Status Updates From Life Beyond Us: An Original...

Still as Bright - Kowal: Imogene has a plan to detect exoplanets, if she can get anyone to listen.

Devil in the Deep - Lukačovičová: People in a Bolivian mine make a discovery about "El Tio"...

Deep Blue Neon - Bianchi: Seeking out a mysterious whale in the South Pacific.

The Dangers We Chose - Older: A fun first contact story with underwater aliens.

Third Life - Czerneda: An alien with multiple phases in their life.

Forever the Forest - Heller: An intriguing sentient forest learns to communicate in some way with a crash-landed human.

The Diaphanous - Benford: An AI has an interesting discussion with plasma creatures out in the void.

The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj - Rappatta: This was just plain fun, I quite liked it, figuring out if these space creatures are sentient or not.

Defective - Watts: I could see this was interesting, I just couldn't understand Ondrej or the Agni situation.

The Mirrored Symphony - Spires: First contact with mirror aliens.

Lumenfabulator - Liu: Crystal creatures with poems.

Cyclic Amplication, Meaning Family - Takács: Solving first contact linguistics issues with prions!

The Last Cathedral of Earth, in Flight - Buckell: A ship of humans running from creatures evolved by a planet near a black hole.

The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery - Ivanov: A young woman at astronomer camp makes a startling discovery. Very good.

Human Beans - Bacon: Bizarre story of people being whisked away from Earth.

The Far Side of the Door - Mohamed: Colonists start falling from an apparent virus, but is it?

Ranya's Crash - Krieg: Ranya is from a group of abandoned humans on an incredibly strange and talkative planet (dragonflies are sassy), and here she seeks help from a dragonfly.

Spiral - Ratnakar: Weird mind thingy in space dust life.

The World of Silver - Petrásek: A human and an alien survive a crash and work together to survive the ice.

Spider Plant - Fisher: Trying to find the source of a radio signal from a planet without apparent civilization.

This is How We Save Them - Olukotun: Animal conservation in the future.

Cloudskimmer - Landis: Researchers in orbit around Venus find something in the clouds.

The Lament of Kivu Lacus - Zelkovich: Two researches deal with impending loss, while observing the local Titan whales. Good.

Heavy Lies - Larson: Well, that was freakin' weird. Alien intelligence (or is it?).

Hemlock on Mars - Choi: Making a tough decision about whether or not to cancel a mission to Mars to protect potential Martian life.

The Dog Star Killer - Bernardo: A young girl grows up to try to rescue her mother in space. Sweet.

Titan of Chaos - Nordley: A submarine stuck in an iceworm on Titan appears to be part of a murder plot.