A deep space mission in the future wrestling with what to do with an extraordinary find. A man unable to escape his struggle with seeing the social or environmental cost of every decision he makes. A dating app that's designed to prevent sexual assault, but has a fatal flaw.

These are just three of the dozen stories that make up Matt Spangler's debut work of fiction, Waking Up. The collection zigzags across a breathtaking range of genres, from historical fiction to literary horror, dystopian scifi, and even an homage to the 1980s subgenre of video game novelizations. Threading the stories together is Spangler's exploration of "wakefulness," and his head-on confrontation with some of the provocative questions raised by 21st century identity debates.