Know Your Enemy, by Matt Gallagher

More from the Wired Magazine Science Fiction issue.  Know Your Enemy is a tribute to Haldeman's The Forever War, and rings very true.  It's set in the future but that's not particularly important--the point is the relationship of war veterans to the rest of society.  We are in a period where we glorify military service beyond measure, partly to make up for the guilt of putting the soldiers in harm's way.  The protagonist in the story, a female Marine, reflects on this and many other things about being a disabled vet.  It's a good story, solidly written and allows drawing your own conclusions.  I give it 3 stars.

Hold Dear the Lamp Light, by Jay Dayrit

Continuing the Wired Magazine Science Fiction Issue: Hold Dear the Lamplight is one of several dystopian stories in the collection.  We see a picture of society failing, rather gracefully actually, through the story of the loss of a community's power plant.  In the story it's climate change taking the plant away, but this could be in any war torn disorderly country in the Middle East or Africa.  The family learns to make do.  It's sort of made to sound tragic but isn't.  Anyway, it's OK, 2 stars.

Stochastic Fancy, by Charlie Jane Anders

Continuing my review series on the Wired Magazine Science Fiction issue.  Stochastic Fancy has our protagonist sitting in a bar, answering polling questions into her KloudScape, which seems like a fancier and more immersive phone interface.  Her thing about incessant opinion polling is pretty on target.  In the story the polling is used as a real-time matchmaker.  Works so-so.  Story OK but forgettable.  2 stars.

The Black Box, by Malka Older

Another from the Wired Science Fiction issue.  The Black Box shares an element with the previously reviewed story Subtext, in that the technology it features is capable of recording and playing back your personal experiences.  The author illustrates how such an outsourced, potentially publicly available memory would shape a person's life.  It's kind of true to life in that it doesn't upend everything, the world is still recognizable.  It's fine, but not amazing.  2 stars from me.

Subtext: It Knows What You're Thinking, by Charles Yu

Another entry from the Wired Science Fiction Issue, Subtext is a literal stream of consciousness, as transcribed and possibly helpfully edited by the app.  Not much different than a raw first-person narrative, which is something of a staple in many fiction genres.  I guess the idea is that we're getting close to making it real.  I suppose we are.  2 stars.

The Evaluators, by N. K. Jemisin

Wired Magazine's January issue consists of 15 science fiction stories they commissioned to allow us to "approach reality a little more obliquely".  SF has always been the best way to tell truths about the future that mere prediction can't manage, and more importantly to tell truths about the present that are impossible to express directly. 

Most of the stories are freely available on their website, so I'll start with N. K. Jemisin's The Evaluators.  She tells the story of humans contacting an alien species through their correspondence. The story has the same driver as John Campbell's classic Who Goes There? (Link courtesy of Free SF Online)  A super powerful, adaptive predator threatens to subvert the species.  What Jemisin does with the predator's origin is what makes the story worth reading.  3 stars

The Owl Keeper, by Christine Brodien-Jones

My daughter asked me to read this book, and had a copy of it for herself--it's kind of stretching to say that it was free since I paid for it, but I'll count getting a second read out of it.

The Owl Keeper is aimed at the younger end of the YA set.  The protagonist Maxwell Unger thinks of himself as a sickly boy, kept at home by a nasty guardian who rules the household, including his weak parents.  Turns out she has influence far outside the household, and he's not so sickly.  He and a fierce girl (Artemis Rose) go out in search of the Owl Keeper to rescue their people from the Absolute Dark and the High Echelon.

What I liked best about this book was the very full and complex character of Artemis.  She is strong and impetuous in the extreme, being fully herself but needing Max to provide calm and make good decisions.  She made what was otherwise a much too youthful book for me a fun read. 

I can recommend this for 10-12 year olds with 3 stars.