Book #80 of 2019:
A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams
I expected to really love this anthology, based on its foreword and stated goal of bringing a Howard Zinn recentering of marginalized perspectives to the world of tomorrow. The authors and characters include women, LGBTQ people, racial minorities, and others who don’t always see themselves represented in science-fiction. There’s a definite boldness in a group like this declaring that the MAGA era will not be the final word on America, and that there will still be a future with all of us in it, for better or worse.
In practice, however, too many of the stories herein seem like either generic dystopias divorced from actual history or exercises in worldbuilding without compelling plots attached (or both). Luckily there’s a string of stronger entries near the middle of the book, from a time traveler coming back to tell Donald Trump his ideas don’t last in Ashok K. Banker’s “By His Bootstraps” to an interesting look at life under Universal Basic Income in Hugh Howey’s “No Algorithms in the World.” And while not particularly futuristic, I especially enjoy how the final tale, Alice Sola Kim’s “Now Wait for This Week,” pairs its Groundhog Day plot with a timely message to#BelieveWomen.
Overall, though, the collection struggles to live up to its potential of original speculative fiction distilling the essence of 2019. I’d still recommend it for the occasional gems and its sheer existence as a book with such a diverse set of writers, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed from what I imagined this exercise could produce.
★★★☆☆
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