Read the first third and had to give up. All of the stories read, ALL of them, were overlong, overslow, boring, unengaging and very, very low scifi. I don't know how that could happen: I regularly read Tor.com and enjoy most of its stories. There is just a tiny minority I do not... and they are all probably in this book. Who did the selection?I need to know, so as to avoid her in the future! ( )

• “Deriving Life” by Elizabeth Bear – an alien symbiosis of love and death. Excellent.
• “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll – ghastly picaresque nonsense.
• “Beyond the El” by John Chu – sibling rivalry and complex meals. Good.
• “Zeitgeber” by Greg Egan – timeslips disrupt family life. Very Good.
• “One/Zero” by Kathleen Ann Goonan – refugees organise a better world with the help od an emergent AI. Very Good.
• “Skinner Box” by Carole Johnstone – experiments in space. Dull, DNF.
• “The Song” by Erinn L. Kemper – whales get angry. Dull, DNF.
• “Articulated Restraint” by Mary Robinette Kowal – another entry into her “Lady Astronaut” world. Good.
• “Painless” by Rich Larson – macho cyborg stuff. Dull, DNF.
• “Seonag and the Seawolves” by M. Evan MacGriogair - some Celtic mythology nonsense. Dull, DNF.
• “Any Way the Wind Blows” by Seanan McGuire – entertaining parallel worlds story. Good.
• “Blue Morphos in the Garden” by Lis Mitchell – death as bodily transformation into objects. Interesting ideas. Good
• “His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light” by Mimi Mondal – tedious Arabian nights stuff. DNF.
• “Old Media” by Annalee Newitz – how to love a cyborg. Excellent.
• “More Real Than Him” by Silvia Park – geek-girl roboticists search for true love. Interesting.
• “The Hundredth House Had No Walls” by Laurie Penny - quirky fairy-tale romance with a feminist perspective. Good.
• “The Touches” by Brenda Peynado - a society living in VR because the world is so contaminated. Quite good.
• “Knowledgeable Creatures” by Christopher Rowe - fantasy about an uplifted detective dog. OK but peters out at the end.
• “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon - meandering fantasy. DNF.
• “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck - Giant, space-faring hermit crab! What's not to like!
• “Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy” by JY Yang - meandering fantasy. dnf.
• Water, a history by K J Kabza - an old, sick woman and a young girl bond on a dusty exoplanet. Excellent and quite moving.
• As the Last I may know by S L Huang - heavy-handed tale about war and sacrifice. Poor.
• “The Time Invariance of Snow” by E. Lily Yu – Entrancing mythologies entwined with physics. Excellent. ( )

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