New Year, New You edited by Chris Campbell: Review by Alexandra Pierce

New Year, New You, Chris Campbell, ed. (Im­mortal Jellyfish Press 979-8-99077-550-3, 312pp, $25.00, tp). Cover by Melinda Smith. October 2024.

In my experience, it’s often the case that once you hear a good idea, you think “Of course! Why has no one done that before?” In that spirit: the “new year, new you!” slogan seems a perfect theme for a speculative fiction anthology – now that Chris Campbell has edited one. Primarily made up of authors and instructors (like Elizabeth Bear and Daryl Gregory) from the Viable Paradise Workshop of 2023, these stories cover the wide range of possibilities that such a theme suggests.

Some of the stories included here are wholly affirming – people willingly making changes that have a positive impact on their lives. In several other stories, changes are forced on the protago­nists, who deal with it in a variety of ways. And, of course, some of the stories remain ambiguous about the changes experienced. A wide variety of science-fictional situations are used to ex­plore the idea of reinvention: There’s time travel (of course), cloning, and various technologies (including AI); people living on other planets, and after an apocalypse. There are fewer stories that lean into the fantastical rather than science fiction – Cinderella and Persephone, and some magical realism.

Perhaps my favourite story is Charlotte Ahlin’s “The Ravishing Moon Princess”. The entire story revolves around Davina making physical changes to her body, which to me seemed ap­palling and unnecessary; Ahlin forced me to confront my reaction, and consider Davina’s motivations and agency. It begins as the rather grim story of the chorus girl desperate to be a star, who makes drastic physical changes to achieve her goal – and then makes yet more changes to keep the life she has achieved. She is always the one deciding to change herself (new kidneys, new eyelashes, new skin), but of course the question of social pressure and expectation looms behind those decisions. Quite unexpect­edly, the story concludes much more positively than I had anticipated; Davina doesn’t regret any of her choices, and ultimately makes even more drastic ones that lead to a happy ending.

At the other end of the spectrum in terms of consent and decision-making is Ash Howell’s “Chat_Transcript_Elsie_User260916_2089-12-13T21-18-32.661Z”. It’s a story comprised of the chat transcript between a human, Elsie, and what she initially assumes is a chatbot. In this world, humans are expected to have a complete “biophysical update” in their 20s (transferring their consciousness to a new body), and Elsie is reluctantly organising hers. But the focus of the story is not on Elsie and her choices: In the course of their conversation, Elsie discovers that her interlocutor is not a bot, but the consciousness of someone who was uploaded many decades before and edited without her consent. The contrast between Ahlin’s and Howell’s stories around who decides what happens to one’s body and mind is stark.

The theme of consent and manipulation threads through other stories too. Julie Danvers’s “Ugly” imagines Cinderella’s younger, nice stepsister Stasia, who is manipulated by a voice (perhaps that of a mouse?). Stasia goes along with the voice’s drastic suggestions on how to win the prince: initially apparently worth it, but not for long. Eventually, Stasia chooses to make her own decisions, and be herself, instead. Similar in theme, but even more creepy, is “Redo” by Brigitte Winter: a deeply disturbing story of a husband who chooses to restart the timeline for both him and his wife (without consulting her) after she is unfaithful. Like Stasia, Mary does finally take control of her own narrative. Then, in “Better Me is Fun at Parties” (F.E. Choe), the protagonist has a “Better Me” – a sort of twin, who just appeared one day, and who makes changes to their “original.” Whether these are for the good of the protagonist remains entirely ambiguous, as does the existence of consent.

Interestingly, there are very few stories where the protagonist is not, ultimately, allowed to be their “new” (or real) self. Some stories are troubling – “Better Me” certainly is, and so is Melinda Smith’s “Fracture”, set in a world where everyone has a BrainFrame and downloads apps directly to their brain: Fracture separates the pain of a memory from the memory itself. But Sophia Tao’s “The Catadromous Nature of Eel” is the only story that presents a protagonist who doesn’t actually get to be their new self. Anna knows that she is an eel-person, and that she can’t continue to live on land, but her fish-father won’t let her come home to the ocean and her flesh-family can’t understand why she wants to go into the ocean. Anna cannot (yet?) be herself, and it’s left ambiguous as to what will become of her as a result.

The fact that Anna’s is the only story that ends in complete frustration for the protagonist is indicative, perhaps, of the framing of the theme: “New year, new you” is generally presented as a positive motivation for change – even though we so often fail to meet our own (or society’s) expectations. Having said that, as should be clear from the discussion above this is not an anthology full of celebration and cheerfulness. The stories – individually and as a whole – are nuanced, looking at a range of motivations for wanting to change or be changed, and ways of achieving that goal. Depending on your mindset, it may be a good book to read in December or January….

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This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.

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