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

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more