This is ordered by ascending order of favorites.
Kill Team Kill
A platoon in Afghanistan fights a cybernetically-enhanced bear created by the CIA. It had its humorous moments, but far too gory and cartoonish, in the figurative sense, for me to get attached to this.
Mason’s Rats
An old farmer invests in some high-tech weaponry to deal with his rat infestation. Like Kill Team Kill, there wasn’t much here to interest me. Maybe if I kept a tally of all the curse words it would’ve made the runtime go by a little more quickly.
Three Robots: Exit Strategies
Three robots continue their examination of an earth after humans are extinct. I didn’t like the first part from Volume 1 because of the dialog, and I didn’t like this one for the same reason. Also, the childish “push button” worldview morality, which I might explain in a future post. This story was written by John Scalzi, who wrote I book I tried to read, the title of which I don’t remember, but I couldn’t go on after the second chapter.
Night of the Mini Dead
A miniature, quadruple-time zombie apocalypse. Nothing much here but some fun visuals. The mutated, overgrown zombies belching Greek fire and the zoom-out into a miniature galaxy-view of things were both well done.
In Vaulted Halls Entombed
A special forces rescue team fights a monstrous presence in the caves of Afghanistan. I can always tell when a writer stitches their anti-religious beliefs onto a story, because it really doesn’t seem to flow with the rest of the story. Likely, it was badly shoehorned in by an editor who needed his opinion known. Interesting ending.
Bad Travelling
A sailor strikes a deal with the large carnivorous crab that just attacked his ship, to take it to an inhabited island for feasting. Loved the dialog, stylized character physiologies—and how Torrin outsmarted the rest of his shipmates—but this was too gross for me to mark it as a favorite.
Swarm
A scientist pays a visit to a researcher living with an hive of insects that has been traveling through space and evolving for millions of years. Until the ending part, this one wasn’t horror but it was likely to squeam some folks that are insect-averse. It reminded me a bit of Star Trek in that there were interactions between alien species that weren’t automatically hostile. If you have beings that satisfy a certain intelligence or self-awareness threshold, and they come together, it’s not necessarily the case that it will be all out war from the very first encounter onward. We might have been conditioned a bit too much to think that way, but a there are a lot of science fiction stories, like this one, that propose a more real-life interaction.
The Very Pulse of the Machine
An astronaut on Io, dragging along the corpse of her crewmate, learns there’s more to the moon than previously thought. This was excellent but the ending hurt me so bad because of the way the protagonist’s situation was framed. If Kivelson’s oxygen is one minute from running out, and the extraction ship wouldn’t be anywhere near her when that happens, her big choice was not a difficult one; she was going to die anyways. Ultimately her struggle was a physical one, and she lost. This story was a spark gap’s distance away from being my favorite of the series, but this major flaw at the conclusion—and a few minor ones leading up to it—knocked it down to second place. I have half a mind to rewrite the script (keep that in your pocket for now), even though it was based on a short story of the same name that won some awards, so what do I know?
Jibaro
A greedy, deaf conquistador contends with a waterbound siren guarding her home’s treasures. Oh my, goodness gracious…this was a masterpiece of animation and visual storytelling, depicting an everyday dysfunctional relationship through the back-and-forth between Jibaro and the siren. Here’s the video of the inciting incident of the story. I honestly couldn’t find any fault with the story overall, which is why it’s in the number one spot. One minor quibble is that it’s a little too bloody and intense for younger audiences (the perfect story, to me, wouldn’t exclude certain maturity levels). Describing too much of Jibaro isn’t going to be enough of an explanation so you’d just have to see it for yourself, even if just for the surface-level experience: for the sound design, and especially for the animation, which was indistinguishable from live action videography. It’s amazing to think the director, Alberto Mielgo, was likely working with a fraction of a budget that well-known animation studios have at their disposal, and was able to knock out something like this.