Ninth Planet by Jason Palmer is a collection of original science fiction short stories and one fantasy tale. The compilation comprises nine complete stories, each reading wholly independent of the other as stand-alone pieces. They vary widely in length, tone, tenor, and style, with stories such as Starter House, where a family that resides in a living, breathing house faces the consequences of their callousness. Conditional Perfect weaves together the perversity of 'love' where its object is an unwitting recipient; and Martin the Dictator, who makes a shocking non-decision decision regarding one-hundred and fifty million alien refugees that turns out to have consequences on a microscopic level.

Jason Palmer has one heck of a creative imagination and one would hope that Ninth Planet turns out to be the first of many anthologies he gifts science fiction readers. With the world-building required in order just to set the foundation of a science fiction story that has any hope of engrossing a reader, the skill needed to embed technology, language, social structure, character development, and a whole plot into a few pages is really, really hard to come by. The rogue fantasy short story, Another Man's Treasure, was my least favorite. It's as well written as the others but somehow including magic among sci-fi mechanics feels like cheating. My favorite is Jacob and the Angels, a story that rides along an arc of solving a mystery but has an undertone of beautiful irony when early on a character complains about how crappy dialogue in a novel can be in a story that Palmer has constructed primarily out of dialogue. The difference? Palmer's is exceptional. Very highly recommended.

Jason Palmer has collated a combination of nine science fiction and fantasy stories and delivers them in a single volume called Ninth Planet. The science fiction stories include, but are certainly not limited to, a man who embodies the saying, “You don't own your house, your house owns you,” in Starter House and one sorry Charley who becomes a futuristic petri dish for billions of years lost species in Son of Man. The fantasy story is called One Man's Treasure and follows a hero's journey with some unexpected sights and, more pointedly, scents, with an unexpected twist that sheds light on the origin of the story's title. All nine of Palmer's short stories are stand-alone.

I was so amused by Martin the Dictator that I bookmarked it so I could go back whenever I wanted to smile. As the story goes, no country on Earth is willing to take in refugees who come from somewhere in deep space after losing everything. The theme is reminiscent of the xenophobia Western countries exhibit today, a willingness to take in 'their own' but not 'others'. What's interesting is that Martin technically makes a choice by not making one at all, and the hundred million plus that land are unlikely to have any negative impact on the country. Or that anyone would even notice they are there. The nuances of Jason Palmer's themes in Ninth Planet are as crafty as the stories and the parallels between science fiction and hints at realism are all there. Ninth Planet is deliciously written, completely immersive, and just plain fantastic overall.