This volume of stories and novellas collects some of Ore's valuable fiction of the 1990s, work that continues to be of vital interest with a strong focus on persistent issues that remain urgent in our current world. In "Hypocaust & Bathysphere," time-traveling academics more than meet their match in the medieval inhabitants they assume are naïve and ignorant and easily "studied. The historians exploring America's past in "Scarey Rose in Deep History" uncover secrets in America's past that challenge them personally to the core. "Stone Whorl Flint Knife" and "Horse Tracks," set in Ore's Bracken County where magic works and logic doesn't, are tales of love and vengeance that play out amidst that county's high-stakes power struggles. In "Collected Ogoense," the volume's title story, an underpaid biologist toiling over dangerous pathogens seeks refuge from the bleakness of her existence in her passion for African killifish until treachery takes her refuge from her and launches her into the obsession for revenge. "Accelerated Grimace," on the 1998 Otherwise Award Honor List, explores the effects of a technology on the transactional relationship between an artist and his muse/trophy wife whose great ambition is to be a famous artist's widow.

--Ore, Rebecca