This collection comes out swinging with Melissa Scott‘s "The Sweet Not–Yet." In this far future tale, mankind has colonized other stars with the help of faster than light, quantum ships. A young man named Cass used to race for his family’s mining company until an accident kicked him outside normal space and time, into a realm known as the sweet not-yet. Now he is achronic, meaning time no longer affects him. He wears a memory prosthesis that supplements his six minutes of natural memory by prompting him on people’s names and the preceding day’s events. He is handicapped, and feels useless. But when another racer goes missing, Cass is the only one in his family who can pilot another ship to go find him.

This is a powerful little story, and a great lead-in to this collection. It’s one of my favorites in the book as well. Scott makes use of some clever technology in the form of Cass’s memory prosthesis and the ships, which use some kind of biological entity called a workhorse to poke a hole into the sweet not-yet, which is a rather poetic version of hyperspace. This is one hardworking fable, and if you only read this one story out of the whole collection, consider your time well spent.

In "Threesome," Leslie What gives us a glimpse of the interactions of three teenaged girls as the rest of the world’s population is being sucked up by aliens. This is a quiet little story, in which the SF elements take place off stage. The real story here is the interactions among the girls and how two of them intentionally do things together in order to exclude the third. It feels a bit out of place coming in behind Scott’s "The Sweet Not-Yet," as it isn’t hard SF, but there are a few other stories in this collection that aren’t as well. What’s story is a convincing character study in an SF setting.

In "Area Seven," Robert Onopa takes us to a planet that doubles as a section of Dante’s Inferno. On this world, dark, twisted shapes dot a barren landscape, and an explorer believes they are speaking to him as he’s taking samples. He soon realizes that they are reciting lines from Dante, and that he is within the region of the Violent, the ring of Dante’s Inferno reserved for suicides.

This is a weird one, a strange combination of alien landscape and the tortured imagery of a long dead poet. Onopa seems to be asking us what is real and what is imagined here. Very nicely done.

In "The Dream of Vibo," Patrick O’Leary takes us to a dying, far-future Earth, where the emperor of the society there, Vibo, dreams of long ago lives. In the dream, in which there were cars and birds, Vibo’s point of view shifts from a man to a bird to a woman to a leaf, and Vibo tells his son about the dream when he wakes up. Together, they decide that if they can dream the life of someone who lived long ago, then perhaps someone from long ago can dream about this future Earth and do something to prevent it. This is a cool story that covers a lot of ground in a short space. The writing is beautiful, well-wrought and poetic, and breaks the boundaries of the ordinary SF tale.

In "The Artist Makes a Splash" by Jerry Oltion, an artist in a human colony on Altair is commissioned to create a piece of art to commemorate the newly terraformed atmosphere. Assigned with the task of creating something ephemeral, Talan decides to create the hall in which the ceremony will be held, then destroy it. When the president of the colony decides that the structure is too beautiful to destroy, Talan does it anyway.

This story was nicely done. I liked Talan right away, and wanted him to succeed. Oltion says a lot here about artists and their responsibility to their art. This is a fun story, and one well worth successive readings.

"Fired" is another weird tale from Ray Vukcevich, about a spaceman looking for a little action in his ship’s bar. He meets a women there who may or may not be made of fire, who wants him to show her his spacesuit. Thinking this will allow him to show her a lot more, he complies, and what follows is the same utter weirdness that has made Vukcevich a favorite among speculative fiction fans, including this one.

This story was inspired by a painting by Alan M. Clark of an astronaut dying from explosive decompression, his blood boiling out into space through his severed arm. The blood looks a little like flames shooting out, and Vukcevich uses this flame image in his fire woman. While technically it’s a misinterpretation of the artwork, it’s a good example of a talented writer bringing his own perceptions to bear and using that vision to craft something uniquely his own. I don’t think this is the best thing Vukcevich has written, but it’s very representative of his bizarro style.

Nancy Jane Moore‘s tale "Nohow Permanent" is a fun, inventive story about a three-eyed, female smuggler transporting a political dissident to safety. By speaking out against the violent government on the planet Yacare, Vlad Pyotrvich has put his life in danger, and has hired three-eyed Pogo to bring him to another planet to join the resistance movement against Yacare. She brings him to her homeworld of Procyon, a hollowed-out moon, to hitch another ride to his destination because it is safer. But she quickly runs into him again while he is fleeing from both the local police and bounty hunters. This is a fast-paced, fun story. No lesson, no moral, just pure adventure SF.

"By Any Other Name" by Steve Beai is an anti-war story about an oiler on a deep space repair station. Peery isn’t well-liked by his colleagues, and spends all of his free time looking at news about the war. When a ship comes in for repairs–with enemy ships in pursuit–Peery and his fellow mechanics spring into action, helping to destroy the enemy ships and starting their repair work on the vessel. When Peery discovers a major problem, he is called into the ship to fix it, and discovers the president of his group and that of the rival faction in a secret meeting to destroy his hometown, where his wife and family wait for him. Discovering the entire war is a lie, Peery does what he must to save his family. While some of the technical details of this piece were a bit beyond me, I really enjoyed the anti-war message of this story.

Syne Mitchell‘s "Stately’s Pleasure Dome" is a quirky, burlesque tale of an intergalactic bordello inside a hollowed-out asteroid and former fluorite mine. George Stately’s Pleasure Dome promises pleasure no matter what the species, and gets a real challenge when a tentacled alien man comes in. The men and women of the Pleasure Dome, which Mitchell refers to as sharecroppers, quickly get to work, and soon discover that what they are doing to the alien has the most unbelievable effect on him.

More conservative SF readers will have a hard time with this one, but if you’re a fan of stuff like Harlan Ellison’s "How’s the Nightlife on Cissalda," and wonder what it would be like to have sex in space, then this tale is for you.

Arinn Dembo‘s "Between the Lines" is a hard SF mystery involving psionics, rifts in space-time, and first contact with a mysterious alien race. It is told in past tense, in the form of a report by Naval intelligence after they have pieced together the strange set of occurrences. The story centers on a brilliant researcher as she seeks to cure a mysterious illness, and a young soldier who has been surgically grafted to his ship, which can jump through holes in space-time. Humanity has made contact with a mysterious alien race they have dubbed the Black Fleet. These aliens only attack when provoked, and in one such battle, the psionic soldier and his ship are lost. That’s when things start getting weird. A mysterious disease begins affecting the people of Earth, and the soldier’s ship reappears as the chief doctor working on a cure dies of the very disease she was studying. Then the Black Feet appears in the skies above Earth. The strange connection between the soldier and the scientist form the backbone of an intriguing SF mystery tale, with plenty of bold extrapolation to keep everyone guessing up to the last page.