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mistressviolet's review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Like most short story collections, this one has some great stories, and some that are entirely unmemorable. Scalzi's story was my favorite, with the telltale lightness and humor that I love from him.
Some good stories, some just meh.
ljesica's review
adventurous
dark
hopeful
medium-paced
3.5
This one is really 5 short stories set in the same future fiction. Each story is written by a different sci-fi author, and they are all pulled together/edited by Scalzi.
I liked some of these stories better than others. It's an interesting and terrifying and hopeful future for our planet which we've obviously destroyed.
I bought this b/c it was the only Scalzi they had at the used book store. It was fine, but I definitely prefer his solo writing.
h3dakota's review against another edition
2.0
I was really enjoying the first story, but it ends abruptly without actually answering big questions (who the hell IS Tyger Tyger, why did he go to Cascadiopolis, what happened with the female spy, etc). I loved Scalzi's story of Benjy & the pig farm - I had many LOL moments listening to it. The other stories all faded into the background compared to it. The final story, I just never finished, it was too cumbersome.
alyssaht's review
4.0
Interesting look at what the future might look like. This is a collection of short stories and some are better than others. I don't usually like audiobooks as much but this one had some really talented readers.
kynan's review
3.0
This is an anthology of stories that consider the approaching changes to our way of life (circa 2008) as a result of climate change. There's a lot of consideration given to the many different ways that societies will be reshaped, both positive and negative, of the physical changes that will cause political boundaries to flex and break and of the potential for corporations to take the reins for one last shake of the money-tree before everything collapses into anarchy. It's mostly positive, and there are some interesting ideas in general but I think that ultimately the format doesn't do the ideas justice. Nearly all of the stories feel like they were space-constrained and I think in the end the ideas that we see outlined here were followed up and done better by people like [a:Cory Doctorow|12581|Cory Doctorow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1595482071p2/12581.jpg] (ten years later) in [b:Walkaway|40604388|Walkaway|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529601317l/40604388._SY75_.jpg|50573549], or more recently by [a:Toby Weston|15341505|Toby Weston|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1501094418p2/15341505.jpg]'s [b:Singularity's Children|32569271|Denial (Singularity's Children, #1)|Toby Weston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1476142853l/32569271._SY75_.jpg|51027295] series.
I gave the anthology 3 stars after ranking and averaging up my thoughts on the individual stories. The sum was (2+3+2+4+3)/5 = 2.8, and I rounded up to 3. Below are completely spoiler-free thoughts on the individual stories.
In the Forests of the Night - novella by Jay Lake **
Ehh. This felt like it was taking itself waaaay too seriously. I guess that, as the first part of this world-building series it's maybe trying to set the tone? We'll see. It felt like Forests of the Night was made of too many parts that just don't come together, nor do they fit the tone of the prose or narration (not the audio narrator, but the way the story is told).
The story revolves around the appearance of some kind of messiah figure in an anarchistic forest enclave. There's a lot of first-person narrative, I think at least three different people, but as a whole it feels like it's being told from a very long distance, like an apocryphal retelling of a Bible story where things don't necessarily have to make sense, or be realistic. It was the messiah, of course he walked across the water!
There is a lot of world-building that is embarked upon, almost like a set of sketches, but the different points of view that we see the story through did nothing to dispel the fog of ignorance and in the end, the whole thing just feels like a jumbled mess. It felt like there was a goal to the telling of the story, but the end of the tale left me only with a dim view of a world tumbling into environmental chaos, with disjoint efforts at seceding from the capitalist/democratic world all being ravaged by the death throes of the neo-liberal system. It's laid-on pretty thick, and, frankly, makes no sense, right up to the final nonsensical semi-religious weird scene where it all fades to black.
Stochasti-city - novella by Tobias S. Buckell ***
Now this story I was able to get behind! The contrast to Forests of the Night is marked by a different narrator and a clear depiction of the world in which we're moving. The politics are a lot clearer here, it appears to be unashamedly pushing the green agenda, and it does so with a remarkable lack of shades of grey!
The narrator, Reginald, is a bouncer for an insignificant nightclub in a Detroit that is rapidly spiralling out of control as dwindling fossil fuel supplies make the urban sprawl an impossible luxury in terms of commuting power and the city reformats itself to allow the working-poor to continue doing their tasks. The tale is almost noir in style, told from Reginald's down-on-his-luck, tough-but-fair perspective. He ends up bullishly chasing some money he's owed, blinkered to what's going on around him and ends up right in the middle of a very interesting situation. It's hard to say anything about this without spoiling things, so I shant. Suffice it to say that this story was a lot of fun and a refreshingly clear story after Forests of the Night.
The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood - novelette by Elizabeth Bear **
Scalzi's intro to this story was heavy on the praise for how Bear managed to tie "Red in the Sky Is Our Blood" into the story told in "Stochasti-city", how they prove the idea of having a bunch of authors attempt to write stories set in the same, very small, world, can work out really well and give the reader another facet of the story to consider/admire. The tie-in is literally a one-line throw-away reference to the major plot line of Stochasti-city, a reference does not a thread of continuity make!
Anyway, that gripe aside, this felt like another story that had a LOT more to say and not enough room in which to say it. You can feel a good story-teller flexing her muscles as the story begins, but when the last page rocks up there's been no real plot arc. A bunch of things happen to a set of people, only one of whom we've really had any chance to get invested in.
There's a cool concept, it echoes what we saw in both the previous stories: the Earth is in trouble, actually, scratch that, humans are in trouble and civilisation as we knew it is coming crashing down as climate change wreaks havoc on physical and political borders, resource scarcity drives capitalism into end-stage death throes and the thin veneer of humanity is rapidly stripped from civilisation. The folks in the Forests of the Night represented one style of "escape from civilisation" in the (proto-?)Cascadia as well as one set of the ruthless and self-serving capitalist "bad guys" in the form of William Silas Crown. Stochasti-city gave us the Edgewater Security Company (the "Eddies"), the muscle who are "just following orders" to keep the city from collapsing while the eco-anarchists try to forcible convince the government to turn over a new ecological leaf. This time, the bad guys are more traditional and singular or amorphous and undefined. And, weirdly, the good guys are similarly unclear. The concept of barter and reputation as at least an element of societal currency is considered but this story, the shortest of the anthology, feels just as rushed as Forests in the Night (the longest!) did.
Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis - novella by John Scalzi ****
This one I really liked! I'm not sure if coming in with low expectations made me appreciate this more or if it just really is a well-written and interesting story, I think it's the latter.
There were a couple of things that I liked here. Firstly, as editor, Scalzi really has taken the extra steps to try and tie these stories together. All three of the previous stories are referenced in this one, tying them to the plot of this story in a sane and interesting way and perhaps even going some way to explain the craziness at the end of the first novella, In the Forests of the Night (I might be wrong on that one).
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the story is fast and fun, it's not heavy and overly-concerned with smashing you in the face with the whole ecological consequences thing (looking at you Forests and Red in the Sky...) yet it still manages to convey the same ideas, get the point across about the changes that are likely coming to our world, and why, and what's more I think this story did the most to make it clear that this is not something to be simply addressed in solitude, even good ideas may need some work and explaining before being unleashed upon society.
This story takes place inside one of the arcology cities, New St. Louis, and our protagonist has reached the age at which he must take a job or be evicted for not being a useful part of society. As with most of Scalzi's works that I've read, the politics is pretty overt, but it wasn't heavy-handed and it very much felt like it was trying to show the other side of the story from what we've seen in the previous three. It was quite refreshing! Again, it's too easy to get into spoiler territory so I'll say nothing more, apart from: this was one of the two stories that make the anthology worth reading so far.
To Hie from Far Cilenia - novella by Karl Schroeder ***
The incredibly deep voice of the narrator, Stefan Rudnicki, put me off a little - but I was sucked in within the first couple of sentences and, to pay him his dues, I think Mr Rudnicki did a pretty good job of dealing with some interesting concepts like the cyranoids.
Also, wow, Scalzi talks this up as a skull-cracking finale to the anthology, and it kind of delivers! The story starts with and a nuclear investigator named Gennady Malianov, our narrator, tracking down some stolen radioactive reindeer. He is rapidly embroiled in another, seemingly similar case and that case leads him into untrammelled investigative areas as he follows some truly bizarre clues.
This story doesn't lean so hard on the environmental cataclysm, it's a lot more overtly technological and, to some extent, anchored more in the "now" of when it was published. There's a lot of AR and it's used very artfully to slowly pull you into a very interesting alternative society that definitely mirrors the ones that we've been presented in the other stories, but one that I think is far more plausible in our time. The concepts aren't "out there", they're not weird or esoteric, but they're nicely fleshed out and Mr Schroeder certainly has a way with words. I really liked the way one of the characters makes an analogy of physical locations to social networks:
I thoroughly enjoyed this story, although I think it got a little too wrapped up in its own kool-aid toward the end, hence the three stars.
I gave the anthology 3 stars after ranking and averaging up my thoughts on the individual stories. The sum was (2+3+2+4+3)/5 = 2.8, and I rounded up to 3. Below are completely spoiler-free thoughts on the individual stories.
In the Forests of the Night - novella by Jay Lake **
Ehh. This felt like it was taking itself waaaay too seriously. I guess that, as the first part of this world-building series it's maybe trying to set the tone? We'll see. It felt like Forests of the Night was made of too many parts that just don't come together, nor do they fit the tone of the prose or narration (not the audio narrator, but the way the story is told).
The story revolves around the appearance of some kind of messiah figure in an anarchistic forest enclave. There's a lot of first-person narrative, I think at least three different people, but as a whole it feels like it's being told from a very long distance, like an apocryphal retelling of a Bible story where things don't necessarily have to make sense, or be realistic. It was the messiah, of course he walked across the water!
There is a lot of world-building that is embarked upon, almost like a set of sketches, but the different points of view that we see the story through did nothing to dispel the fog of ignorance and in the end, the whole thing just feels like a jumbled mess. It felt like there was a goal to the telling of the story, but the end of the tale left me only with a dim view of a world tumbling into environmental chaos, with disjoint efforts at seceding from the capitalist/democratic world all being ravaged by the death throes of the neo-liberal system. It's laid-on pretty thick, and, frankly, makes no sense, right up to the final nonsensical semi-religious weird scene where it all fades to black.
Stochasti-city - novella by Tobias S. Buckell ***
Now this story I was able to get behind! The contrast to Forests of the Night is marked by a different narrator and a clear depiction of the world in which we're moving. The politics are a lot clearer here, it appears to be unashamedly pushing the green agenda, and it does so with a remarkable lack of shades of grey!
The narrator, Reginald, is a bouncer for an insignificant nightclub in a Detroit that is rapidly spiralling out of control as dwindling fossil fuel supplies make the urban sprawl an impossible luxury in terms of commuting power and the city reformats itself to allow the working-poor to continue doing their tasks. The tale is almost noir in style, told from Reginald's down-on-his-luck, tough-but-fair perspective. He ends up bullishly chasing some money he's owed, blinkered to what's going on around him and ends up right in the middle of a very interesting situation. It's hard to say anything about this without spoiling things, so I shant. Suffice it to say that this story was a lot of fun and a refreshingly clear story after Forests of the Night.
The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood - novelette by Elizabeth Bear **
Scalzi's intro to this story was heavy on the praise for how Bear managed to tie "Red in the Sky Is Our Blood" into the story told in "Stochasti-city", how they prove the idea of having a bunch of authors attempt to write stories set in the same, very small, world, can work out really well and give the reader another facet of the story to consider/admire. The tie-in is literally a one-line throw-away reference to the major plot line of Stochasti-city, a reference does not a thread of continuity make!
Anyway, that gripe aside, this felt like another story that had a LOT more to say and not enough room in which to say it. You can feel a good story-teller flexing her muscles as the story begins, but when the last page rocks up there's been no real plot arc. A bunch of things happen to a set of people, only one of whom we've really had any chance to get invested in.
There's a cool concept, it echoes what we saw in both the previous stories: the Earth is in trouble, actually, scratch that, humans are in trouble and civilisation as we knew it is coming crashing down as climate change wreaks havoc on physical and political borders, resource scarcity drives capitalism into end-stage death throes and the thin veneer of humanity is rapidly stripped from civilisation. The folks in the Forests of the Night represented one style of "escape from civilisation" in the (proto-?)Cascadia as well as one set of the ruthless and self-serving capitalist "bad guys" in the form of William Silas Crown. Stochasti-city gave us the Edgewater Security Company (the "Eddies"), the muscle who are "just following orders" to keep the city from collapsing while the eco-anarchists try to forcible convince the government to turn over a new ecological leaf. This time, the bad guys are more traditional and singular or amorphous and undefined. And, weirdly, the good guys are similarly unclear. The concept of barter and reputation as at least an element of societal currency is considered but this story, the shortest of the anthology, feels just as rushed as Forests in the Night (the longest!) did.
Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis - novella by John Scalzi ****
This one I really liked! I'm not sure if coming in with low expectations made me appreciate this more or if it just really is a well-written and interesting story, I think it's the latter.
There were a couple of things that I liked here. Firstly, as editor, Scalzi really has taken the extra steps to try and tie these stories together. All three of the previous stories are referenced in this one, tying them to the plot of this story in a sane and interesting way and perhaps even going some way to explain the craziness at the end of the first novella, In the Forests of the Night (I might be wrong on that one).
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the story is fast and fun, it's not heavy and overly-concerned with smashing you in the face with the whole ecological consequences thing (looking at you Forests and Red in the Sky...) yet it still manages to convey the same ideas, get the point across about the changes that are likely coming to our world, and why, and what's more I think this story did the most to make it clear that this is not something to be simply addressed in solitude, even good ideas may need some work and explaining before being unleashed upon society.
This story takes place inside one of the arcology cities, New St. Louis, and our protagonist has reached the age at which he must take a job or be evicted for not being a useful part of society. As with most of Scalzi's works that I've read, the politics is pretty overt, but it wasn't heavy-handed and it very much felt like it was trying to show the other side of the story from what we've seen in the previous three. It was quite refreshing! Again, it's too easy to get into spoiler territory so I'll say nothing more, apart from: this was one of the two stories that make the anthology worth reading so far.
To Hie from Far Cilenia - novella by Karl Schroeder ***
The incredibly deep voice of the narrator, Stefan Rudnicki, put me off a little - but I was sucked in within the first couple of sentences and, to pay him his dues, I think Mr Rudnicki did a pretty good job of dealing with some interesting concepts like the cyranoids.
Also, wow, Scalzi talks this up as a skull-cracking finale to the anthology, and it kind of delivers! The story starts with and a nuclear investigator named Gennady Malianov, our narrator, tracking down some stolen radioactive reindeer. He is rapidly embroiled in another, seemingly similar case and that case leads him into untrammelled investigative areas as he follows some truly bizarre clues.
This story doesn't lean so hard on the environmental cataclysm, it's a lot more overtly technological and, to some extent, anchored more in the "now" of when it was published. There's a lot of AR and it's used very artfully to slowly pull you into a very interesting alternative society that definitely mirrors the ones that we've been presented in the other stories, but one that I think is far more plausible in our time. The concepts aren't "out there", they're not weird or esoteric, but they're nicely fleshed out and Mr Schroeder certainly has a way with words. I really liked the way one of the characters makes an analogy of physical locations to social networks:
“If you shot a time-lapse movie of a whole city at, say, a year-per-second, you’d see it [evolving]. A city is a whirlpool of relationships but it changes so slowly that we humans have no control over how its currents and eddies funnel us through it. And if a city is like this, how much more so a country? A civilization? Cities and countries are frozen sets of relationships, as if the connection maps in a social networking site were drawn in steel and stone. These maps look so huge and immovable from our point of view that they channel our lives; we’re carried along by them like motes in a hurricane.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this story, although I think it got a little too wrapped up in its own kool-aid toward the end, hence the three stars.
szachary's review
4.0
WOW.
Well I was mighty impressed by this book. I have to echo that the first story is unbelievably bad. I almost turned off the audio-book but I am glad I soldiered on through. If you can do the same you will be rewarded with rich stories from talented authors in this shared universe.
I cannot add anymore then other reviewers on the synopses of the book and each individual story, other then I echo that the last three stories were by far the best. The last story in particular was by far the best of the bunch and had me laughing out loud a few times.
I must say that the first story may be my own ignorance. There was definite undertones and metaphors that I felt I was missing, and subtle discussions which I knew had more then the words laid over-top. Even the end I failed to grasp the significance so, I feel that maybe the general reader was either not the goal of this story, or it was meant to be one of those deep symbolic stories full of gems for repeat listens. Regardless as a piece of entertainment value, I found it dry, and strikingly short on any climax.
The narration was superb and I will be picking up books two and three to continue on with this series. It's a five star book without the first story and a four star book with it.
Well I was mighty impressed by this book. I have to echo that the first story is unbelievably bad. I almost turned off the audio-book but I am glad I soldiered on through. If you can do the same you will be rewarded with rich stories from talented authors in this shared universe.
I cannot add anymore then other reviewers on the synopses of the book and each individual story, other then I echo that the last three stories were by far the best. The last story in particular was by far the best of the bunch and had me laughing out loud a few times.
I must say that the first story may be my own ignorance. There was definite undertones and metaphors that I felt I was missing, and subtle discussions which I knew had more then the words laid over-top. Even the end I failed to grasp the significance so, I feel that maybe the general reader was either not the goal of this story, or it was meant to be one of those deep symbolic stories full of gems for repeat listens. Regardless as a piece of entertainment value, I found it dry, and strikingly short on any climax.
The narration was superb and I will be picking up books two and three to continue on with this series. It's a five star book without the first story and a four star book with it.
kittypaws9's review against another edition
3.0
Since it is a collection of short stories, some of them were good, some not so good. Overall a good listen though. Ty can read me anything. Scalzi wrote a great tie-them-together story.