Everything Is Nice

‘Introduction’ by Jetse de Vries
‘The Earth of Yunhe’ by Eric Gregory (Excerpt)
‘The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up’ by Jacques Barcia (Excerpt)
‘Overhead’ by Jason Stoddard (Excerpt)
‘Summer Ice’ by Holly Phillips (Excerpt)
‘Sustainable Development’ by Paula R. Stiles (Excerpt)
‘The Church of Accelerated Redemption’ by Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard (Excerpt)
‘The Solnet Ascendancy’ by Lavie Tidhar (Excerpt)
‘Twittering The Stars’ by Mari Ness (Excerpt)
‘Seeds’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Excerpt)
‘At Budokan’ by Alastair Reynolds (Excerpt)
‘Sarging Rasmussen: A Report By Organic’ by Gord Sellar (Excerpt)
‘Scheherazade Caught in Starlight’ by Jason Andrew (Excerpt)
‘Russian Roulette 2020′ by Eva Maria Chapman (Excerpt)
‘Castoff World’ by Kay Kenyon (Excerpt)
‘Paul Kishosha’s Children’ by Ken Edgett (Excerpt)
‘Ishin’ by Madeline Ashby (Excerpt)

I have never been a fan of positive SF, I think it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about literature. However, I admire Jetse de Vries for realising his vision ; he went beyond just cheerleading for the concept on the internet to persuading a publisher to put out an anthology of new fiction. Hats off to him for that. Unfortunately, the novelty of this experience comes through rather too clearly. de Vries can’t help himself from drawing back the curtain at the sausage factory and the book would have been immeasurably improved if he had removed his introductory comments from each story. The same goes for the horrendous haikuesque Tweets that bookend each story. As for his main introduction, I’ve already expressed some frustrations but let’s return to that after the stories themselves.

First, let’s dismiss three of the stories – ‘Sustainable Development’, ‘Seeds’ and ‘Scheherazade Caught in Starlight’ – as being too short to be worthy of discussion. That leaves thirteen stories of which I’d say four were actually any good. Although ‘Summer Ice’ is my least favourite of these, it does deserve special praise for being the only story that ignores technology entirely. Its focus on society instead of magic technology is something I would have liked to have seen a lot more of in the anthology. Chief offender here is ‘The Earth of Yunhe’ but ‘The Solnet Ascendancy’ and ‘Paul Kishosha’s Children’ also describe remarkably similar exponential curves to the stars. At least ‘The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up’ keeps its genie in the bottle (even if that does ruin the story).

This ties into some comments Mark C Newton made on his blog recently:

I can understand the need to stress the importance of Big Ideas. It’s what the genre is about, no? But in some cases – such as climate change – this is where your future dreaming will get the world in trouble. A reliance on such visions in this particular example is a terrible thing.

There’s so little time to hold back anthropogenic climate change (assuming you accept the unequivocal science in the first place). Leave it too long, and it will be too late to bring back CO2 concentrations to the necessary levels, causing a huge variety of issues that I’ve gone on about many times before. Dreaming up science fiction, Big Ideas, will not address the actual problems of dumping huge amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere in the first place. Moreover, this SF is diverting attention, political and financial resources away from urgent action. What this also does is play right into the hands of corporate lobbyists who will use it as an argument to delay such urgent action even further, usually to the benefit of [insert polluting organisation here].

Blind faith in science as a solution to our ills, or as some remarkable future dreamscape, can be a dangerous thing.

So in ‘Castoff World’ we have a technological solution to one specific problem but it is clearly seen as a single step; the world has not been saved but it has been made slightly better. optimism is tentative (as well it might be). In my two favourite stories – ‘Sarging Rasmussen’ and ‘Ishin’ – technology that already exists within their fictional worlds is re-purposed by dedicated individuals. There is no paradigm shift, instead pockets of humanity work with what they have to slowly work towards a better world. Both stories also focus (in very different ways) on building relationships; lobbying and alliance building is more likely to save us than nanotechnology.

Bubbling under, ‘At Budokan’ is a really fun concept but out of place here and the characters are little more than placeholders for the idea and if ‘Twittering The Stars’ ultimately falls flat on its arse, at least it made a brave stab at doing something different. The less said about the remainder of the stories, the better, so back to de Vries introduction and his goals. Firstly, what does near-future actually? Niall Harrison suggested:

I tend to think that a few decades is near future, a few centuries is medium term, and a few millennia is enough to qualify you in the far-future division. Fuzzy categories, though, I could be persuaded that anything this century should count as near-future; perhaps another way of thinking of it is within the lifespan of someone born today?

Whereas Abigail Nussbaum said:

I might suggest that “near future” is similarly not a matter of chronological years but of familiarity. I’d call a setting near-future if it comprised technological or geopolitical developments that are currently considered inevitable or imminent, and if its setting was largely similar to our world but for these changes.

I lean more towards Niall’s view than Abigail’s because I tend to an absolutist mind set and I want something nice and clearly defined. Many of the stories in Shine appear to range far beyond the next couple of decade but most deliberately conceal when they are actually set. There is something a bit like a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in place; as long as you don’t rub your far future setting in my face, I won’t ask you to prove it is near future.

Anyway, this is far less inmportant than the other question, what does optimistic mean? I had assumed this was quite straigthforward but after reading story after story in which Earth was inevitably doomed to environment and economic collapse I started to wonder. For all his criticism of crapsack futures, de Vries has presided over an anthology that things the current negative trends are just going to keep on getting worse. The only question seems to be, can we eventually dig ourselves out of this chaos? The majority of the stories take place in either the lead up to flipping a magic switch and saving the world or at the very outset of a long hard climb out of the hole we’ve got ourself into (a climb that it is by no means certain will suceed). It is only truly ‘Summer Ice’ that presents an optimistic, positive future that has already come to pass. You can understand that because fiction (and particularly genre fiction) thrives on problems to be solved but it is still extremely noticeable.

‘Summer Ice’ is also the only story set entirely within the United States of America. It is unusual and pleasing to see such a diverse range of settings but I can’t help but think most contributors have ignored the elephant in the room. Perhaps the BRIC countries will one day really rise to the superpower status that has been predicted for them but at the moment, the US remains the dominant global power. Nor do the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Economic Forum or any other international institutions get a look it (with the honourable exception of Gord Sellar). These are stories that address symtoms in isolation rather than looking to the system these symtoms stem from. In my view, Shine is far too optimistic for its own good because it doesn’t really confront the problems it wishes to solve.

Reading the introduction to Shine I remarked that the problems the anthology seeks to solve are primarily economic and political. Perhaps understandably the majority of stories have shied away from this fact and instead treated the symptoms of the problem with a judicious application of magic technology. So it is nice to end the book with a story that sees beneath this.

In medicine, it is well known that prevention is better than cure; in politics, it is well known that punishment is better than prevention. Building another super max prison or aircraft carrier is always more attractive than tackling boring issues like entrenched inequality. Ashby’s story sees a tiny corner of the military industrial complex re-inventing itself to concentrate on prevention, justice and healing. It represents exactly what de Vries intended for this antholgoy: an ineffable flame of hope.

Near-future? Yes.
Optimistic? Yes.
Readable? Yes.
Good? Yes.

“Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas”, it says on the back cover of Shine, but I don’t know how you could describe this lovely little fairytale as anything other than idiotically optimistic. Paul Kishosha single-handedly starts an East African space race with his children’s science programme that culminates with a successful mission to Mars and a space elevator in Tanzania. The details along the way are surprisingly good but this is so far fetched as to make a total mockery of the idea optimistic SF is meant to be about solving problems or engaging with the real world.

Near-future? Half and half.
Optimistic? Impossibly so.
Readable? Yes.
Good? No

After the shock to the system of ‘Russian Roulette 2020′ and coming to the end of what has been a pretty poor anthology, ‘Castoff World’ is a pleasdant surprise. Not what I would describe as an optimistic story that was positive about the future though. I’d be more likely to reach for adjectives like “disquieting”.

As with so many of the stories in Shine, it takes place after a devestating environment collapse. Child’s family has fled the crumbling US to take up residency on a floating pile of rubbish in Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Since their arrival, both her parents have died, leaving her in the care of her granddad (who calls her “child” hence, slightly unbelieveably, her adoption of that as her name). So far, so optimistic.

Their pile of rubbish is actually something rather more sophisticated than just plastic junk. For a start it has a name: Nora. This stands for Nanobotic Oceanic Refuse Accumulator, it is a collection of nanobots that have been sent out into the Pacific gyre to collect the floating rubbish and render it down into tolerable elements. It ignores organic material so the stowaways are safe but Nora wages a war of attrition against their possessions. It is a novel and nicely evoked setting.

Once this concept is established, it is swiftly unravelled by an event that sends both Child and Nora off in a new direction. It is a new beginning but not necessarily an optimistic one because the rest of Child’s story is untold.

Near-future? Yes.
Optimistic? No.
Readable? Yes.
Good? Yes.

Apparently this is Chapman’s first science fiction story but it is so bad I could easily believe it is the first thing she’s ever written. Rada is a hot Russian who likes to cartwheel through the forest with no pants, the better to display her luxuriant pubic hair. MV is an American retard who caught a rash off the internet. They fall in love. At least, I think that is the story; Chapman seems to have forgotten to actually write it though. Every sentence brings a fresh embarrassment and the story single handedly manages to drag down the whole anthology.

Near-future? Yes.
Optimistic? No.
Readable? No.
Good? No.

Last September I naively suggested that Hackney was reaching breakfast saturation. I was utterly wrong – new cafes are springing up so quickly you could almost believe it was a council initiative to fill empty shop fronts. Just this morning I walked out to post a letter and discovered another one had opened up across the road (albeit one inside a Danish furniture shop). Anyway, the most recent two that I’ve sampled are Railroad and Pacific Social Club. Both are on insalubrious streets, both are carved out of cramped, less than idea units and both feature charming, mismatched crockery and charming, harried staff.

Railroad is the slightly bigger and more grown up of the two, a double corner unit of white walls and bare wood. It was a small, changing menu (which moves beyond breakfast to dinner) but the one thing that remains on the menu is a Vietnamese sandwich with slow cooked, spiced pork and pickled vegetables. N ordered courgette gratin with tomato salad but I was always going to have this sandwich. After I ordered mine, I saw a woman at another table receive her’s and start cutting it up with knife and fork. Pft, I thought to myself, how fastidious. When mine I arrived I just stuffed it in my mouth. And realised I’d bitten of more than I could chew; there was no way for me to put it down without the sandwich disintegrating. This meant I ate it very quickly and with the odd plaintive request for my wife to hold my mint tea up to my mouth. A good sandwich – the warm, spicy meat counter by the crunch of the vegetable and coriander – but it needed some sort of sauce to bind it all together; breakfast is a time for moist food. Breakfast is also a time for drinks and they were very impressive. My fresh mint came as a pot at a scandalously low price (it really didn’t need a strainer though). They’ve also got a really interesting beer list that I’d like to sample at some point.

Pacific Social Club is even smaller, it is so narrow it doesn’t even have room for a kitchen. Instead, there is a tiny prep counter next to the coffee machine which means they are limited to the bread and diary portions of breakfast but they are inventive with what they have. I ordered the Venezuelan sandwich because how could I not? Chorizo, black pudding, black beans, avocado and cheese squashed into a crescent of flat bread. This is what you need for the first meal of a Saturday: high protein, rich, sticky, slightly excessive. The only error was in a bizarre choice of cutlery. I was presented with a tiny butter knife that might as well have been a toothpick. I looked around and, to my astonishment, saw that everyone had one. They’ve obviously hijacked a consignment of dollhouses. Baffling but didn’t really detract from the food. However, if their sandwich was slightly than Railroad’s then the drink was slightly worse. Now, I’m not allowed to drink coffee so, when I very infrequently break the rules and indulge, I don’t feel qualified to criticise but this was seriously underwhelming. (The Time Out review I linked above because they don’t have their own website identifies a similar problem).

After these two happy accidents, on Friday I explicitly went in search of a signature sandwich. This one has Anglo-Franco heritage but can’t be described as anything but a great British sandwich: the foie gras toastie. This meant a pilgrimage down the the Canton Arms, a surprisingly pleasant half hour walk from my office in Victoria down some pretty unpleasant main roads. I arrived before the kitchen opened but, although I had a hunger and the toasties are available from the all day bar menu, I decided to heighten my sense of anticipation with a pint of Timothy Taylor Golden Best and the G2 crossword.

The pub is basically the Anchor & Hope of South London (technically, the Anchor & Hope is the Anchor & Hope of South London but, spiritually, Waterloo is Central.) That is where chef Trish Hilferty has come from and she has applied the same formula here: a glass of fizz to start (in this case damson gin and prosecco, the thump of the gin perhaps too pronounced), a relatively short menu of British dishes and a couple of specials to share (rabbit for two and lamb neck for four on my visit). Briefly tempted by the fried ox heart, I stayed true and ordered the toastie of the bar menu followed by chicken leg with bacon and peas served with chips. The latter was a nice, simple dish but I would quibble over the description on the menu. Chips are chips, particularly on a such a British menu, so if you are going to serve fries (which I was happy to have) then you should say so. It also came with cream sauce – again, nice but unexpected (and a bit of a hazard for the fries which I would have served separately) – which transformed it into much more of a bistro dish than was apparent from the menu. As for the froi gras toastie, it was exactly that: white bread, cheese, thin layer of liver, all compressed into the classic Breville triangle. It was rich, obviously, but not overwhelmingly so; the fried bread was almost delicate which meant its cargo was manageable. Still you wouldn’t want one every day. It was served with a good, sharp chutney that was too strong for the middle but worked well with the crusts.

Finally, yesterday I popped down to Feast on the Bridge as part of the Thames Festival. For one day a year, Southwark Bridge is closed to traffic and laid out as a huge banqueting table with a brilliant selection of food stalls at the south end of the bridge. This year I sampled the Hepworth brewery tent (Summer was vile, Prospect was nice, Blonde was the best but went flat in about five minutes), the Arancini Brothers (great risotto balls but duff advertising which must have kept away the punters) and, best off all, a hog roast sandwich. This was the unassuming name for great hunks of porchetta stuffed into a ciabatta. Nom.

So what am I going to have for my sandwich today?

This isn’t a science fiction story, it isn’t really a story at all. Instead it is a fantasy in which Iran magically becomes a liberal democracy simply because this is inevitable.

Near-future? Yes.
Optimistic? Yes.
Readable? Yes but only because it is about 500 words long.
Good? No.

I’ve known Sellar for over a decade but never read any of his fiction (sorry, Gord). So I’m pleased to be able to say ‘Sarging Rasmussen’ is pretty good.

The central conceit is that environmental activists harness the unholy powers of the Game (not the game the Game) and use their skills as pick-up artists for good rather than evil. It is as high concept as a dinosaur called Derek playing death metal but falls into an uncanny valley of plausibility which makes it more unsettling.

Sellar is very good at rendering the terminology of the “sarging” pick-up artist (or PUA) in the same terms as any other science fictional jargon and, unlike a lot of this stories, he is fully inhabiting the world he has created, working through its implications. Such as the conceptual break through when they realise there are other ways of using this nuerolinguistic programming: “sarging is sarging. It’s all the same game, and all the skills are interchangeable.” After that we are down the rabbit hole and sharking for girls becomes indistinguishable from international espionage.

Near-future? No.
Optimistic? No.
Readable? Yes.
Good? Yes.

Reynolds is by far the biggest name in this anthology. He is a superb short story writer who is now perhaps best know for his huge novels (and, indeed, his huge ten year contract with Gollancz). But he is not an immediately obvious fit for Shine; his vast space operas often attract the adjective “gothic” and the timescales he routinely deals with are virtually nihilistic.

Well, this story isn’t much like anything else in this book and isn’t much like anything else he’s written. ‘At Budokan’ starts with a nightmare about being “crushed to death by a massive robot version of James Hetfield”. It ends with a tyrannosaurus rex playing a Gibson Flying V. Near future and optimistic don’t really come into it.

Near-future? See above.
Optimistic? See above.
Readable? Yes.
Good? No.

Another short short story and, as is so often the case, it doesn’t manage to get anywhere before it ends. In the evil corner we have James Clark, sales rep for Germingen (creators of GM corn – boo, hiss, etc), and in the good corner we have Alejandro Totol, honest Mexican farmer and preserve of cultural traditions. Can you guess who wins?

Well, you are sort of right in that Clark is wrongfooted and potential misses out of promotion. But then it’s also implied that Germingen are going to napalm the whole of Mexico so perhaps Totol shouldn’t celebrate too soon.

Near-future? Yes.
Optimistic? No.
Readable? Just about.
Good? No.