Vries - Shine An Anthology of Near-Future Optimistic Science Fiction

SHINE

An Anthology of Near-future,
Optimistic Science Fiction

Edited by Jetse de Vries
Including stories by

Jason Andrew
Madeline Ashby
Jacques Barcia
Eva Maria Chapman
Ken Edgett
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Eric Gregory
Kay Kenyon
Mari Ness
Holly Phillips
Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard
Alastair Reynolds
Gord Sellar
Paula R. Stiles
Jason Stoddard
Lavie Tidhar

First published 2010 by Solarisan imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84997-166-9
MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84997-167-6

Introduction copyright Jetse de Vries 2010
The Earth of Yunhe copyright Eric Gregory 2010
The Greenman Watches the Black Bars go Up, Up, Up
copyright Jacques Barcia 2010
Overhead copyright Jason Stoddard 2010
Summer Ice copyright Holly Phillips 2006
Sustainable Development copyright Paula R. Stiles 2010
The Church of Accelerated Redemption
copyright Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard 2010
The Solnet Ascendancy copyright Lavie Tidhar 2010
Twittering the Stars copyright Mari Ness 2010
Seeds copyright Silvia Moreno-Garcia 2010
At Budokan copyright Alastair Reynolds 2010
Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic) copyright Gord Sellar 2010
Scheherezade Cast in Starlight copyright Jason Andrew 2010
Russion Roulette 2020 copyright Eva Maria Chapman 2010
Castoff World copyright Kay Kenyon 2010
Paul Kishoshas Children copyright Ken Edgett 2010
Ishin copyright Madeline Ashby 2010

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted inaccordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in anyform or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of thecopyright owners.

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eBook production by Oxford-eBooks

Introduction

Jetse de Vries

T here's a thing like weed: it grows everywhere, despite the common wisdom that it can't grow there. In the most barren, destitute and desperate places, it springs up. It flowers, against the grain. It raises its head at the most unexpected of times, even when--often especially when--most people think it's dead and gone.

It's hope. Hope fed by optimism.

Now, optimism and an upbeat attitude have been given short thrift in written SF over the last few decades, and especially the last one. Yes, there are novels and short stories with a positive outlook, but these are far and few in between. As an exercise, list five downbeat novels per year from 2000 to 2009. Then make a similar list for five upbeat novels per year (upbeat defined as a story where the future is a better place than today, not a story where over 90% of humanity is killed and where the survivors eventually make do): I know which list will be the hardest to make (or even complete).

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has been trying to get an anthology of upbeat SF called Up! going since 2002, but it has never got off the ground. Word at the Anticipation WorldCon had it that he simply didn't get enough stories (I can empathise: I had to extend the Shine deadline). It's become so bad that Gardner Dozois remarked, in the July 2009 Locus:

...although I like a well-crafted dystopian story as well as anyone else, the balance has swung too far in that direction, and nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future have become so standard in the genre that it's almost become stylized, and almost the default setting, with few writers bothering to try to imagine viable human futures that somebody might actually want to live in.

Yet, in the real world, 'study indicates people by nature are universally optimistic.'1 This concurs with what I see in my day job: I train people who come literally from around the world in my company's equipment, and the vast majority of them are very optimistic. So in this matter, written SF is greatly out of step with the real world. Which raises some doubt when SF claims that it is 'a mirror of today's world.'

Now I am not against dystopias, apocalyptic and downbeat SF per se: I have certainly enjoyed many such novels and short stories. However, right now, the balance is gone: in I estimate at least 90% of written SF today is downbeat. Shine is an attempt to redress that balance somewhat.

Shine is also my attempt to show the world that SF can do more than merely say: if this (horrible trend) goes on, we all go down the drain. Yes, it's good to show people the consequences of their behaviour. However, written SF almost exclusively shows the consequences of bad behaviour, and almost never the consequences of good behaviour. Dire warnings and doomsayings, being told over and over again ad nauseam, lose their effectiveness. With Shine I hope to show the other side of the coin: SF that actively thinks about solutions to the problems plaguing humanity today. To show readers that written SF does something more than either provide escapism (which can be nice, once in a while) or wield the whip: that written SF can actively think in a constructive manner.

So, an anthology of near-future, optimistic SF. An anthology where the future is a better place than today (even if that progress is hard fought, as you will see in most of the stories). This was not an easy task, as Jason Stoddard had it: 'There's nothing like taking on two kinds of impossible.'

Impossible part 1 is getting SF authors to write an optimistic story. Impossible part 2 is getting them to write about the near future, which is immensely hard to do right, as well. Hence I've been constantly shelling out examples on the Shine blog (real world and imagined), posted--or tried to post--controversial articles and even a guest-blog series of 'Optimism in Literature around the World, and SF in particular' just to inspire, provoke or even shame writers into writing such stories for this anthology. Which they eventually did.

Then I needed to clarify which kind of stories I was not looking for, and even had to extend the Shine deadline in the hope of finally getting enough of the type of stories I was looking for (as I mentioned above, I can surely empathise with Patrick Nielsen Hayden's problems with Up!).

And if that wasn't enough already, I got it into my head that Shine should also be a representation of the world at large: in settings, characters and hopefully also authors.

Why make my editorial life even harder? We might as well get Freudian on my arse. For most of my adult life, I have travelled the world extensively. I've been to a wide variety of places, experienced a great diversity of cultures and seen awe-inspiring places. What it comes down to is that Shine may very well represent my belief that this world is a place that is both beautiful and scary, inspiring and frightening, full of wonder and full of danger; and that we can make it work. Correct that: it is already working in many places, but we can make it work better. We can do better, we can make it a better place to live in, even given the huge problems we're facing.

That is what Shine is about. So fasten your mental seatbelts as Shine takes you on a trip across the world and beyond. Stops on the way to a better future include:

• A West Africa where boys' toys become girls' gadgets...