Miniatures

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. It's hard to rate a short story collection, but this one is somewhat uneven.

Some of these are really funny. I especially enjoyed all the stories about everyday alien contact - so insane and always slightly gross. The story about Thumbbringer was my favorite, and I also liked the Redshirts story a lot. I haven't read Redshirts yet, and that story definitely moved it up my TBR list.

But the first few stories had some humor that I didn't like. I do know this collection goes back to the early 90s, so it's not a big deal; everybody's social conscience evolves over time. Actually, there is a clever and (imo) respectful joke about trans people in one of the alien stories (the most recently written one) - it had to do with human interaction with gender-changing aliens, and that this alien species would appreciate a human's announcement of their own gender transition on the alien's official gender-changing day, although the human would need to be careful of overenthusiastic alien camaraderie. I liked that because it was portrayed as just another ordinary experience humans might have with these aliens. I mostly hide away reading only very socially conscious fiction, so it's nice to see something like that in mainstream sci-fi.

For other reasons, I didn't like the lemonade story at all - this is not nice of me, but it felt like Dave Barry, and a real-world setting felt out of place in this collection. On the other hand, I thought the one non-comedic piece at the end, a poem about Odysseus' wife Penelope, was very good, even though it was completely different from everything else.

If you like John Scalzi's humor, or silly sci-fi humor in general, you will probably enjoy this. I listened to the audio version, and I really enjoyed the author's brief introductions. It's always great to hear authors talking about their own work. All of the narrators were very good also.