2023 SF short story collection in the Planetfall universe.
These are all quite short, typically a scene or two; so while
they don't all show transformational moments, they do show a
character's state of mind, and I find I don't mind the lack of plot as
I might in a longer work.
"Albert and the Kraken": set around the time of the great collapse,
the surviving crew member of a wrecked container ship learns to live
with the monster that's keeping him on his island.
"Act of Kindness": a look at the man who sells vegetables to Carlos at
the start of After Atlas.
"Inheritance": before Mack leaves on the Atlas mission, he deals with
what he's leaving behind.
"The Letter": someone rejected from the Atlas mission comes to terms
with what to do next.
"Primary Purpose": directly after Before Mars, a side story on the
point of existence.
"The Generation Gap": the childhood of Marco, one of the colonists
from Planetfall. (But also how not to recognise selfishness.)
"The Dangerous Choice": the pathologist from After Atlas and the way
she thinks.
"Tailor Made": what gov-corp life is like, from the inside. And
memetic warfare.
"What Travis Built": a little like "Primary Purpose": when the
immediate struggle for survival is sorted out, what do you do, and
why?
"Non-Person": hacking the system.
Like Newman's novels in this setting, these aren't comfortable
stories, but they're very good. They always manage to show someone's
state of mind, but also to go deeper on the big questions of life.
Also, if there were any doubt, she's One Of Us. Considering the very
limited ideas that non-SF-readers have about the breadth of SF:
This is why I am always utterly dismayed when an author who has only
written and read ‘literary' novels decides to write science fiction.
I'm sure that they too hold these same outdated ideas [i.e. pew-pew
and cardboard characters] about what the genre is, as the concepts
they focus on are so tired, already having been thoroughly discussed
in the genre-wide dialogue that science fiction writers have been
conducting for over a hundred years!
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