I received this arc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.I liked the stories. Most of them were very captivating and I was hooked instantly, often I was surprised that the story ended already, I would like to know what happenes next.4 shiny stars for this collection of short sci-fi stories.

I pick up a local book in every state I’m in and this was my Pennsylvania book. Immediately fell in love and added every other book Lackey has written to my wishlist. Amazing short stories that I can read again and again.

This was a fantastic collection of scifi short stories. They range from cute and humorous to unsettling creepy. Some fill you with optimism and hope for future generations and space explorations whereas others have you clutching your pillow and remembering those terrifying words from Alien, "in space, no one can hear you scream." Definitely worth reading.Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the reading copy.

This lovely collection of short stories from established writer Jamie Lackey spans the gamut from grim, tightly paced post-apocalyptic thrills to quietly sensitive character pieces to hauntingly poetic, atmospheric dystopias. Ms. Lackey's characters grapple with complex, morally ambiguous choices that test our understanding what it means to be human. The title story quietly orchestrates one woman's resilience against the dangerous isolation of deep space exploration. Structured as a love story,

A breath of fresh air in the cluttered SF/F landscape.Writing short stories is often harder than writing novels. In a novel, you've got room to sprawl. In a short story, every word counts. Even Jo Walton admits that she has a rough time with them (though you'd never know it, based on the end product). Pittsburgh author Jamie Lackey, however, avoids all the usual short fiction pitfalls to deliver on a solid volume of stories you'll want to read over and over.So often SF/F is cold and heartless, w...

For me to consider a short story to be really good, it must leave me tingly once I finish. This collection had many stories that did just that. I rated each story individually, and would overall recommend this collection. A Metal Box Floating Between Stars - 5/5. The title story is a sweet, stasis pod romance, set on a colony ship in space. What Comes After - 5/5. A woman changes what mortality means while finding a way to cure herself of cancer. Losing Home - 5/5. Terrifying worm parasites. I w...

Lackey’s collection of short stories is pleasantly surprising. With twice as many short stories as I expected when I first requested the collection for reviewing, the variety and quality meet every ideal marker in the science fiction canon: love, politics, life, ethics, and questions about the intimacy of being human. The sheer quantity of stories (my favorite perhaps being the titular, which set me off on a lovely high note) did leave some room for variety in quality. There is a special effort

I found myself pleasantly surprised by this collection of short stories. Starting off with the charming titular story - quite a wide range of stuff explored here - from aliens to clones to assassins to nanobots to off-world colonisation. My favourites are the aforementioned titular story and The Retired Angel of Death. Overall I found these nice caps to read at the end of the day when all you want is a good yarn. Recommended! Definitely put this author on my radar.First Finished: September 5thSo...

A Metal Box Floating Between Stars and Other stories was a very interestingly varied anthology of Horror sci-fi.A Metal Box Floating Between Stars was a sweet and inventive romance of pen pals on a space stationWhat Comes After is in a word an amazing story of transcendence Losing Home a creepy and scary story of a rescue and escape from the worms the best line '" I wish my dad was a terrorist instead of a hunter..."Broken Promises is a creepy story of discovering spiders like Aliens a suto Stoc...

A Metal Box Floating Between Stars - 5/5Holy shit that was so cute!! From the opening paragraphs, I was expecting story where one by one people would stop waking up but instead I got a cute story about people bonding over robot pets and long "distance" letterWhat Comes After - 3.5/5This was interesting. I feel like it could have benefitted from being longer. I know the author's focus was on the emotional and human side of the story but I wanted to know more about how the politics of being upload...

The first thing to say about the paperback is that it's another lovely Air and Nothingness Press product. Lovely to hold in the hand, lovely to read, lovely on the shelf. I urge you to seek them out, and to force AaN to publish second and third editions.This is the second AaN Lackey collection I've read, the first being The Blood of Four Gods and Other Stories (see my review) which was primarily Fantasy. This volume is primarily Science Fiction, though better labeled Speculative Fiction. It is q...

Oh my goodness. So. I need a movie version of "A Metal Box Floating Between Stars" (the titular story) like, ASAP. Preferably starring (heh pun) Idris Elba. Jamie writes these incredibly lush stories that pull you in as deeply as a novel does. I recommend reading one a day with a warm beverage. Her prose is a master class in economical and precise word choice.

NOTE: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This review is my honest opinion of the book. This book contains 19 short speculative/SF stories that include everything from family, semi-sentient AI (Fluffy the cleaning bot is absolutely adorable!), odd-ball aliens, space exploration, clones, assassins, alien invasions, zombie fungi, to a whole range of other strange and wonderful combinations and original ideas. The writing is beautiful and concise, the stories original and thought-provoki...

I realized it’s been a minute since I’ve read some science fiction and, since I do believe in a diverse literary diet and since this one so conveniently popped up on Netgalley, it just had to be read. I’ve never heard of the author, but glad to have discovered her. She’s definitely talented, at least going by these stories. The collection itself is very small, 19 stories that last maybe 150 minutes at most, but it’s a time well spent. The first one had me thinking this might be romance leaning,

What a collection this was! I think out of all the stories maybe two didn't hit the mark for me, but were still good reads. The rest I absolutely loved.Jamie Lackey certainly has mastery of the short story. The stories in this book are short yes but they feel complete. The reader is not left lacking or expecting more, which is sometimes the trouble with a short story.I cannot pick a favorite.

A collection of SF short stories and flash fiction. Definitely a solid collection, and there are a few stand-outs. The title story was my personal favorite: a quiet love story stretched across time and space, which gave me "Voices From a Distant Star" vibes. My only complaint was that I felt the stories could have used more variety, in terms of subject matter & tone. And some of the shorter works lacked a real emotional punch to get me very invested. But if you're looking for a solid collection

This is longer than I meant for it to be.In all fairness, when I started making notes and made the decision to loosely “review” each story as I went, I wasn’t aware there were so damn many because I’m about as observant as a potato going on a bird sighting and fly through the first index pages without paying attention. I was expecting maybe five or six short stories, not nineteen tiny stories, but by the time I realized I had dug my hole like a dumbass, I had to accept that it’s always been my f...

Jamie Lackey's short stories never disappoint, and this collection is no exception. Each story pulls you in to a new, exciting world, and you'll find yourself wishing you could to explore and chat with the characters just a little bit longer while at the same time eager to turn the page and explore the next. The perfect short story collection to live permanently within reach of your favorite seat.

[I was given a free digital copy through NetGalley]Usually, my choices of reading are longer pieces of work, so when I saw that there was a collection of science fiction short stories, I had to dip my toes in the water. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, and somewhere in the back of my head, my novel-brain was probably expecting all of these stories to be connected, but the only connection these stories had was the genre and that was really refreshing for me. Sometimes they would be about love,...