This is Marek’s third collection. Disappointingly, none of the stories match that brilliant title. But it’s a disappointment I soon overcame once I started reading the collection.

Most of the twenty-one pieces deal with the intersection between technology and our daily lives (even if that urban life occurs on a space station). But you wouldn’t know that with the opening piece, “We Won’t Show Any of This,” an intense monologue between a director and an actor. The director explains the motivation of the actor’s character, but at a level of detail that’s more than anyone would ever need to know, especially when we discover that this scene is unlikely to make it to screen. It’s a funny slice of absurdity. 

The second story is more indicative of the rest of the collection. Presented as an article penned by a science fiction writer, it deals with the history of a failed piece of technology, Cog Shift, which can control a person’s body, switching off their consciousness during exercises. (You can imagine how that might end up being a terrible idea).

With “Poppin” and “Pale Blue Dots”, he gets on the AI-is-evil bandwagon. The former sees a digital assistant start making relationship decisions on behalf of its user. In the latter, an AI makes a digital copy of its user to live a life free of doubts, regret and anything remotely human. Several of the stories take us into space. I especially liked “Lightspeed”, set on a space station where time dilation is straining the relationship between a pilot and his family. 

Between the science fiction, there are moments of surrealism and humour. “Commit. Plunge. Bam!” sees one superhero, Mr Indomitable, take relationship advice from Leopard Man. The joke goes on for a little too long, but it’s still funny. And I loved “The Bullet Racers”, about a boy who outraces a bullet in an annual race.

But my favourite story is the magnificent “End Titles”. Like “Commit. Plunge. Bam!” it’s written entirely in dialogue, but in this case, it’s the transcript of an episode of Desert Island Discs. On the show, Professor Brody Maitland chooses his favourite tunes and discusses discovering the Hermes Particle, an extraordinary, human-shaping discovery. But bubbling underneath all that is Maitland’s deep jealousy of his sister, who, despite all the famous things he did, was always viewed (at least in Maitland’s eyes) as the more successful. It’s a spiky portrait of jealousy and fame.

There’s more to like here — I go into far more detail in my Locus review… due next month — but if you need a serving of top-quality genre short fiction, this will sort you.