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

Infinity Plus: Quintet (SF) - Keith Brooke (Ed.) ****

When I was younger there was nothing I liked better than a good, deep, dark (frankly, often downright miserable) science fiction story, and this collection delivers excellent modern examples that would have fit easily into a thoughtful if downbeat 70s collection such as the 'New Writing in SF' or the Interzone magazine of the day (one was actually first published in Interzone, in 1987 - the rest date between 1989 and 2010).

If I'm honest, I prefer more upbeat fiction now, but that doesn't stop me appreciating the quality of these five stories, put together by the SF website and publisher Infinity Plus. I've rarely seen a better contradiction of Margaret Atwood's putdown of science fiction as being limited to 'talking squids in outer space.' What we have here is pure character-driven storytelling with not a mention of space, spaceships, ray guns or aliens. It's the inner world, not the outer trappings of sci fi tropes that interest these writers.

On…
Post a Comment
Read more

The Lost Planets - John Wenz **

Reading the first few lines of the introduction to this book caused a raised eyebrow. In 1600, it tells us, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake 'for his radical views - that not only was the Sun just one of many stars, but those stars likely had planets around them as well.' Unfortunately, this bends the truth. Bruno was burned at the stake for holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith - for conventional heretical beliefs amongst which his ideas on cosmology were trivial. This was an unfortunate start.

What John Wenz gives us is a people-driven story of the apparent early discovery of a number of planets orbiting other stars, made by Peter van de Kamp and his colleagues at Swarthmore College in America, most notably connected to a relatively obscure star called Barnard's star. Wenz is at his best dealing with personal conflict. The book really comes alive in a middle section where van de Kamp's discoveries are starting to be challenged. This chapter works wel…
Post a Comment
Read more

Bone Silence (SF) - Alastair Reynolds *****

Of all the best modern SF writers, Alastair Reynolds is arguably the supreme successor to the writers of the golden age. He gives us wide-ranging vision, clever concepts and rollicking adventure - never more so than with his concluding book of the Ness sisters trilogy.

Neatly, after the first title, Revenger was written from the viewpoint of one sister, Arafura and the second, Shadow Captain, had the other sister Adrana as narrator, this book is in the third person. It neatly ties up many of the loose ends from the previous books, but also leaves vast scope for revelations to cover in the future if Reynolds decides to revisit this world (he comments in his acknowledgements 'I am, for the time being, done with the Ness sisters. Whether they are done with me remains to be seen.')

As with the previous books, the feel here is in some ways reminiscent of the excellent TV series Firefly, but with pirates rather than cowboys transported into a space setting. Set millions of years in…
Post a Comment
Read more