My favorites are:
- Annalee Newitz’s utterly adorable “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”
- Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention”, featuring a smart home I’m jealous of and a terrifyingly literal “pollen tsunami”
- Mark Stasenko’s “Overvalued”, which imagines a securities market for trading shares in a child’s lifetime earnings (this doesn’t seem like a huge leap from Income Share Agreements)
- Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Mika Model” starring a murderous sexbot
But the rest of the stories are good, too. Some memorable bits:
- Mark Oshiro’s “No Me Dejes” asks what it would be like to inherit the memories of a parent or grandparent.
- Deji Bryce Olukoton’s “When We Were Patched” puts you inside the mind of an AI that exists entirely to assist in refereeing sports—a singularity of purpose which is perhaps less than entirely healthy.
- Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Lions and Gazelles” includes a startup named “CarrotStick” that “re-engineer[s] your dopamine receptors to hack motivation”. (That story also tries to convey the appeal of ultra running, but I am unmoved.)
- Lee Konstantinou’s “Burned-Over Territory” imagines people who are no longer useful to the economy banding together to meet each other’s needs in a “Federation” of communal-living houses.
- The adorably eponymous protagonist of Maureen McHugh’s “The Starfish Girl” has starfish DNA thanks to a medical procedure that fixed her spinal injury.