From a group of RPG authors and contemporary sci-fi standouts (Ken Liu, Madeline Ashby, Karin Lowachee), comes a solid collection of stories set in the dark cosmos of Eclipse Phase.

I've got mixed feelings on Eclipse Phase the RPG. On the one hand, the setting a cool mashup of my man Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, The Singularity, and H.P. Lovecraft. On the other hand, the rules are a mess that actively oppose the fiction of the game. And on the third augmented cyborg hand, it doesn't do a good job of giving people comprehensible and cool things to explore and do, or the sense that there's much life in transhuman culture. This collection does a little in that direction, but mostly just hits on the familiar tropes of action and horror. Firewall team investigates weird events, finds mutilated bodies, there's a shootout, reboot from backups and try again. On the plus side, there's a strong editorial vision that maintains consistency with the setting throughout. The flip-side of that is that the stories wind up feeling and sounding very similar, and I felt that a few could have been trimmed.

The two stories that stood out were "Prix Fixe" by Andrew Penn Romine, where wealthy gourmet follows a celebrity chef to a hidden asteroid restaurant to discover that the next leap in cuisine is more than she bargained for, and "Stray Thoughts" by F. Wesley Schneider, which dials down the hypertech to focus on a noir story about a Venusian private eye and her son. "White Hempen Sleeves" by Ken Liu, leads the collection and puts the rest of the standard tales to shame.

Fans of Eclipse Phase will like this collection, sci-fi fans in general less so.