Global arson

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, speculative fiction

The third section of Terraform: Watch | Worlds | Burn, edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans, contains 17 stories, nearly all in the darkest of moods.

One, "Mammoth Steps" by Andrew Dana Hudson (a play on mammoth steppes) has a hint of hope. The tundra is being restored by restored woolly mammoths, tended by cold-resistant mahouts. The oldest mammoth, and presumably the one with the largest proportion of elephant genes, decides to travel south. It's like an adopted child looking for a birth mother.

The stories range from evocative to puzzling; an example of the latter is "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried" by Debbie Urbanski. The author's sense of time hops around, seemingly at random, beginning with the supposed last resort, "human extinction". Some of the items are imaginary (one hopes), such as "bomb auto plants"; others may be possible in the future, such as "biodegradable bullets"; and others are aspirational/unlikely, such as "Coca-Cola removes polar bears [from advertising]".

Bruce Sterling shows up with "Brain Dump", a tale of hacking on another level, told with insufficient punctuation, in a patois that's intended to sound like a Ukrainian learning English.

Does "Dream Job" by Seamus Sullivan, about outsourcing sleep, describe the ultimate outsourcing? I no longer recall who wrote, "Why should we live? Our computers will do that for us."

I suppose the stories were intended to be depressing. They generally are. Most are also extrapolation beyond absurdity. Take a clue, folks: depression is not motivation.