This volume covers 2020, the year of COVID. Apparently a LOT more people wrote & submitted short stories to be published. The collection has an increasingly foreign flavor - a good thing IMO.
There are a number of climate fiction stories. I'm sure that this number will continue to grow.
The 1st story "Scar Tissue" is by Tobias S. Bucknell, whom I reliably enjoy. He will always have a soft spot in my heart, because after reading & liking some of his stuff, I could not find eBooks for the early trilogy he did. I emailed him & asked if he knew where I could find it. He emails me back the ePubs of the 3 novels. I love living in the future!
This story completely implements an idea about AI that I have had for decades - that for an AI of human capabilities, you must raise it as if it were your child.
The Ray Nayler story "Eyes of the Forest" depicts an interesting ecology. Another soft spot, due to Nayler's novel which featured intelligent octopuses.
The Carrie Vaughn story "Sinew and Steel and What They Told" I think I had read before. It is a good old-time sci-fi story, reminded me, say, of "Slan" by A.E. Van Vogt, maybe.
The story "An Important Failure" by Canadian Rebecca Campbell is an absolutely fabulous story of climate fiction. A violin maker stives over decades to find the now mostly vanished woods to make a violin suitable for a young virtuoso. It is really well written.
"The Bahrain Underground Bazaar", by Nadia Afifi was very well written. As an old person, I appreciated this thoughtful story about an old person considering their death.
The James Patrick Kelly story, "Your Boyfriend Experience" was a fun story, with some interesting concepts re human-like androids. Extra points for the protagonist being a foodie.
"Beyond The Tattered Veil" by Mercurio D. Rivera was a great story. A very nice examination of the "we're living in a simulated universe" concept.
The Carolyn Ives Gilman story, "Exile's End", I had read before. It is a well-executed page-turner, but the basic premise of the story I found off-putting.
"Invisible People", by Nancy Kress. I'm reading this story & I'm like "Wow, a Nancy Kress story, & it's not too bad!" Famous last words. I'll go on & SPOILER ALERT this story, maybe you can skip it of you read the collection.
The Bronze Rule is: "Don't Be An Asshole". Libertarianism shares with MAGAtism either a disregard for this rule - "It's OK to be an asshole." or, an actual espousal of the anti-bronze rule: "Be an asshole whenever possible."
So some oligarch decides to genetically engineer children to be altruistic. After this gets found out, the adopted parents of one of these children, 9 years old, decide to have their child undergo an experimental treatment to reverse the genetic changes. That is how the story ends.
There was also a scene where the altruistic child takes toys to a homeless camp, after news reports that the children had no toys, & is being threatened by a drunk homeless man. Her 18 YO babysitter pulls out a handgun & fires a warning shot in the air! And the parents' response: "You better have a permit for that!" Ugh, ugh, ugh. Handguns kill far more children than homeless people do.
Kress was born in 1948, so she was maybe 72 when the story came out? Another scared, selfish old white woman. Sad.
"Textbooks In the Attic", by S. B. Divya, is a well-paced climate fiction story.
"Seeding the Mountain", by M. L. Clark, is another, longer climate fiction story, this time set in Columbia, with nano-tech and pandemic elements. Several moving parts come together nicely in the end.
"Knock Knock Said the Ship" by Rati Mehrotra was a fun space pirate story set in a solar system at about the same level of development as The Expanse.
"Tunnels", by Eleanor Aranson was a fun story of corporate intrigue & film-making. You have to love a story where 1 of the main heros is the last crab-like body - normally they have 8 bodies - of an alien whose superpower is accounting & auditing.
We are the best players of capitalism in the known galaxy.Aranson was born in 1942, her Wikipedia page makes her sound pretty woke. So not all old people write libertarian drivel, yay! I have her last novel, "Woman of the Iron People", 1991, on my iPad, I may have to get around to reading it ...
"Test 4 Echo", by Peter Watts. Holy crap, what a great story! It reminded me of his incredible novel "Blindsight", blogged here, for the creativity and originality with which he riffs on intelligence, consciousness, etc. - via NSAs - Neuromorphic Sapient Artefacts.
The Ken Liu story, "Uma" is tight, well-constructed, and a great read. Liu is 1 of our best sci-fi writers now IMO. A UMA is a Utility Maintenace Avatar, BTW.
"The Translator, At Low Tide" by Vajra Chandrasekera, is another climate fiction story. It is very well written, but very grim, morose, depressing even.
"Salvage" by Andy Dudak was a great story. An interesting cosmology - have I encountered it before? - and a nicely flawed heroine.
And finally, "How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar" by Rich Larson. I had read this before, I'm guessing in the tor.com blog when it came out, or in the annual recap they do of the original short stories they publish there. Larson is definitely the most viscreral writer I've read lately. This story reminds me a lot of the run of Case at the end of "Neuromancer".
The main hacker character is male transitioning to female, as was Violet, the main character of "Annex", blogged here. I mentioned in that post that despite there being an excerpt from "Cypher - Book Two of the Violet Wars" at the end of "Annex" - Book One of the Violet Wars - "Cypher" does not seem to have materialized. Every online site talking about Larson has the same blurbs with no recent info. As I said before, I hope Larson is doing OK.
This was a strong collection. I think Clarke is proving to be a good successor to Dozois.
I have several good novels waiting, plus I need to further my explorations into the wonderful world of bullshit.
