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by twic 2496 days ago
I was handed a collection of shorts a while ago [1] [2]. Only two of the stories had a male protagonist: one is an ineffectual programmer trapped inside a smart house (which has a female AI personality; in the end a female colleague rescues him) [3], and the other is an insane space probe. It's not quite the pogrom jcriddle4 was describing, but it was an interesting swing of the pendulum.

The stories were mostly pretty average. I thought 'Escape from Caring Seasons' by Sarah Pinsker was great; sadly, it doesn't seem to be online. 'Byzantine Empathy' by Ken Liu enraged me greatly, because it was about the transformative power of blockchain, and like everything about the transformative power of blockchain, contains a massive implicit "???" right before the "profit".

[1] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?659620

[2] https://factordaily.com/twelve-tomorrows-mit-technology-revi...

[3] http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/okay-glory/

[4] https://breakermag.com/kchain-science-fiction-premiere-byzan...

1 comments

I'm kind of confused; this is a collection of 12 stories that does not appear to claim that they reflect all of science fiction or even a broad subset of science fiction. It could be entirely possible that it just happened that that specific anthology fell that way (it is an n=12 only, after all). How does it compare with The Best Science Fiction Of The Year and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy?