Lightspeed Magazine, August 2012
by John Joseph Adams, Caroline M. Yoachim, Michael Swanwick, Wil McCarthy, Kat Howard, Delia Sherman, Linda Nagata, Joe Haldeman, Carrie Vaughn, Kim Stanley Robinson, Seanan McGuire, Hrvoje Bešlić, Ken Liu, Charlie Jane Anders, Tina Connolly
When I saw the title, I was hoping for something silly about how sentient life is united by a need to gamble. This is more serious, about writing and reading, the different ways to pass knowledge and when it might be wiser to let it go---and sometimes, when it's a good thing that your species is being slowly ossified by the pursuit of knowledge. The ending was a little gooey, I didn't think it was really necessary that the {insert name generator here, idr} ~mystically understood~ the meaning of the lost books, just that they made something beautiful and useful out of them.
Heard on the Lightspeed podcast, 7 August 2012 episode.