Declinism is the theory that the world used to be better than it is now--it is the conviction, common to many people, that Things Are Getting Worse. There's a brilliant example of the theory at work in a recent, very thorough and well-written review of three Best-of-Year SF anthologies at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Now, the problem with declinism in art criticism is that everybody has their own model for what the best of a particular genre or style is. If your favourite SF was all published before 1980, you're going to believe SF has been in decline since then. If it was 1960, then... well, dates differ. But declinists can always find some cut-off point where things started going downhill.

Kincaid has this to say about the best SF of the past couple of years:

In the main, there is no sense that the writers have any real conviction about what they are doing. Rather, the genre has become a set of tropes to be repeated and repeated until all meaning has been drained from them.

Is this true? Or is it rather Kincaid's own perceptions that have shifted? There lies the problem--one can't tell. But even if it's all the eye of the critic, if everybody else is having the same reaction to SF, then it's a real effect, whether the exhaustion lies in the stories themselves, or in the minds of the readers. What seems to be true, however, is that this particular reader is finding that he's no longer inspired by science fiction. And that really is a problem.

The bigger problem, for me, is that Kincaid goes on to list my story, "Laika's Ghost," as emblematic of this malaise. I can't let that stand. He says this about the story:

 It is one of the best stories in these three collections, but it is almost anti-SF in its affect: the future has run its course and come to an end; what was one of the most exciting aspirations of science fiction—the promise of life on another world—is here made available only to those looking backward to a former time. It is a story that makes manifest the exhaustion that is immanent throughout these three collections.

This is great stuff--but a complete misreading of the story. First of all, "Laika's Ghost" has to be read in the context of the other Gennady Malianov stories. It only sorta kinda stands on its own; the fact is it is part of a continuum of stories that paints a very specific view of the near future. That view is not of an exhausted world, but of a world that is shifting gears--undergoing civilizational change. Sure, the scions of the old world order may be exhausted, but there are plenty of new and dynamic forces at work in Gennady's world. This is most thoroughly shown in "To Hie From Far Cilenia."

Secondly, Gennady himself is a necessary character for science fiction at this time. Why? Because he's neither a starry-eyed optimist nor an apocalyptic nihilist. He's a realist who fully intends to have a future, and for the world he lives in to have a future too. So while the people around Gennady rise and fall, taking whole civilizations and possible futures with them, he's cleaning up the mess. It's what he does. 

The necessity of buckling down and tidying up the trash left by 100+ years of techno-optimism in no way contradicts the wondrous potential of the future. It's just a necessary piece of the whole process. Gennady knows this; he knows that decommissioning old nuclear reactors is a manifestation of Progress. Shooting radioactive camels in the Gobi desert is one of the prices to be paid for our industrialist past, and somebody has to pay it. Gennady represents that side of technological progress that we in SF so rarely acknowledge: he's a trash collector.

It's not starry-eyed wonder that we need at this point in history; it's a rolling-up of the sleeves to finish what we started when we introduced electric power, vaccinations, indoor plumbing and all the other critical inventions of modernism. In that sense, "Laika's Ghost" is not the best of a bad lot. It's a reminder that science fiction ultimately reflects where we stand in the world right now. And where we stand, is at a time when there's work to be done. If the science fiction of today represents that harder-edged and less sentimental vision of the future, then great! I'll write more of it.

I started reading Ian Bogost's latest book last night. Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like to be a Thing seems an unlikely excursion for a theorist whose major work so far was a literary theory for video game criticism. (I used the ideas in Bogost's book Unit Operations as a major theoretical framework for the scenario-fiction writing technique I outlined in my Master's thesis.)

 It's not often that I have the experience of hopping up and down, gnashing my teeth and shouting "well of course!" but I've been having it since starting Alien Phenomenology. But I don't mean that in a bad way; I had the same experience when I dove into Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, and more recently exploring the work of philosopher Graham Harman. It's the frustration of a long-delayed recognition of kindred minds. I talked a little about that recently, and here's that same new feeling again.

So, as I'm reading Bogost and I come across statements like 

That things are is not a matter of debate. What it means that something in particular is for another thing that is: this is the question that interests me. The significance of one thing to another differs according to the perspective of both.

...I am forcibly reminded of, how, nearly fifteen years ago now, I imagined Jordan Mason sitting on the shore of a lake, and listening as the smart-dust nanotech that pervaded the entire surface of the planet Ventus tried to figure out what it was:

He could hear the song of the lake. It was deep and powerful, belying the tranquility of the surface. Thin grass grew here, but the soil beneath his feet was shallow, quickly giving way to sand. Below that... rock? He couldn’t quite make it out, though it felt like there was something else down there, a unique presence deep below the earth.

There was no indication that anything supernatural dwelt here.

He sat down, mind empty for the first time in days, and watched the water for a while. Gradually, without really trying, he began hearing the voices of the waves.

They trilled like little birds as they approached the shore. Each had its own name, but otherwise they were impossible to tell apart. They rolled humming towards Jordan, then fell silent without fanfare as they licked the sand. It was like solid music converging on him where he sat. He had never heard anything so beautiful or delicately fragile.

He didn’t even notice the failing light or the cold as he sat transfixed. His mind could not remain focussed forever, though, and after a while he made up a little game, trying to follow individual waves with both his eyes and his inner sense.

He tried to follow the eddies of a particular wave as it broke around a nearby rock, and in doing so discovered something new. It seemed like such an innocent detail at first: as the wave split, so did its voice. From one, it became many, then each tinier individuality vanished in turbulence. As they did, they cried out, not it seemed in fright, but in tones almost of... delight. Urgent delight--as if at the last second they had discovered something important they needed to tell the world.

This quote from my year-2000 novel Ventus presents a vision of the self-definition of the world becoming visible for the first time to a human being. The designers of the Ventus terraforming system imagined a technology that would dissolve into everything in the world and actively investigate it. The nanotech in and on a tree would figure out that it was a tree; a rock would know it was a rock, a hill that it was a hill. And each of these objects would be able to communicate to the human settlers of the planet what it could do for them. "I am flint, you can build a fire with me." "I am mint, you can eat me." The only problem was, this magnificent system for identifying things had to be able to invent its own categories in order to do its job; and it did that too well. When the human settlers arrived, it quickly decided what they were--but on its own terms, and using its own ontology and semantics. As far as the humans were concerned, the nanotech didn't recognize them. But something far more interesting had in fact happened: it saw them, not as they wanted to be seen--not through their filter--but as it had come to see things. 

And so the nanotech (which later generations of humans called the Winds) destroyed all the settlers' competing technologies, knocked them back to the stone age, and went about integrating them efficiently into the artificial ecosystems of Ventus.

Ventus was far more than a cautionary tale about technology run amok--in fact it wasn't really that at all. I wanted to talk about how objects see other objects; but back then, I had nobody to talk to about it. Bogost's new book is another indication that the hourglass has turned, and that these ideas are finally current.

I've since moved on to next steps--but I would recommend Alien Phenomenology because Bogost also senses the need to go from discussing OOO in the abstract, to working out what it means in practice. Alien Phenomenology is the first book I've seen that explicitly challenges its readership to employ and deploy the ideas of speculative realism. This will be no mean feat, and I've already spent five years planning how to do that for my as-yet unwritten third novel in the Ventus/Lady of Mazes series, a book I've tentatively titled The Rewilding. 

Because now that an entirely new world--new universe, in fact--lies open to us, it's time to stop pointing at it, and time to start exploring it.

And building in it.

On the heels of great reviews at Locus and Canada's premiere newspaper, The Globe and Mail, I'm delighted that SF Site has looked at Ashes of Candesce and pronounced it good. It's not just a ringing endorsement of this last Virga novel; the message that's emerging from people who've read all five books is that there's no low spot in the series. The books are consistently good.

For me, there's always two goals: each book had to be as good as it could possibly be; and the series as a whole had to be excellent. The reviews for each individual book have been stellar, but it wasn't until I read Greg. L. Johnson, in this latest review, saying "With Ashes of Candesce, Karl Schroeder brings his Virga series to a rousing, fitting conclusion," that I started to believe I'd succeeded with Virga as a whole. 

Russell Letson had already said this over at Locus:

In a recent (as I write this) Locus Roundtable post, Karen Burnham posed the question of the appeal of SF and fantasy – ‘‘Why do you enjoy this crazy brand of literature?’’ I responded with several paragraphs of babble, but I think I could have just offered this series as my answer.

He added, 

All this clearly places Schroeder’s work in discussion with that of Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge, among others.

In the SF Site review, Johnson also says, 

Karl Schroeder is also exploring many of the ideas that have dominated hard science fiction for the last twenty years or so... Those themes place the Virga series and its author in the company of writers like Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and others. 

And, summing up, 

That the story and character development never lags as a result makes the Virga series a first-class reading experience both for long term fans and anyone looking for a good introduction to the ideas, and artistry, of contemporary hard science fiction.

I've been proud of the individual Virga books. Now I'm proud of the series, too.

Nikola Danaylov sat down in my living room last week and grilled me for over an hour about my thoughts on technology, the Singularity, and my alternatives to it. The whole interview can be seen here, or downloaded as a podcast; be warned, it covers a huge amount of ground and I don't get much chance to fully flesh out the ideas I'm throwing around. Hence much of it may sound like gibberish. 

There is much that I told Nikola that bears extensive expansion and I would love to lay out these ideas (eg. about the Technological Maximum and the Rewilding) in a book... but only when somebody pays me to write it. I am sadly unable to take on a project like that without backing anymore; I'd starve before I finished the thing.

Meanwhile, others seem to be discovering my work. There's a new review of Lady of Mazes on The Atlantic's website! It's a pretty awesome exploration of the key themes of the novel; I have to say that, seven years after the novel came out, people finally seem to be ready for the conversation that it proposes. Should we control the technologies that influence our lives, or do we willy-nilly spin the roulette wheel of technological change and simply accept what comes out of it? This is the question Lady of Mazes asks; there could be no more relevant a question for the present, yet when the book first came out, there wasn't much said about that aspect of the story. People didn't really... get it. Now, it seems they're starting to.

Over at io9, Andrew Liptak has written a well-considered article about the national differences in military-oriented science fiction--contrasting American SF with Canadian, British and other nations' takes on the future (or lack thereof) of war. He extensively references my 2005 short novel Crisis in Zefra, which I wrote for the Canadian military. Zefra has been widely read and commented on; it was even excerpted in Harper's magazine.  Liptak praises Zefra for presenting something different from the American perspective on war, by describing a multi-stakeholder peace-keeping mission without any of the 'winner takes all' characteristics of U.S. triumphalism.

To say that I'm ambivalent about war would be a huge understatement; I come from a Mennonite background, after all (you do the math). Nonetheless, while my attitudes definitely played into Zefra, the document is ultimately a reflection of Canadian military doctrine and forward thinking. 

Yes, we think differently up here; and we wage war differently, too.

I've been waiting for this particular review with the proverbial bated breath. Locus magazine, which is the multiple-award-winning industry review and news magazine for SF and fantasy, has reviewed Ashes of Candesce. Russell Letson knows the series, and so he's in a position to compare Ashes to Sun of Suns and the rest of the Virga books. He puts it this way:

Because schemes and puzzles have been staples of these books from the start, one expects to encounter hidden agendas, mixed motives, secret histories, confused or conflicting loyalties, concealed plans, and unmaskings. But alongside the engagingly busy cut-and-thrust of the intrigue plot runs an equally intriguing component of the book – the play of ideas and science-fictional inventions that make this more than a cunningly engineered thrill ride – and a deeper kind of fun starts when those plot secrets and revelations connect with that layer.

--And, in terms of where these books sit in the broader field of science fiction, he makes the observation that 

All this clearly places Schroeder’s work in discussion with that of Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge, among others.

...Which seems about right, considering my obsessions and reading habits. Mitigating this somewhat daunting list of comparisons, though, are Letson's closing comments, where he says

In a recent (as I write this) Locus Roundtable post, Karen Burnham posed the question of the appeal of SF and fantasy – ‘‘Why do you enjoy this crazy brand of literature?’’ I responded with several paragraphs of babble, but I think I could have just offered this series as my answer.

Thank you, Russell. And adieu Virga, it's been a great ride. Time to move on to something wilder, and to those ideas that have been bottling up in me since I began this series... seven years ago, now.

Over at the Globe and Mail, Tom Sandborn talks about my fifth and final Virga book, Ashes of Candesce--and he likes it despite not having read the previous four. Now, I did all I could to make each book in the series stand on its own, but there was always going to have to be one that tied up everything that was left dangling in the others--and that one couldn't be engineered to be a complete stand-alone work. Hence, the cliff-hanger ending to The Sunless Countries, and the dive-in-with-both-feet approach to Ashes.

One tactic I've used throughout the series, though, was to use a different point-of-view character for each book. I do the same with Ashes, and I think it paid off because Sandborn was able to enjoy the book because it remains Keir Chen's story, though of course he's fully aware that there's a massive history to all the other characters and the setup to this particular story. To which I say, yay! That's what I had in mind.

Sandborn says:

The action scenes are brisk and exciting, and all the space-opera elements are linked to remarkably sophisticated reflections on themes of embodiment, attachment and artificial intelligence. Think Buck Rogers meets Buckminster Fuller meets the Buddha. ...This is, in the end, a thought-provoking and oddly beautiful story, with enough charm to send me back to read the earlier books in the Virga series.

If you've been following me on twitter or here lately, you'll know I've been fretting about this book, waiting for the reviews. So this is a big relief and a reason to cheer about all the hard work that went into Ashes--the book I undertook while recovering from heart surgery. 

I'm happy now.

What if our planet suddenly gained a new continent? Imagine Atlantis unexpectedly rising, seaweed-cloaked, from the depths. --Imagine the political upheavals, the land rushes, resource booms, profiteering and euphoria and misery. 

Impossible? Well, what if the Earth suddenly acquired a new ocean, and the traditional distances between ports suddenly skewed and shifted? Wouldn't that be the same as gaining a new continent? --After all, it would mean new coastlines, new ports and destinations for rail lines; areas of countryside formerly lying fallow suddenly opening up: new frontiers in neglected corners of supposedly-settled countries. 

Like those figure-and-ground visual illusions, oceans define the  land. Tobias Buckell knows this--so when he writes a thriller set in an open Arctic ocean, he lays out incredible possibilities for us to savour. Suddenly places like Pandora Island and the Barendts sea become common place names, even destinations. This is half the delight of Arctic Rising: the exploration of a literal new world brought to life by extreme global warming.

The other half of the delight is that within this setting, Arctic Rising is a straight-ahead, no-nonsense old-school thriller. You're not going to have to learn quantum mechanics to get what's going on here: Anika Duncan, airship pilot and fiercely independent loner, has been framed and decides to get her reputation back. She does so in true James Bond fashion, but she's nothing like Bond--she's black, a lesbian, and beholden to no state or secret society. The book is just her against the world, and that's what makes it great.

Buckell has taken a great idea and run with it. He owns this new Arctic sea, and Anika is a true 21st century heroine who just might sustain a whole series of works set there. 

A new ocean defines new continents, new nations--and a whole new brand of thriller.

If you head on over to Tor.com, you'll find a review I've just posted of the Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050. A review of a foresight project? Hell, why not? Foresight exists as a kind of parallel world to science fiction--a realm of official futures and aspirational texts that plays off of SF tropes but also invents its own. There are a lot of foresight projects out there and their findings can be fascinating, illuminating and controversial (remember the Limits to Growth and all the ink that was generated around it?).

If people like this little review I'll be happy to write more. Should be interesting, because there's an obvious subtext to this first review: it's the question, is the science fiction readership actually interested in other visions of the future?

Let's see what happens. Should only take a day or two to find out.

Russ Allbery has reviewed most of my novels on his site, and he's always provided an extremely good litmus test of how well I'm doing.  (Except of course for his giddy and utterly approving review of Lady of Mazes, which if not entirely objective was at least a great piece of ego-boo for me.)  As well as praising the strengths, he finds the weaknesses in my work with unerring precision and for this reason I always await his reviews with great anticipation.

What he has to say about The Sunless Countries is extremely positive, and his criticisms are fair.  I can learn from a reviewer like this:

 The Eternists are a bit over the top, though. Schroeder paints the politicians as manipulative, self-serving slime, and since the protagonist is an academic, the conflict follows stock fault lines and seems pat and cliched. He makes it work within the book, but the obvious analogies outside the book are too easy and a bit distracting.

Yeah, okay.  I'll try to do better.  On the other hand, this is his overall assessment:

The Virga series still falls a bit short of Schroeder's other work for me, but this is the most intellectually interesting entry. He moves away from steampunk set pieces and into more analysis of the nature of government and the perils and alliances of high technology. It's one of the better books in the series, although it still trails Queen of Candesce.

Fair enough, and thanks once again for a well-measured review.

Nice review at Sci Fi Wire, full of words like "rich" "hectic" "dangerous" and "exciting."  Not to mention "enigmatic" "exotic" and "bizarre."  A book full of "perilous intrigue" that contains "revelations about Virga's place in the 'foam of worlds.'"

But the reviewer (Paul Di Filippo) is careful to make the point that while Sunless Countries fills in the blanks on the map provided by the other books, it can also be read on its own:

It might very well serve as a good gateway for newbies into the fascinating Virga cosmos, an enormous, air-filled fullerene balloon in the Vegan star system containing worldlets of varying size that center around the "sun of suns," Candesce. It's a Boschian landscape, full of rich cognitive estrangement, and Schroeder gets the most out of his conceptual playground, with taut prose and wild plotting.

In short, a very happy, enthusiastic review for the fourth book of "the Virga trilogy." 

Russell Letson has read all the Virga books, and so he's eminently qualified to compare them with one another in his review of The Sunless Countries.  Does this fourth book, which diverges so totally from the arc of straightforward adventure that tied the first three together, pass muster?  Apparently.

Science fiction is supposed to be the genre that melds the adventures of the mind and body into a single thrill ride, as though a roller coaster could be combined with the Discovery Channel and an advanced degree in speculative anthropology and experienced all at once.  This series, and this entry in particular, fulfills that promise.

This is an excellent first major review of the book, and especially good as it arrived two days before Worldcon starts.  In my usual way I had no idea whether I'd crafted a masterpiece or a doorstop; at least I can go to the yearly party with some confidence that I've done right by the other Virga books.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly has to say about the upcoming (August) print edition of our Hugo-nominated shared world project, METAtropolis:

Editor Scalzi (Zoe’s Tale) and four well known writers thoughtfully postulate the evolution of cities, transcending postapocalyptic clichés to envision genuinely new communities and relationships. Selfsustaining walled cities struggle with their responsibilities to dying suburbs in Scalzi’s “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”; goods are exchanged through multiple microtransactions in Tobias S. Buckell’s “Stochasti-City” and a reputation economy in Elizabeth Bear’s “The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood.” A lone man attempts to overthrow an early enclave in Jay Lake’s “In the Forests of the Night,” while Karl Schroeder’s “To Hie from Far Celenia” brilliantly combines steampunk, urban sociology and network theory as entire subcultures go “off the grid.” Each story shines on its own; as a group they reinforce one another, building a multifaceted view of a realistic and hopeful urban future. (Aug.

Edited by John Scalzi. Subterranean, $30 (264p) ISBN 978-1-59606-238-2 )

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say right off the bat that I've written an award-winning short story and a novel with David Nickle.  I consider him one of the finest horror writers around, and in combination we've crafted some pretty weird stuff; but by temperament David's always been a short fiction writer.  His best pieces are small, intricately-crafted, and often disturbing glimpses of humanity's dark side.  Now, he's finally collected some of them into a book you can buy.  The book is Monstrous Affections.

David's work is by turns horrific, touching, and wickedly funny--sometimes all at the same time.  (Consider a vampire-as-special-needs-kid story where the poor misunderstood vampire toddler is swarmed by righteous preschoolers and--well, you can imagine.)  David's got a blog you can check out, The Devil's Exercise Yard, which is lots of fun, and of course you can still find copies of the novel we wrote together, The Claus Effect, which is basically a James Bond thriller with Santa Claus as the super-villain.

Monstrous Affections is available now for pre-order from the Horror Mall (as warm and cuddly a website as you can imagine).  The book will be released on Halloween of 2009; but by ordering it now, you send a strong signal to the publisher and other interested parties that you're interested in David's work.  And, if you later forget that you've put in the order, you'll have a pleasant little surprise in your mailbox around Halloween (and it won't be a stick or somebody's left ear!  Although, who knows, you might get that too).

I don't read very many web-based comics.  I don't find many of them are very good.  So it's come as a surprise to me that I'm totally hooked on Tom Siddell's Gunnerkrigg Court, a Gormenghastian saga about a very strange school/factory/city and the enchanted and often sinister forest that lies next to it.

Antimony Carver is a new student at the school called Gunnerkrigg Court.  She's come from the hospital where she spent much of her sheltered youth watching her mother slowly wane and die.  Now, at the Court, she has the chance to make friends and learn how the world works.

Except that Antimony's world is far stranger than she (or we) could have imagined.  It's a madhouse of ghosts and robots, forest spirits and virtual classrooms; a school so huge and labyrinthine that whole neighbourhoods of it have remained unexplored for who-knows-how-long.  The story unfolds at a rate of three pages per week (updated on mondays, wednesdays and fridays) but as it's up to Chapter 22 and the chapters average 30 pages in length, there's plenty of reading to do to catch up.

I'm completely addicted.  I'm also delighted that you can now buy the first volume of the series on Amazon.  Siddell's work deserves wide recognition and praise.  Gunnerkrigg Court brightens up at least three days of my week, and for a writer and artist to be able to sustain such a high quality of output for so long is itself a feat worthy of recognition. 

All hail the Court, and three cheers for Antimony Carver!

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton speaks about her recent discovery of my first novel, Ventus.  It's a nice review and a good introduction to some of the ideas in the book.  Ventus, mind, is the sequel-of-sorts to Lady of Mazes, and moreover is available from this website as a free ebook if you're interested in checking out my work with no commitment cost.  If you're at all interested, check out Jo's review, then come back and grab a copy of the novel.

I'm just emerging into that phase of the Virga series when the books can be reviewed as a whole; and of course this won't seriously happen for another couple of years, when Ashes of Candesce is finally out.  But it's starting, and a very nice, and highly favourable review of the series as a thing in itself is now online at the Porter Square Books blog.

You can read the review yourself if you're interested; I was just very proud to read the following bit (talking about Queen of Candesce):

Following the machinations of Venera and her enemies really did remind me of Frank Herbet’s Dune; it is a rare treat to read about smart people outsmarting other smart people.

So I'm in my office going through the page proofs of The Sunless Countries, worrying that the pacing is off, and I decide to procrastinate by doing some ego-surfing--and what should I find but a review of TSC!  A favourable one!  And he doesn't even mention the pacing.

Schroeder evokes the slow, crushing drift into ideological nonsense in a distressingly compelling way, & puts Leal [Maspeth] in the heart of it; should she collaborate with the Eternists to try to salvage some representation of science & history (even if she has to teach it as heretical, along side accepted dogma) or should she make a meaningless stand?

Wow.  This is like getting a newspaper from next week.  It also suggests to me that the current practice of sending out Advanced Reading Copies this early needs to be reconsidered, because that practice is predicated on it taking reviewers months to get their reviews out.  I could literally tweak the book right now to solve some of the issues the reviewer, Mordecai, raises.  Luckily he hasn't found many.

Very timely and useful.

Weird, though.

It's February, and time to confirm once again that Locus Magazine really really likes me.  Pirate Sun is one of the twenty novels they recommend out of the hundreds published in 2008.

So, every one of my Tor novels has made this list--six in a row.  I guess this means that, as far as Locus is concerned, I'm one of the top twenty SF novelists working in English.  (I can hear the chant now:  "We're number 20!  We're number 20!)

This recommendation appears to have nothing to do with, and no influence on, sales; but I can't exactly complain, can I?  The list is chosen by a pretty heavy-hitting set of reviewers and editors, all of whom are experts in the field.  Collectively, they read pretty much everything that comes out every year.  So it's hugely flattering that they've given me this rare vote of confidence not just once, but with every book I've written.

Hmmm... maybe, then, I should write another novel.  What to call it?  Perhaps... Ashes of Candesce? ...

Bookgasm has chosen Lou Anders' excellent anthology Fast Forward 2 as its best SF book of the year.  They say:

Anders has assembled some of the best and brightest current stars of the genre, and they turned in stories that, as a whole, really do represent the cutting edge of fiction. From a fashion designer who grows living gowns to a raid on the doomsday seed bank to a young man getting Cyrano-with-a-twist dating advice in the India of the future, FAST FORWARD 2 is the book to read this year.