I will begin this a review with a plea to editors, publishers, and marketers: please include a list of authors when you publish an anthology. This one isn’t completely opaque, because they’re all listed on the cover, but you have to look at it enlarged and some of them are upside down making it a bit of a pain. So to spare others this annoyance, the authors in order of appearance are:
Tobias S. Buckell
Yoon Ha Lee
Arkady Martine
Alistair Reynolds
T. Kingfisher
Charlie Jane Anders
Aliette de Bodard
Seth Dickinson
Lavie Tidhar
Becky Chambers
Anya Johanna DeNiro
Ann Leckie
Sam J. Miller
Karin Tidbeck
As for the anthology itself: this was great. I was familiar with some of the authors, and not others, as is usually the case. I got to visit some favorite universes and hopefully discover new ones. I read a few of the stories a few months ago as a palette cleanser between other books, and then when writing this review discovered (to my delight) that the T. Kingfisher book I read a few weeks ago was not in fact my first experience of her work; I’d read her story in this anthology, and loved it.
None of these stories were bad; there was nothing I had to force my way through. But to highlight my favorites:
“A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” by Charlie Jane Anders. I don’t even know what to make of this story; it was a hilarious absurdist story about a heist & various other assorted hijinks, pleasure taken too far, and a solar-system-sized testicle and the cult that worships it.
“Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson. A few pilots are on a ship falling into a star, with insufficient power to pull out of it and no hope of rescue. This story is a reflection on dehumanization during war; both that which the pilots did to their enemies, and the price doing so inflicted on they themselves.
“A Good Heretic” by Becky Chambers. Those who have read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (if you haven’t, go read it, it’s fantastic) might remember the navigator aboard the Wayfarer was a member of a species that had a symbiotic relationship with a virus that allowed them to navigate space-time. Somewhat unusually for Chambers, she revisits that species here.
“Planetstuck” by Sam J. Miller. An interstellar sex worker has been cut off from his home planet, and his brother, after an isolationist sect destroyed all the FTL gates on the planet. He copes with the homesickness, the loneliness, and the simultaneously tantalizing and distressing possibility that there might still be a way to reach home.
“The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck. The engineers of a starship (which is basically a few crew quarters strapped to the back of a skyscraper-sized transdimensional hermit crab) work to help their ship, which is outgrowing its shell, find a new one.
“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher. My favorite of the anthology. An old man on a remote planet creates two AIs, and declares them to be brother and sister. But when the old man has to go for medical treatment and leaves them alone, they must struggle along on their own. When they encounter a third AI, they have to work out concepts like “lies” and “untrustworthy” and make decisions they were never prepared for.
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