...

I genuinely do not have the slightest recollection of how this book came to be in my library, but it is so I read it. Because of this, I didn't have any idea what to think going in. But I did have a really enjoyable time with it.

I don't really know how to describe what genre this is really. It's an anthology, to start. Given some credits and stuff at the end I think they were originally published as like individual short stories in various magazines or whatever. They're all like, kinda sci-fi-ish, thought never intensesly specific with the technology. There's one story about a farmer who gets a prosthetic arm, which believes itself to be a road in Colorado (the farmer has never been to Colorado). Another aboard a generation ship, about the value of archival work and teaching histoy. One about a true crime AI tech startup. A murder mystery where every character is a different version of the author.

A lot of these stories are just queer, and I really liked that. Like, that farmer story, where a part of your body believes itself to be something else is transgender. And it's not loud about it, it just hangs in the air. And it's fun. So many of the stories feel like that, there's an off-handed remark about a sapphic relationship and it feels at home.

The stories are scifi, but the realism of the characters is so well grounded. The fantastic elements let us get a closer look at the characters, it's putting them in weird situations for observation. All the bits of writing sell it really well. I don't have tons to say about it now, but it's 100% the kind of story to quickly show up in a Jacob Geller video or whatever. I can't articulate exactly what I was thinking and feeling as I was reading, but everytime I finished a story I had to let it sit with me for a while. Please read it please please