Skip to main content

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.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more