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"The Streets of Babel" Author: Adam-Troy Castro Main Characters: --- Main Elements: Fantasy - Living Cities "Auburn" Author: Joanna Ruocco Main Characters: Lady Abergavenny Main Elements: Fantasy "Golubash, Or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" Author: Catherynne M. Valente Main Characters: The Nanut family Main Elements: Science Fiction - Colonization "The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births" Author: José Pablo Iriarte Main Characters: Jamie, Alicia, Benjamin Main Elements: Fantasy - Reincarnation "The Eyes of the Flood" Author: Susan Jane Bigelow Main Characters: --- Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post-Apocalypse "Divine Madness" Author: Roger Zelazny Main Characters: --- Main Elements: Fantasy - Time Travel "Someday" Author: James Patrick Kelly Main Characters: Daya Main Elements: Science Fiction - Colonization "The Court Magician" Author: Sarah Pinsker Main Characters: Unnamed Main Elements: Fantasy - Wizards

"The Streets of Babel" is my favorite, a truly bizarre story about cities that are living, consuming things, driving those they catch for it's own purposes, rebuilding itself to meet it's own agenda, and is told from the point of view of one poor human captured and forced to act out the city's whims. I personally think the city is trying to recreate our modern world, but without understanding why we do what we did. Like hurrying to work and sitting at a computer in an office cube. It recreates all that, but in an artifical, forced way. It was a fascinating, disturbing view of how our socity functions and how incomprehensible it is both to the city trying to simulate it, and the man forced to go through the motions.

"Auburn" has a strong mystery at it's core, why does Lord Abergavenny marry women with auburn hair but never spend any time with them? Why is that footman so creepy? What are Boffin birds? While you don't exactly get an answer at the end of the story I found I didn't quite mind as it leaves it up to the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps.

"Golubash, Or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" there are a lot of colonization stories out there, but this one was unique, told from the point of view of vintners trying to grow wines on alien planets, particularly one planet that appears to be in fact a sentient being. What kind of vintage does one get planting a vine into the skin-body-blood of a living being? And what if this vintage is declared illegal by a wine monopoply? This story, though wrapped up in an illegal wine tasting scene, creates an entire world, an entire future, and it's just about the wine, but about freedom of entrepeneurs and the stangleholds mega corporations can have on the little guy.

"The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births" Jamie is a gender confused young man, but you can't blame him as he has lived many past lives as either gender and he remembers them all. So when he runs into a new neighbour, Benjamin, he is shocked to see the man who killed him in a past life...or not, Jamie can't quite recall the details. This is an interesting story that while being about a non-standard gendered characters, it's not really about his gender identity but about solving his past murder.

"The Eyes of the Flood", so something happened to the Earth, leaving this one character changed but still alive. The story uses the second person narrative to give a sense of aloneness but not a sense of loneliness.

"Divine Madness" is a bizarre and somewhat disturbing story about a man who has suffered some tragedy (we don't know what it is until the end) who suffers from seizures where he finds himself reliving time backwards. He's fully aware of it happening, he just can't do anything about it but sit back and experience "undrinking" and "uneating", "untalking" and walking backwards. It twists the mind a bit as he spits back the sips of his martini, then manages to split the two drinks he poured into it back into their respective bottles (at which point we understand why the laws of physics, which don't really have any restriction as to why time can't go backwards, we realize it just kind of can't...while there are a million ways you can mix two liquids, there is one and only one way to reverse it, and probability means it will never be possible). I thought this story was amazingly well written and continues to prove why Zelazny is a master of his art.

"Someday" was an interesting tale of a long lost colony where humans have started taking multiple partners to have a child, a complex process meant to give a child the best mix of genetic material. Aside from the core of this story there is off on the side, a spaceship that recently landed with humans that have evolved on the homeworld and advanced to the point they no longer bother with pregnancy. I enjoyed the reading of it, but I didn't quite get the point of it when it ended though. It was kind of interesting though as I was reading at the same time as The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin who is known of scattering the universe with human colonies that were allowed to evolve independently and develop unique biology and societies. I could almost see this story as part of the Hain universe.

"The Court Magician" is a Hugo award nominee and for good reason. It's a tale about what are you willing to sacrifice for power, for knowledge, and for who are you willing to make those sacrifices for? How far are you willing to go? And what are the consequences of what you do (who are those women chanting names outside the walls and what happens to them after they are made to disappear?). And when you are done, are you willing to encourage another to suffer the same fate as you?