From Booklist
These nine stories set in the near and not-so-near future include a sampling of characters and settings Rusch has returned or hopes to return to in a novel. The Hugo-nominated novella "The Retrieval Artist" led to the series-opening novel
The Disappeared [BKL Je 1&15 02], but in the story, an absorbing character study, Miles Flint is a harder, more jaded detective than in the novel, complete with an attractive, double-crossing client. In "Dancers Like Children," a disgraced xenopsychologist, who is engaged to investigate whether a race of aliens is capable of understanding what they are doing to human colonists, gets a lesson in humanity; the story wound up, along with its successor here, "Alien Influences," in the Arthur C. Clarke-nominated
Alien Influences (1997). Other stories comment thoughtfully on subjects ranging from genetic testing in "Results" to mother-daughter relations in "Reflections on Life and Death" to what human cloning could mean to celebrity and journalism in "Flowers and the Last Hurrah," which includes a better plot twist in 40 pages than most novels ever manage.
Terrence MiltnerCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
