Bonjour! I’m happy to report I am no longer sick, and even more happy to report that The Future’s So Bright is now available wherever better books are sold! To celebrate, after my felicitous cigar, I’m taking some time here to review a few of my favorite stories in the anthology. Read short fiction, hein?
“Emergence,” by A.M. Weald, took me by the first line, same as it took its author.
A duster bot was stuck again.
“Emergence” is that rarity of rarities, a post-apocalyptic story I actually enjoyed (otherwise pretty much limited to “By the Waters of Babylon”, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, and “Darkness”). The nature of the apocalypse is background radiation – mentions of long-gone nuclear winter and environmental conservation. The focus here is on the present, and on the future.
The duster bot is the responsibility of Kelle, of undergrounded Pod North, one of the four remaining centers of population on the North American continent. After removing the stuck duster and replacing it on the solar panels with a fresh robot, she flirts by phone with Arjun, of Pod West, who announces with a breathless “Guess. What.” that “they” are planning to link the disparate domes together – maybe even open them completely. They are interrupted by their compulsory time in the sun, where the politely-coercive authorities mandate mingling. Kelle pointedly doesn’t meet anybody, but Arjun does…
This story almost feels like a realistic, solarpunk-ish take on the Fallout vaults, scraped clean of their affected hypercynicism and sickly green filter of over-the-top human suffering. The authorities do seem a tad Orwellian, and the state of the surface and of technology (undergrounded telephone is the only form of communication except with the few hundred people you grew up smelling, and if you want electricity in your room, you better get biking on your post-Pelaton) give pause. But as disruptive as the hour of sunbathing is (repeatedly), and as awkward as the mandatory mingling is, these are recognizably ordinary people living ordinary lives, not beat-down sufferers like Winston Smith or exceptional culture rebels like John the Savage. The casual polyamory (with its attendant little dramas) just seems an extension of their ordinary lives.
Spoilers
And seeing the happy family out on the surface, reseeding the Earth with rich life, was sweet as can be – a victory for the common man.
What really gets me is the little details – the landline phones like Battlestar Galactica, Kelle’s touch starvation, Arjun’s casual romance with another man and how this interacts with his feelings for “his person” Kelle, the description of the sun room (which sounds exactly like coffee hour at St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea[tm]), the way they guess the ineffeable intentions of “them.” Per Carla Ra’s recent article, I very much write solarpunk as if it were fantasy, and I get the feeling Weald does too. These little details make Pod North feel not only real, but somehow familiar. I feel like I could live there.
This was first, but far from only, story I enjoyed from The Future’s So Bright… Tune in Thursday for a midnight visit to the “Night Circus.”
The Future So Bright
“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke
“The Comforting,” by Kevin David Anderson
“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden
The Future So Bright four-star review
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