The Reinvented Heart: Tales of Futuristic Relationships

Though largely entertaining, this anthology of 24 stories from women and nonbinary authors lacks editorial clarity and is burdered with some confusing inclusions. If it’s meant to reexamine gender roles, a story like Devin Miller’s “Photosynthesis, Growth,” which presents “the girlfriend” as a literal flower whose ambitions are “to start a band...work in a shop... [or] take care of people” while her partner—the narrator—attends college feels out of place, with nothing terribly “futuristic” about the gender roles there. Naomi Kritzer’s “The Shape of the Particle,” meanwhile, sketches a pleasantly implausible picture of communal living but has no science fiction elements at all; the robot servers and artificial intelligence studies she references all exist now. More successful stories—among them, Seanan McGuire’s “Retrospect,” Xander Odell’s “Perfectmate™,” and AnaMaria Curtis’s lovely “Lockpick, Locked Heart”—zero in quickly on a single familiar element (laboratory research, dating apps, and paywalls, respectively), move that element into a foreseeable future, and depict their central relationships through that small, clear lens. It’s not wholly successful, but there’s enough here to please. (Mar.)