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Over the Brink: Tales of Environmental Disaster (Third Flatiron Anthologies Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Rich Larson (Author), Curtis McConnell (Author), Mark Mills (Author), Format: Kindle Edition
3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
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The science fiction anthology, "Over the Brink: Tales of Environmental
Disaster" comprises a tasty baker's dozen short stories about the
possible consequences of fooling Mother Nature. These tales are
sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes way out or hilarious, but always
mind-expanding.

Enjoy additional stories in this edition by Ian Rose, Ken Staley, Khristo Poshtakov, and Robina Williams.
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  1. Book 1 of 32
    Third Flatiron Anthologies
  2. Print length
    78 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publication date
    June 4, 2012
  6. File size
    837 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00895J1RQ
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Third Flatiron Publishing; 1st edition (June 4, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 4, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 837 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 78 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Rich Larson

    Rich Larson

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    RICH LARSON was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he’s sold over a hundred stories, the majority of them speculative fiction published in magazines like Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com.

    His work also appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, and Italian. Annex, his debut novel, comes out in July with Orbit Books. Tomorrow Factory, his debut collection, follows with Talos Press in May 2018. Besides writing, he enjoys travelling, learning languages, playing soccer, watching basketball, shooting pool, and dancing salsa and kizomba.

    Find out more at richwlarson.tumblr.com and support his work via patreon.com/richlarson.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Ian Rose

    Ian Rose

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Ian Rose has moved around a bit. Born outside of Philadelphia, he lived in New Orleans, Alaska, Hawaii, and elsewhere before settling in Oregon. Now a resident of Portland, he devotes himself to his writing, his fiancee and his two beloved soccer teams, Inverness Caledonian Thistle and the Portland Timbers. He has worked as a biological technician, a sports blogger and a web developer, and hopes that all of them have left a mark on his writing. In particular, the ocean and marine life are a huge influence.

    See more on the author's page
  3. Tim J. Myers

    Tim J. Myers

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Tim J. Myers is a writer, songwriter, storyteller, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. His ebook "Glad to Be Dad: A Call to Fatherhood" (Familius) won the inaugural Ben Franklin Digital Award. His children's books have won recognition from The New York Times, NPR, the Smithsonian, Nickelodeon, and others. He's published over 140 poems, won a first prize in a poetry contest judged by John Updike, has four books of adult poetry out, won a major prize in science fiction, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has published much other fiction and non-fiction for children, adolescents, and adults. He also won the 2012 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for Fiction, and the West Coast Songwriters Saratoga Chapter Song of the Year award.

    His website is www.TimMyersStorySong.com.

    Check out his YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/user/TimJMyers

    It's best to search for him on Amazon as "Tim J. Myers," since there's another Amazon writer named Tim Myers. And his Shelfari shelf is at http://www.shelfari.com/timmyers/shelf. Thanks!

    See more on the author's page
  4. Colleen Anderson

    Colleen Anderson

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Colleen Anderson writes fiction, dark fiction, erotica, poetry, SF, fantasy, and anything of interest. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and freelances as a copyeditor and proofreader. Her works have been nominated for multiple awards: Elgin, Rhysling, Dwarf Stars, Pushcart, Aurora. As well, her works have been shortlisted for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the Friends of Merril short fiction contest, the SFPA poetry contest, and placed in the Rannu competition, Balticon poetry contest and Crucible. Colleen also won the Jerry Jazz Musician short story contest and has received several honorable mentions in the Year's Best SF, Year's Best Horror and Fantasy, and the Writers of the Future.

    She is a member of the HWA and SFPA and is the current president of the SFPA helping to promote speculative poetry for all readers and writers. She co-edited Tesseracts 17 with East Coast, dark fiction writer Steve Vernon, Playground of Lost Toys with Ontario, award-winning author Ursula Pflug, and edited Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland.

    A recipient of the Ladies of Horror Fiction, Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants in writing, she has published over 300 pieces of fiction and poetry. You can find some of her works online at Polu Texni, Polar Borealis, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Radon Journal and many others, as well as her short fiction collections Embers Amongst the Fallen, and A Body of Work (Black Shuck) through Amazon. She is the author of two poetry collections as well; I Dreamed a World (LVP), 2022, and The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams (Yuriko Publishing), 2023, also available through Amazon

    Colleen has served on several juries for the Bram Stoker awards and the British Fantasy Awards as well as on the HWA Scholarship Committee. www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com

    Some of the early influences on her writing were Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlien and Frank Herbert.

    You can see other books that contain her stories at Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/481782.Colleen_Anderson

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

3.3 out of 5 stars
3.3 out of 5
7 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Anita Buckowing
5.0 out of 5 stars Good stories, definitely make you think
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2021
Verified Purchase
The "creepy" factor is strong in many of these stories.
They definitely make you think and they are really quite unique. I plan to look into other writings by many of the authors in this book.
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Bob Pierce
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your time. The ingredient list on a jar of peanut butter is more interesting.
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2016
Verified Purchase
If I was a tree hugger I might of been interested but after the second story I couldn't take any more . Writing was on par with an 8th grade essay assignment.
One person found this helpful
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==Leonard
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Theme Anthology
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2012
Verified Purchase
"Over the Brink" is an interesting anthology. The publisher has assembled writings in a particular theme, environmental disaster in this edition. The stories span a wide range of possibility, in the what-if realm of science fiction and some fantasy. Many are unconventional, such as "The Brown Woman" and "Bonfire". Some are more mainstream science fiction, such as "Comp Ice", about the environmental impact if ice were to shrink when it freezes instead of expand, which is a thought I've heard in outdoor nature hikes during the winter. "Take One with Water" is an entertaining story about the value of the water on our planet to aliens. "The Swamp" is a fun story of evolution with good character development. There's even a fantasy horror, "Essence of Bat". There are some short non-fiction essays, too, but the bunk is the fiction. The publisher has achieved the goal of out-of-the-ordinary plots.
2 people found this helpful
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David Pinault
4.0 out of 5 stars Review of "Over the Brink" by the author of "Museum of Seraphs in Torment"
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2013
Over the Brink: Tales of Environmental Disaster
Juliana Rew, Editor; Published by Third Flatiron Publishing ©2012
In this collection, 13 storytellers visualize the consequences of what we--collectively and individually--are doing to ourselves and to our planet. What they glimpse: dried-up oceans, genetically-twisted frogs and flies, technologically "enhanced"--and dangerously degenerate--humans, and disease-ridden bat-gods with a hunger to bite.
Some stories are marred by a tendency to preach, to tell rather than show; characters become megaphones for authorial stances, and it becomes hard for readers--this reader, at least--to become emotionally engaged with these stick-figures and their plight.
But the best of the lot make one care, pull one in. In Colleen Anderson's "The Brown Woman," we meet a mysterious tree-spirit who struggles to protect her forest-world. The author shows a creative love of language in imagining the environment through this spirit's consciousness and her probing tree-limbs: "She branched her awareness." Anderson does a fine job of evoking this spirit's encounter with a human male, as the Brown Woman compares the man's organs of vision with the moon: "...whites of eyes like the shining one at fullness." The conclusion, with its melding of human-dendroid consciousness, hauntingly evokes ancient vegetation-god myths of Adonis and Tammuz.
Tim Myers's "Chameleon's Cry" vividly imagines the moral dilemma experienced by an anthropologist who's been hired by an interstellar extractive-industry corporation to live in a resource-rich forest-planet in order to investigate its indigenous people, learn their ways, and prepare them for the environmental ruin about to befall them. Skillfully Myers conjures forth an entire world, its peoples, its customs, its tale-within-a-tale myths told by firelight that explain how humans and wild beasts first became estranged. The more we learn about this forest-world, the more we come to care about it--and so does the anthropologist, who undergoes a change of heart: from industrial spy to frantic would-be savior. Particularly impressive is the way Myers shifts tone at the end, from the evocation of campsite-oral-narrative to the brutal snap of machines that gouge the earth. This is a story that succeeds beautifully in its match of pacing and theme.
And William Highsmith's "Tempest Kings" convincingly shifts between two time-frames, both set in Honduras, one in the near-future, the other thirteen hundred years ago. 21st-century archaeologists explore an ancient Mayan site, pondering the evidence for civilizational collapse caused by disregard for how much of a human burden a region's soil and water can bear. We then enter that ancient world, watching its long-ago kings--rendered vividly in all their vanity by Highsmith--as they build monuments to themselves and order one blood-sacrifice after another while disregarding the disaster staring them in their lavishly crowned faces. A shift back to the 21st century, with a climate-change-triggered hurricane about to engulf the tomb-explorers and their ruins, reminds us of continuities between present and past.
Stories such as these make Over the Brink a collection well worth the read.
Review by David Pinault, author of Museum of Seraphs in Torment: An Egyptological Fantasy Thriller
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Freddy McCall
3.0 out of 5 stars Quick takes on a relevant topic
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2012
As advertised, excepting one story, these thirteen short, short stories address potential environmental disasters in a fictional and sometimes fantastical manner. I tend to like imaginative fiction if it stays within the realm of what I can possibly believe, allowing for considerable latitude. For example, I could enjoy the movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Given that, some of these stories were more appealing to me than others; many held my attention, while others were not to my liking.

The two stories I found most interesting were "Chameleon's Cry" and "Tempest Kings." Not the least appealing quality of these stories is the fact that they are well written. "Chameleon's Cry" is a Cassandra's warning about "the people from beyond" that creates a metaphorical framework that could be applied to the American Indians, to any contemporary primitive society, or in fact to any of the modern developed countries. "Tempest Kings" cleverly moves back and forth from the future in 2022, where scientists are excavating a Mayan tomb in Copán, Honduras, to the eighth century when the tomb being excavated was a pyramid temple in the contemporary society. The interplay between the dour environmental conditions in the eighth century versus those in 2022 was engaging.

Honorable mention goes to "The Swamp" that develops the themes of rapid evolution and the interconnectedness of all living things.

On the other end of the spectrum, I could not get beyond the first few paragraphs of, "SPACESHIPS AT THE SPACEPORT IN SPACE CITY!" before cutting my losses. And I found that "The Brown Woman" was so obscure that I did not get the message. A good thing about such a collection is that, if one story does not please, you can look forward to the next.

I found "The Essence of Bat" was the most personally involving, being taken in by its deft creation of suspense. But there was a major flaw in the telling for me: why did Jay wait several minutes before entering the cave after Wyn? And their encountering Camatoz was a stretch.

Some of the stories I thought were derivative, or not particularly imaginative. "Comp Ice" seemed to me to be a direct take-off on Vonnegut's Ice-9. "Take one with water," simply postulates the mysterious disappearance of all Earthly water and then considers the consequences. "A Joy born of Madness" is only an elaboration on the events in the movie, "The Blob."

The topic of environmental disaster does not permit much humor, though "The Swamp" shows it can be done. And I found "How I Made My Name as a Sci-Fi Writer" to be hilarious. This latter seems to be included for its humor, since it does not treat directly of the topic of environmental disaster.

Undoubtedly my likes and dislikes will not be those of hardly anyone else who takes up reading this diverse collection of stories, but I am certain that everyone who makes the effort to read these will *have* likes and dislikes.
2 people found this helpful
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A. Mann
4.0 out of 5 stars So when it runs amok like it has with hurricanes Harvey and Irma
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2018
An inconvenient truth: the environment is all that we have. So when it runs amok like it has with hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it's more enjoyable to take our medicine in the form of speculative fiction, as in "Over the Brink." I particularly enjoyed Robina Williams's tale, "Essence of Bat," as well as fun stories by Rich Larson, Curtis James McConnell, and Khristo Poshtakov.
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