Future Americas
Author: John Heller and Martin Greenberg, Eds.
Publisher: Daw Books
ISBN-13: 9780756405083
Rating: 8/10
Chewing over the past is easy. Predicting the future is hard, and no matter how easy New Age mystics and futurists make it look, pinpointing what will happen 5 years, 10 years, even five minutes from now is tricky stuff. Which is why "Future Americas" is so interesting. Spanning 17 stories of possible USAs, from picturesque ruins to misguided utopias, this is one of the most entertaining anthologies written in a long time. It is also one of the more provocative.
This book spans decades as it immerses the reader in worlds hardly imaginable today. From a tropical wilderness set in a stratified society worthy of an Umberto Eco novel, to a futuristic L.A. marred by terrorism and Balkanization, we get a glimpse of worlds that might be. There are many things that will seem recognizable to the reader, from the present of a jacked-up World Wide Web, to the familiar remains of the U.S. Capitol. Graceland even gets a shout-out, in a gory action-adventure story that sees the South finally rising again-sort of.
Sometimes, the slick storytelling and compelling characters can be fooling. Case in point: “Family Photos”, a provocative-and tough-story of a sister of a sex abuse victim who gets poetic, or rather, artistic revenge on her mother. Such stories aren’t unusual, but for every tense story, there is an equally fantastic one in the true sense of the world that is as escapist as anything on TV these days. It’s all relative, and as always, a matter of taste.
"Future Americas" is worth jumping into the Time Machine.
John Winn - Staff Writer
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