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Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q: Short, bird's eye view of a "war" fought entirely using remote controlled drones...on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain: Very much worth reading. The main character is a "scanner," a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the "pain of space," a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He's called up for an emergency meeting while "cranched," a meeting that calls the scanners' whole purpose into question. And he's the only one there who's in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

The Game of Rat and Dragon: Not as serious a story as "Scanners..." but fun and still thought-provoking. There's something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths -- and it's faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human. It starts off being very coy about the "Partners," but manages to avoid "tomato surprise" territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot.

Cross-posted from my website.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)