Oh, and here's a spoiler warning, although I'll try not to spoil anything too much.

Eclipse Three should be required reading among anyone who wants to write short stories — or, for that matter, among anybody who still clings to the hope that short fiction can be enriching. The storytelling in this volume is, for the most part, both polished and bumpy — that is, it gives you the assurance from the first sentence that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows what s/he is doing, but it also contains lots of irregularities and odd surprises. These are almost all stories by people who know how to set up, and subvert, expectations without seeming manipulative or crass.

I had high hopes for Eclipse Three already — the first two volumes from editor Jonathan Strahan were superb (you can read my review of volume two here.) And the list of contributors for the third volume is pretty awe-inspiring, including Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Maureen McHugh, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nicola Griffith and Paul Di Filippo. (Not to mention a lovely, previously unpublished cover by the late Richard Powers.)

But it's actually better than I'd hoped. Pretty much all I need to say about the quality of the stories in this volume is that the Peter S. Beagle entry does not stand out. By which I mean, it's as rich and clever and epic-feeling as any Peter Beagle short story — but you don't feel as though you've stumbled on the one standout story in the book. A number of the other stories in the book are just as instantly engrossing, and have that "personal but also huge and world-encompassing" feeling that Beagle does so well.

A lot of the best stories in this volume follow a main character who encounters a stranger who opens up a bizarre world. In Beagle's story, it's a magician who meets a woman whose husband and little girl have died, and shows her how to play a trick on death. In Molly Gloss' "The Visited Man," it's a weird (and not very good) painter who befriends a man whose wife and son have also died, forcing the widower to adopt more and more animals and go in search of night ghosts. In Nnedi Okorafor's "On The Road," it's a little boy who shows up at a woman's door in Nigeria, carrying with him some kind of terrible hunger that hollows you out from the inside.

There are also a lot of stories about people's relationships with odd communities, including Fowler's opening piece, where a rebellious teenage girl gets sent to a nightmarish kind of "boot camp" where her spirit is broken (and the camp turns out to have a weird secret). Or Di Filippo's "Yes, We Have No Bananas," in which a guy gets evicted and goes to live on a houseboat in a world that we (and he) gradually realize is an alternate universe. In Pat Cadigan's "Don't Mention Madagascar," a woman gets caught up in a world of travelers who are being forever being shuttled around impossible destinations — is it the spirit world? Alternate universes? — and they form an odd sort of community.

A lot of the stories have to do with creativity and the life of the artist, including Maureen McHugh's "Useless Things," the story of a sculptor who gets robbed and finds herself hardening against the world, and Elizabeth Bear's mermaid-meets-guitarist tale. Most of all, many of these stories deal with loneliness and loss, and the strange discoveries that come to people who've given up on finding themselves in this world.

The best story in the book, though, is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," the jaw-dropping story of freakish biochemistry experiments, venture capital, and a lesbian lapdance that goes much further than anyone expects. It's reminiscent of the thrilling leap-in-the-dark feeling of her novel Slow River, but feels even more intense and weird, maybe because nothing could be weirder than a strip club in Marietta, Georgia.

Though a few stories in the book didn't thrill me quite as much as the rest, and purists may protest that a few of these stories are more literary than speculative, Eclipse Three is almost entirely a great prize. I didn't realize how much my faith in the short stories had dwindled, after reading dozens of unsustaining tales, until I read these stories. It made me want to go back to writing short fiction myself, something I've been neglecting, in the vain hope that I can write something half as engrossing as the tales in this collection. [Borders]

McHugh, who won accolades for her novel China Mountain Zhang, has written a funny, thoughtful story about what would happen if the middleware you ran on your giant UNIX network achieved a form of consciousness on the level of a shark. How would you debug it when it started behaving in a shark-like manner and randomly messing with your data? Would it be unethical to revert the system?

And Duchamp, whose Marq'ssan Cycle earned praise from Samuel Delaney, writes about the first man to be fitted with a wearable artificial womb that feeds nutrients to his baby via a placenta-like filter that siphons his blood into the baby's body. It's a really weird story, in part because it deals mostly with how this fairly manly guy deals with being pregnant — and with his wife's ambivalence about having children at all. This is not at all your usual gender-role-switching story. Highly recommended.

Plugged In [via Aqueduct Press]

In "Any Given Day," reporter from National Public Internet (which has replaced NPR) interviews a teenager in 2018, and the transcript has the feeling of a real interview from All Things Considered, including little musical segues. In McHugh's future world, the Baby Boomers are all getting into their 70s and are desperately availing themselves of genetic treatments to restore their lost youth and gain a second chance at being kids. (But you can always tell a rejuvenated Boomer, because they're not young on the inside.)

Our teen hero has had sex with a Boomer named Terry, and then contracts a weird new STD. It seems "contaminated batches of genetic material associated with the telemerase" used in Terry's rejuvenation therapy has converted itself into a proto-virus called pv414. And now the teenager, Emma, has had to take grueling treatments to guard against possible cancers and "hairy cell leukemia." Even after she's pronounced cured, she's constantly worried about getting sick and feels all slowed down and cautious. It's as if Terry, in his selfish quest to stay young another 50 years, has stolen Emma's youth inadvertently. Emma, meanwhile, belongs to a new youth subculture called "Culture Freaks," which tries to borrow from specific non-white cultures, like India or Egypt, as much as possible.

This being NPI, whenever we get to a particularly intense skein of Emma's memories, we suddenly cut to a piece of Baby-Boomer easy listening music, as in this section, where Emma narrates losing her virginity to an older teenager:

Emma: I was fourteen when I lost my virginity. I was drunk, and there was this guy named Luis, he was giving me these drinks that taste like melon, this green stuff that everybody was drinking when they could get it. He said he really liked all my Egyptian stuff and he kept playing with my slave bracelet. The bracelet has chains that go to rings you wear on your thumb, your middle finger, and your ring finger. "Can you be my slave?" he kept asking and at first I thought that was funny because he was the one bringing me drinks, you know? But we kept kissing and then we went into the bedroom and he felt my breasts and then he wanted to have sex. I felt as if I'd led him on, you know? So I didn't say no.

I saw him again a couple of times after that, but he didn't pay much attention to me. He was older and he didn't go to my school. I regret it. I wish it had been a little more special and I was really too young.

Sometimes I thought that if I were a boy I'd be one of those boys who goes into school one day and starts shooting people.

(Music—"Poor Little Rich Girl" by Tony Bennett.)

It would be easy to make a story like "Any Given Day" into a polemic or a flat-out satire, but McHugh gives the story more emotional resonance. The real focus of the story isn't even Emma's disease, but the relationship between Emma, Terry, and the rest of Emma's friends — which leads up to an explosive conclusion. "Interview: On Any Given Day" is part of McHugh's story collection Mothers And Other Monsters, which is now a free Creative Commons download from Small Beer Press. [Small Beer Press]