Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales From Tomorrow

• Gartner, Zsuzsi
• Douglas & McIntyre; 2010
• Paperback; 464 pages
• 9781553654926

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland's balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Survivor, to Sheila Heti's meditative romp about beleaguered physicists and Oracle of Delphi-like Blackberrys, "Darwin's Bastards" is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza.