Recent Reads

Futureshocks, ed. Lou Anders. This collection includes short stories by a number of leading lights of science fiction, all of whom were apparently asked to contribute projections of "What terror does tomorrow hold?" In other words, these aren't happy cheerful stories full of optimism and faith in human nature; they're visions of how our future could go horribly wrong. Fortunately, SF does this kind of thing pretty well.

Standout stories include:

Paul di Filippo's "Shuteye for the Timebroker", in which the development of chemical treatments which eliminate the human need for sleep results in a hyperdriven, 24-hour-a-day economy. A "timebroker" can make a good living acting as middleman and directing people to various amusements at all hours of the day and night... but not if he loses his job, his health coverage, and his anti-sleep medication. I wasn't convinced by the resolution of the story, but it's an interesting glimpse at a possible future.

"The Man Who Knew Too Much", by Alan Dean Foster, takes a cockeyed view of the ever-expanding amount of information available to individuals. An obsessive bookcollector who acquires more information than his brain can absorb creates a cluttered home and a problem for movers. But what if such obsessives could download the knowledge straight into their brains? (Yes, I recognize that I resemble the protagonist in this story.)

Caitlin Kiernan's "The Pearl Diver", like much of her work, skimps on plot but has a wealth of foreboding atmosphere and arresting imagery.

"Before the Beginning", by Mike Resnick and Harry Turtledove, asks a logical question about time travel: What if you could set the controls to the instant before the Big Bang?

Adam Roberts' "Man You Gotta Go" proposes both a possible destiny of an interstellar-travelling human race and an answer to Fermi's Paradox.

Canadian Robert J. Sawyer, who has written about the possible intellectual and social consequences of human contact with alien civilizations in Calculating God and elsewhere, seems to wonder, in his story "Flashes", whether the human race is really ready for such levels of knowledge. Similar thoughts in SF date back at least to Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory", and have been presented in novelistic form as recently as Vernor Vinge's 2006 Rainbow's End, but Sawyer presents them as well as anyone.