First published 2019
This collection presents six science fiction novellas that blur the line between short stories and novels. Jaine Fenn delivers a Mars-based heist that echoes The Italian Job's clever mechanics. Kathleen Ann Goonan follows gifted children who commandeer a luxury spacecraft and abduct a physicist for an interstellar journey beyond our solar system. Alexander Jablokov creates Sere, a human resident of an overcrowded alien city who risks everything to study mysterious extraterrestrials while investigating an exterminator's suspicious death. Gwyneth Jones presents scientists who must collaborate with reality television producers to fund their desperate experiment in instantaneous planetary transport as Earth dies around them. Alec Nevala-Lee examines how local bird populations threaten efforts to rebuild Bikini Island as rising seas reshape the world. Robert Reed concludes with three diplomats from the Great Ship who travel to negotiate with intelligent rivers for new worlds to settle.
Genres: short-stories, science-fiction, space-opera
Vibes: atmospheric, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, heist
Setting: Mars, Bikini Island, Great Ship
Period: 21st-century
350 pages · Paperback · Independently published