Another gloriously wild idea is at the center of Stephen Kotowych’s "Saturn in G Minor": a great composer wants his final piece to be played using Saturn’s rings as the instrument...I was pleased by the audacity of the whole thing.

A young man travels far to see a now-aging musical maestro, and finds that the maestro's final work is to be writ on a large scale. Kotowych handles the dialog and relationship between the two quite successfully, which is not easy as you might think.

The most straightforward SF [in the anthology] is 'Citius, Altius, Fortius', by Stephen Kotowych, about a failed sprinter with some talent who is lured to a fictional African country for a radical program of bodily alteration that makes him an Olympic champion...[A] solid look at an athlete's obsession.

I enjoyed Stephen Kotowych's 'Borrowed Time' from the Daw anthology Under Cover of Darkness...[T]his story about a relationship and a man who steals time, and what he does with it, stood out above the rest as well characterized, with a clever central idea.

In "Borrowed Time," Stephen Kotowych confirms what we already suspected, that there's a secret group stealing away the idle moments of our lives, stockpiling it in service to a greater agenda. But are they doing us a favor, or do we deserve every moment of our lives, even the ones we waste? There's a rogue faction dedicated to exploring this very question in this nifty little tale.

[A] talented newcomer

The best stories I read in DAW anthologies this year [included]...'Borrowed Time', by Stephen Kotowych (Under Cover of Darkness)...

Promising and energetic work by [a] new [writer] who will get even better...My favorites [from Writers of the Future XXIII] were Stephen Kotowych’s "Saturn in G Minor", in which a great composer wants his final piece to be played using Saturn’s rings as the instrument...

I rather liked Tesseracts Eleven...Stories by Stephen Kotowych [et al] impressed.