This is what sf could--and should--be. ( )

Man, I am in love with Nancy Kress. The woman can write no wrong. In this latest collection, she once again displays the mastery of the short story. While her novels are good, her short stories are great.

My favorite of the collection was "Mirror Image". Filled with a universal scale of wonder, the story links the lives of five sister-selves; inter-connected beings in a post human galaxy intertwined by an all knowing membranous A.I. At the same time of overwhelming scientific insights, Kress floods the story with familial hopes and love.

Also to be noted is the story "Patent Infringement". Simultaneously hilarious and frightening, this brief tale is composed of a series of memos between an exec and a lawyer of a large drug company fighting the claims from an ordinary guy, that the corporation stole his genetic information for developing it's new super-drug.

While I mentioned these two stories in particular, I must note that every story is worth the price of admission. Kress has put together another profound work.

I read three of the stories, "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls," "Patent Infringement," and "Computer Virus," (about 70 pages out of 324 before quitting. The plots kept my attention and the technological speculation was interesting, but I gave it up because there was no connection to the characters. I think this may have been because there is little detail nor sensory description to draw the reader into the characters' world.

However, I wanted to finish the stories that I read, and I enjoyed Kress's notes on the writing of each story. ( )