Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles (Conversation Pieces Series #26)

Claire Light's fiction shifts our perspective just enough off-center to render the world we know a strange and unfamiliar place. In this volume, a woman with the most thankless job in space will calculate a new kind of ''cold equation'' to get her home to port. In a fantastical place where adulthood is the biggest threat to adolescent boys, predators arise from unlikely quarters. In a world with wonky physics and no gravity, a lone human learns the meaning of ''reckless endangerment of alien life.'' And an alien abduction is only prelude to a long phantasmagoric journey. Interspersed with evocative flash fictions, this collection of stories luxuriates in the weird and wonky, half-lit realities and sidelong looks at painful truths.