Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams

Seeds of Change is an anthology of new science fiction edited by John Joseph Adams. In his introduction, he says that he asked the contributors to write about paradigm shifts, to consider the societies we live in and ways they might change. One could argue that this is an implicit aim of all science fiction; so is there anything particularly special about this anthology? I’ll come back to that question later.

“N-Words” by Ted Kosmatka posits the return of an extinct species through cloning, examines the resulting social changes, and asks whether extinction is the likely outcome a second time. It is a vehicle to explore racism and its consequences, the tone dark and sombre, and offers some serious scientific and social speculations.

David has died, and Mandy must battle through a crowd of protestors to attend his funeral. She has her son and her sister with her, and reflects back on the circumstances that brought her, and the world, to this moment.

In most cases, this kind of storytelling, looking back on past events, would be a poor choice because it lacks immediacy, but Kosmatka knows what he is doing. This is the moment when the world will change, and he lays out the reasons why with calculated precision.

It is rigorous science fiction of the highest order, in the sense that the author doggedly follows through on his premise. If you make the assumptions that he does, then it leads you inexorably down the path he describes. It is very powerful and I expect it will be widely praised.

In Jay Lake’s “The Future by Degrees,” a team of boffins invent a thermal superconductivity device/process that will change the world. Powerful forces move to suppress it to protect their selfish economic interests. Grover Ruggles, an unlikely hero, goes on the run. Will he be able to “go public” with his information, change the world, and save himself from getting squished by the mysterious powerful people?

It is easy to imagine the potential benefits of a relatively lossless means to store heat energy, but unfortunately the Big Idea here is mostly overlooked in favour of the derivative plot. Improbabilities abound, such as Grover having fortuitously taken some “lab castoffs home to play with.” Not so top-secret after all, then.

Grover is at least a likeable character, but even he seems disappointed in the villains when he describes them thus:

They were bulky, in gray suits and dark glasses. It was a scene straight out of Central Casting. Grover found the sheer lack of imagination offensive.

K.D. Wentworth takes a jokey approach to the theme of societal change in “Drinking Problem.” A new law requires all beer drinkers to purchase a “Smart Bottle,” which they must use for all future beer drinking. Only the owner of the bottle can use it, and they cannot drink beer unless they drink from their one and only bottle. It’s the law, and the Smart Bottle comes fully equipped to enforce it.

At first glance this appears to be a satire on the theme of re-use and recycling, as Joe’s fruitless attempts to dispose of his bottle result in increasing penalties for him. But it’s actually a different kind of satire, on the way new technologies infiltrate themselves into our lives. You never knew you needed it, but how did you ever live without it?

Wentworth’s achievement here is in portraying a situation that is implausible in almost every specific detail but nevertheless rings true. Readers able to suspend disbelief should find much to enjoy.

Blake Charlton’s “Endosymbiont” begins with a girl, Stephanie, who thinks she is 14, thinks she has cancer, and thinks she sees a rattlesnake toy eat its own tail. But that isn’t physically possible.

Stephanie begins to doubt that she is really in a hospital, hacks into its information system, and eventually attempts to escape. But she is intercepted by a Dr. Mandala who knows the full circumstances of her condition and seems to encourage her towards a deeper understanding of her situation and potential.

She learns about Anti-Singularity laws designed to prevent the development of post-human artificial intelligences. She learns that in evolution, there is something called horizontal gene transfer, where genetic information can be transferred to organisms that aren’t your children. She learns, too, that she has been groomed for a potential next evolutionary step. But groomed by whom, and for what purpose?

All of this is genuinely interesting stuff, but there are moments of nonsense thrown in for authorial convenience. When Stephanie asks whether an uploaded consciousness could simply be saved to disk, she is told that this is not possible because: “The connections decay unless they’re active.” Err, how’s that, then?

And it does rather drag on in a plodding fashion. Stephanie has a series of encounters with people who can reveal more about the truth of her situation, but each one plays out dramatically in much the same way. Some judicious cutting would have made the piece stronger.

In Ken MacLeod’s “A Dance Called Armageddon,” it is the fifteenth winter of the Faith War. With conflict raging in the Middle East and Central Asia, Britain seems relatively unaffected. An old man sits in the pub and waits for the end of the world. He listens to live music, folk songs that tell of a long history of defeat.

America has a different history, a greater expectation of victory, and is “going into national nervous breakdown from coast to coast.”

“A Dance Called Armageddon” is a bleak deliberation on the nature of winning and losing, lightened by some gallows humour. There is little in the way of science fictional gimmickry; some high-tech glasses to watch TV with are about it, and they still steam up when you come in from the cold.

“Arties Aren’t Stupid” by Jeremiah Tolbert has a completely different sensibility. The Arties have been created to be artistic, but it seems their creators/owners, the Elderfolk, take little interest in them. Tin policemen are charged with cleaning up the mess the Arties make.

Niles and his group of Arties attempt to stay one step ahead of the tin men by finding new ways to create art, new ways to Make. If it hasn’t been seen before, then it can’t be illegal. When the “brainiacs” give them factory machines to design and make new things, Little Mona, a seemingly insignificant member of the group, begins to remake the world. Arties may not be brainiacs, but they are a resourceful lot.

Tolbert creates a believable street lingo for the Arties and does a wonderful job of capturing Mona’s view of the world, where the difference between right and wrong is a matter of the symmetry of a smile, a broken voice, or the ache inside if you’re not able to Make.

“Faceless in Gethsemane” by Mark Budz considers the voluntary adoption by a segment of the population of a process by which the brain is rewired to render it incapable of distinguishing facial characteristics.

Its proponents argue that being unable to recognise skin colour or other racial characteristics frees them, allowing them to see people for who they really are, not what they look like. Protestors against the procedure argue that diversity must be embraced rather than denied.

These questions are explored, but Budz goes beyond this to consider how important our past, our personal history, is to each of us. The story is told from the point of view of Trevor, whose sister Keeley has had the procedure. To their parents, whose faces Keeley will never again be able to distinguish, it is a betrayal. To Trevor’s wife, Fran, it is simply the latest example of Keeley’s eccentric and unpleasant behaviour.

The characters are complicated, believable, and thankfully not written simply to illustrate the theme. Budz does give us a little too much in the way of explanation, particularly at the beginning, which is unnecessary because everything we need to know is shown perfectly well in the drama. But this is a minor criticism. Infused with a palpable sense of tragedy about to happen, this is a thoughtful and impressive piece of work.

“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is equally good. Eme and her abusive husband live on the edge of a village in the Niger Delta, with an oil pipeline running through the backyards. The days when her mother’s grandmother used to lie on the pipe listening to the liquid running through are long gone, as it is now patrolled by fearsome spider robots who can sense any vibration in the pipe and are ruthless in defending it from sabotage.

Eme’s only comfort is to go out into the night to play her beautiful guitar, which is decades old and once belonged to her father. Everything changes when Eme strays recklessly close to the pipeline, attracting the attention of one of the robots, but not in the way she imagined.

A relationship of sorts, based on music, develops between Eme and the robot. But why is the behaviour of the robots evolving, and what will the consequences be?

Beautifully written and darkly tragic, I found the setting and the author’s insight very refreshing and interesting. I’ll look for more by Okorafor-Mbachu.

“Resistance” by Tobias S. Buckell is by far the most action-adventure oriented story in the book. The Haven space station has suffered a coup and is under the rule of a technological dictator named Pan. A mercenary named Pepper comes to Haven having been hired by a resistance movement. Pepper has an electro-magnetic pulse device with which to kill Pan and return the power to the people.

Stanuel is the unfortunate resistance member assigned to assist Pepper. As the two of them commence their assault on the tower to kill Pan, Pepper discovers the circumstances of the coup. It began when the population, eager to make every decision democratically, found themselves having to make an unfeasibly large number of decisions. Faced with the sheer volume of decision-making required, they decided to delegate their decisions to artificial intelligence emulations of themselves.

But once that decision has been made, what control do you have over the decisions then being made on your behalf, and where might it lead? Buckell has achieved something I might have thought impossible, an entertaining romp on the importance of voting. It’s an excellent ending for the book.

So, to return to my earlier question, is there anything particularly special about this anthology? I would say that at least five of the nine stories are particularly fine. Science fiction has always asked us to consider the societies we live in and ways they might change. Books like Seeds of Change demonstrate that SF continues to do so, and surely this is something to be encouraged and thankful for.

Publisher: Prime Books (Aug. 2008)
Price: $13.57
Hardcover: 240 pages
ISBN: 0809573105