And now the third review in a row of a book I got sent as a free ARC, thus discharging all of my current review obligations. I feel kind of bad about how long it took me to get to this; I didn’t get a release date when they sent me the book, and I put it on a sort of mental “find out when this is coming out” list, only to discover it had already been released when they sent it to me. So this is not timely; my apologies.

This is a hell of a concept for an anthology, really; the back cover describes it as “a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology filled with own-voices stories from neurodivergent creators”– in other words, stories about neurodivergent people encountering aliens, written by people who are themselves neurodivergent but presumably have not encountered aliens. I find the word “neurodiversiverse” immensely fun to say, and while anthologies aren’t always my thing, there are certainly some gems to be found in here. Cat Rambo’s Scary Monsters, Super Creeps is about a young woman with an anxiety disorder who discovers it gives her superpowers, and Ada Hoffman’s Music, Not Words is about an autistic girl who is the first contact for an alien race.

Most of the authors in the collection are people I’m not familiar with, though; I sort of jumped around rather than reading the collection straight through (how do people usually read anthologies? Is that weird?) and Lauren D. Fulter’s The Cow Test is probably the standout of the rest of the anthology, for me at least. It involves cows. It’s a short story, I’m not spoiling the details. 🙂 There are art pieces and poetry as well. Some of the aspects of neurodivergence that get explored here are really interesting; Jody Lynn Nye’s A Hint of Color is about synesthesia, for example, and Keiko O’Leary’s Close Encounter In the Public Bathroom is the only poem I’ve ever read that combines being about OCD and aliens.

No, seriously, this anthology made me recommend a poem. That’s worth picking up, right?