This is a collection of science fiction short stories (and a few essays). I remember David Brin's Uplift series, which I read many years ago, as some of my favorite science fiction books of all time. So I spent much of this book puzzling over why I just couldn't get into this short story collection. I considered the possibility that it was because my tastes have changed since my teenage years, but dismissed that thinking about how some of those books won the Hugo and/or Nebula awards for best science fiction. Then I got to the best part of this book, the novella "Temptation" which is set in the Uplift universe. It's been so long since I read those books (the last book of the second trilogy was published in 1999 which is when I read it), that I didn't remember the characters or the setting - and yet this story was by far the most captivating in the whole collection. And I think it's because this story actually has characters with personalities, while so many of the stories in this collection do not. Indeed, in his interstitial comments between the stories, Brin alludes to the fact that he considers many short stories to be more in the nature of thought experiments. And for the most part, those just didn't work for me. So, the novella was great, and there were a few other stories that were pretty good. But too many of the stories were tedious, boring, and/or confusing - some to such an extent that I had to skim them because I just couldn't get through them.