I'm rating the whole thing higher than I'd rate most of the stories. I really like how it all works together.

The weird thing is that for me, the stories followed a pattern: Almost all of them had one element that I really liked, and one that I really disliked. Sometimes one was bigger than the other, sometimes it was about equal. ( )

A collection of "modern" cyberpunk stories. The editorial premise is that our cyberpunk dystopia is already upon us, and most of the fiction plays to the theme of an almost immediate future but with much more advanced technology. The stories are extremely short, maybe four or six pages on average, and so they are almost all concept pieces. Like any anthology there is some variation in quality, and in the case of this particular collection I'd say the variation is a narrow band around meh, and not too bad. Nothing stood out as a particularly awful story, although many were kind of basic or not memorable in any way, and a few had interesting enough premises that I enjoyed them. About two thirds of the way through I started getting a little of the same stuff over and over again. A lot of war trauma, a little body horror, massive class divides, the sort of thing that is standard with cyberpunk, but not too much that was new. I enjoyed the voice and the characterization in The Faithful Soldier, Prompted, where an old soldier is driven through the desert by his optical node to find a cure for his wife, but the ending lacked much closure (a typical issue for these very short pieces). The Singularity is in your Hair was another short fic with a good voice and premise, and the open-endedness of the plot worked this time. The Bees of Kiribati was the story that addressed some of the more immediate social ills of our world the best, in my opinion, and gave voice to a sort of rage that wasn't really as believable in many of the other stories, even though they often dealt with disenfranchisement or struggle against establishment. But other than that I didn't feel like I was reading much that was new. There was obviously a go at more superficial diversity. Many genders, sexual orientations, nationalities and ethnicity were represented, and in a couple stories, like The Bees of Kiribati, for example, those elements play an important part of the story, but for the most part the names and languages and skin color was stage dressing, with a more homogeneous aesthetic and mindset sitting underneath. I would certainly not say that this was a bad anthology. It was worth the read, but the vision felt limited, possibly because of the average wordcount. ( )

Caitlin G. recommended the author Alyssa Wong and the only piece of her writing I could find in the library system was her story in this anthology, "Your Bones Will Not Be Unknown." It is the first-person story of a doomed young spy who makes a sacrifice and receives an act of mercy in return.

See also: The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu.