A review by octavia_cade
Women Invent the Future: A Science Fiction Anthology by Becky Chambers, Walidah Imarisha, Liz Williams, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Madeline Ashby, Cassandra Khaw, Anne Charnock, Molly Flatt

3.0

Honestly, I was expecting a little more from this. From the most literal perspective, I suppose it does what it says on the tin. This small anthology, consisting of six stories and a poem, is indeed a collection of sci-fi stories set in the future, and they are all written by women. That said, when you have a title like that, you are given to expect, I think, some sort of reason behind it. The introduction is all about encouraging diversity in tech, in getting more women into STEM, so you would think that the stories would have a strong focus on gender, on how women authors and characters both interact with potential futures; how they are affected by them, how they come up against expectation. And a couple of the stories - by Khaw and Ashby - do do this, but the rest are a little more mish-mash, and a little less concerned with theme. (This doesn't necessarily make these other stories bad. The one stand-out of the collection, "Chrysalis" by Becky Chambers, was excellent, but it was also a story where genders could have been changed without any impact on plot or theme.)

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the anthology, but if you're going to set up an anthology around a central conceit, as this does, don't go milquetoast on it... go the whole hog. An anthology like this should have been innovative and cutting and confronting, a range of stories with the punch of Khaw's... but it wasn't.