Polyphony
I may write a fuller review some other time, but for now just wanted to say that I've finished reading Polyphony, vol. 1, and am really rather impressed. By the halfway point I was thinking of it as not bad but not great, but after reading (and really liking) the second half of the book, I looked back at the table of contents and realized that in fact I'd liked all but one of the stories in the book. (Oddly, the one that didn't really do anything for me was the one I most expected to like, the Andy Duncan piece, which is the first story in the book, which I think had a lot to do with why I started out feeling lukewarm about the book. As for that story, I suspect I'm missing the context, having never heard of Charlie Poole before.)
Not that I like them all equally well, mind you. But I keep wanting to name favorites from this volume, and realizing that I can't pick just one or two favorites. But I will note that among my favorites are the two first sales: "Anthropology," by Victoria Elisabeth Garcia, and "The Room on the Roof," by Vandana Singh. Everybody who reviews this mentions those stories, and I thought perhaps it was just a case of wanting to say nice things about newcomers, but no, I have to agree that these are really strong stories.
For details on the stories, see Sherwood Smith's review in Tangent.
Um, I should note that I'm not the most unbiased of readers; we've published fiction by four of the authors here (and one of the editors), and nonfiction by at least two of them (in fact, Vandana is the author of this week's article at SH, about extrasolar planets), and I've interacted in a friendly sort of way, online or in person, with almost all of them.