primeideal

Reminder: when it comes to anthologies, I sometimes review books in which I and/or close friends have been contributors. If so, I don't review our piece(s). (Not necessarily specific to this book, I've read a couple other anthologies that released this year!)

The title/theme of this book is "This Exquisite Topology: a collection of happy abstractions." Topology is the branch of math where, the joke goes, you can't tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. Such an open-ended theme lends itself to a lot of different interpretations. Some engaged with math; I tended to like those! But a lot of them wound up on that border between free verse and flash fiction that, for me, often comes off as over-the-top word salad. If I had to infer the theme without the title or introduction, I would probably have guessed something about "too much of a good thing turns into body horror."

Anyway, some highlights for me included a poem and a story, respectively, with fantastic opening lines:

"Las Bruja-jas--troublemakers all--" "Bewitched Border," Lisa M. Bradley. ("Brujas" is Spanish for "witches," triple entendre!)

"Four-year-old Selka tipped her chair back and fell for a half-second. Half of her soul poured out before she caught herself." "Other," Emmie Christie.

"The Disappearance of 'Ways of Being'," by Cullen Wade, is about a mysteriously "lost" film. When I saw the specific reference to Bluesky at the beginning, I was like, "this will age well," but it goes on to engage with contemporary memes in a clever way.

That last bit was the quote they used in the parade of think pieces—or rather, the parade of variations on the same thinkpiece:
“Like an average Joe whose eulogy is full of superlatives he never earned when alive; like an estranged lover we can’t stop thinking about; like a bulldozed childhood home we dream of returning to, Ways of Being has been granted an indelible glamor by virtue of its inaccessibility. It isn’t quite that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone—the fact of its being gone allows us to invent what we had.”
They all said crap like that.

"Mirrorcat," by Robert Dawson, is about a cat lady, and it's also about a scientist character who actually...does science.

And some more mathy ones:

"A Mathematician's Guide to Being Normal," by Sam E. Sutin, is second-person POV and not really speculative, which are usually hard sells for me. But the way it riffs on many (extremely high-level-math, I wasn't familiar with many of them!) technical definitions of "normal" with the mundane struggles of ninth grade is playful and bold, and I think the conceit works.

Definition: In multivariable calculus, a vector is normal if it is perpendicular to some object or structure. Normal vectors help you define directions on a surface or curve at a given point. Specifically, they are essential in determining one’s orientation.

(I did have a slight quibble with this one, in that there didn't seem to be a consistent sense of when it was set; "You’ve only just gotten friends and if you lose them now everything will fall apart and you’ll get super depressed and it'll be like 9/11 all over again" makes it sound like the narrator is old enough to remember 2001, but her friends also make TikToks. It doesn't quite add up. Overall it seems to be early 2010s, shorly after I graduated high school, but again, the narrator seems to go to a lot more wild drunken parties than I did.)

And some free verse:

"Complex Alice in the Riding Hood" by Geoffrey A. Landis

Later, when the woodsman cut open the wolf, which is to say, performed a branch cut on the embedding function in the complex plane, who is to say that it was Red Riding Hood (that is, Alice) who popped out,

Branch cut! :D

"Rolling Over Indecision" by Brian U. Garrison, about the platonic solids/dice shapes:

Octahedron may prove handy

if you're needing to decide

which arm to chop off the giant squid

first, but you're probably safest

to sever them all as soon as possible.

Bingo: 5+ short stories, published in 2025, small/indie press, hidden gem. Again, I've read several different anthologies recently, so what works for one of these squares often works for all of them. ;)