From a Certain Point of View

Short story collections are interesting things to read. Often they are difficult to read in one go due to jarring contrasts in style and content. From A Certain Point of View has to be one of the easiest to read short story collections that I have ever encountered as its concept of taking background characters from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and fleshing out their backstories means if you are familiar with the movies you are already fully ensconced in the world and can recognize and easily imagine the scenes behind the stories being told.

As always with any short story collection there is some unevenness to the quality but overall this is an impressive collection and the gems in it really do shine. My personal favourite was Ken Liu's which puts a desk jockey's perception on how to avoid the blame for not targetting the escape pod that contained C3PO and R2D2 - the bureaucracy behind the empire must have been huge and this is an amusing take on it.

There are some inconsistencies where two different authors have taken different characters from the same scene which are a bit annoying, but honestly that is my main criticism. I look forward to the next collection for the Empire Strikes Back