sci Fi, I expect it to be unequal and intertesting because that is what I expected when I got it from the bookstore.  The book is a collection of 21 short stories, two of which are novelets, 5 of which were specifically written for the book, which I suspect most of them came from authors who wrote their stories on an knapkin in a bar and published the stories so that they can still have a job.  The first one, which I would describe as less realistic on particle accelerators than Angels and Demons, was called the Pavetron Rats.  The story is about two British girls in the year 2018 who go on a field-trip to a particle accelerator near Oxford, England.  They find two rats in the accelerator.   They bring home the rats, and stuff starts going really, really insane.  The best I can summate what happens comes from an actual line in the book:  "Time travelling mutant radio-active rats."  No, that is not a rejected concept for a knock-off of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I probably made you picture the rats differently than they described in the book.  They are bascially normal looking rats that can travel through time.  The two rats eventually escape, multiply and cause what I could only describe as 28 days later with replacing the raging virus with time-travelling rates and no zombies.  And the story gets only more bizarre.  The girls turn off a computer at the particle accelerator, and the rats disappear and time goes back to normal and everyone forgets what happens.  I am not making this up!!  The story feels like it was written and concieved in a day.

Another short story is called "Vacuum States," which is the last story in the book.  Unlike Pavetron Rats, it was published in 1988 and is less interesting than Pavetron Rats. It is about a guy giving a lecture to a bunch of scientists concerning a device that could potentially destroy the universe.  I got lost at that point because I was confused.  He turned on the machine and the cliff hanger then was to decide whether to turn the machine off or not.  Some participants thought the unviverse was doomed if the machine remained on.  Others thought it was doomed if the machine stopped.