Getting to Know You by David Marusek
In one of my library forays I picked this book up fairly randomly. Mostly because I was in a foul mood and nothing about it irked me immediately. On to details.
This is an excellent bunch of short stories. Over here is the author’s blog.
All of the stories are fast reads, with great concepts. Almost all of them use a sort of pinhole camera approach to telling a tale. By this I mean you’ll have the main character in their own environment, but you get tiny glimpses of the vaster, often horrible, world, and these glimpses often leave brutal marks on the narrative character. It leaves you relating to the character, since you experience the blindside attack when they do.
Most of it’s very much the speculative sort of sci-fi, and he does a great job of bringing consequences into focus without preaching, or indeed even trying to lead you whether it’s all right or wrong. No, those are left to you, and that’s great.
I’m quite too tired to cover this thing story by story, but it was a fantastic read, and I hope to locate a copy of his long fiction sometime soon.