This is an excellent collection of short stories and essays by Brin. The stories don’t really have much of a theme, but the essays all touch on Brin’s theme of ‘otherness’: a valuing of diversity and change.
The essays are good, but the stories are uniformly excellent. In particular, Dr Pak’s Preschool left a lingering sense of unease after it, and is certainly not one that I’ll forget any time soon. Those Eyes (an alternative explanation for UFOs) and The Warm Space (biological and artificial intelligence tries to co-exist in the solar system) are lighter and left me with a smile, while they still have an edge to them. Even What Continues… And What Fails…, although it started off slowly grew to have some enormous themes, as well as ideas that were just thrown away, which could have formed entire novels themselves. Highly recommended.