Lazarus Risen

by Hayden Trenholm (Editor), Michael Rimar (Editor), Matt Moore

Dreams of immortality and eternal youth are almost as old as human culture itself. But what would the world look like if everyone could live and be young forever? What would it look like if only some of us had that privilege? Lazarus Risen presents sixteen stories from around the world that explore the economic, political, social and psychological consequences of life extension, human cloning, the hard upload and other forms of the biological singularity.

Stories by Brent Nichols, Sean McMullen, Teri Babcock, Nancy SM Waldman, Brad C. Anderson, Fiona Moore, Felice Picano, Matthew Shean, Matt Moore, Suzanne Church, Peter Wendt, Holly Schofield, Deborah Walker, Kevin Edwin Stadt, Leigh Kimmel, and Andrew Barton.

Genres: Short Stories

292 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2016

Reviews

[Felice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lazarus Risen
Edited by Hayden Trenholm & Michael Rimar

First, a confession: I have a story in this collection. But I have stories in about fifty anthologies and I seldom review them. I’m reviewing this one because its an extraordinary book, out of Bundoran Press in Canada and if you have any interest at all in Science Fiction or Spec. Fict. Or in fact just good short stories, get a download of this for only $3.98. I’ve only heard of a few of the writers here, but Trenholm and Rimar know a bunch of talent, and some of the work here is both intimate and other work really far out—mind-stretching in fact. Also each story is a complete world within a story. I’ll start with Fiona Moore’s “Seal,” a haunting and quite wonderfully nasty tale of family and inheritance. Suzanne Church’s “Lost Flesh” is another take-no-prisoners tale of a possible further future which takes Shylock’s demand a few steps further. “Inquisitor” by novelist Brent Nichols is smart, Matthew Shean’s “Sylvia and Larry” a love-story—sort of; while Kevin Edwin Stadt” “Lunar Escape” is the real thing and quite moving. Some of the most optimistic pieces include Deborah Walker’s clever “The Rebirth of Mr. Scratchy-Claws” and Holly Schofield’s “Generation Gap.” But they’re all worth reading at least once and in some cases, more often.
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[Brittney Carmichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book

[Derek Newman-Stille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayden Trenholm and Michael Rimar’s collection of fiction Lazarus Risen constructs itself as a collection of stories about the biological singularity, exploring “dreams of immortality and eternal youth”, yet most of the stories in the collection bring attention to that spectre that always haunts ideas of youth – old age. This is an anthology that is well-timed and extremely important as ageing gets codified in political policies and ideologies that largely examine ageing as a social burden. These stories provide a challenge to easy ascriptions of ageing and interrogate assumptions about ‘old age’. They provide a foundation for a genre of Ageing Futurisms, which is a genre we desperately need as our societal views of old age continue to be narrow. Lazarus Risen explores the complexities of ageing and the potentials that exist within ageing bodies and identities.

Most of the tales that we encounter, whether through speculative fictional lenses or through realist genres, tend to focus on youth, constructing 20-somethings as the harbingers of “relateable experiences”. Our social favouritism toward youth feeds our social obsession with staying young, holding all of the negative implications for those who don’t fit this social mould of youth. Ageing people tend to be constructed as, at best, inconveniences, and at worst, are erased because they are seen as being non-contributors. We create social ideas that the aged have been erased from our society by virtue of not contributing in the economic ways that we construct as normative, ignoring all of the ways that ageing people contribute to society and add to our social growth.

It is fascinating that so many speculative fiction texts erase ageing people from their narratives (or cast them in stereotypical roles such as the role of the mentor or the burden to the narrator) because age is something that is fundamentally connected to a major theme in speculative fiction – change… and age is powerfully connected to the idea of the future and the passage of time, which SF frequently interacts with.

We pretend in our society that “coming of age” happens only once – in the transition between childhood and adulthood, yet we are ALWAYS coming of age, always moving from one age category to the other and shifting and changing to accommodate those movements. Lazarus Risen provides a space for examining the way that we keep coming of age, that people keep shifting and changing over the course of their lifespan.

Like any SF collection, Lazarus Risen deals with the social changes that come with technological changes, but the tales in this collection centre the human (or inhuman) experiences that come with these changes, exploring how “what it means to be human” is something that always has to run after our technological imagination, constantly redefining itself. It is the focus on the human experience that makes this collection a powerful one, and it is the focus on age that makes it one that is both timely and necessary. Lazarus Risen makes readers confront their insecurities about the spectre of ageing, makes us examine that biological clock that keeps ticking away, reminding us that change is inevitable and that change comes with constant new wonders, excitements, and, yes, challenges.

To read reviews of some of the short stories in this collection, visit:
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/03/...
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/03/...
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/03/...
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/03/...
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/02/...