“The End of the Line” by Robert Silverberg

Stiamot is eager to learn more of the shapechangers and has sought out a local guide, a Dr Mundiveen. But Mundiveen turns out to have a past association with the Coronal – not a happy one.

These events are presented as long-past history, and there is a strong sense of inevitability about them – a tragic sense. We see no real agency on the part of the characters; it is not that they wouldn’t act, but that events overwhelm them. What we see is their reaction, and how they are affected. The reasons and motives driving events are concealed from them, as well, and thus to the readers. Just as matters reach a climax, the action fades into the ink of historical archive.
“Corn Teeth” by Melanie Tem

Sonya is an abandoned child in the process of being adopted by resident aliens on Earth. She is rather unclear about what this entails, but she wants it desperately, to belong and be loved. But her misunderstanding has consequences.

    “We’re gonna go talk to a judge and Yoolie and Ib and Zama are gonna say they want us forever and the judge is gonna say we’re their kids forever and there’s this big hammer and the judge’ll pound on the table with the hammer and then we’ll turn into Alayayxans.”

One of those stories in which the first-person narrator talks in a childish voice in run-on sentences, supposedly to engage reader sympathy, but I only find it irritating. The xenophobia is not original; the bureaucracy of social service agencies rings true.
“Paradise as a Walled Garden” by Lisa Goldstein

Alternate history: an Elizabethan age of steam. Tip works in a manufactory staffed largely by robots [here called homunculi] made in Al-Andulus, which tries to keep secret the advanced technology it sells to backwards Christian nations like England. One day the homunculi malfunction [rebel] and try to wreck their workplace. The foreman, along with Tip, is sent by Queen Elizabeth to Al-Andulus to make an official inquiry, Tip being a clever girl working as a boy who knows how to read the Arabic numerals on the steam dials – a perfect cover for an industrial spy.

    So no one in England knew how the homunculi worked, Tip thought. She had always wondered about that. And she saw immediately what Elizabeth was doing, that she was blackmailing the Arabs, making them share their precious knowledge to keep news of the homunculi’s rebellion from spreading to other countries. Many people had called Elizabeth a clever queen in Tip’s hearing, or a cunning one if they disliked women, but Tip had never understood why before.

I liked this alternate history scenario, the power games, espionage and sabotage among the various kingdoms and states of the age. I would have liked the story much better if it hadn’t emptied the box labeled STEAMPUNK of all its brass gears, steam cars, airships and automatons. Spunky girl disguised as a boy? Disaffected labor replaced by mechanicals? None of this is new. And at some point, the Caliph’s court seems to have gotten its hand on one of the Star Trek universal translators. That would be new.
“Watch Bees” by Philip Brewer

Post apocalypse. Farms are growing self-sufficiency and protecting themselves from bandits and raiders with GM watch bees, programmed to recognize strangers. David has come to the Ware farm in Illinois to steal some of the bees to protect his family’s orchard, because in Michigan, profit-seeking corporations have engineered bees that can’t reproduce a new queen. But the genetic engineering has made this more complicated than he’d supposed, and besides, he’s falling for the Ware’s daughter Naomi.

The nature of the apocalypse that has so altered life is not specified, but I would guess it had something to do with oil. This and many of the other issues that make up this interesting scenario are quite timely: agribusiness has increasingly replaced crops with patented varieties that don’t produce fertile seed, and colony collapse disorder has made us realize how very much we depend on bees [although I understand that native orchard mason bees are in fact more efficient as pollinators for tree fruit than honeybees]. But where I don’t follow the author is in his claim that the GM watch bees would be so expensive that fruit growers in Michigan couldn’t afford them, would instead take such extreme measures as we see in David’s case. Simply put – you don’t make a profit by pricing yourself out of the market, and Sayes Law, that demand creates its own supply, would seem to be contradict the premise in this case.