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Tomorrow's Parties (SF) - Jonathan Strahan (Ed) ****

I've read several of MIT Press's science fiction short story series 'Twelve Tomorrows' (for example, the original Twelve Tomorrows book and Make Shift), and this is probably the best of the lot. 

The stories here are described as featuring 'life in the Anthropocene'. Strictly, this is just the era when humans have had a significant impact on the environment, but has mostly been taken as life following catastrophic climate change. Despite this dystopian context, the idea (hence the 'parties' of the title) was to 'take rational optimism as a moral imperative, or at least a pragmatic alternative to despair.'

I'm not sure that rational optimism is the prevailing emotion, but there are a couple of excellent stories here, plus two more that have superb ideas, despite being heavily flawed. There are probably only two clunkers, one of which was so boring I had to give up on - but that's par for the course in an SF story collection.

The real standouts for me were Daryl Gregory's Once Upon a Future in the West and Saad Z. Hossain's The Ferryman. The first, set in a wildfire-dominated American West beautifully ties together a number of apparently unconnected threads (though I did slightly worried that the writer would be sued by Tom Hanks) and portrays an all too imaginable dystopian future. The Ferryman has a very different setting -  Bangladesh or India - and explores an area of existence that is all too often ignored. It also has a truly surprising ending.

The two stories I mentioned with superb ideas despite flaws in the plots were the first two in the book, Drone Pilates of Silicon Valley by Meg Elison and Down and Out in Exile Park by Tade Thompson. Both have fascinating tech/bio-tech components to the story. The first is beautifully engaging, while the second has a wonderfully imaginative setting. What let both down for me was their naive political stance, broadly along the lines of 'capitalism evil; anarchy is the way forward'. 

At one point, Down and Out had me laughing out loud when Thompson envisages a parliament where any citizen can speak, surely a recipe for drowning in nothing ever being decided - it made me wonder if he's ever actually been to a meeting involving normal people. What's particularly amusing is that we are told 'Competence means you get listened to and your opinion is weighted in your area of expertise.' But how in an anarchist society can you possibly measure expertise? (There's also an inconsistency where we are told 'anybody over sixteen can attend, comment, and vote' but later quotes 'a vocal fifteen-year-old' in the parliament - but then it is anarchy...)

Something I was a bit disappointed by was that there are only ten stories here, some far too long. It would have been good to have had more of a mix of length and a few more stories. That whole 'twelve tomorrows' framework is a bit restrictive anyway, but also it's a shame that two of the slots were wasted with an interview and the somewhat pretentious justification of the artist involved - these could have been ancillary to a full twelve stories.

Overall, though, a suitably imaginative and thought-provoking collection to show why this is such a good idea from MIT Press.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
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