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A review by maxed
Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future by Ed Finn
3.0
It's a bit unfair to review in 2022 a "visions for a better future" book written in 2014... But maybe not. A lot of these stories are near-term sci-fi, and so it makes sense to see if those visions came true, or at least were not completely wrong. As a TL;DR, I'd say this collection isn't the worst one I've ever read, but I bet I would be hard-pressed to remember a single story from it after a year - they're just not THAT good.
Atmosphaera Incognita, Neal Stephenson (3/5): A classic Stephenson, condensed into a smaller form, and worse for it - there are not enough info-dumps and clever technical details and adventures, and characters are as bland as ever. The 20km tower idea still seems dubious to me, but who knows?
Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, Kathleen Ann Goonan (2/5):
Here's a short summary of this story:
1. A cure for dyslexia
2. ...
3. PROFIT
Really, I want to like this story, because it makes a case for a reform of education and a system of mentorship, which is I'm all for, but it barely works as a pamphlet advocating it, and as a sci-fi story it fails completely because it doesn't show a connection from its premise to the ending.
By the Time We Get to Arizona, Madeline Ashby (3/5): Competent, but boring story about immigrants trying to get access to abortion pills. Kind of going for an anti-utopia vibe, I guess, but it has nothing new to say about corporate surveillance or anti-abortion laws, so there is no need for this story to exist.
The Man Who Sold the Moon, Cory Doctorow (4/5): Cory's fanboying about Burning Man in early 10's was really a bit too much for me, but the story is good enough. Landing a 3D printer creating panels for buildings on the Moon seems like a strange idea to me, though, without a planned follow-through. What if the next expedition needs a different kind of panels, not the ones that were produced? Or something else entirely?
Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA, Lee Konstantinou (4/5): Now, that one reads like another Cory Doctorow story. A roving dronepunk building mesh network with flying drones of questionable legality, a young out-of-luck SMM specialist turning into freedom of speech activist...
Mesh networks, incidentally, seem to be one of those things like cold fusion: they've been just around the corner since mid 00's (my friend wrote his thesis about improving one mesh technology in 2008), but somehow they never become reality.
The naivete of this story is a bit annoying: by 2014 people should have already seen that "network not controlled by government or corporations" is not THE answer to all humanity's problems: aunt Mildred will share the same conspiracy theories, no matter if she uses Facebook or some darknet social network built over a mesh network. Or maybe not - America only really felt the impact of Internet's "eternal September" in 2016, after Trump's victory.
Still, it wasn't a BAD story.
Degrees of Freedom, Karl Schroeder (2/5): Ah, to have that early 10's techno-optimism about Bitcoin and blockchain! And algorithms in general. Although you have to be extremely naive to trust Dorians - the "images of future you" that are supposed to help you make decisions. I mean, it's very easy to influence one's decisions this way by tweaking Dorian-generating code.
As for another book's another idea, definition-matching site that helps to organize negotiations and resolve conflicts, I can't get my head around it. I feel it shouldn't work, because professional negotiators will game it, and even if not, I still can't quite see how having people with the same explicit definitions of terms will be much of a help in negotiations. As an old Jew said, "I have only one disagreement with Bolsheviks, on the question of land. They want bury me in this land, and I want to bury them".
Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy, Annalee Newitz (2/5): Not much of a story, really. Just two not very interesting visions of a Solar-powered city. As a citizen of a country where there are not enough sunlight to make any of this reality, I dislike all that solar hype.
A Hotel in Antarctica, Geoffrey A. Landis (2/5): It would be a nice engineering tale in the style of Stephenson, only it lacks any technical details. Or a protagonist who's good at, well, anything. It feels like the whole thing was written for the final few pages, where the local Greenpeace stand-in finally agrees that a hotel in Antarctica is probably a good thing, because it will help to raise awareness of Earth's beauty (and detoriorating climate). It doesn't really work for me.
Periapsis, James L. Cambias (4/5): Teenagers competing to win a highly prized citizenship on Deimos fall in love and decide to build star drive that will make Deimos obsolete as a hub instead. Not much science in this fiction, but I liked the way it was written.
The Man Who Sold the Stars, Gregory Benford (4/5): Unabashed Heinlein tribute, this novelette takes us through the career of a very determined businessman who wants the stars. The first part reads a lot like Suarez's "Delta-V" when he talks about quickly burgeoning asteroid mining industry. This idea gets mentioned more and more lately, so I guess its time is coming.
The second part is about building further in space and preparing for an interstellar expedition, and it ends with a complete success.
It's not a bad story, though it lack details (we only get brief snippets from each stage of man's career) and reads more like history than story because of that, if you get what I mean. Still, it was nice to see such old-fashioned tale.
Entanglement, Vandana Singh (1/5): Couldn't finish this one.
Elephant Angels, Brenda Cooper (4/5): Somewhat interesting idea (volunteers flying drones to protect elephants from poachers), but not much of a story: the action part feels forced upon the rest of the text just to have something other than the basic idea. Still, competently written.
Covenant, Elizabeth Bear (4/5): The "(ex-)serial killer captured by another serial killer" idea is getting a little over-used these days, but it was probably new enough in 2014. More importantly, Elizabeth Bear writes her ex-killer quite well, and the idea of curing psychopathy with computer-controlled hormones injectors looks like a near-future sci-fi.
Quantum Telepathy (3/5), Rudy Rucker: I have a hearty dislike of Rudy Rucker since forcing my way through his "Ware" tetralogy. This story continues with his favourite hobby-horse of mind-meld, and is written in his typical style which I only can describe as "dirty and wet". I kind of can't see the point of it.
Transition Generation, David Brin (5/5): "People will take ANYTHING for granted and then start to grouch about it" is not a novel idea, but the story is so well-written that I will let it slide, and anyway, the description of a world where everyone can fly has enough retro-future-optimism in it to carry this little text further than it would otherwise go.
The Day It All Ended, Charlie Jane Anders (3/5): Overly optimistic "captain of industry has a secret plan to save the world" story that sounds like the author was on the verge of total despair, and so opted to live in a fantasy world where Apple is secretly a force for good.
Tall Tower, Bruce Sterling (3/5): An echo of Stevenson's opening story, this one depicts the tower after many, many years, when humanity mostly migrated into space and only a few people still live on Earth. A man decides to climb to the top of the tower. On a horse. And there are some strange savages living up there. I don't like it.
Atmosphaera Incognita, Neal Stephenson (3/5): A classic Stephenson, condensed into a smaller form, and worse for it - there are not enough info-dumps and clever technical details and adventures, and characters are as bland as ever. The 20km tower idea still seems dubious to me, but who knows?
Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, Kathleen Ann Goonan (2/5):
Here's a short summary of this story:
1. A cure for dyslexia
2. ...
3. PROFIT
Really, I want to like this story, because it makes a case for a reform of education and a system of mentorship, which is I'm all for, but it barely works as a pamphlet advocating it, and as a sci-fi story it fails completely because it doesn't show a connection from its premise to the ending.
By the Time We Get to Arizona, Madeline Ashby (3/5): Competent, but boring story about immigrants trying to get access to abortion pills. Kind of going for an anti-utopia vibe, I guess, but it has nothing new to say about corporate surveillance or anti-abortion laws, so there is no need for this story to exist.
The Man Who Sold the Moon, Cory Doctorow (4/5): Cory's fanboying about Burning Man in early 10's was really a bit too much for me, but the story is good enough. Landing a 3D printer creating panels for buildings on the Moon seems like a strange idea to me, though, without a planned follow-through. What if the next expedition needs a different kind of panels, not the ones that were produced? Or something else entirely?
Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA, Lee Konstantinou (4/5): Now, that one reads like another Cory Doctorow story. A roving dronepunk building mesh network with flying drones of questionable legality, a young out-of-luck SMM specialist turning into freedom of speech activist...
Mesh networks, incidentally, seem to be one of those things like cold fusion: they've been just around the corner since mid 00's (my friend wrote his thesis about improving one mesh technology in 2008), but somehow they never become reality.
The naivete of this story is a bit annoying: by 2014 people should have already seen that "network not controlled by government or corporations" is not THE answer to all humanity's problems: aunt Mildred will share the same conspiracy theories, no matter if she uses Facebook or some darknet social network built over a mesh network. Or maybe not - America only really felt the impact of Internet's "eternal September" in 2016, after Trump's victory.
Still, it wasn't a BAD story.
Degrees of Freedom, Karl Schroeder (2/5): Ah, to have that early 10's techno-optimism about Bitcoin and blockchain! And algorithms in general. Although you have to be extremely naive to trust Dorians - the "images of future you" that are supposed to help you make decisions. I mean, it's very easy to influence one's decisions this way by tweaking Dorian-generating code.
As for another book's another idea, definition-matching site that helps to organize negotiations and resolve conflicts, I can't get my head around it. I feel it shouldn't work, because professional negotiators will game it, and even if not, I still can't quite see how having people with the same explicit definitions of terms will be much of a help in negotiations. As an old Jew said, "I have only one disagreement with Bolsheviks, on the question of land. They want bury me in this land, and I want to bury them".
Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy, Annalee Newitz (2/5): Not much of a story, really. Just two not very interesting visions of a Solar-powered city. As a citizen of a country where there are not enough sunlight to make any of this reality, I dislike all that solar hype.
A Hotel in Antarctica, Geoffrey A. Landis (2/5): It would be a nice engineering tale in the style of Stephenson, only it lacks any technical details. Or a protagonist who's good at, well, anything. It feels like the whole thing was written for the final few pages, where the local Greenpeace stand-in finally agrees that a hotel in Antarctica is probably a good thing, because it will help to raise awareness of Earth's beauty (and detoriorating climate). It doesn't really work for me.
Periapsis, James L. Cambias (4/5): Teenagers competing to win a highly prized citizenship on Deimos fall in love and decide to build star drive that will make Deimos obsolete as a hub instead. Not much science in this fiction, but I liked the way it was written.
The Man Who Sold the Stars, Gregory Benford (4/5): Unabashed Heinlein tribute, this novelette takes us through the career of a very determined businessman who wants the stars. The first part reads a lot like Suarez's "Delta-V" when he talks about quickly burgeoning asteroid mining industry. This idea gets mentioned more and more lately, so I guess its time is coming.
The second part is about building further in space and preparing for an interstellar expedition, and it ends with a complete success.
It's not a bad story, though it lack details (we only get brief snippets from each stage of man's career) and reads more like history than story because of that, if you get what I mean. Still, it was nice to see such old-fashioned tale.
Entanglement, Vandana Singh (1/5): Couldn't finish this one.
Elephant Angels, Brenda Cooper (4/5): Somewhat interesting idea (volunteers flying drones to protect elephants from poachers), but not much of a story: the action part feels forced upon the rest of the text just to have something other than the basic idea. Still, competently written.
Covenant, Elizabeth Bear (4/5): The "(ex-)serial killer captured by another serial killer" idea is getting a little over-used these days, but it was probably new enough in 2014. More importantly, Elizabeth Bear writes her ex-killer quite well, and the idea of curing psychopathy with computer-controlled hormones injectors looks like a near-future sci-fi.
Quantum Telepathy (3/5), Rudy Rucker: I have a hearty dislike of Rudy Rucker since forcing my way through his "Ware" tetralogy. This story continues with his favourite hobby-horse of mind-meld, and is written in his typical style which I only can describe as "dirty and wet". I kind of can't see the point of it.
Transition Generation, David Brin (5/5): "People will take ANYTHING for granted and then start to grouch about it" is not a novel idea, but the story is so well-written that I will let it slide, and anyway, the description of a world where everyone can fly has enough retro-future-optimism in it to carry this little text further than it would otherwise go.
The Day It All Ended, Charlie Jane Anders (3/5): Overly optimistic "captain of industry has a secret plan to save the world" story that sounds like the author was on the verge of total despair, and so opted to live in a fantasy world where Apple is secretly a force for good.
Tall Tower, Bruce Sterling (3/5): An echo of Stevenson's opening story, this one depicts the tower after many, many years, when humanity mostly migrated into space and only a few people still live on Earth. A man decides to climb to the top of the tower. On a horse. And there are some strange savages living up there. I don't like it.