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Upgraded, ed. Neil Clarke. (Wyrm Publishing, 978-1-890464-30-1, $16.95, 368 pages.) Cover art by Julie Dillon.

Coming Soon Enough, Six Tales of Technology’s Future, ed. Stephen Cass. (IEEE Spectrum). Illustrations by Martin Ansin.

Hieroglyph, Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. (William Morrow, 978-0-06-220469-1, 532 pages).

 

Upgraded, an original SF anthology edited by Neil Clarke, the editor of the Hugo-winning electronic magazine Clarkesworld, was inspired by the editor having a defibrillator implanted in him after a near-fatal heart attack, turning him into a “cyborg,” a mixture of man and machine—which subsequently inspired him to edit this anthology that examines the various roles, positive and negative, that cyborgs play in science fiction. As a cyborg myself, I thoroughly approve. And Clarke does a pretty good job with the anthology, although perhaps because Clarkesworld primarily features short stories and usually observes an upper word-limit, he crams a lot of short stories into the book, twenty-six stories in 368 pages, and some of them could have used a little more breathing room; in fact, it may be significant that the best stories here are the longest ones, while most of the weakest tend to be the shortest. Some of the stories here are standard postcyberpunk or Military SF, with the cyborg’s enhancements merely a device to help carry out an espionage or battlefield mission, the kind of stories that can be found by the dozen in any year and which could have appeared in any SF anthology, but others are more appropriate for a specialized cyborg anthology, taking a more thoughtful and more original look the cyborg experience itself, what it means and feels like to be part human and part machine, and how it helps or hinders the protagonists in the course of their lives. Some of the enhancements that turn the protagonists into cyborgs are not gross physical augmentations, but rather subtle methodologies that allow their memories and emotions and thought-processes to be monitored and adjusted, sometimes by the person themselves, sometimes by external control—an idea that’s getting an increased amount of attention in SF these days.

The strongest stories here are Ken Liu’s “The Regular,” also the longest story in the book, and Peter Watts’s “Collateral.” “The Regular” is a tightly told and suspenseful futuristic crime drama, featuring a cyborg detective whose emotions are tightly controlled by a regulating device, who is on the trail of a creepy serial killer; “Collateral” is a bleak and uncompromising look at the consequences of taking humans out of the loop and letting autonomous robot systems make their own decisions as to when to fire in combat situations (something Philip K. Dick warned us about decades ago, but a warning which the real-world military is largely ignoring), which reads like a high-tech modern updating of Lucius Shepard’s well-known story “Salvador,” with much the same moral outrage bubbling not too far under the surface. Also good here are Elizabeth Bear’s “No Place to Dream, But a Place to Die,” a grim look at the lives of miners who have had their bodies radically redesigned to enable them to function in mines in a hostile offworld environment, and who in spite of their high-tech augmentations can look forward only to lives that are nasty, brutal, and short, and Greg Egan’s “Seventh Sight,” a typically clever examination of how an augmentation designed to enable those in danger of losing their sight to see better can have unexpected and profound wider social consequences over time. Oddly, there’s only one story here dealing with cyborg augmentations for sports, the field where extreme augmentations are likely to appear first in the real world, but it’s a powerful one about the cost of getting to be better at everything than everyone else, “God Decay,” by Rich Larson. Robert Reed offers another Great Ship story, “The Sarcophagus,” and since almost everyone in the long-running Great Ship series is a cyborg of one sort or another, it’s a valid inclusion—but somehow it doesn’t seem to quite belong; if everyone in the universe is a cyborg, then that becomes the new baseline reality, and exploring the distinction between cyborgs and unaltered humanity becomes difficult to do; much the same applies to Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Synedoche Oracles,” set in a bizarre future where everyone has been transformed in strange and grotesque ways. On the other hand, back in the near-future, Madeline Ashby tells a tense school-shooting story in “Come From Away” which really could have been told with little change whether the protagonist was a cyborg or not, and Mari Ness’s poignant “Memories and Wires” would have played out in much the same ways if the protagonist was an unhappy woman cutting herself rather than a cyborg unraveling her wires. Upgraded also features good work by Yoon Ha Lee, Chen Qiufan, Tobias S. Buckell, Xia Jia, Seth Dickinson, and others.

IEEE is self-described as the “world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences,” and in honor of their 50th Anniversary they have put out a special all-SF ebook edition of their magazine, IEEE Spectrum, called Coming Soon Enough, Six Tales of Technology’s Future, edited by Stephen Cass, who used to edit similar original SF magazine / anthologies for MIT Technology Review. These are meant to be “about a plausible future, one that we may find ourselves living in before too long” (hence the title, Coming Soon Enough, drawn from a quote by Albert Einstein: “I never think of the future—it comes soon enough”), and which deal with the problems and potentialities of living in a world featuring “cybernetic implants, autonomous drones, wearable computers, renewable energy, 3-D printing,” a future that also figures in most of the other anthologies reviewed here and in several earlier ones this year, and which is quickly becoming science fiction’s new consensus future. There’s plenty of ingenious ideas here, as in the other futurology-oriented anthology, Twelve Tomorrows, that we reviewed here a couple of months back, and as is also true of Hieroglyph, which we’ll get to below, but it shares a weakness with Upgraded, in that many of the stories here are very short, having time to set up an interesting idea or situation, but not the time to do much with it in terms of dramatic elaboration or creating human interest. (Is this a prejudice of those who work with internet-published fiction? On the whole, the internet is hostile to or at least resistant to long fiction, which always strikes me as odd, since ezines shouldn’t have to worry about the practical word-length limitations that affect print publications.)

The best story here, by a good margin (and, coincidentally or not, also I believe the longest), is “Shadow Flock,” by Greg Egan, an ingenious and suspenseful story about an intricately timed caper pulled off using fly-sized remote-controlled drones, one with a sting in the tail at the very end which should make us all a bit uneasy. Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Incoming” proposes a clever answer to the Fermi Paradox (“Where Is Everybody?”), but as far as I can tell has nothing whatsoever to do with the anthology’s ostensible theme, seeming to have wandered in from some other anthology altogether (Ian Whates Paradox anthology, perhaps). The protagonist of Nancy Kress’s “Someone To Watch Over Me” is so unlikeable, and what she’s willing to do in the service of jealousy so unconscionable, that it’s hard not to read this not only as a Cautionary Tale but as a horror story as well. Brenda Cooper’s “A Heart of Power and Oil” has something of the air of a YA story, as do several of the others here, and really doesn’t tell you a lot about the future it’s projecting, but does manage to mate the abstract idea to an engaging human story. There are also stories here by Mary Robinette Kowal and Cheryl Rydborn. As far as I can tell, Coming Soon Enough is available only in ebook form, and can be ordered from Amazon or iTunes.

Of the year’s three similar futurology-oriented, near-future SF anthologies, Twelve Tomorrows, Coming Soon Now, and Hieroglyph, Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, Hieroglyph is the most successful; not all of the stories here are exceptional, but the anthology does feature several of the year’s best stories and much other good stuff as well, making it one of the year’s best original SF anthologies, seriously rivaled only by Jonathan Strahan’s Reach for Infinity. Produced in conjunction with the Hieroglyph Project of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and Technology, this self-described book of “Aspirational SF” carries a heavy didactical freight, claiming to be “an anthology of new SF that will be a conscious throwback to the practical techo-optimism of the Golden Age,” one which will help to “reignite innovation in science, technology, and how they’re used,” and “rekindle grand technological ambitions through the power of storytelling,” in the way that SF once inspired young dreamers to create the Space Program that landed humans on the Moon. In some ways, this may be the most ambitious anthology of the year, featuring non-fiction essays and commentary on the stories by the authors as well as the fiction, and links to places on the Center for Science and Technology website (csi.asu.edu) where you can read extended discussions of the subject matter of the stories (and evaluations of its feasibility) by SF writers, scientists, engineers, and futurologists.

All of those elements are beyond my purview here, so let’s stick to the fiction, which on the whole does a good job of balancing this formidable weight of polemic with entertainment values and readability (although a few of them do flounder and sink). On the whole, I agree with the sentiment behind the Hieroglyph Project, that the pendulum has swung too far and SF as a whole has become too bleak and pessimistic—a future where you crouch in a ruined car during a blizzard toasting a poodle on a stick over a trash fire is unlikely to inspire any societal-changing Big Dreams, and really doesn’t offer too many dramatic possibilities except whether the ax-wielding feral street gangs catch you or not.

Not even all the stories here manage to toe the Techno-Optimism Party Line—the “Utopia” in Madeline Ashby’s “By the Time We Get to Arizona” strikes me as a horrifying dystopia instead, one I’d want to get out of as soon as possible (as indeed do the characters in the story), and the future in Lee Konstantinou’s “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA” is rather a bleak one as well, and in spite of a note of somewhat forced optimism at the end, strikes me as a rather hopeless one that’s unlikely to change. But most of the stories do manage to create hopeful futures that we might actually be able to obtain and might actually want to live in, without the author strapping on the rose-colored glasses and ignoring the problems of the present—which is not an easy thing to do. The strongest stories here are also (coincidentally or not) the two longest ones, Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” a fascinating examination of how one small technological innovation can, over the course of a lifetime, end up building a significant stepping-stone for the future, and Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement,” which shows the hidden connections between several people in a near-future world who are struggling—and to at least a small extent, succeeding—to combat the worst ravages of global climate change. Also first-rate are “Covenent,” by Elizabeth Bear—a story with some points of similarity with Ken Liu’s “The Regulars” from Upgraded, except that this story, which becomes extremely gripping and suspenseful, is told from the point of view of a serial killer who has been conditioned against killing even when put into a life-or-death situation—and Geoffrey A. Landis’s “A Hotel in Antarctica,” about the difficulties faced in creating such a place, and a story which manages to strike a hopeful note, with the characters resolving not to give up, even in the face of a sudden environmental catastrophe. Hieroglyph also features strong original work by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling, Brenda Cooper, James L. Cambias, and others, as well as strong reprint stories by Neal Stephenson and Gregory Benford.