Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias | ||||||||||||
edited by Kim Stanley Robinson | ||||||||||||
Tor Books, 352 pages | ||||||||||||
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A review by Thomas Myer
In this world hellbent for either Tomorrowland or Blade Runner (or a
combination of both), filled with the rhetoric of machine-age ejector-seat teleology, millenarian
hype and encounters of the cybernetic kind, we sometimes forget how
tough and redoubtable this planet is and how totally uncaring. The
world has been around since before the first trilobyte and has
shrugged off the mighty T. Rex. Assuredly, the ecology will
eventually roll over us, despite our silicon dreams and Internet sex.
Unless, of course, we give up our militaristic need to conquer
nature and embrace a different way--an approach of interaction
and interpenetration. It's hard, because the memes of
scientific progress and technologic manifest destiny
may have already crucified us.
Future Primitive, an anthology of stories partly
inspired by Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, offers
us visions with those difficulties sharply in focus -- futures
unimagined by the streetsmart cyberpunks and silicon capitalists.
The multiple award-winning "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry
Bisson surprises in its clarity,
dazzles with its simplicity and angers with its conclusion. The
title ursine characters remind us how we must have been, long
ago, when we first harnessed technology--way before smart
bombs, plutonium and ozone holes.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Newton's Sleep" points out that
man is but the ultimate herd animal, the most highly evolved
of all lemmings, either unable to heed reason, or unwilling
to let go of it, to see the truth behind the veneer of consensus reality.
Howard Waldrop's 1976 story, "Mary Margaret Road Grader" describes
a future in which Native Americans take back a piece of America
and mix tribal customs with a sort of retro-white-trash pastiche
of tractor pulls, keggers, and bad blood. The machines exert and
tear the land, the men smoke hemp and a single woman changes everything
forever. It all ends not in a crescendo of steel and gears, but the
silence of rust and unforgiven bygones.
There are other stories too, by Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolf, Pat
Murphy, and Ernest Callenbach among others. A worthy anthology for any
collection and an important voice in science fiction.
Thomas Myer is a technical writer and freelance scoundrel. When he's not reading or writing, his family (wife Hope, and dogs Kafka and Vladimir) makes him mow the lawn and scrub floors. He also happens to be an excellent scratch cook. |
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