Corporate sponsorship has some upsides. When Microsoft wants to do a sci-fi anthology, it gets some of the most brilliant writers in the field. I think everyone here has at least one Hugo, Nebula, or Campbell award.

The stories lean towards hard sci-fi, and while they're generally optimistic about technology, Microsoft didn't buy loyalty. The company doesn't appear by name at all, and when a similar entity does show up (big Pacific NW tech company) its is usually as suits threatening to cut funding from the cool projects before they appear. Some guesses as to the cool tech demoed for the authors: machine translation, quantum computing, emotional intelligence, and SETI. Microsoft is more than Office and Xbox and a warehouse of unwanted Zunes. They want to remind people that they're on the cutting edge.

The stories are all solid, but my favorites came at the end. David Brin delivers a sharp and funny take on skeptical magicians debunking various types of fraudsters, and how we as a species can get better about thinking about the future (it'd be great if various speculating idiots were held to some level of accuracy in their speculation, which I'm sure we'll get around to doing in the next Critical Six Months, or Friedman), and Ann Leckie with a story about violence between two alien species variously aided and abetted by faulty machine translation.

Since last I checked this collection is free, you've got nothing to lose. Track down a link and enjoy the beneficence of the Beast of Redmond.