Sorry you haven’t heard from me recently; it’s been a busy month. There was the trip to South Carolina, four days at home, a week-long family cruise (from which I still haven’t gone through the pictures, though I intend to, in order to share some), the book-launch event in Massachusetts (I was there for three days), and now, finally, trying to get back up to speed.

In the midst of all that comes this wonderful review of Jewish Futures from the Elder of Ziyon blog:

“[M]any of these stories are good enough to be included in collections of the best SF of the year.… [Samantha] Katz is an enormously talented writer for a 16 year old high school student.… Leah Cypress’ ‘Frummer House’ is a laugh-out-loud funny story about smart homes that suddenly enforce a higher level of religiosity on their Jewish residents than they are comfortable with. It is so steeped in frumkeit that it has its own glossary so everyone else could understand it. For religious Jews who would get the references, the book is worth it for this story alone.… ‘Initial Engagement’ by Steven H. Silver uses a future world to help us understand our world [and] is the epitome of what SF should be.… The longest, and best, story in the collection is ‘Moon Melody’ by SM Rosenberg. It is outstanding in how it explores the moral issues of [the characters’ superpowers].… I would be surprised and disappointed if ‘Moon Melody’ is not included in the Best of the Year anthologies for 2023.… Altogether, it is a really good collection of stories, with a higher percentage of stories that I enjoy than most anthologies I have read. There have been other Jewish science fiction anthologies… but this is to my mind by far the best, the most professional, and the most Jewish of all of them.”