As for the stories, they are generally decent, but none stood out for me. I thought David Conyers's "The Uncertainty Bridge" the most intriguing, but I don't feel it quite managed to work. It's about a young man in a plague-riven area whose sister is the latest to take ill. Somehow he survives, though, only to learn a terrible secret behind the plague, and his resistance. Louis B. Shalako's "The Stud Farm" takes on an idea that's been examined before: aliens have conquered Earth, and humans are kept by them as riding animals -- very much like horses. Compare, for example, Carol Emshwiller's Philip K. Dick Award-winner The Mount (2002). In this story the main character is an adolescent, and the story, somewhat predictably, shows his first experience with one of his responsibilities, signaled by the title. We also get a brief picture of the alien-dominated society he lives in. It's not bad work, but not particularly special, either.

"Stippleback", by Colin P. Davies, tells of the attempt at revenge of the one survivor of a group of aliens who have been exterminated by an oppressive human ruler. His encounter with a helpful human changes his attitudes slightly. This is one of those pieces that I think would work better as part of a larger story. Finally, Jude Coulter-Pultz offers "No Man's Land," about an expedition investigating the disappearance of colonists from an alien planet. Could it be that there were unexpected local sentients? The setup is interesting, and the resolution cynically promising, but the execution of the story simply failed to convince me.