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brigdhA People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. A collection of short stories themed around the ideals of Howard Zinn's legendary A People’s History of the United States – history told from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged – except that this time it's, you know, the future and also fictional. Honestly I picked this up mostly because LaValle was one of the editors and after his The Ballad of Black Tom I will forever read anything LaValle is involved in. Unfortunately it turns out that he didn't write any of the stories here. Oh, well. His introduction was good?
The stories themselves varied in quality, as anthologies tend to do. Though in this case the stories I disliked outnumbered the ones I did; there's nothing exactly bad in this collection, but there are quite a few stories indistinguishable from the sort of extremely earnest tumblr posts in which the good people are Very Good and Very Oppressed and the villains are Very Bigoted and Very Mean and after some struggles Our Heroes are recognized as Beacons of Pure shining Innocent Goodness and probably the crowd applauds. And, I mean... bigots and oppression are bad! I'm happy to see villains get their comeuppance! It's just that I'd like it even better if everything could be a little less one-dimensional and boring.
Thankfully not every story was quite so checkbox-woke. Let me tell you about the ones I did enjoy:
The Wall by Lizz Huerta. Brujas are real and are being born in increasing numbers, as humanity's instinctive attempt to heal itself after catastrophic climate change and chemical pollution. They are mostly present in Mexico, which leads to Americans smuggling themselves south (which, yes, very clever, but if it was a plot point in a Roland Emmerich movie 15 years ago, it's not exactly the cutting edge of political satire). The US government obviously does not approve, so it doses its entire military with obedience-drugs in the drinking water to force them to commit war crimes. In this setting, Ivette (a bruja) has a secret relationship with her cousin Surem (the leader of a violent drug cartel which has also taken over running large portions of the local government), and between bouts of sex they fight about the ethics of rehabilitating mind-controlled US soldiers. This is all fascinating and some incredible world-building! Unfortunately it desperately needed to be at least an entire book, or maybe even a series of books, and not crammed into six pages. Hopefully someday Huerta will write the longer version.
Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted] by Malka Older is a fascinating experiment in style, supposedly an academic article on "futurist histories" (apparently histories of potential but not yet realized futures?), focusing on a twitter community's experiment with grassroots democracy. I have absolutely spent enough time online to laugh in recognition at the group's troubles, although the odd mix of tenses required by the very idea of futurist history occasionally made getting through individual sentences a slog.
It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes It All Right by Sam J. Miller. Caul is a gay man in an America where being gay is incredibly illegal. Caul also has an intense crush on his coworker, which he represses via anonymous street sex. Unfortunately, in one of these encounters Caul catches a metaphysical STD in which sex transports him to a terrifying alternative dimension, but one where he might be able to control a great deal of power. Homophobic dystopias aren't a new concept (and show up repeatedly in A People's Future of the United States), but Miller's writing was vivid and specific enough to make this my favorite of the several examples here.
Riverbed by Omar El Akkad. The US government imprisons all of its Muslim (and Sikh, due to confusion) citizens in camps – in what is a quite clear allusion to the Japanese internment camps – supposedly to protect them from racist attacks. Decades later, Khadija Singh returns to the camp where she was imprisoned as a child (which has since been turned into a peace memorial; Akkad's portrayal of this is wonderfully cynical) to claim the belongings of her brother who died in an escape attempt. Her grief and rage, and the incompetent bureaucracy she has to face, are all incredibly well-written.
Calendar Girls by Justine Ireland. All forms of birth-control have been made illegal, so Alyssa (a teenager, since you can't try minors as an adult) sells packets of The Pill on a street corner in Manhattan. That is, she does until a leading pro-life senator blackmails her into helping his daughter get an abortion, because hypocrisy reigns eternal. Calendar Girls promptly transforms itself into a very clever heist story, and I loved Ireland's sense of humor in the narration.
The Blindfold by Tobias S Bucknell. It's well-known that race and gender influences jurors – a black man is more likely to receive a longer sentence for a crime than a white man, all other factors being equal. How to fix this? Force jurors to wear headsets that randomize the defendant's appearance, of course! The unnamed narrator is a hacker who, for the right amount of money, will make sure that in your case, you get that sweet, sweet jackpot of "white male" appearance. Unfortunately, his latest bout of hacking attracts the attention of the Russian government, which promptly begins trying to assassinate him. Bucknell's writing is funny and quick-paced and has a great twist of an ending.
Good News Bad News by Charles Yu. This isn't even really a short story so much as a series of excerpts from sci-fi themed articles from The Onion, but it made me laugh harder than anything else in A People's Future of the United States, so who cares. Excerpts:
An earlier edition of this story quoted Jeff Bezos as CEO of AmazonGoogleFace. Technically, the quote should be attributed to “Jeff Bezos Version 3, LLC, an incorporeal person organized under the laws of Delaware” as the legal heir and cognitive descendant of the human known as Jeff Bezos.
***
These latest changes to the tax code, expected to disproportionately benefit the largest and wealthiest corporations, were passed by the R-Bot in a 1–1 vote against the D-Bot in the Robo-Congress-O-Matic 5000, with the tie being broken by the tie-breaking algorithm, all of this taking place, as usual, inside a four-foot-by-three-foot black box inside of the U.S. protectorate satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Washington, D.C.
***
“We’ve long been silent in the face of unspeakable acts. Deforestation. Clear-cutting. Toxins in the soil,” said Eondo’or, an eighty-foot, six-hundred-year-old redwood and senior representative to the U.N. for Kingdom Plantae. “Not to mention getting peed on by drunk people.
Now Wait for This Week by Alice Sola Kim. Bonnie, a self-centered rich white girl with a habit of victim-blaming who lives in present-day NYC, gets trapped in a time-loop, doomed to repeat the same week over and over again, ad infinitum. Bonnie reacts to this in various hilarious and/or tragic ways: attempting to go viral by predicting the future (at least seven days of it), starting a dark magic cult, learning new languages and traveling, denouncing all her friends, becoming much closer to all her friends, aging a terrifyingly unknown amount. Now Wait for This Week, however, is actually narrated by Bonnie's roommate, who has no idea that she and everyone else on Earth are trapped in the same week, and just occasionally thinks to herself, "huh, Bonnie seems different today". It's all a metaphor for the #MeToo movement ("the actor many of us loved would be revealed as a leering terrible date who expected sex as his due and took no for an answer only temporarily before starting up the sex stuff yet again until he took no for an answer only temporarily and so on until the woman gave up."), but is also just a fantastic conceit written fantastically well. It was BY FAR my favorite story in the book, so good job ending on a winner, A People's Future of the United States!
Anthologies of Resistance-themed speculative fiction have been something of a wave this year (just on my own bookshelf, there's also New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color and How Long 'til Black Future Month?). Which is great! But given that we have available such a diversity of options, I would recommend pushing A People's Future of the United States to the bottom of your reading list. It's just too uneven with too frequent annoying stories. Plus, hey, you can read Now Wait for This Week online! So why bother with the rest?
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century by William Rosen. Nonfiction about the several years of heavy rains and brutal winters beginning in 1315 that led to crop failures and famine across northern Europe. Although nearly six million people died, the Great Famine has been largely forgotten – mainly due to the Black Death hitting a few decades later and claiming all the attention for itself.
Rosen focuses his story on England and Scotland and particularly the borderland between them, which had to deal not only with the continent-wide bad weather and food shortages, but also the local problem of armies repeatedly crossing the territory, burning fields and looting storehouses as they went. This is the time of Edward II (of Marlowe's Edward II) and Robert the Bruce (of Mel Gibson's Braveheart), of Scotland's attempts to claim independence and England's attempts to... not... have that. Since most of my previous knowledge of Edward II was from Marlowe and other sources primarily concerned with Edward's homosexuality, I was intrigued by The Third Horseman's vastly different approach. Rosen argues that Edward lost his throne not because he was gay (and indeed, kings of England both before and after managed to be gay without getting killed for it), but because he had the bad luck and/or incompetence to be a king who kept losing battles and whose country was hit by a famine he failed to alleviate. Poor Edward. It's hard to live up to a dad with a nickname like "Hammer of the Scots".
The Third Horseman involved way more discussion of medieval battle tactics and way less discussion of anywhere in Europe off the island of Great Britain than I was expecting, but nonetheless I loved it. Rosen has a great conversational tone of writing, dropping all sorts of interesting facts into his narrative, and the period and topic are just fascinating. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys popular history.
The stories themselves varied in quality, as anthologies tend to do. Though in this case the stories I disliked outnumbered the ones I did; there's nothing exactly bad in this collection, but there are quite a few stories indistinguishable from the sort of extremely earnest tumblr posts in which the good people are Very Good and Very Oppressed and the villains are Very Bigoted and Very Mean and after some struggles Our Heroes are recognized as Beacons of Pure shining Innocent Goodness and probably the crowd applauds. And, I mean... bigots and oppression are bad! I'm happy to see villains get their comeuppance! It's just that I'd like it even better if everything could be a little less one-dimensional and boring.
Thankfully not every story was quite so checkbox-woke. Let me tell you about the ones I did enjoy:
The Wall by Lizz Huerta. Brujas are real and are being born in increasing numbers, as humanity's instinctive attempt to heal itself after catastrophic climate change and chemical pollution. They are mostly present in Mexico, which leads to Americans smuggling themselves south (which, yes, very clever, but if it was a plot point in a Roland Emmerich movie 15 years ago, it's not exactly the cutting edge of political satire). The US government obviously does not approve, so it doses its entire military with obedience-drugs in the drinking water to force them to commit war crimes. In this setting, Ivette (a bruja) has a secret relationship with her cousin Surem (the leader of a violent drug cartel which has also taken over running large portions of the local government), and between bouts of sex they fight about the ethics of rehabilitating mind-controlled US soldiers. This is all fascinating and some incredible world-building! Unfortunately it desperately needed to be at least an entire book, or maybe even a series of books, and not crammed into six pages. Hopefully someday Huerta will write the longer version.
Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted] by Malka Older is a fascinating experiment in style, supposedly an academic article on "futurist histories" (apparently histories of potential but not yet realized futures?), focusing on a twitter community's experiment with grassroots democracy. I have absolutely spent enough time online to laugh in recognition at the group's troubles, although the odd mix of tenses required by the very idea of futurist history occasionally made getting through individual sentences a slog.
It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes It All Right by Sam J. Miller. Caul is a gay man in an America where being gay is incredibly illegal. Caul also has an intense crush on his coworker, which he represses via anonymous street sex. Unfortunately, in one of these encounters Caul catches a metaphysical STD in which sex transports him to a terrifying alternative dimension, but one where he might be able to control a great deal of power. Homophobic dystopias aren't a new concept (and show up repeatedly in A People's Future of the United States), but Miller's writing was vivid and specific enough to make this my favorite of the several examples here.
Riverbed by Omar El Akkad. The US government imprisons all of its Muslim (and Sikh, due to confusion) citizens in camps – in what is a quite clear allusion to the Japanese internment camps – supposedly to protect them from racist attacks. Decades later, Khadija Singh returns to the camp where she was imprisoned as a child (which has since been turned into a peace memorial; Akkad's portrayal of this is wonderfully cynical) to claim the belongings of her brother who died in an escape attempt. Her grief and rage, and the incompetent bureaucracy she has to face, are all incredibly well-written.
Calendar Girls by Justine Ireland. All forms of birth-control have been made illegal, so Alyssa (a teenager, since you can't try minors as an adult) sells packets of The Pill on a street corner in Manhattan. That is, she does until a leading pro-life senator blackmails her into helping his daughter get an abortion, because hypocrisy reigns eternal. Calendar Girls promptly transforms itself into a very clever heist story, and I loved Ireland's sense of humor in the narration.
The Blindfold by Tobias S Bucknell. It's well-known that race and gender influences jurors – a black man is more likely to receive a longer sentence for a crime than a white man, all other factors being equal. How to fix this? Force jurors to wear headsets that randomize the defendant's appearance, of course! The unnamed narrator is a hacker who, for the right amount of money, will make sure that in your case, you get that sweet, sweet jackpot of "white male" appearance. Unfortunately, his latest bout of hacking attracts the attention of the Russian government, which promptly begins trying to assassinate him. Bucknell's writing is funny and quick-paced and has a great twist of an ending.
Good News Bad News by Charles Yu. This isn't even really a short story so much as a series of excerpts from sci-fi themed articles from The Onion, but it made me laugh harder than anything else in A People's Future of the United States, so who cares. Excerpts:
An earlier edition of this story quoted Jeff Bezos as CEO of AmazonGoogleFace. Technically, the quote should be attributed to “Jeff Bezos Version 3, LLC, an incorporeal person organized under the laws of Delaware” as the legal heir and cognitive descendant of the human known as Jeff Bezos.
***
These latest changes to the tax code, expected to disproportionately benefit the largest and wealthiest corporations, were passed by the R-Bot in a 1–1 vote against the D-Bot in the Robo-Congress-O-Matic 5000, with the tie being broken by the tie-breaking algorithm, all of this taking place, as usual, inside a four-foot-by-three-foot black box inside of the U.S. protectorate satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Washington, D.C.
***
“We’ve long been silent in the face of unspeakable acts. Deforestation. Clear-cutting. Toxins in the soil,” said Eondo’or, an eighty-foot, six-hundred-year-old redwood and senior representative to the U.N. for Kingdom Plantae. “Not to mention getting peed on by drunk people.
Now Wait for This Week by Alice Sola Kim. Bonnie, a self-centered rich white girl with a habit of victim-blaming who lives in present-day NYC, gets trapped in a time-loop, doomed to repeat the same week over and over again, ad infinitum. Bonnie reacts to this in various hilarious and/or tragic ways: attempting to go viral by predicting the future (at least seven days of it), starting a dark magic cult, learning new languages and traveling, denouncing all her friends, becoming much closer to all her friends, aging a terrifyingly unknown amount. Now Wait for This Week, however, is actually narrated by Bonnie's roommate, who has no idea that she and everyone else on Earth are trapped in the same week, and just occasionally thinks to herself, "huh, Bonnie seems different today". It's all a metaphor for the #MeToo movement ("the actor many of us loved would be revealed as a leering terrible date who expected sex as his due and took no for an answer only temporarily before starting up the sex stuff yet again until he took no for an answer only temporarily and so on until the woman gave up."), but is also just a fantastic conceit written fantastically well. It was BY FAR my favorite story in the book, so good job ending on a winner, A People's Future of the United States!
Anthologies of Resistance-themed speculative fiction have been something of a wave this year (just on my own bookshelf, there's also New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color and How Long 'til Black Future Month?). Which is great! But given that we have available such a diversity of options, I would recommend pushing A People's Future of the United States to the bottom of your reading list. It's just too uneven with too frequent annoying stories. Plus, hey, you can read Now Wait for This Week online! So why bother with the rest?
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century by William Rosen. Nonfiction about the several years of heavy rains and brutal winters beginning in 1315 that led to crop failures and famine across northern Europe. Although nearly six million people died, the Great Famine has been largely forgotten – mainly due to the Black Death hitting a few decades later and claiming all the attention for itself.
Rosen focuses his story on England and Scotland and particularly the borderland between them, which had to deal not only with the continent-wide bad weather and food shortages, but also the local problem of armies repeatedly crossing the territory, burning fields and looting storehouses as they went. This is the time of Edward II (of Marlowe's Edward II) and Robert the Bruce (of Mel Gibson's Braveheart), of Scotland's attempts to claim independence and England's attempts to... not... have that. Since most of my previous knowledge of Edward II was from Marlowe and other sources primarily concerned with Edward's homosexuality, I was intrigued by The Third Horseman's vastly different approach. Rosen argues that Edward lost his throne not because he was gay (and indeed, kings of England both before and after managed to be gay without getting killed for it), but because he had the bad luck and/or incompetence to be a king who kept losing battles and whose country was hit by a famine he failed to alleviate. Poor Edward. It's hard to live up to a dad with a nickname like "Hammer of the Scots".
The Third Horseman involved way more discussion of medieval battle tactics and way less discussion of anywhere in Europe off the island of Great Britain than I was expecting, but nonetheless I loved it. Rosen has a great conversational tone of writing, dropping all sorts of interesting facts into his narrative, and the period and topic are just fascinating. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys popular history.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 05:18 am (UTC)ALMOST TOTALLY OFF-TOPIC
Date: 2019-08-24 07:45 am (UTC)Thanks for the story link!