Word Puppets by Mary Robinette Kowal

[chuckro]

This is a collection of short stories that I picked semi-arbitrarily from the bundle of such collections, and I liked pretty much every one of them. It’s the humanized sort of sci-fi, where there’s generally one major change to the world and the story is about how people are reacting to it. (As far as I can tell, only two of the stories are set within the same world, where Dewey became President and punch-card computers never went out of style.) I can see why she’s been winning awards—virtually all of these are reasonably thought-provoking.

The advantage to single-author short story collections: If you like one, odds are good you’ll like the others. The anthology problem doesn’t hit anywhere near as hard. I’m not sure her writing style could sustain my interest for a full novel length, though I suspect I’ll eventually find out, as she has a number of them out and I’m actively trying to read more books. I’ll get there when I do.

Overall: If you like sci-fi short fiction, then yes, this is very good.