Superb title, uneven stories

How to Save the World
Charles Sheffield, editor
Tor Books, 1995

We have no friendly advisor looking over our shoulder. We will have to make do with the next best thing: humans who are close observers of the actions of our species, but who are not directly involved in trying to run the affairs of humanity.

This of course is exactly what writers are and have been through recorded history.... Even among writers, I argue that the writers of science fiction form a special sub-group. They tend to be interested in global problems, in the impact of science and technology, and in the long-term future of humanity. They are observers of events at the largest scale. (pp. 12-13)

This then is a collection of these observations, examining themes as far ranging as the failure of public education in the US to the breakthrough in space exploration to the cure for patriarchy to an ugly dilemma inherent in the feminist rhetoric of "reproductive choice." For those of us who (often) feel motivated to save the world, this book provides an entertaining meditation on the shadow side of the utopian and of the unknowable consequences of our wholly benevolent intentions.

Sheffield writes, "Some of the stories in this book may offend. I certainly hope so." (p. 14). None of the stories offended this reader, but disappointingly most didn't make much of an impression either way. The unevenness of the stories was a definite let-down, particularly considering the devastatingly understated (or, as Sheffield puts it, "unduly modest") title. After all, what self-respecting Christian anarchist bodhisattva utopian would pass up the manual on how to save the world?

So here are some thoughts on the stories that impressed a little SF wisdom on me, providing visions of possible futures and of some pitfalls that might face us along the way. They also all rocked as stories.

• "Zap Thy Neighbor" by James P. Hogan. I'd read this one almost a decade ago in an anthology of Hogan's stories and science writing called Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution, and enjoyed rereading it. Hogan has envisioned a world in which everyone has a listing in a big directory, and that anyone with a grudge or grievance, if she can find two willing accomplices, can "call your number." It's a simple system with a twist that ensures that it really works as promised---in creating a more civil society.
  

• "Choice" by Lawrence Watt-Evans. In college anthropology I was first introduced to the dilemma faced by many feminists in Asia (and other locales) regarding abortion. It is, in short, that the rhetoric of "reproductive choice" that has dominated liberal discourse on the issue for almost two generations (i.e., that a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy is absolute and absolutely hers) stands in uncomfortable company with third-world cultural realities which lead most women with free access to contemporary reproductive technologies to abort only female fetuses. Watt-Evans presents a "culturally pure" (read: third world) society, presumably in the Middle East, where poverty, disease, overpopulation, etc. have been become things of the past. How? By allowing women to make their free choices, aborting females and keeping males until the ratio of men to women is over 10 to 1. This, as we see in the story, poses its own interesting problems.
  

• "The Meetings of the Secret World Masters" by Geoffrey A. Landis. This story reminded me of the film The Last Supper except that instead of serving individuals poisoned meals, a handful of scientists genetically engineer myriad changes to the human race. A pretty chilling story about way too much power being in the wrong hands--or in any hands.
  

• "The Invasion of Space" by James Kirkwood. Reminisces about the crucial "Big Bang" moment in deep space exploration and how it was a poet (and an inadvertent martyr), and not a scientist, who was needed to get humanity's mythological juices flowing in the direction of outer space. Because without that, you can only get so far off the earth.
  

• "Buyer's Remorse" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Why is this story here? I absolutely hated, hated, hated, hated this story. Completely pretentious short story told in the form of letters to an advice columnist about life in the far future and the columnist's responses. Confusing and didn't say much to me, which means I probably need to re-read it a couple of times until I finally get it. (That or simply forget about it).
  

• "My Soul to Keep" by Jerry Oltion. In the near-future US, religion is seen as a dangerous, infectious neurological disorder and so free exercise of said infection is therefore no longer enshrined in the US Constitution. When the Pope is injured while on a clandestine trip to the US, and the contagion is released, all hell (ahem) breaks lose. One scientist begins to regain her faith, and so her fellows protect her from the illness. For her own benefit, of course.

Relevant and riveting anthology of "green" science fiction

Dreams Edge: Science Fiction Stories
Terry Carr
Sierra Club Books

"So here are twenty stories about energy depletion, endangered species, pollution, our vanishing wilderness, overpopulation, and alternative energy sources--problems of the immediate future. Science fiction still tells of wondrous futures far away and a long time from now...but these are stories of the boundaries that lie immediaely before us. We're coming to the edge of something---is it to be the death of our world, or an endless future? Before we think about next week, we need to know that there'll be a tomorrow." (p.4)

Indeed. While amazing stories of space colonization and alien invasion are still great fun, I currently find myself needing a science fiction that addresses my pressing "green" concerns. Science fiction has always been the literary form which demands that the writer and reader think through the unthinkable, and, as anthologist/contributor Terry Carr reminds the reader, previous impossiblities like space flight found their initial inspirations in the fancies of science fiction writers. Now that the unthinkable includes the prospect of the collapse of civlization, or even of life itself, we urgently need science fiction speculation to help us find our way. I, along with Carr, hope that this anthology will inspire its readers to "devote their working lives to solving environmental problems," so that science fiction may "make an even more important contribution to the world."

To this end, Terry Carr has collected twenty wide-ranging masterpieces to address these environmental concerns, and not one of the stories is disappointing. Some of my favorites include: "Occam's Scalpel," in which the old trope of extraterrestrial colonization of the Earth meets the new call for ecological awareness; "Young Love," a chilling love story set in a future where everyone abides in government-sanctioned idiocy; the metafictional "How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?"; John Shirley's chilling "Under the Generator," in which death itself is exploited as a source of energy; and Carr's own "Virra," a sad yet hopeful finish to the anthology. Each story is a gem; collected, they are a masterpiece.

(This review was originally written on March 2, 2007.)

Rich, challenging, literary anthology that demands re-reading

Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias
Kim Stanley Robinson
Tor Books, 1997


At first I was a bit disappointed in this collection, because the earliest stories didn't seem ecotopian, utopian, or even SF in character. After I discovered the editor's endnotes, though, the intention behind the collection and its total vision became apparent, and the inclusion of the early stories made perfect sense.

As Dr. Robinson himself notes, the stories don't tend toward standard utopian themes---namely the planned, perfect, permanent society---but they instead reflect the dirty, earthy, organic, fertile concerns of the ecotopian. The "stories reveal everywhere their writers' belief that the societies they depict are preferable to the boxed existences of modern, urban life" (p. 346) through embodied engagement with the world of physical nature and the re-infusion of meaning into everyday life. "What these stories ask us to reconsider is what is really important in life, and thus new definitions of utopia must be reconsidered as well" (ibid).
"It's not that [these stories] advocate a simple return to nature, or a rejection of technology, which given our current situation would be nothing than another kind of ecological impossibility." Instead, these stories, "reject ther inevitability of a machine future" (p. 11).

Not all of the stories are immediately accessible, and many, if not most, demand re-reading in order to get a full appreciation of both the ideas and the writing in which those ideas are expressed. Most of the stories in the anthology really impressed me, but my favorites (at least right now) would have to be "Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands," "House of Bones," "Chocco," and "Newton's Sleep," all of which explored essential themes about what it means to be human in communion with (or separation from) the world of biological nature.

All in all this is a superb science fiction anthology that belongs on the bookshelves of anyone interested in utopian and ecotopian fiction, about the current state of humanity, and about our possible futures.

(This review was originally written on January 27, 2007.)

Exhilarating SF tour de force---brings "cyberpunk" from the neck down

Moldies & meatbops: Three *ware novels : Software ; Wetware ; Freeware
Rudy Rucker
Doubleday Direct, 1997

This volume collects three of the four novels in Rudy Rucker's intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable *Ware series: Software, Wetware, and Freeware. The arc of these three novels carries the reader from the dawn of the 21st century, when humanity's lunar robots reprogrammed themselves for freedom and consciousness, to the middle of the century, the radical future of artificial life, and beyond. In Rucker's mostly optimistic vision of the near-future, robots (from the Czech word for "slave", remember) give way to self-directing boppers (and human-dominated asimovs), who in turn pave the way for the quasi-organic moldies, who themselves become the staging ground for something far more transcendent. Meanwhile, humanity tries as best it can to keep pace with its new neighbors while inadvertently catalyzing their evolution from time to time. An exhilarating intellectual romp!

Rucker's novels work on so many levels that it beggars description. His intellectual and philosophical speculations about the nature of conscious life itself provide the skeleton, his joycean linguistic inventiveness enrobes his fresh ideas in strange flesh, and his sheer joy at being embodied succeeds both in animating his creation and in bringing the genre of science fiction, which has long been decidedly cognitively top-heavy, from the neck down. This is science fiction for people who love the raw stickiness and smelliness of physical existence. Moldies and Meatbops, or, more properly, the novels collected therein, easily ranks as Rucker's SF masterpiece.

(This review was originally written on September 4, 2006.)