Turns out, our main character is going to need to talk to many more people than one ghost.
And to get to this next person, it’s time to see more of this magical city. It’s time to go to the docks, where magical portals are very common.
“Slow Time Between the Stars” has almost no plot. And that’s perfectly fine. If you try to read it expecting a plot—or really even conflict—to arise, then you’ll be disappointed. This is pure idea-based science fiction. It’s continuous interesting ideas. That’s it.
Do you ever wonder what aliens use to communicate with each other?
Well, in this story, the answer is cell phones.
When our main character started talking to a ghost, he probably didn’t expect to end up trying to save his whole city.
“Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach” is a fascinating, humanist piece of science fiction. Despite having almost no conflicts, barely anything that counts as a propelled plot, it’s intriguing all the way through. Reading it instills so many emotions: sadness, joy, wistful nostalgia, and the exact type of curiosity that incredible concepts have all the power to invoke.
A warning, dear reader. This story contains spiders—and if you have arachnophobia, at all, you may not want to read this one.
“The Long Game” is actually a story about very short periods of time and the exploitation of a species. Its title refers to one idea in the story, among a few different, some related, some not, concepts—and the greatest strength of this one, like “How It Unfolds,” is how interesting those ideas are.
Imagine, if you will, a series of spaceships housing all of humanity.
Now imagine the level of work it would take to keep such locations livable and pleasant.
We return to our supernatural tale, dear reader.
Now that our main character has finished talking to a ghost about the ghost’s troubles, there’s more to do.
“Falling Bodies” is an outlier, so far, in this collection. The concept of time does play a part in the story, but no more than any story that deals with someone’s past. There are plenty of sci-fi elements, but it takes place on a normal time scale.
An extra-dimensional species simply called “Needles” has just arrived—and things have gotten bad.
“Void” is a murder mystery story, front and center. And, with as much forthrightness, I’ll admit to my lack of knowledge of the subgenre. I don’t know the conventions.
