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 Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, ed. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. (Upper Rubber Boot, 978-1-937794-75-0, 253 pages.) Cover art by Likhain.

Global Dystopias, ed. Junot Diaz (Boston Review, Boston Globe).

Children of a Different Sky, ed. Alma Alexander. (Kos Books, 177 pages.) Cover art by Gordana Curgus.

Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak. (Laska Media Groups Inc., 978-1-928140-04-9, 354 pages.) Cover art by Samantha M. Beiko.

Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, ed. Ellen Datlow. (Tor, 978-0-7653-9106-3, 333 pages.)

 

Let’s take a look at some of the minor anthologies of 2017 that we haven’t covered as yet. Mostly from small presses, these are anthologies that aren’t in the same league overall as the year’s major anthologies such as Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Wars or Nick Gevers’s Extrasolar—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still worthwhile stories to read to be found in them.

Falling into the futurology/climate change category we discussed last month, like David Brin and Stephen W. Potts’s Chasing Shadows, is Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. This is (or says that it is) a collection of Solarpunk stories. It’s a bit unclear precisely what “Solarpunk” is, or what distinguishes it from all the other sub-categorizations in our genre, and I’ll leave that for more astute critics to figure out (assuming that we ever hear anything about Solarpunk again; remember the few months a couple of decades back, before it was exiled to the graveyard of dead genre sub-classifications, when everybody was briefly talking about “Cowpunk”?). The anthology’s Introduction describes Solarpunk as “a new movement in SF that examines the possibility of a future in which currently emerging movements in society and culture such as the green movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and certain aspects of Occupy Wall Street coalesce to create a more optimistic future in a more just world.” This sounds good—I myself have been calling for less despair and nihilism in SF and more stories set in “a more optimistic future in a more just world”—but some of the authors here don’t seem to have gotten the message, since the anthology doesn’t frequently deliver material like that, but instead mostly bleak stories where all the battles have been fought and lost.

The best story here is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Road to the Sea,” an autumnal but mutedly lyrical look at a society struggling to survive and put itself back together after most of the world as we know it has been destroyed by catastrophic climate change. Also good is “A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World,” by A.C. Wise, another autumnal story about the people, mostly older folk, who choose to remain behind on an Earth with a rapidly shrinking habitable zone while their children set off in generation ships to seek refuge out among the stars; quietly moving in many ways, but hardly “optimistic.” Jess Barber’s “You and Me and the Deep Dark Sea” and Tyler Young’s “Last Chance” are also poignant, but rather bleak, the Barber showing the population of a small seaside community learning the hard lesson of working together to survive in the face of ongoing catastrophic climate change, and the Tyler, until the twist ending, set in an Earth rendered completely uninhabitable, with the only humans surviving in deep-buried underground cities. The story here that seems to do the best job of conforming to the self-described tenets of Solarpunk is Nisi Shawl’s “The Color of Money,” which takes place in the Alternate World setting of her recent novel Everfair, and which deals with political maneuverings to keep natural resources out of the hands of rapacious large nations.

So, a number of strong stories and some good reading here, but there’s no real reason why the majority of the stories couldn’t have been published in an ecological/climate change anthology rather than a specifically Solarpunk one. Be interesting to see what the next Solarpunk anthology, if there is one, is like. Sunvault also features a large number of poems and illustrations, and strong reprints by Daniel José Older and Nick Wood.

There’s no pretense of optimism about the future in Global Dystopias, a special section of the Boston Globe newspaper, edited by Junot Diaz. The title tells you just what you’re going to get, and most of the stories here are brutal and grim. Oddly, many of the dystopias presented here vere into the surrealistic to one degree or another, with only Maureen McHugh’s global pandemic really a realistic possibility. The best stories here are Charlie Jane Anders’s “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” a sort of updated version of Kafka’s The Castle taken to an extreme, with a faceless government unit, acting for no particular reason the victim ever understands, doing it’s best to strip an individual of everything that makes them an individual; “The Reformatory,” by Tananarive Due, an even more brutal example of a “correctional institute” doing much the same sort of thing as in the Anders story; and Maureen F. McHugh’s “Cannibal Acts,” about refugees in a remote outpost struggling to do whatever they need to do to survive in the face of a worldwide pandemic that has killed the rest of the human race. Grim stuff, and not for those with weak stomachs.

The fact is, though, I’m getting tired of dystopias. When you can see just by turning on CNN that you already live in one, they lose something of their appeal. I’d like to see some stories instead that provide realistic hope for a viable human future—which is why I wish movements like Solarpunk well (although a bit skeptical that they’ll actually be able to deliver).

Children of a Different Sky, edited by Alma Alexander, is a mixed SF and fantasy anthology about refugees and immigrants, with part of the profits being donated to various charitable institutions that help refugees, such as Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, with a list of the addresses of such charities in the book’s front matter if reading Children of a Different Sky moves you to make donations of your own. The best stories here are Aliette de Bodard’s “At the Crossroad of Shadow and Bone,” which literalizes a metaphor for war in a horrifying fashion as a relentless and unstoppable churning black mass that rolls slowly across the countryside, swallowing and obliterating everything in its path, and a straight mainstream story, “The Horse Head Violin,” by Jacey Bedford, a moving and ultimately hopeful story about Belgian refugees fleeing to Britain during World War I. Also good here are stories by Brenda Cooper, Seanan McGuire, and others.

One of the most interesting and encouraging developments in modern science fiction is a flood of good new writers of Asian descent (some Asian-American or Asian-Canadian, some living in various Asian countries around the world) entering the field. In recent years, writers such as Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Vandana Singh, Indrapramit Das, Yoon Ha Lee, and Liu Cixin (who won a Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem) have established reputations for themselves, and Clarkesworld has been featuring a story or two translated from the Chinese in almost every issue. And as shown by Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak, there are plenty of other Asian writers out there to be found.

Of course, to talk about “Asian Science Fiction” raises the same question that critics in the field were struggling with when discussing “Australian Science Fiction” a few years back. Other than using Australian characters and placing their stories in Australian settings, is there anything that makes Australian Science Fiction aesthetically different from American Science Fiction or British Science Fiction? Here the question is, other than using Asian characters and placing their stories in Asian settings, it there anything that makes Asian Science Fiction aesthetically different from other varieties? Then, for Australian Science Fiction, the consensus answer was “No,” and judging from the stories in this anthology, most of which could have appeared in any magazine or anthology without seeming out of place, the answer here is more or less “No” as well, with many of the stories leaning toward the cyberpunk and the post-cyberpunk. (The translated-from-the-Chinese stories that have been appearing in Clarkesworld seem to have a bit more aesthetic difference, although that could be because of the uneven quality of the translations themselves.) Aesthetic differences show up in a more pronounced way in the fantasy stories, not surprising since they’re drawing on a whole different body of mythology and folklore than does the standard genre fantasy.

Questions of categorization aside, there’s a lot of good reading to be found in Where the Stars Rise. The strongest stories here are “Looking Up,” by S.B. Divya, telling how a woman’s decision to emigrate to Mars sparks a reconciliation with her family at home, “Memoriam,” by Priya Sridhar, about a child torn from his family by war and his long journey to find his place in life, “Spirit of Wine,” by Tony Pi, about a man’s struggle to rescue his brother from possession by a destructive spirit, “The dataSultan of Street and Stars,” by Jeremy Szal, a cyberpunk caper about a hacker’s dangerous mission to liberate captive AIs, and “Weaving Silk,” by Amanda Sun, detailing the struggle of two sisters to survive in a Japan wrecked by natural disasters. Also good here are stories by Calvin D. Jia, Minsoo Kang, Fonda Lee, Melissa Yuan-Innes, and others.

I usually don’t review horror anthologies, but although there are streaks of darkness in it (it is, after all, an Ellen Datlow anthology), the subject matter of Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, edited by Ellen Datlow tends to make the stories more whimsical than horrific, and so more to my liking. The strongest stories here, from my perspective, are Andy Duncan’s compassionate study of Alice illustrator Sir John Tenniel, “Worrity, Worrity,” Ysabeau S. Wilce’s madcap “The Queen of Hats,” Richard Bowes’s study of an Alice in Wonderland movie that never was, “Some Kind of Wonderland,” and Seanan McGuire’s rather sad and poignant study of a reverse-Alice, one who came out of Wonderland to face the problems of the real world, “Sentence Like a Saturday.” There’s also good work here by Jane Yolen, Jeffery Ford, Delia Sherman, Priya Sharma, Genevieve Valentine, Catherynne M. Valente, and others.