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Empire of Dreams and Miracles
I'm a regular reader of the sci-fi magazines, and I have to say, the stories in this collection are so much better than 95% of what gets published in those magazines. Maybe it's because the big-circulation magazines are so desperate for readership that they prefer to publish only stories from well-known authors, and many of them seem to use the short-story format only as a place to dump ideas that just don't quite make it into novels. The unknown authors in this anthology, on the other hand, seem to come up with fresh ideas and take pains to craft good short stories around them. This is probably what OSC is referring to when he writes in the foreword to the collection that in order "to find deep novelty, readers of science fiction must find new writers as well as new tales from old friends."
Okay, enough of that. What are the stories like? There's a lot here that Slashdot readers would find provocative and interesting. My favorite in the collection is "Twenty-Two Buttons" (my first reaction when I saw this title was: On a mouse or keyboard? Alas, that's not the sort of buttons we are talking about). The story takes place in a future where pollution, crime, and lawlessness have turned the Outside into a myth, and people spend all of their time inside their houses. They manage to go to work and school, find friends and lovers, and have contact with people outside the family only through the Net (ok, ok, so some of us already are living that way, but still), which is heavily censored and monitored by the government -- in fact, the story implies that the dangerousness of the Outside is exaggerated in order to justify the government's control over the Net (draw your own paranoid analogies with the present). This has some fascinating consequences. For example, children make play dates over the Net and rely on VR projections to learn to socialize. Families meet each other through a kind of Net dating service for whole families, and though two families may be from opposite ends of the continent, they manage to sit down "together" to have dinner, the VR screen going down the middle of the table. (I actually kind of wish that were true. Why should I be stuck with the people who happen to have moved in next to me?) Since physically moving yourself and your possessions from one place to another is so expensive, once you are married you are pretty much truly stuck. The main character in the story had an affair over the Net because he connected with the woman he could only touch through the mediation of technology so much better than his wife, but when the affair was discovered he was too afraid of the Outside to join the other woman. In the end the other woman did in fact leave the protected life on the Net and go Outside, and she tantalizingly sent him the buttons from her blouse, inviting him to "come out and play." (The actual story is so much better than my crappy summary, sorry.) This is the story in the collection with the most un-sci-fi-ish prose style, but it actually works really well.
"Carthaginian Rose" is based on an idea from Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines. Basically, the idea is that we'll soon (as in within 30 years) be able to scan people's brains into computers powerful enough to simulate neural activities -- and instant immortality! The scanning technology initially will be kind of crude, and so we might need to do it destructively on some people to try it out (Kurzweil speculated that a person facing imminent death may volunteer to be the first test subject). The story takes this idea and speculates on what kind of person that first volunteer would be and how someone might be driven to happily, willingly, and even work hard at being destructively scanned.
The title story, "Empire of Dreams and Miracles," is probably the craziest story of the bunch. It involves a future so far off that people literally kill for sport (the victims are then brought back to life). The entertainment industry is centered around competition among the killer-artists to bring the most pleasure and novelty to each kill, and the psychology of a culture with no real death but a lot of colorful imitations of it is described with a great deal of detail and imagination. The images are eye-popping and they come at you one after another, giving you almost no time to absorb each one (so you end up feeling a little like the sensation-saturated inhabitants of this future). The fascination with violence, death, and the sexual energies in both can be seen as a satire of our own world or just really good mood setting.
"Who Lived in a Shoe" is about alien house hunting. For any slashdot readers who have looked for a dwelling the story will resonate. It's a funny, light piece that is less sci-fi than fantasy. Some of the houses that the main characters visit on their search may well appeal to the crowd here. This story shows the wide range and styles in this collection.
There are eight other stories in the collection, ranging from Twilight Zone-like horror to cosmology-as-religion. There are space stations and artificial intelligences, social commentary as well as pure fantasy. All of the stories are well-written short stories, not aborted attempts at novels or sketches that go nowhere. OSC wrote an introduction to each story and it's interesting to get his take on each.
To be sure, sometimes the writing in these stories is not as polished as one could wish, but you see that kind of roughness even in the mass-circulation magazines. After all, we are talking about sci-fi here, not the Atlantic Monthly. All in all, given the diverse range of ideas, characters, and styles in this collection and the fact that these are all fresh, new talents in the field, this is my second favorite short fiction anthology for the year (it was my first favorite anthology until Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life -- you just can't argue with all those Nebulas).
You can purchase Empire of Dreams and Miracles from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Certainly the stories described sound interesting. Although the themes for several sound more like amplifications than new ideas. I'm sure most of us can see links to "The Matrix" and "The Truman Show" in "Twenty-two Buttons".
As for the prime magazine comment, I think it's hard to break into the field because there is such a flood of junk that the editors do tend to give preference to those authors they have some reason to think can write a decent story.
I ran a semi-professional magazine (Radius) for a while, and while the funding was difficult, what really drove me out of the business was having to read through the slush pile. I'd get about 200 stories a month, and often would find only one or two that I could get all the way through. I can only imagine the headaches that the editors of "Asimov's" or "Analog" must get.
FWIW...
Adrew Greeley (a Catholic priest) has writen some science fiction. One that I've read is: Final Planet .
I suspect that your not so much interested in religious science fiction writers as much as science fiction writers religious in the same way you are
Yet Another Web Site
The publisher lists 100 science fiction books you have to read. Very good list. There's a few more by Greg Bear that I would love to add to that list, but then it wouldn't be as diverse as it is.
I don't like it when SF is used as a platform for pro-life/creationist crap.
Fair enough. I, in turn, don't like it when it's used as a platform for atheist or pantheist crap, which tends to occur far more often.
And to think there is such a joke you could have made with the terms "science fiction" and "creationist".
You contradict yourself. You say that writers are free to add it in there right after you say that doing so feels like them being dishonest.
I am torn between creationism and natural selection (took a great class in Evolution at Cornell University), and I am a fan of OSC. In a lot of his books he does hint at a sense of ethics, but I have yet to see him pull strongly for a creationist's standpoint in any of his books.
In addition, by picking up a book I feel that I am opening myself up to the ethics of the author. I recently read "Just for Fun" (Linus's autobiography). Do you think that he would leave out his ethics surrounding the open-source movement?
I gladly welcome any author adding his or her ethics and beliefs into a story. It is fiction. Just because I am reading it does not mean that I have to believe it. And almost any good fiction book, SciFi or not, is going to have ethical questions and decisions. They book would not be any good without them.
"Cryptnomicon" - is it alright to take money from drug lords and other criminals to start a business that will provide something that will benifit the common man once it gets up and going?
Fiction works on a "suspension of beliefs" idea. If you are unable to suspend your belief in natural selection for one book, I feel sorry for you.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Those who read the Marvel comics in the 80's will be interested to know that one of the principals here is Jim Shooter, the Editor-in-Chief in those times.
Shooter is a very skilled editor, and a very good writer in his own right, altough his authoritary style made a lot of enemies at the time.
One can find more info and a biography here.
Um, what, exactly, does an immortal soul do? Name something that it provides, or function it performs, or some means that it makes its presence felt.
Damage to the brain damages self and consciousness in fundamental ways. People who suffer some kinds of strokes lose half their world, literally. They lose, for example, the concept of 'left'. They only eat half of what's on their plates. Ask them to imagine walking down their street, they only describe the houses on the right. Ask them to mentally "turn around", and they forget the houses they just described and start talking about the ones on the other side of the street.
Look up Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia can understand language, but can't speak. Damage another part of the brain, and you get Wernicke's aphasia, where they can speak, but can't understand. They speak in "word salad". They don't even realize they aren't making sense. Put two of them together and they'll have a whole conversation of nonsense.
The more you read up on neurological problems, the weirder it gets. (Almost any book by Oliver Sacks is good for this.) I don't know of an intellectual faculty that can't be damaged, if not eliminated, by damage to the brain.
If there is a soul, what can it do? Moreover, how can whatever's left after my brain is gone be called "me" in any real sense? Why should I care what happens to the soul when I die? All my memories, emotions, and consciousness seem tied up in my brain.
"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car." - Frank Zindler
(This leads to a whole different problem with 'transmigrating' to a machine - that might be a perfect copy of me, but I would still be dead. But that's separate from any 'immortal soul' speculation.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
You're exactly right. The atheist crap has got to go. The rest of the atheist stuff should stay, however.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.