Post-Apocalypticism prevails

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In three days I've read seven more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. I'll point out the interesting ideas and comment just a bit extra on the stories I liked the best. Among the seven, four are explicitly post-apocalyptic and two are post-modern dystopian.

The most openly post-apocalyptic is "If We Make it Through This Alive" by A.T. Greenblatt. Three women have entered a cross-continent rally contest, from the abandoned King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia to an unnamed location in Sacramento, 2,800 road miles away. With a dramatically modified, electrified, ruggedized Jeep they expect to make the journey in 10-11 days. I couldn't get ImageFX to add the solar panels and other accoutrements to the Jeep for this image, but the mood is about right.

For reference, on present-day Interstate highways, the driving time estimate is 40 hours. The fact that average speeds are expected to be in the 25-30 mph range indicates that the author posits a not-totally-annihilated road system. The three each have their own hidden traumas to re-overcome, and each her reasons for being in Philadelphia in the first place, when city living has become much more fraught than rural life.

A story that seems post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's because the middle of a forest fire is apocalyptic enough for most of us, is "All The Burns Unseen" by Premee Mohamed. Fire may cleanse a landscape, but the protagonist, on a mission to find and possibly rescue her parents, finds that it reveals her fractured family relationships, healing nothing.

Producing a colony in the atmosphere of Venus was supposed to yield a utopia. In "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert, the daughter of "the woman who built the city" has a much more lowly job, but one that provides her with a few perquisites in the dystopia that the city has become. Like many post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories, the cynicism of "the elite" and despair of almost everyone else sits right on the surface. Although the protagonist's heroism earns her mother's respect and "saves the day", the story ends without resolution. Presumably the cynics who run things will make at most token concessions.

In "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Naylor it gradually becomes clear that the protagonist is a sort of Android. That is, his continued existence is because in an emergency his personality was ported into the body of an Android, whereas "ordinary" Androids have a scripted or manufactured persona. A key concept is the Connectome, the totality of connections between the nervous system and the body, whether human or mechanical. A secondary concept is that humans can detect an Android instantly; one presumes that the "uncanny valley" has not been fully crossed. Both these matters emphasize the point that true artificial intelligence requires embodiment, while demonstrating that such embodiment is no easy conundrum to crack.

Other ideas of interest:

• Being in a simulation already, and experiencing meta-simulations ("Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café" by M. Bennardo; otherwise rather boring).
• Reification of an old photo (and presumably a lot of other stuff, hardly mentioned) into a simulation of a deceased person or pet ("The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott; puzzling and moderately sad without inculcating care for the protagonist or anyone else).
• Those left behind on Earth when all the rich escaped into orbiting habitats, such as "Erewhon", the home of the rich losers the story centers on, have been modified to digest plastic, because there is so much of it left ("The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell; point made, the story goes nowhere and the people learn nothing).

So far, the book is holding up well. The least interesting of the stories I have read so far is better than the best to be found in the volume of mainstream short stories I panned a month ago.