★★★★★ – I’m smitten.

Dammit. My fear was realized: The most exciting story in the anthology was written by the author only known as “Q”, meaning that I’m now interested enough to have to wonder who in heaven’s name Q is.

I’m taken with Q’s worldbuilding technique – details about the world are invariably presented like the bonus temporary tattoo in a popsicle wrapper: always slipped in with something tasty and engaging; always delivered with something to make taking it in extrinsically worth it. Chew on this early example:

One of the trails goes through an abandoned neighbourhood, and I like to make up stories about the people who might've lived there. For example, that reed shack with the caved-in roof? It belonged to an old Korean couple. Married 53 years. They ran a roller skating rink and went to a different theme park each year for their anniversary. (Yes, I know. Theme parks and skating rinks are like unicorns over here: people will send you to the looney bin if you say you've ever seen one. But it's my story; I can tell it like I want to.) See that sad-looking tree-hut by the thorngrove? The woman who lived there won the lottery. No one knew it till she disappeared to travel the world and left a fortune to her favourite animal charity. That red bamboo longhouse with the rope-swing housed a lesbian couple who were trying to get pregnant before the floods came.

In a paragraph, we’ve learned 1) that we’re in a spin on our own world, 2) that this place floods, 3) that it wasn’t always that way, 4) what the local architecture looks like, and 5) that we’re in a dystopia dour enough to lack theme parks. Not one of these was stated as a plain fact or in a “box text”-style description. Instead, the author gives us a device to make it exciting, and simultaneously builds out the perspective character’s personality. Supremely efficient. The venerable short story is the author’s home field.

The texture of the story changes dramatically throughout, what with changes of perspective (and with it, voice) and scenery, and since the character writing is already strong from the word “go”, it has its claws in you from start to finish. I’d read a whole book about the all-too-prosaically-named Joe Brown (who, although he seems a bit of a doormat, didn’t manage to roll my eyes further than 45° or so) and his emphatically more protagonistically named moitié Ellie Green. Hoo boy. Their romance had me hot under the collar all the way up to the tear ducts.

For the first time in Liberating Earth, a story ties into the framing narrative, rather than the street being exclusively one-way. The shining result is that it both is greatly augmented by the framing narrative and greatly augments it – the whole book, really! – in return. Note to self: When I end up writing for an anthology (I can’t imagine it won’t happen), communicate proactively with the editor – this sort of coordination and synthesis is only possible by going out into the yard and playing a bit of the good old conversational catch.

Figures that the story that captures me is the decidedly YA-esque one. I haven’t read YA in a long time – but though I am an A, I am, I suppose, still a Y one, so I shan’t hang my head in too much shame.