The Best of Full-Throttle Space Tales
The Full-Throttle Space Tales series collected action-packed, high octane science fiction stories across the full potential of the genre. Here, the original editors have teamed up to pick the very best of Full-Throttle Space Tales, eighteen stories collected here for the first time.
Stories by David Boop, C.J. Henderson, W.A. Hoffman, Julia Phillips, David Lee Summers, Carol Hightshoe, Irene Radford, Bob Brown, Scott Pearson, Alan L. Lickiss, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Dayton Ward, Anna Paradox, Ivan Ewert, Erik Scott de Bie, Shannon Page, Mark Ferrari, Gene Mederos, Jean Johnson, Mike Resnick, and Brad R. Torgersen
Buckle up, because we’re accelerating to Maximum Velocity!
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Back in 2009, I edited an anthology of military science fiction stories, Space Grunts, the third installment of Full-Throttle Space Tales, a series of pulpy SF short fiction with each volume centering around a particular theme. There ultimately were six collections, all published by David Rozansky and Flying Pen Press:
Space Pirates – edited by David Lee Summers
Space Sirens – edited by Carol Hightshoe
Space Grunts – edited by moi
Space Horrors – edited by David Lee Summers
Space Tramps – edited by Jennifer Brozek
Space Battles – edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
A few years ago, Flying Pen got away from publishing fiction, and all of the original anthologies are out of print. The rights to the individual stories have reverted back to their original authors, and few have even republished their tales in other anthologies or markets.
Then, in early 2014, David Lee Summers broached the idea of finding a way to reprint the original FTST anthologies, perhaps with an eye toward one day reviving the series. After the idea lay dormant for a bit, until the summer of 2015 when fate so fit to bring me to a convention with David and Jennifer Brozek. We revisited the notion and decided it still had merit, but finding a home for six collections of short stories felt to us like a daunting if not impossible task. So, the idea of creating a “Best of” anthology was hatched, while retaining the hope of this perhaps kick-starting a FTST revival.
David, with the help of original FTST contributor David Boop, took our idea to best-selling and award-winning author/editor Kevin J. Anderson, who happens to have his own independent publishing company, WordFire Press. Kevin was enthusiastic about hosting our little anthology, so with that in our pocket, we five editors got to work figuring out what would go in it.
The idea was simple: Each editor selected three to five stories from one of the anthologies for consideration by the other editors. To keep things as impartial as possible, we decided to reread the anthology that came before ours in the sequence (with David pulling double duty since he’d edited two). For example, I went through the stories collected in the second anthology, Space Sirens, and made my recommendations. At long last, the result of all our deliberations is this shiny new tome, Maximum Velocity.
Many thanks to Kevin J. Anderson and the team at WordFire Press for giving us our new home. Thanks also to the other editors and most especially to the other authors, without whom this entire endeavor wouldn’t even have been possible.
The Fog of Ward. 