Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene by Jonathan Strahan, ed.

Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (MIT Press 978-0-26254-443-6, $19.95, 232pp, tp) August 2022. Cover by Sean Bodley

As a critical term, ‘‘hard SF’’ is something of a blunt instrument. Originally used to distinguish the more-or-less rigorous adherence to known science in the work of authors like Clarke, Asimov, or Clement from the more metaphorical and ‘‘literary’’ SF of a Bradbury, Sturgeon, or Zenna Henderson (which was sometimes saddled with the passive-aggressive moniker of ‘‘soft SF’’), it started becoming prob­lematical, if not quite irrelevant, when authors from Ursula K. Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson showed that it was always something of a false dichotomy. Maybe it would be more useful if SF readers talked more like wine mavens, describing such novels as, say, a bit science-forward, with undertones of style and satire, and a satisfying literary finish. At least that might be said of many of the stories in Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, Jonathan Strahan’s entry in the MIT Press ‘‘Twelve Tomorrows’’ series of anthologies, which by virtue of its venue alone might lead us to expect the more familiar itera­tions of hard SF. And indeed, while nuggets of hard SF can be found within most of these tales, it doesn’t really surround, confine, or define them.

Take for example, Meg Elison’s lead story ‘‘Drone Pirates of Silicon Valley’’, which begins with the rather homey image of a boy and his dad attending a baseball game in which the hot dogs are delivered to the stands by swarms of drones. By a year later, Danny is involved in a group out to undermine the massive Babazon corporation by snagging its delivery drones in mid-air. Not exactly a daring prediction – we’re already being warned about such things as drone piracy – but the details with which Elison works out the actual scheme, using Faraday cages, reads like classic hard SF. Similarly, the central technology in Malka Older’s ‘‘Legion’’ is essentially with us already – near-universal bodycams, monitored by legions of users to help protect against harass­ments and assaults – but the unique futuristic setting, a talk show in a protected underwater studio, is worked out in impressive detail. Justina Robson’s ‘‘I Give You the Moon’’ describes in good hard-SF tradition technologies for trying to clean the environment – giant machines filtering the seas, mechanical crabs scouring the seabed – but it’s also a moving tale of a boy in Africa who yearns to be a Viking.

One could hardly ask for a more classically hard-SF passage than this, from Emily Jin’s trans­lation of Chen Qiufan’s ‘‘Do You Hear the Fungi Sing?’’:

The hypercortex network was born out of the dire need to confront these climate chal­lenges. A next-generation network, it mapped the digital world onto the physical world with maximum precision and resorted to artificial intelligence to dynamically adjust parameters such as resource deployment, energy con­sumption, pollution emission, population flow, and vegetation enhancement….

The story turns not on the ingenuity of the data network that China has imposed virtually everywhere, but on a remote village – essentially the last holdout – which turns out to have its own natural systems for environmental balance and energy management in the form of an ancient network of fungi, whose spores even function as a sort of airborne nanotech. A similar twist (without giving too much away) occurs in Tade Thompson’s ‘‘Down and Out in Exile Park’’, which describes a debris island off the coast of Nigeria which has grown so large it supports inhabitants (not too much unlike Catherynne M. Valente’s ‘‘The Future is Blue’’), but again an unexpected biological twist refocuses the tale in a surprising way.

One sobering theme that recurs in several stories is that science isn’t likely to provide easy solutions to the mess that the Anthropocene era has created, and that current economic systems aren’t particularly well-suited for it, either. In an insightful interview with James Bradley which opens Tomorrow’s Parties, Kim Stanley Robin­son (whose work seems to be a shadow looming over the whole anthology) argues, ‘‘We need to change our political economy so that one index, profit, isn’t our measure for doing well.’’ This is nowhere more directly reflected than in one of the more powerful stories here, Sarah Gailey’s ‘‘When the Tide Rises’’. Set in an underwater kelp farm viewed as a model of sustainability, its protagonist is trapped in a predatory cycle of debt and wage slavery to the corporation that runs the farm. Resigned to her fate, she argues with a col­league, ‘‘The company has to make money some­how.’’ When he asks the simple question why, she realizes ‘‘I don’t have a response to that.’’ Like the young protagonists of the Meg Elison story about drones, one of whose parents is a brutally anti-union capitalist, she begins to realize that profit and environmental balance aren’t always compatible. For that matter, the jobs involved in trying to clean up the mess are often oppressive, like managing those crab drones in the Robson story or painstakingly planting mangrove trees in an effort to stave off the encroaching ocean in James Bradley’s ‘‘After the Storm’’, perhaps the most beautifully written story here in terms of character development, showing how even family tensions are exacerbated by the shifting climate.

Of the remaining tales, the most structurally adventurous is Daryl Gregory’s ‘‘Once Upon a Future in the West’’, which follows three dis­tinct plotlines – a doctor whose self-driving car is hacked, a cowboy smuggling a shipment of increasingly scarce beef, and a character whose dual personalities are that of a gambler and a prospector – and then neatly knits them together in a shrewd conclusion. Greg Egan, from whom we might have expected the most arcane variety of hard SF, instead provides a bruising satire of climate deniers and anti-science attitudes in ‘‘Crisis Actors’’, while Saad Z. Hossain’s ‘‘The Ferryman’’ describes yet another unappealing future job: that of a corpse collector in a world in which nanotech and brain implants have made deaths uncommon. Taken together, all the tales in Tomorrow’s Parties may at times feel more like tomorrow’s bad jobs, but they offer a disarmingly credible portrait of what life and work might be like in a future that may already be here, and that may or may not be reclaimable.