Review copy provided by the publisher.
The line between mosaic novel and themed short story collection is a very blurry one, but I spent 99% of this book fairly sure that it was in the latter category. And then I got to the end and I don’t know any more. These stories are linked thematically and by their science fictional world conceit. There’s not an overarching character arc for any characters told in these tales.
…unless, as I was carefully taught as a high school sophomore, the setting can be a character, in which case there absolutely is character arc here, and a very settling/satisfying one too. These science fiction stories have a consistent thread of using technology to reach out to the natural world and to heal the things that are already broken in our time. There’s a wide range of characters–dolphins, robots, cats! humans I guess if you need those!–and they are generally not perfect but doing their best, which is basically my favorite kind of characters.
I am not the target audience for the type of mini-comic that appears in a few places throughout the book, but these particular examples of the form are charming and fit well with the stories around them. I feel like “now, more than ever” is one of those cliches I don’t want to lean too hard on in 2026, but also now, more than ever, we really do need stories about doing the best we can with what we’ve got, and these are that, and I’m so glad they’re all in one place to lean on.