Scan barcode
A review by broughtyoubooks
Meet Me in the Future: Stories by Kameron Hurley
5.0
The first two stories in this collection caught me up immediately. Elephants and Corpses leads you into a piece about body-jumping mercenaries – definitely the way to get me reading. It also offered a unique way to view gender dysphoria, something which is risky to do in the first place, but that landed in a really, really interesting way in the story, and continues later in the collection.
The set up of alternative families, particularly in When We Fall, drew me in a whole lot too. An AI and a mechanic, a guy and his elephant, a woman and her two wives; there’s a lot of non-normative families, which admittedly don’t always work out for the characters, but I love how they exist in the tales.
Each story is usually backgrounded by some distant war, or past war, or approaching war. War is never fully central to the story, which I’m glad for, but it does inform a lot of the narratives. Knowing war’s proximity to each piece assists in forming an understanding of the current climate of the place, which I honestly just thought was really cool. Plus, all of the characters and spaces are fulfilling. Some don’t really reach their full potential and I’d love to see a couple of them in expanded works, but as far as short stories go, they’re incredible.
The set up of alternative families, particularly in When We Fall, drew me in a whole lot too. An AI and a mechanic, a guy and his elephant, a woman and her two wives; there’s a lot of non-normative families, which admittedly don’t always work out for the characters, but I love how they exist in the tales.
Each story is usually backgrounded by some distant war, or past war, or approaching war. War is never fully central to the story, which I’m glad for, but it does inform a lot of the narratives. Knowing war’s proximity to each piece assists in forming an understanding of the current climate of the place, which I honestly just thought was really cool. Plus, all of the characters and spaces are fulfilling. Some don’t really reach their full potential and I’d love to see a couple of them in expanded works, but as far as short stories go, they’re incredible.