The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth 2, edited by Allan Kaster: Review by Alexandra Pierce

The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth 2, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-276-3, $19.99, 275pp, tp) December 2024. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

With anthology series that focus on robots and AI, and on space and time, I was surprised to come across Infinivox and Allan Kaster doing a series about science fiction on Earth itself; it seemed too mundane. Kaster addresses this in the first line of his introduction, pointing out that change is all around us right now, and that stories set on Earth are just as ripe a science-fictional environment as the centre of the galaxy. Interestingly, all of these stories are set in the near, even very near, future: there’s no “we’re coming back to Earth from Pluto” story; there’s very little technology that’s not a logi­cal progression from what I use every day. Unsur­prisingly, climate change is one of the dominating factors within the eleven stories featured; AI also crops up in several, although it’s rarely central to the story. The main feature that stood out to me is that some stories are defiantly hopeful, either for individuals or entire societies, while others are ominous, with little room for hope.

The anthology is bookended by stories that are ultimately hopeful. Whether that was deliberate on Kaster’s part or not, perhaps it speaks to a desire for uplifting fiction at the moment. First is Char­lie Jane Anders’ “A Soul in the World”, the only story that features aliens, and the origin story for Anders’s Unstoppable series. In it, a pair of aliens are looking for a safe human family to bring up a baby that is the clone of their now-dead com­mander. They choose Gwen, who has just been told that she won’t ever conceive. Life for Gwen and the child, Tina, is very ordinary, and the world around them isn’t awful; focused on family, it’s a gentle story, where even holding secrets doesn’t end up being destructive. Last is Paul McAuley’s wonderful novella “Gravesend, Or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene”. Rose is a young army veteran dealing with the repercussions of a psych bomb, living in a heavily climate-change-impacted England. She gets involved in a mystery involving the theft of “soul chips,” but as the title suggests, this is really a story of everyday life. For most of the story, Rose lives a community of much older people at Gravesend; she forages for sea purslane and other plants, and tries to find a place and a purpose. Around her, humans are being human, and communities are either adapting to climate change or belligerently refusing to do so. Despite the radical changes brought by climate change, the novella is a hopeful one because of people’s attitudes.

One other hopeful story should be mentioned: coming right in the middle, Ian McDonald’s “Sigh No More” is my favourite story of the anthology. Not too far in the future, a Carrington event has knocked out all of the satellites, and there are cascading failures of power grids and other infrastructure. McDonald writes of a commu­nity theatre group in London determined to stage Much Ado About Nothing despite (or because of) these problems. Individual determination and community-mindedness work together to create something wonderful, as McAuley also suggests.

This is not an anthology of hopepunk, however, and there are several stories that present disturb­ing or hopeless experiences of Earth. Some key examples: Karin Lowachee’s “A Borrowing of Bones” gives us a deeply creepy world where people are selling, or swapping (that’s unclear) bits of their bodies, which bring along memories from their original body, so that the new owner can experience other lives. And Dean Whitlock’s “Deep Blue Jump” has child slave labour being used to pick a newly evolved hallucinogenic berry. The world is awful, wracked by climate change and rife with drug abuse – and, obviously, slavery. While there is the suggestion of hope at the end, it doesn’t mitigate the horrors.

As an Australian, I was particularly moved by T.R. Napper’s “Highway Requiem”, a very Austra­lian story about one of the last truckies, driving across the country to earn money for his estranged son’s wedding. Kev is at the forefront of the struggle between the individual needing to earn money versus climate protesters wanting change, and the outsourcing of work to AI. It’s a deeply pathetic (in the ‘arousing pity’ sense) story: Kev is a man stuck in a rut through no fault of their own. Whether the world itself is improving is irrelevant; Kev is being left behind.

Finally, I will mention a fascinating story that doesn’t fit my hopeful/disturbing schema. In Cécile Cristofari’s “A Kingdom of Seagrass and Silk”, a son takes his parents to an isolated island, to be out of the way during a pandemic. The couple watch the lights go out across the bay, with no way of knowing what’s happening. Their lives are not entirely comfortable, but quite bearable. The juxtaposition – maybe everyone over there is dead, while we here are going along happily – has certainly been explored before in science fiction; it makes this an intriguing and uncomfortable and fascinating story.

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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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