Shine: An Anthology of Near-future, Optimistic Science Fiction

If these are optimistic futures, I would rather live in a Peter Hamilton Dystrophy. Every story starts with the grimmest of visions; drastic weather, starvation, unemployment, and despair. And ends up with just a possible glimmer of hope...only if all past human behaviors are forgotten and we enter a world of drug addled fantasy land. None of these stories are helped by the editor's call for "diversity". Possibly a call for better writers would have made this a better anthology, but only without the story structures that were already laid down. The only halfway decent story is about a T. Rex who learns to play heavy metal guitar. But somehow I don't feel exactly optimistic about a world where increasingly intelligent carnivores are let show more loose on a planet of easily eaten homo sapiens. show less

In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that my writing partner and I submitted a story to de Vries for Shine and it was rejected. I hope this hasn't colored my reception of the book, but I did have a reaction that was more negative than not. Part of what bothered me about the book was the sameness: many of the stories featured a future-Earth in the throes of environmental collapse, all of them seemingly obligated to slap the prefix "wiki-" onto something. Then, at the end, one small thing happens... hardly optimisitc, to be honest. De Vries wants stories where there's been serious positive change in the world, but his writers have perpetrated the scame crime he accuses much of contemporary sf of: they cannot conceive of how show more it could actually happen in the short-term future.

Even aside from conceptual problems, many of the stories in the book didn't interest me. Many felt generic, with people bravely fighting climate change or something with an "innovative" idea. Their samey futures meant that these stories lacked the strong sense of wonder that can make good sf; there was a lot of sub-cyberpunk stuff here that just failed to impress me either way. Less than a month since I finished it, and already much of the book I've forgotten. However, I particularly disliked "The Church of Accelerated Redemption" by Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard, which features a creepy cult kidnapping a woman and forcing her to work for them... and I think we're supposed to sympathize with the cult? Eva Maria Chapman's "Russian Roulette 2020" was also bad, a version of M. T. Anderson's Feed without the attention to character that makes Feed work; a noble savage Russian woman who walks around naked to teach the value of "real" sexuality tells our American hero how to stop being so capitalist and smell some flowers. Ugh. Then there were stories that weren't even stories, just short pieces where a character goes "I have an idea to make the world more awesome!" and then it just happens easily: Lavie Tidhar's "The Solnet Ascendancy," Silvia Moreno-Garcia's "Seeds," and Jason Andrews's "Scheherazade Cast in Starlight." The worst story, though, was "Paul Kinosha's Childen" by Ken Edgett, an overly sentimental story of a man who makes an educational television series that inspires all Africans to go into space or some such nonsense. Please.

There is some good stuff, though. I didn't expect to like Mari Ness's "Twittering the Stars" (Shine is littered with crappy stories from Outshine, de Vries's "Twitterzine"), but it did something inventive with the Twitter form, especially in the way it unfolded backwards, introducing surprisies that didn't feel contrived. In "At Budokan," Alastair Reynolds doesn't give much of a story, but he does depict some great ideas on the evolution of rock and roll. Neither of these stories seemed to have anything to do with the optimistic premise of the book, however. My favorite story, though, was Gord Sellar's "Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic)," which tells of a group of pick-up artists who decide to use their abilities to manipulate social situations to enact positive environmental change. What a great idea! Unfortunately, it's one of a scant few great ideas in a book of dreary ones. Shine is a great concept, but if de Vries tries for optimistic sf again, I'd like to see it be two things: 1) actually optimisitc and 2) actually good. show less

...I wonder if de Vries knew what he was getting into with this project. It's not as if others hadn't tried before and it is certainly a lot easier to let a negative view of the future get the best of you. The stories in this anthology don't always depict shiny, bright futures but to do all posses a sense of profound positive change, ranging from a very personal level to things that will shift the balance in a nation or even worldwide. The diversity of the stories and the consistently high quality of this collection is testament to his passion for this project...

Full Random Comments review

The stories are, indeed, optimistic. The quality of the stories is uneven. I loved some, found the others a bit meh. I didn't entirely skip any, though.

I only got this for Alastair's story, At Budokan.

A wonderful twist on the "should we resurrect dinosaurs" theme.   Especially for the heavy rock types out there.

Next up in Alastair's time line is The Old Man and the Martian Sea.

Good enough collection. Nothing particularly grabbed me.

Really enjoyed:

* Overhead by Jason Stoddard
* Twittering The Stars by Mari Ness
* Castoff World by Kay Kenyon

These were pretty good as well:

* The Earth Of Yunhe by Eric Gregory
* The Grenman Watches The Black Bar Go Up, Up, up by Jacques Barcia
* Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic) by Gord Sellar
* Ishin by Madeline Ashby