Deep Dream (SF) Indrapamit Das (Ed) ****

There have been several Twelve Tomorrows collections from MIT Press since the original in 2018 - stories that are supposed to make the reader think about the impact of future technology. This latest addition focuses on 'science fiction exploring the future of art' - which presented a distinct danger of pretentiousness taken to the extreme. Thankfully, editor Indrapamit Das has been able to avoid this trap. Like all such collections, there is a mix of good, bad and indifferent - but on the whole the balance is positive.

Even a story like the opener The Limner Wrings His Hands by Vajra Chandrasekera - which scores fairly high on the pretentiousness stakes, and is far too clever clever somewhat in the manner of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - is surprisingly readable if you force yourself to focus hard on the word salad (though it is fantasy rather than SF).

To pick out two favourites, The Art Crowd by Samit Basu was a significantly more readable piece, well structured and with a very solid link to the future of art. And the closing piece The Quietude by Lavie Tidhar really engages with rich environment that could easily be expanded to make a likeable novel.

The only big name here besides Tidhar, Bruce Sterling, contributed Immortal Beauty, which felt a little called in, if quirky. Despite its deliberately stilted style, though, it does draws the reader in - but it felt rather strange that this and practically every story had a post-apocalyptic setting - the brief was just SF exploring the future of art - perhaps we should blame the editor for not providing more diversity of possible futures.

Occasionally a lack of writing experience came through in some tortured metaphors: we are told in one story that someone had ‘a gaze that said she wanted a precise taxonomy of his experiences’ - I’m not convinced any gaze ever said that. In another we are told that antiseptic corridors were like 'a cold mist' - I really don't think they were. But overall this is an interesting collection, attempting something different with a degree of success.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

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...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog