XIII: Tales of Transformation

Too many of the 29 entries in this anthology celebrating change%E2%80%94a theme that doesn't entirely manifest in all the stories%E2%80%94are hobbled by unfortunate prose, some genuinely cringeworthy ("swing your canal boat of pirate literature just so so you don't lose your balance of good taste and fall into the waters of lawsuit"). Those stories that do offer intriguing angles don't follow through successfully.Liz Argall's "Augustus Clementine" may be the first ever written about a sentient "less than ordinary roller skate," but the story of its transformation into a prosthetic limb, and eventually into part of a "sculpture with many other limbs to speak of greater truths he did not understand," is more pretentious than precocious. And the humor of a soccer tournament featuring teams such as Uncollapsed Wave Front, Kepler's Laws, and Metaconsciousness United, with one team scoring by "setting part of the ball's trajectory in a time when the [defending] wall wasn't there," isn't realized. (Mar.)