Residential aliens anthology review

Lyn Perry sent me a PDF of this pod book (an outgrowth of a web based fantasy magazine) and I have read about a third of it. Lyn asked me to share my thoughts about this book, and I hope I do it justice. I liked a lot of what I read, although I'm afraid some of the stories are too focused on Christian mythology for my taste. I really enjoyed one flash story: "up or down" by Alex Moisi. The protagonist wakes up one morning to see an angel and a devil hovering over his bed and he has a choice to make. How he makes the choice is pretty charming. In "Harry and the thinking machine" Patrick Cox explores the response of a sailor to being accidentally transported to the deck of a starship 400 years in the future. The unexpected passenger and his fellows are fitted with devices that allow them direct mental contact with the ship's computer. I'm not sure that the protagonist of this story would really have accommodated so comfortably to his predicament. However, if one assumes his mind is that flexible, then the rest of the story is quite entertaining. Its greatest defect, in my opinion, is that the protagonist wonders whether the ship's computer has a soul, but then drops the subject. It is not picked up again. However, this story seems to be one of a series and if one regards it as an isolated chapter of a novel then the question will most likely be dealt with in some later chapter. "Not exactly plagiarism" by Rob Carr is a time travel story, and I've always enjoyed time travel stories. This one even has a plot like a flash story I wrote not long ago. In Carr's story, an unsuccessful author answers an e-mail spam ad about becoming a writer. He does it basically because he's bored, but he quickly finds out it's for real. Soon he is getting published in all sorts of prestigious venues and writing better than he ever had. This happy state of affairs does not last forever, and I really enjoyed the way Carr introduced the twist. I cannot unequivocally recommend this book, but I did enjoy a lot of what I read.

So this is not really a review, because I didn't read everything in the book.  At least not yet.