Skip to main content

Twelve Tomorrows 2018 (SF) - Ed. Wade Roush ****

For several years, the MIT Technology Review has published the Twelve Tomorrows series as a magazine, but this year it has been handed over to the MIT Press as a big, grown up book. The idea is to have stories that really make you think about the implications of a technology - something that exists to some degree now, but that is extrapolated into a future where it may be far advanced from its current form.

There is a danger with this kind of story that it can be more than a little po-faced and can work over-hard at educating the reader about the technology at the cost of losing an effective narrative. Thankfully, most of the authors avoid this trap and present genuinely intriguing stories. Ken Liu's Byzantine Empathy is the story that comes closest to falling into this mode in its attempts to explain blockchains (not very well, sadly) - but is entirely forgiven by presenting what is one of the most powerful storylines in the book, using the idea of a blockchain mechanism for getting an empathy response from followers as a way of deciding how to allocate aid funds. The story really digs into the whole head vs heart balance on charity and aid - and the outcome is not the idealistic, black and white one you might expect.

 That was probably my second favourite story, being pipped to the post by the opener, The Woman Who Destroyed Us by S L Huang which explores the ethics of using direct brain stimulation to alter personality in order to deal with mental problems... or just to 'improve' an individual. To begin with, the narrative felt a little predictable to me, but by the end it had won me over. I was very impressed and had changed my own opinion on the topic.

 Inevitably not every story hit the mark. I felt Chine Life by the best-known author in the book, Paul McAuley, seemed rather forced and I found the last story in the collection, Vespers by J. M. Ledgard unreadable. I also doubly resented the graphic novel-style story Resolution by Clifford V. Johnson. The comic book images did nothing for the story, which was almost entirely a conversation - it would have been far easier to read as a short short story that was straight text (it's a shame as this was, effectively, the only short short, which is one of my favourite SF story forms). The pictures just got in the way. The other half of the resentment is that having the comic book layout forced the overall book to be in an uncomfortably large format, making it physically feel more like reading a textbook than a collection of stories.

 While not all in the garden was rosy, though, at least half the stories were excellent and this is a collection that is well worth looking out, especially if MIT don't spoil things by pricing in like an academic book. (Postscript: it is more expensive than I'd hoped. And why is there no Kindle version?)

Paperback:  
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

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more