I only read four-star reviews on Amazon. Let me tell you why.
The five-star reviews are all glowing praise that makes a J. J. Abrahms joint look dim, and in their worst cases, are bought and paid for. The one- and two-star reviews are just unrelentingly negative, often miss the point, and though sometimes entertaining on their own for the reviewer’s semi-coherent tangents, are rarely actually informative. If I clicked on the book’s page, I’m generally interested. I want to buy, but I want an honest look at what I’m getting first, and the four-star reviews actually tell you what they like, and a few things they didn’t.
So here’s my four-star review of The Future’s So Bright.
Some of the stories in here are real gems. I’ve highlighted the ones I loved over the past few weeks – but when you read it, you might fall in love with “The Salvage at the Selvage” or “The Repairwoman” or maybe even “Scars of Satyagraha” instead. You might find “The Comforting” leaves you cold and you got no love for “Lady Jane.” But it’s the kind of anthology where there’s a favorite for everyone in here somewhere.
And as for the rest? Hell, it’s in the title. Even the mediocre stories (and there are mediocre stories and a few out-and-out duds) are trying to do something new, trying to imagine a future so bright, you gotta wear shades. No tacked-on sad ending, no cheap cynicism, no sudden twist that they were actually all terrible people the whole time. In a world of, as I called the possible future of “Lady Jade,” rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues, sometimes you want the comfort of knowing the author’s either optimistic, or tryin’ real hard to be. And, intellectually, there really are new ideas here, new ways of looking at old problems. Even the worst duds in here have a one weird idea or two.
There’s a couple of typos, a few spots where the italics clearly got away from the proofreader and never came back, and I hope they’ll be fixed for the second edition. But they don’t much interfere with the reading, they’re just irritating.
And, to address the delicate question a few of you have raised in my DMs and emails, here’s my mini-review-in-a-review of “Scars of Satyagraha”.
“Scars of Satyagraha” is the most Quaker story I’ve ever told. Originally intended for an anthology on gender, the prompt made me think of the often opposing genders of Gentleman and Real Man, and Sam caught between them. The rest, the meditation on violence, ahimsa, gender, bodysurfing, and Mafia movies, happened quite naturally. I’m particularly proud of Babuji’s nails, they are splendid.
Sami Chaturvedy is a young woman we would recognize as trans, on an Indian-Nigerian independent Mars where switching bodies is as easy as getting a tattoo, torn between the nonviolent Martian values of her Babuji and the tarnished, violent honor she imagines of her deceased mother’s Yankee heritage. But her childish wishes to connect to her heritage through mafia movies and the Yankee Militia underworld of Mars lands her in hot water faster than you can say Colt .45, and she finds herself forced to choose where she stands in the worst way.
In a lot of ways, this story feels like a trial run for Doña Ana Lucía and …To The Future!. Sam’s Mars feels like an earlier age of the Six Worlds, more open, less dense, but just as eerie. Sami herself is grappling with the same issues of ethnic identity, otherness, and integration that underlie Doña Ana Lucía’s psychology, and, for that matter, mine as a franco-americain, even if she isn’t literally grappling with actual bad guys all that much. But it’s also very much a story unto itself. Sami’s inner conflict is front-and-center, and she an unwilling participant in the action after her youthful disillusionment. Her world is less a spicier Star Trek utopia than it is an alien, weird thing unto itself – a Mars that separated nonviolently but with great vigorousness, inspired by the postcolonial liberations of its two founding cultures.
I hope you like it.
I hope you like the other stories, too. Typos and the occasional dud (but what anthology doesn’t have the occasional dud? Even Dangerous Visions had “Lord Randy, My Son”) aside, The Future’s So Bright is an anthology I’ll be thumbing through again in the future. However bright it turns out to be.
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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