I don’t read many anthologies and I don’t read much speculative fiction, and books like this make me realize I’m missing out.

I haven’t read any other Jemisin, but now I need to. Her balance between the “real” and fantasy—and how she uses one to pick apart the other—is precise. You can have no idea what’s going on, and still her words hold such significance.

Jemisin doesn’t hold back, but she also doesn’t spoon feed. Without getting too heavy-handed, she uses fantastical elements to comment on topics like poverty, parenthood, and authoritarianism.

One way she does this is with ambivalence. A lot of the stories and their characters are both hopeful and bleak—simultaneously defeated and determined. She also has us question (almost perpetually) what signifies cultural advancement. What criteria do we use to evaluate whether an entity or community are civilized, evolved, moral?

I would love to reread this in the future. I’m sure different stories will stand out to different readers at different points in their lives. But generally, this is just a treasure trove. A super weird treasure trove

NK Jemisin is a treasure. These short stories are the perfect place for a reader new to her work to start at as they build on ideas and narratives that she explores further in her outstanding novels.

It’s not surprising to see common elements between Jemisin’s stories and stories from the age when gorgonpsids roamed; whatever her gibbering critics might claim, she’s clearly One of Us. At the same time, Jemisin is interested in themes olden time SF might have ignored. Editors of that long-ago time were worried about upsetting their readers. One editor, John W. Campbell, would have been cheering for the other side. But he’s dead and largely forgotten. Who says there’s no progress?

Jemisin’s body of work is one concrete example of the welcome changes in SF in the last few decades. Her slowly accumulating stack of awards shows I am not alone in thinking this.

Thought-provoking, original, different -- I really enjoyed this collection of stories, and will definitely be waiting in line for whatever the author writes next!