The Fragrance of Orchids

From Aurora Award winner McBride (Indigo Time) comes an impressive, career-spanning collection of 14 sci-fi shorts. Thematically, the pieces vary enormously, but uniting them is a lovely sense of playfulness and the clear joy McBride takes in writing, which shines through both in the stories themselves and in the brief author’s notes that accompany each piece. (On attempting her only horror story, “Hello, Jane, Goodbye,” she writes, “I cracked my knuckles and confronted my fears.”) Many of these tales deal in classic sci-fi tropes, including alien invasion in “Speaking Sea,” life on other planets in “A Breath After Dying,” and self-aware computers in “Softlinks,” and though they sometimes feel expected, they’re always well executed. McBride’s talents truly shine, however, when she flips familiar setups on their heads. The best example of this is the standout title story, in which an alien—the last of her kind and raised on Earth since infancy—struggles with loneliness and searches for love, told from the perspective of her therapist. New readers and those who have followed McBride for decades will equally relish this collection. (July)