Tales of Old Gods and New collects ten stories from fantasy and science fiction writer Kate MacLeod: the high fantasy murder mystery Impostor Apparition , the western weird tale Unsafe, Unsound , the pseudo-Egyptian fantasy Tear of a Sphinx , the early Bronze Age fantasy Changing Tides , In the Waste Places , the sequel to Oil Fire ; the science fiction story Taren and Keui , tale of two alien beings finding a way out of a zero sum game; the dark fantasy tale The Story for the Letters , about a little girl and an ancient evil; the science fiction story AI: Aesir Intelligence , where the sole survivor of a shuttle crash stays alive on a hostile world with the guidance of some unconventional babysitters; the science fiction story Upon the Lonesome Wild about a woman meant to be the matriarch of a far reaching clan on a newly discovered world who instead finds herself alone on a dying one; and the science fiction novelette The Inscrutable Visages of the Sowmyatha where a young officer finds it easier to communicate with a rocklike alien race than her human teammates.