Skip to main content

Entanglements (SF) - Ed. Sheila Williams ***

It's important to say up front that the star rating here is an average: there are some 5 star stories in this collection and there are some that would only get 1 star.

 It's very brave to put together a collection of science fiction stories with a message - in this case, the impact on relationships and families of emerging technologies. There is something very dampening about an enforced message that can so easily kill a story by making it feel like little more than propaganda. It's to the credit of many of the authors here that this doesn't usually happen.

 This is a collection of ten SF stories. A few really stand out. The opening story Invisible People, by Nancy Kress was excellent, exploring the tangled concepts of gene editing and designer babies with a fascinating twist on the subject of altruism. My only criticism would be that I think writers rather let their reader down when the story pointedly ends just before a major decision by a character, leaving the story incomplete. I don't buy the 'it's down to your imagination' argument - if you're telling a story, you should finish it.

 Two others deserving of high praise were Rich Larson's Echo the Echo and Sparklybits by Nick Wolven. In Echo the Echo there was a combination of a fascinating idea of an AI personal assistant that knows you so well it can audition dates for you (or rather can audition their avatars), plus some interesting thoughts on the nature of memory and personality. Although Wolven irritated me by the 1950s-style SF failing of unnecessary overuse of weak-sounding future technology names - why make an oven an 'ovenex'? - it's great fun with a twist on Ghostbusters where we're dealing with what amount to ghosts in the machine.

 My favourite overall was Suzanne Palmer's Don't Mind Me, set primarily in a school in a chilling near future America where, at their parents' request, some students are provided with textbooks with everything excised that is 'controversial' (such as climate change or the Earth being more than 6,000 years old), and where brain implants prevent memory storage whenever the students hear things their parents don't want them to hear. It's a great read.

 Every short story collection will have some pieces that work better than others. (It helps if there are rather more stories - only having ten meant some were over-long, and there were fewer opportunities to find favourites.) But, I suspect because of the weight of that imposed message, there were more that didn't work here than is typical. Three of them I had to give up on entirely. They simply didn't engage me as a reader - this hasn't ever happened with so many stories in a collection for me before. Two others were simply the right-on message wrapped in a fictional context - readable, but not much to write home about as storytelling. The other five were excellent.

 Considering the difficulty imposed by the need for a message, this collection does well - but it could have been so much better if the prime decision-making factor for inclusion was whether or not there was a good, engaging narrative, rather than whether or not the story ticked the right boxes for the theme.
Paperback:    
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more