I'm conflicted about this book. Mamatas is a writer with many gifts, an avowed leftist with a deep background in horror who ably mixes classic imagery with premonitions about the future. His writing is Extremely Online and Extremely Correct. And yet, a lot of it was just okay.

The stories are at their best when he does alternate history, imaging a past of steampunk and dieselpunk wonders inhabited by Engels and Trotsky. And there are a few more intimate psychological studies, of Greekness and fatherhood, and of the psychology of pain, that really worked. But about half of the book was filler, a kind of late-Gibson "welcome to you cyberpunk present" without the deep estrangement that makes Gibson so great (it just clicked that my favorite Gibson is "The Belonging Kind"). Without that kind of cutting insight, the scifi was just glib. And the finale story, an antiwar fable about micronations and a telepathic kid, failed to move me entirely.

I appreciated the biographical notes at the end of each story, a sad tale of publications shuttered, of nominations to awards lost, of the quiet desperation of a 'full-time writer' in the 21st century. Mamatas is perhaps best known for a practical book on writing, Starve Better, and this stories are plenty hungry. But the conclusions felt like the first answer to the premise. Mamatas comes up with fascinating ideas, but the workings through of those ideas are all too often predictable, a dish without the necessary ingredient of surprise.