Category: future’s so bright

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

“Emergence,” by A. M. Weald

“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke

“The Comforting,” by Kevin David Anderson

“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden

The Future So Bright four-star review

Check this out:

DOCTOR LADY and her FLYBOY EX have JUST TWELVE HOURS to get THE ANTIDOTE to THE PRESIDENT or what remains of South America will fall to THE WARLORDS.

Of course they are. You knew that just reading the slugline.

In less than a page, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.

“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden, is solarpulp. Such pure, undiluted solarpulp that I absolutely know she watched Only Angels Have Wings the night before she started this story. And, much like knowing that of course they make it in time, that’s no bad thing. Bowden has the breathless pace and suddenly-exotic climate changed environs I want from my pulps, breathing new life into old twists (La Paz is an island, the big storm is really big).

Cressida Jade, one of formerly-North-America’s foremost experts on snake venom, is the only one who can save President Ricarda, whose life is the only thing holding South America together by a thread, from the mysterious snakebite that may have been deliberately set on her by regional warlords. But she can’t possibly make it in time, until Jack Lacy

Whadda guy!

steps in with his trusty flying rig the Lady Jade. But Jack and Cressida have a history behind them, and the mother of all storms ahead. Though the mission to save the president is never in doubt, will Jack and Cressida be able to save themselves? Rounding out the cast are Cressida’s beau Luke Araba and Vice President Waru Dangati.

My only complaint about this story is that there’s too little of it! Having made just these kinds of cuts myself in the past, this story cries out that it was a fantastic ten or fifteen thousand words, full of derring do and strange adventures, but had to get cut down to size to submit to this anthology. I’d love to see whatever original version might be floating around on Ms. Bowden’s hard drive, or more adventures in this universe or one just next door. The world could certainly use mere derring-do and strange adventure in the wake of rising tides, rearing storms, and political intrigues.

But that’s, hopefully, a nice problem to have. At any rate, I was thoroughly surprised and delighted to find two-fisted solarpunk escapades between the pages of The Future So Bright. It’s kind of future that, if there were enough like Cressida Jade and Jack Lacy in it, it would be safe to live in, yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Next time, bringing it all together (including a review of “Scars of Satyagraha, by R. Jean Mathieu).

The Future So Bright

“Emergence,” by A. M. Weald

“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke

“The Comforting,” by Kevin David Anderson

“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden

The Future So Bright four-star review

Last week, I mentioned the no-nonsense prose most of the other stories had, in contrast to Regina Clarke’s lyrical dream-voice. Here, just as Clarke’s dreamlike language works for “Night Circus,” that no-nonsense, hard-boiled prose works for Kevin David Anderson’s “The Comforting.” Both are featured in The Future’s So Bright, now available wherever better books are sold.

Detective Lentil sits in his faded office, a gruff cop of the old schools, who knows better how to get information out of people than computers, and prefers it that way. This time, though, it’s not the leggy blonde who walks in and breathlessly asks after her dear, disappeared husband (though I’m sure Lentil would have preferred it that way), but a beardless boy name of Jasper Casper, who’d like to report an assault by his plaid comforter.

Yes, the blanket.

“Just the facts, man.”

And as Lentil tries his damnedest Joe Friday to get this kook’s report so he can go home to his empty apartment, more reports start coming in (and walking in) of a crazed plaid comforter, loose on the town, who’s finally snapped his last thread and  taking it out on an indifferent world. Soon, instead of going home, Lentil, Jasper, and Ms. Peaches are racing across town, where the rogue blanket is atop the towering Skyrell Corporation building, and everyone but Lentil are taking selfies. What follows is a hilarious, Adamsian-but-not-quite-as-dense satire of misapplied high technology, misanthropic blankets, and one very misguided corporate turtleneck.

Which makes sense, Anderson specifically mentions “a scene by the late great Terry Pratchett” as his inspiration for the piece. While his voice is unmistakably American, in that New York minute sort of way, he does have something of both Pratchett’s and Adams’ absolute poker-faced voice going for him. Although he affirms his distrust of technology (like Detective Lentil, he still exclusively plays the vinyl he bought in the eighties, and refuses to own a cell phone), Anderson’s criticism of technology and the culture it breeds lacks the cruelty and mean-spiritedness of a lot of similar “satires.” I work in a tech company, own an iPhone, and handle tech support for a living, and I was laughing my ass off at the dialogue even when it wasn’t silly, because I know these people. For someone who despises tech, Anderson seems to spend a lot of time with tech heads.

It makes me wonder exactly which Pratchett scene it was, the one that has nothing to do with technology, that he read.

Next week, the wild, unexpected ride of “Lady Jade.”

“What even was that de tabernak?”

Those were the first words out of my mouth when I finished this story.

…that’s a good thing.

I still haven’t figured out if Regina Clarke‘s “Night Circus” is magical fantasy, wondertech sci-fi, or something like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, where the distinction long ago grew moot. It starts with the short paragraph:

It was said the girl-child dreamed worlds into being. Arain ran to me with news of her arrival from Rengal.

And the entire story is very dreamlike. The narrator, Silla, wanders past flamevines and figs, under the psychic eye of the never-sleeping Preceptor, meets his weirding red-and-green eyes, follows in her father’s otherworldly footsteps, and encounters the golden couple of a disappearing mound beyond dreams out in the wastes of desert quadrant Forty-Two.

That’s not even a third of the way through the story.

Silla must confront the Night Circus, the realm that binds her father, Arain’s mother, and the Preceptor, be offered a choice, and make it freely. That is the way of things, and only her and Arain’s choices will make things different again (possibly by dreaming a new universe into being).

And what of the girl-child?

This Night Circus is second cousin to Bradbury’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the way his Mechanical Hound is to the Hound of the Baskervilles. There are nightshades of Jim and of Will Halloway in Arain and Silla, though who is Halloween’s child is rather less clear here. There’s a lot that’s unclear here, lost in shadows of poetry, give or take a simile, gain or lose a metaphor, disappearing in the smooth sands of Forty-Two like Rea and Tamis’ mound and its Builders. And the thing is – it works. It helps make the story what it is, to create a peculiar taste on the tongue that lingers but never quite settles. Whether I liked them or not, the other stories I’d read had a certain no-nonsense air to them. “The Night Circus” very much does not, and it still had me thinking on it days later.

“Night Circus” is available in The Future’s So Bright, and Regina Clarke’s page can be found here. When I finish the anthology, I’m thinking of picking up “Out of Time,” and see what dreams may come…

Next week, “The Comforting.”

The Future So Bright

“Emergence,” by A. M. Weald

“Night Circus,” by Regina Clarke

“The Comforting,” by Kevin David Anderson

“Lady Jade,” by Maureen Bowden

The Future So Bright four-star review