Brave New Worlds

John Joseph Adams has distinguished himself in the past with outstanding speculative fiction anthologies, from Wastelands to The Living Dead and others. His latest volume, Brave New Worlds, is perhaps one of the finest sets of short fiction that I've ever read, with a stunning table of contents and authors to tell their stories of oppression.

Brave New Worlds is a complete turnaround from Wastelands, an anthology that looks at humanity after the demise of civilization. Here, the focus is on societies where government has not only remained, but strengthened to the point where the people themselves become the enemies of the state. It's an incredibly frightening future, and one that feels far more relevant to today's world than most works. The argument between Republicanism and Federalism is a familiar one to anybody who has tuned into the news over the past couple of years.

Indeed, this anthology came to me at a time of personal political crisis. The past couple of years have been ones of discussion, learning and thinking about the differences in political parties, and what these sorts of things mean at the end of day and down the road. The idea of an overly strong state that impinges upon the rights of its citizens is something that is undesirable to me, and what our country represents. Numerous actions taken by the government have had a speculative-fiction feel to it, such as the detainees in Guantanamo Bay and the kill order against a radical cleric overseas, to the authority of the Transportation Security Administration following some terrorist attacks. It is a frightening future, but one that also needs to be balanced against the idea of a libertarian world where little order or government control exists to keep people from killing or harming one another. As such, Brave New Worlds is scary much in the same way that Wastelands (of what I've read and heard of it) was scary: it exists at the other extreme end of the political spectrum.

There are a good number of fantastic stories here. The anthology starts off with Shirley Jackson's classic story The Lottery and continues to tell a great number of tales such as S.K. Gilbow's Red Card, where people are assigned by their state randomly to kill lawbreakers, Ten With A Flag by Joseph Paul Haines that sees citizens given rankings based on their potential and Geriatric Ward by Orson Scott Card, which sees people who have vastly accelerated life spans. One of my absolute favorites is Jordan's Waterhammer by Joe Mastroianni, a tale of miners valued only as tools. Many of the stories here were fairly new to me: I'd either heard of them by reputation or read them once long ago, while there were also a fair number of stories that I have read before, such as Carrie Vaughn's Amaryllis (published on Adam's online science fiction magazine Lightspeed), Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Paolo Bacigalupi's disturbing Pop Squad. There are few of the stories that I didn't get into, such as The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin and O Happy Day! by Geoff Ryman, simply not suiting my own tastes for any number of reasons, but these were few and far between.

What impressed me even more than the excellent lineup of stories and authors was that the anthology didn't feel repetitive. There are plenty of short stories and novellas that fall into the dystopian category, but one could have easily told story after story of an intrepid citizen standing up and fighting the power, so to speak. That certainly happens, in their own ways, but there's a broad spectrum of stories to be told. Jordan's Waterhammer is a story that I expected to see more often in the anthology, but stories such as Amaryllis, The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away (Cory Doctorow) and the funny Civilization by Vylar Kaftan (a choose your own adventure style story) shows a diversity in the story types, but also the morals and themes behind the stories. While Brave New Worlds is scary, it goes out of its way to demonstrate the numerous ways in which fascism can manifest itself in society, in any location.

One of my favorite stories here was Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, which I first read in the theater waiting for the movie to begin. Of all the dystopian stories that I can think of, the story and the film both demonstrate the core themes for any type of dystopian story: which is the greater evil, protecting the people from themselves, or allowing them to come to greater harm?

One particularly striking story that helped define the anthology was Tobias Buckell's story, Resistance, on an asteroid colony that adopted techno-democracy, where everybody can vote on every decision. When the time required to vote becomes to much, their voting habits are taken over by a computer, which in turn creates a leader for them, based on their desires. The story demonstrated to me that in all cases, governance is the product of we the people. Society can certainly back the wrong people, as history has seen from time to time, with figures such as Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini, but rather than a universal evil, supporters remain, for whatever reason: fear, threads, naïveté or blind obedience. Despite the uproar online over the TSA screening procedures enacted around the holiday period, a majority of Americans supported them.

Brave New Worlds isn't a book that's appealing because I see some imminent threat of a governmental implosion or change (although some might view it that way), it is appealing because it recognizes and points out that fascism is a continual threat to society from a particular political philosophy of a strong state, while the opposite philosophy spells danger in much the same way - presumably what Wastelands will tell a reader. The threat is present within us all, through our overreactions and our indifference to the world around us, and for that, I think Brave New Worlds presents us with a stunning cautionary group of stories that shows the limits of what people will tolerate. As it stands, it remains an exceedingly relevant and poignant book that should be an essential addition to any speculative fiction fan's personal library.

Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Last year, I was totally blown away by Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, The Windup Girl, which has since gone on to win a Nebula, is in the running for a Hugo award later this year and was named as one of Time Magazine's top ten books of the year. The book certainly deserves that attention, and Bacigalupi has rapidly established himself as a rising star in the genre, already with the Theodore Sturgeon award for his short story The Calorie Man in 2006, as well as several Hugo and Nebula nominations for The Calorie Man and The People of Sand and Slag. It comes as no surprise, then, that Ship Breaker, his first foray into Young Adult fiction, is a high quality and fast paced novel, one that is both thought provoking and exciting to the reader.

Set at some point in the indeterminate future, Ship Breaker could easily fit into the worlds that have been established in Bacigalupi's other stories. The age of cheap energy has ended, and the consequences of that time have caught up to civilization. Global warming has caused the oceans to rise and society's boundaries to shift. In the former Gulf Coast region, Nailer Lopez is a Ship Breaker, a young man who is part of a team that goes onboard abandoned and decaying oil tankers and transport ships, stripping them of their wiring and anything of value, which is then turned into a sort of company boss, who sells them to someone else. The citizens in this region are an indentured workforce, unable to move away or to seek out a better life.

For Nailer, his prospects shift dramatically when a major storm (nicknamed a ‘City Killer’, something akin to Katrina, most likely), comes through the area, blowing to shore an advanced clipper ship, one with the daughter of a wealthy company owner onboard. Nailer must navigate through a complicated set of events, each of which can fundamentally change his life for better or worse. Throughout the story, he is faced with choices: to take a monumental risk and hope for something better to happen because of it, or act on his instincts, preserving what is familiar. This is a theme that permeates the book throughout, and for that reason, it’s a solid addition to the Young Adult market, because of the lessons that can be learned from it.

What truly stands out for Ship Breaker, much like The Windup Girl, is that Bacigalupi’s vision of the future, one that seems firmly rooted in reality, transposing current issues into the future. Ironically, I picked up this book around the same time as the ongoing Deepwater Horizon explosion and read it during the resulting oil spill that has since contaminated much of the Gulf in the past five weeks. With that in the back of my mind, it’s clear that Bacigalupi has a point throughout his stories: we need to care for our environment, and his biopunk stories (including the fantastic People of Sand and Slag) really look to this theme.

Like The Windup Girl, this story also integrates a fantastic cast of characters into the environment that he’s put together. Nailer is highly relatable for a protagonist, someone caught in the middle of a vast number of changes outside of his control, and provides a very heroic figure throughout, but one who is tortured by his choices, such as his relationship with his abusive and violent father, and some of his fellow workers. ‘Lucky Girl’, or Nita, plays a sort of damsel in distress, whom Nailer discovers after the storm. Tool is a ‘half-man’, a bioengineered guard, composed of human and canine DNA , who’s broken away from his genetic programming to assist Nailer. All of these elements blend together in a notable book, one that is likely to really win awards.

What struck me the most, however, is the detail and care that has been put into the world-building of this future. While the plot left me wanting a bit more (and keeping in mind that this was a YA novel), what left me far more interested in finishing was the society and issues that Bacigalupi has put into the story. There’s a major stratification of society between the rich and poor, with major industrial powers rising, and with people looking to survive off of whatever they can find. There’s an immense amount of relevant commentary within this book, even though at points, I found the plot to be somewhat predictable. Despite that, it’s certainly far superior to most YA novels that I’ve read recently, and it’s certainly something that will bring more attention to Mr. Bacigalupi.

In the end, Ship Breaker is an exciting and rewarding read, one that is good, and should bring new messages and meanings to a variety of age groups, whether it is to the young adult demographic or to adult speculative fiction readers. Bacigalupi presents, once again, a frightening vision of the future, one that seems very likely to me. While I did not feel that it’s up to the same caliber as The Windup Girl, it stands very well on its own, and leaves me wanting much more from Bacigalupi’s world.