Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories

Rusch collects eight well-done recent speculative stories with death as a central theme. The elegiac title novella takes place in an alternate universe where the first manned flight to the moon missed its orbital insertion point, dooming its crew. “Diving into the Wreck,” expanded in Rusch's recent novel of the same title, concerns a salvage team that finds a derelict spaceship armed with a terrible weapon. Other notable stories include the fantasy “Substitutions,” in which men are granted immortality in exchange for their willingness to harvest souls at the point of death, and “June Sixteenth at Anna's,” in which an elderly man enters a VR recording of an exquisitely captured moment in his late wife's early life. Readers looking for serious, somber SF will appreciate Rusch's thoughtful examinations of sorrow and loss. (May)