Seeds of Change

'This thought-provoking anthology of nine original stories posits near-future paradigm shifts in everything from race relations (in Ted Kosmatka's vivid and moving N-Words, where cloned Neanderthals encounter violent hatred from Homo sapiens) to the morality of uploaded consciousness (in Blake Charlton's clumsy but charming Endosymbiont), with varying success. The hero of Jay Lake's The Future by Degrees invents an energy-saving thermal superconductor only to be pursued by corporations protecting their business, with predictable results. Pepper, the mercenary hero of Tobias S. Buckell's Crystal Rain, refuses to assassinate a dictator in the morally contrived Resistance. Considerably more powerful is Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's Spider the Artist, which combines African folk tales and advanced robotics in a chilling story about a rising social conscience in the Nigerian oil fields.' -- Publishers Weekly