My thoughts
Finished
One of the best sci-fi and speculative fiction anthologies I've ever read. I started it yesterday and read all but the last chapter in my first sitting. I'll try to keep this review spoiler free, but I will be discussing format and general concepts so be warned! Some stories breathe fresh life into otherwise well explored topics and others prospect concepts I've yet to come across. To avoid spoilers, I won't go into detail but if you're interested in the intersection between humanity, sentience, the internet and technology in general you'll like most of the stories in this anthology. qntm uses varied mediums to tell their stories ranging from a series of "tweets", a blog post, wiki articles and your standard third-person limited fiction perspective. The shifting format kept me on my toes from story to story and really made the book feel fresh all the way through. Many of the stories feel like they were pieces of media or documentation snatched right out of an alternate reality, or some near future largely in part to the format's they're written in. I was also impressed with the level of world-building done in such short stories (especially so in the wiki articles). So much is left unsaid about these worlds, and I was left after most story's theory crafting about the surrounding situations mentioned in passing and the term's left undefined. If you love short and sweet sci-fi that's not afraid to get a little technical, I can't recommend this book more!