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2084
Fifteen predictions, seventy years in the future. By 2084 the world we know is gone. These are stories from our world seven decades later.
In 1948 George Orwell looked at the world around him and his response was 1984, now a classic dystopian novel. Here eleven writers asked themselves the same question as Orwell did – where are we going, and what is our future?
Visit the dark corners of the future metropolis, trek the wastelands of all that remains. See the world through the eyes of drones. Put humanity on trial as the oceans rise. Say goodbye to your body as humanity merges with technology.
Warnings or prophesies? Paradise or destruction? Will we be proud of what we have achieved, in 2084?
Our future unfolds before us.
In 1948 George Orwell looked at the world around him and his response was 1984, now a classic dystopian novel. Here eleven writers asked themselves the same question as Orwell did – where are we going, and what is our future?
Visit the dark corners of the future metropolis, trek the wastelands of all that remains. See the world through the eyes of drones. Put humanity on trial as the oceans rise. Say goodbye to your body as humanity merges with technology.
Warnings or prophesies? Paradise or destruction? Will we be proud of what we have achieved, in 2084?
Our future unfolds before us.
336 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2017
7 people are currently reading
288 people want to read
About the author
George Sandison
32 books6 followersEditor, writer and reader. I publish at Unsung Stories, focusing on literary and ambitious speculative fiction. That's the kind of thing I write as well.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
November 22, 2017
Book Reviewed by Clive on www.whisperingstories.com
Here we have fifteen short stories from different authors, all with a pedigree. The stories were specifically commissioned by George Sandison and in his introduction he explains that like Orwell’s 1984 this is not a book about the future but an extrapolation of today’s society. We therefore have stories based around technology, social media and European immigration alongside the expected space travel and post-apocalyptic themes.
Sandison has chosen well because there is a lot of variety and not a bad story in the collection. One or two I found hard to understand and some appeared to overestimate our development capacity over the following sixty seven years. Every story was the thought-provoking.
Sadly, the other common theme was that they were all gloomy about our future. There was very little humour and not much hope that tomorrow can be better than today. In particular Saudade Minus One was bleak and Fly Away Peter was very dark.
If I had to name two favourites, I would have to recommend Percepi by Courttia Newland which covers the launch of Buddy 3000i, the latest in a line of house robots. The tale compares it to a current day iPhone launch but the consequences are much worse.
The other stand-out was the final story, Christopher Priest’s Shooting an Episode which is the ultimate combination of today’s passions for reality TV, gaming, gambling and social media.
As an exercise in repeating the ideas of 1984 this book really succeeds; it will challenge your thoughts about the future and about the present time. I am pleased to award it four and a half stars.
Here we have fifteen short stories from different authors, all with a pedigree. The stories were specifically commissioned by George Sandison and in his introduction he explains that like Orwell’s 1984 this is not a book about the future but an extrapolation of today’s society. We therefore have stories based around technology, social media and European immigration alongside the expected space travel and post-apocalyptic themes.
Sandison has chosen well because there is a lot of variety and not a bad story in the collection. One or two I found hard to understand and some appeared to overestimate our development capacity over the following sixty seven years. Every story was the thought-provoking.
Sadly, the other common theme was that they were all gloomy about our future. There was very little humour and not much hope that tomorrow can be better than today. In particular Saudade Minus One was bleak and Fly Away Peter was very dark.
If I had to name two favourites, I would have to recommend Percepi by Courttia Newland which covers the launch of Buddy 3000i, the latest in a line of house robots. The tale compares it to a current day iPhone launch but the consequences are much worse.
The other stand-out was the final story, Christopher Priest’s Shooting an Episode which is the ultimate combination of today’s passions for reality TV, gaming, gambling and social media.
As an exercise in repeating the ideas of 1984 this book really succeeds; it will challenge your thoughts about the future and about the present time. I am pleased to award it four and a half stars.
November 19, 2017
I backed this anthology on Kickstarter because I recognized a few of the contributors' names, and was curious to see what this anthology purportedly written in the tradition of George Orwell's 1984 would have to say. Each short story is a different, pessimistic view of the future.
While individual stories were fine, I thought this was a somewhat weak anthology overall. The power of Orwell's imagining in 1984 was that he tied it to existing horrors, created an allegorical future society, and made the connections clear enough yet left enough interpretation that in the decades since, people on all sides of the political spectrum have read it as a warning of what those other people will do if they come to power.
The stories in 2084, on the other hand, are mostly run-of-the-mill crapsack world future dystopias. Economic collapse, environmental collapse, robot apocalypse, it's all here except for alien invasions or Cthulhu rising (not that type of anthology), but few of the stories really resonated with a warning of how current trends might become a future hell.
The starting story, Babylon, by Dave Hutchinson, was perhaps the most contemporary, depicting the Muslim refugee crisis settling into eternal encampments of political and economic migrants waiting outside Europe's borders, wanting to come in. The protagonists of the story are Muslim infiltrators making use of advanced technology to help get their people across Europe's high-tech borders; on the surface, it seems we're meant to root for the main characters, but it could also be read as a warning about Europe's future.
Desirina Boskovich's Here Comes the Flood combines economic and environmental collapse with reality TV, in an impoverished future of a few enclaves struggling to keep the lights on, while slowly trying all the elderly survivors of the profligate previous generations for their wasteful crimes against their descendants.
Fly Away, Peter by Ian Hocking, was perhaps the most chilling story in this collection, and the most clearly 1984-like, with a look at how day care in an authoritarian dystopia might look.
A Good Citizen by Anne Charnock is a cynical look at voting, in a world where citizens who can barely eat are distracted with votes on trivial issues, where elections really have no more meaning than an Internet poll.
The Endling Market by E.J. Swift was really just a SF story about endangered species and the people who hunt them down and sell their remnants.
Glitterati by Oliver Langmead lampoons the stylish snobbery of the leisure classes.
I can't be bothered to summarize the rest of the stories. Some are good, most are okay, a couple were just boring. This isn't a bad collection but none of them stood out as particularly memorable or future classics of dystopian fiction. Worth reading, but I was really hoping for this generation's 1984 or Brave New World (a tall order from a short story anthology, I know), and mostly what I saw were various iterations of rehashed Hunger Games or Westworld or faint Orwellian echoes with updated technology, or a dark parody of Facebook.
While individual stories were fine, I thought this was a somewhat weak anthology overall. The power of Orwell's imagining in 1984 was that he tied it to existing horrors, created an allegorical future society, and made the connections clear enough yet left enough interpretation that in the decades since, people on all sides of the political spectrum have read it as a warning of what those other people will do if they come to power.
The stories in 2084, on the other hand, are mostly run-of-the-mill crapsack world future dystopias. Economic collapse, environmental collapse, robot apocalypse, it's all here except for alien invasions or Cthulhu rising (not that type of anthology), but few of the stories really resonated with a warning of how current trends might become a future hell.
The starting story, Babylon, by Dave Hutchinson, was perhaps the most contemporary, depicting the Muslim refugee crisis settling into eternal encampments of political and economic migrants waiting outside Europe's borders, wanting to come in. The protagonists of the story are Muslim infiltrators making use of advanced technology to help get their people across Europe's high-tech borders; on the surface, it seems we're meant to root for the main characters, but it could also be read as a warning about Europe's future.
Desirina Boskovich's Here Comes the Flood combines economic and environmental collapse with reality TV, in an impoverished future of a few enclaves struggling to keep the lights on, while slowly trying all the elderly survivors of the profligate previous generations for their wasteful crimes against their descendants.
Fly Away, Peter by Ian Hocking, was perhaps the most chilling story in this collection, and the most clearly 1984-like, with a look at how day care in an authoritarian dystopia might look.
A Good Citizen by Anne Charnock is a cynical look at voting, in a world where citizens who can barely eat are distracted with votes on trivial issues, where elections really have no more meaning than an Internet poll.
The Endling Market by E.J. Swift was really just a SF story about endangered species and the people who hunt them down and sell their remnants.
Glitterati by Oliver Langmead lampoons the stylish snobbery of the leisure classes.
It was generally agreed that Simone was a fashion genius, after all. The way his body lay splayed on the ground, blood leaking out of every part of him – why, it was a masterpiece. His image made the front cover of several magazines, and for a few weeks afterwards fashionable people killed themselves on Thursdays. Then a new fashion came in, for sequins, and Simone was forgotten.
I can't be bothered to summarize the rest of the stories. Some are good, most are okay, a couple were just boring. This isn't a bad collection but none of them stood out as particularly memorable or future classics of dystopian fiction. Worth reading, but I was really hoping for this generation's 1984 or Brave New World (a tall order from a short story anthology, I know), and mostly what I saw were various iterations of rehashed Hunger Games or Westworld or faint Orwellian echoes with updated technology, or a dark parody of Facebook.
September 11, 2017
2084 is an anthology of fifteen short stories specially commissioned by the publisher, Unsung Stories, and supported by a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. It offers
“15 predictions of the world, 67 years in the future.”
The authors have created a variety of dystopian societies that it is distressingly easy to believe could come to be.
In each of the stories technological innovation has created a shift in the way people live, not necessarily for the better. Monitoring of everyday activity by the state and for entertainment is widely regarded as expedient. An elite retain control and breed fear in the proletariat as a means of suppression. These stories bring up to date the underlying message behind the book’s inspiration, 1984 by George Orwell. As the editor, George Sandison, writes
“There are warnings in this book – we would do well to heed them.”
The first story, Babylon by Dave Hutchinson, takes as its theme immigration. The protagonist, Da’uud, is seeking to gain entry into a Europe that has
“encysted itself behind concentric borders and buffer zones, the better to protect itself and its citizens from the likes of him.”
Da’uud carries with him a device, developed by and then stolen from North Korea. The chilling purpose of this is a powerful reminder of ingrained prejudice, all too obvious today.
Here Comes The Flood by Desirina Boskovich is set in a sealed city on the American coast that is struggling to remain functional. Climate Change has resulted in more displaced people than the authorities are willing to accept so these DisPers are kept outside, abandoned to die. Those inside are entertained by publicly broadcast trials of the elderly who are blamed for the current situation.
“Did he buy goods shipped halfway across the world? […] Never a moment’s consideration for future generations as he enjoyed the spoils, savoured the loot: the belching, farting jet planes; the human greed-machines on their hoard of ill-gotten treasures, their water gulping industry, their cheap plastic trash. Did he own a vehicle? Yes? Disgusting.”
Despite the bleak prospects for the city, young couples still apply to the population lottery for permission to procreate.
Glitterati by Oliver Langmead offers the perspective of one of future society’s elite. Its protagonist’s raison d’être is to be seen. Simone spends his days keeping abreast of current fashions, the most important part of his working day being his arrival at the office where he may walk the red carpet, be photographed and applauded. He deplores the lives of those unfashionables he catches sight of on his daily commute.
“The uglies. The unwashed, unmanicured masses. […] It pained him to see them down there, milling around without the first idea of how dreadful they appeared; how their untrained aesthetic snses were so underdeveloped that they could barely comprehend their own hideousnesses. To think they did actual labour! […] It was unfathomable that people existed like that.”
When Simone mistakenly wears the wrong colour for a day he worries that he will suffer demotion. Instead he finds himself trend-setting, which brings new pressures to bear.
The Infinite Eye by JP Smythe looks at life from the viewpoint of an illegal, living in a camp and looking for work. He applies to a start-up which pulls together surveillance from traffic cameras, drones, security systems, photos and videos shot by tourists. The developers had intended to use AI but were concerned about handing over control. Instead they plug people into their network to observe and act as needed.
“You’ll be eyes for the cameras, for the drones. Assisting the police in catching people, finding crimes that are happening or going to happen, apprehending illegals.”
“Inhabit this camera, and watch, the software told me. Wait until there is something worth paying attention to. Then switch to a drone, follow the incident.”
The man is good at this job, but the violation he cannot observe is the one that involves himself.
Several of the stories explore a world where a new generation of robotic helpers become sentient, where there is an overlap between man and machine. The use of AI in electromechanical devices is imagined in many forms: workers, warriors, children. Abilities are enhanced whilst numbing the senses that may balk at required actions.
Shooting An Episode by Christopher Priest offers these enhancements in the form of armour, the numbing a collective conditioning. The population in this story are kept entertained by constantly running reality shows which they may interact with, affecting outcomes. That real people die goes unregarded, those at the sharp end generously compensated to do whatever it takes to increase ratings. The protagonist may be sickened but if they do not do their job someone else will. The demands of the players for action dictates the form of this evolving reality.
March, April, May by Malcolm Devlin looks at a ubiquitous social media, The Space, where individuals’ feeds are personalised and curated by algorithms. Certain behaviour by users is expected, negativity disapproved. One friend in a group refuses to conform.
“April used The Space as she damn well pleased. At least, she did until she disappeared.”
There is discussion about where she may have gone, who she really was, if indeed she existed. There is disquiet about the role played by The Space, but this is laughed away.
“It’s only The Space, we say. The idea is preposterous. It would be like rebelling against a kitchen appliance.”
Nobody really knows what happens to those who contravene the terms of service. It is not a subject for discourse, negativity being unwelcome on The Space.
Each of these stories builds on topics raised today, playing out possibilities in disquieting directions. Ways of living may have moved on but attitudes have not changed.
The writing throughout is excellent, each tale darkly compelling. A collection that deserves to be widely read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Unsung Stories.
“15 predictions of the world, 67 years in the future.”
The authors have created a variety of dystopian societies that it is distressingly easy to believe could come to be.
In each of the stories technological innovation has created a shift in the way people live, not necessarily for the better. Monitoring of everyday activity by the state and for entertainment is widely regarded as expedient. An elite retain control and breed fear in the proletariat as a means of suppression. These stories bring up to date the underlying message behind the book’s inspiration, 1984 by George Orwell. As the editor, George Sandison, writes
“There are warnings in this book – we would do well to heed them.”
The first story, Babylon by Dave Hutchinson, takes as its theme immigration. The protagonist, Da’uud, is seeking to gain entry into a Europe that has
“encysted itself behind concentric borders and buffer zones, the better to protect itself and its citizens from the likes of him.”
Da’uud carries with him a device, developed by and then stolen from North Korea. The chilling purpose of this is a powerful reminder of ingrained prejudice, all too obvious today.
Here Comes The Flood by Desirina Boskovich is set in a sealed city on the American coast that is struggling to remain functional. Climate Change has resulted in more displaced people than the authorities are willing to accept so these DisPers are kept outside, abandoned to die. Those inside are entertained by publicly broadcast trials of the elderly who are blamed for the current situation.
“Did he buy goods shipped halfway across the world? […] Never a moment’s consideration for future generations as he enjoyed the spoils, savoured the loot: the belching, farting jet planes; the human greed-machines on their hoard of ill-gotten treasures, their water gulping industry, their cheap plastic trash. Did he own a vehicle? Yes? Disgusting.”
Despite the bleak prospects for the city, young couples still apply to the population lottery for permission to procreate.
Glitterati by Oliver Langmead offers the perspective of one of future society’s elite. Its protagonist’s raison d’être is to be seen. Simone spends his days keeping abreast of current fashions, the most important part of his working day being his arrival at the office where he may walk the red carpet, be photographed and applauded. He deplores the lives of those unfashionables he catches sight of on his daily commute.
“The uglies. The unwashed, unmanicured masses. […] It pained him to see them down there, milling around without the first idea of how dreadful they appeared; how their untrained aesthetic snses were so underdeveloped that they could barely comprehend their own hideousnesses. To think they did actual labour! […] It was unfathomable that people existed like that.”
When Simone mistakenly wears the wrong colour for a day he worries that he will suffer demotion. Instead he finds himself trend-setting, which brings new pressures to bear.
The Infinite Eye by JP Smythe looks at life from the viewpoint of an illegal, living in a camp and looking for work. He applies to a start-up which pulls together surveillance from traffic cameras, drones, security systems, photos and videos shot by tourists. The developers had intended to use AI but were concerned about handing over control. Instead they plug people into their network to observe and act as needed.
“You’ll be eyes for the cameras, for the drones. Assisting the police in catching people, finding crimes that are happening or going to happen, apprehending illegals.”
“Inhabit this camera, and watch, the software told me. Wait until there is something worth paying attention to. Then switch to a drone, follow the incident.”
The man is good at this job, but the violation he cannot observe is the one that involves himself.
Several of the stories explore a world where a new generation of robotic helpers become sentient, where there is an overlap between man and machine. The use of AI in electromechanical devices is imagined in many forms: workers, warriors, children. Abilities are enhanced whilst numbing the senses that may balk at required actions.
Shooting An Episode by Christopher Priest offers these enhancements in the form of armour, the numbing a collective conditioning. The population in this story are kept entertained by constantly running reality shows which they may interact with, affecting outcomes. That real people die goes unregarded, those at the sharp end generously compensated to do whatever it takes to increase ratings. The protagonist may be sickened but if they do not do their job someone else will. The demands of the players for action dictates the form of this evolving reality.
March, April, May by Malcolm Devlin looks at a ubiquitous social media, The Space, where individuals’ feeds are personalised and curated by algorithms. Certain behaviour by users is expected, negativity disapproved. One friend in a group refuses to conform.
“April used The Space as she damn well pleased. At least, she did until she disappeared.”
There is discussion about where she may have gone, who she really was, if indeed she existed. There is disquiet about the role played by The Space, but this is laughed away.
“It’s only The Space, we say. The idea is preposterous. It would be like rebelling against a kitchen appliance.”
Nobody really knows what happens to those who contravene the terms of service. It is not a subject for discourse, negativity being unwelcome on The Space.
Each of these stories builds on topics raised today, playing out possibilities in disquieting directions. Ways of living may have moved on but attitudes have not changed.
The writing throughout is excellent, each tale darkly compelling. A collection that deserves to be widely read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Unsung Stories.
October 4, 2017
An excellent anthology, with some really great stories. I was pleased to see that the authors haven't tried to copy or emulate Orwell's original - instead these are original, intriguing voices, all of which have something to say about where we're heading. Politics are largely kept to the background, however, as the stories are given room to breathe. Fantastically timely - highly recommended.
April 27, 2020
The title of this anthology is a riff on George Orwell's "1984" albeit one hundred years into the future. Orwell's book is not a direct influence, however, in that none of the authors here are producing 'sequels' of any kind, but the thematic approach of extrapolating our current present into a theological future should our society / situation remained unchecked (or checked, depending on your viewpoint) holds sway. Like many anthologies, some stories will appeal to some readers more than others. For me, the best stories here were excellent, but others quite sadly mediocre (although uniformly well-written, I found them disengaging).
Rather than comment on each story - which wouldn't be fair to those I wasn't keen on - I will simply state that those by Christopher Priest, E.J. Swift, Jeff Noon, and Macolm Devlin are worth the cover price alone, and my absolute favourite was "Saudade Minus One (S-1=)" by Irenosen Okojie where both the language and the story had something new to say. I will seek out more of her work.
Rather than comment on each story - which wouldn't be fair to those I wasn't keen on - I will simply state that those by Christopher Priest, E.J. Swift, Jeff Noon, and Macolm Devlin are worth the cover price alone, and my absolute favourite was "Saudade Minus One (S-1=)" by Irenosen Okojie where both the language and the story had something new to say. I will seek out more of her work.
May 17, 2020
3.5/5
2084 contains fifteen Orwell-inspired stories of varying lengths. All the pieces are original to the collection and cover a variety of themes associated with our near-future.
I can't say the anthology as a whole awed me but I greatly enjoyed at least three stories.
I may write a longer review if I find motivation.
2084 contains fifteen Orwell-inspired stories of varying lengths. All the pieces are original to the collection and cover a variety of themes associated with our near-future.
I can't say the anthology as a whole awed me but I greatly enjoyed at least three stories.
I may write a longer review if I find motivation.
August 30, 2018
Really fantastic collection of stories- I don’t normally go for dystopias and true to form, many of these were suitably depressing but they also offered some interesting and perceptive insights. Left me feeling good, which is hard to do with dystopia.
December 20, 2017
I really enjoyed this collection stories. There were only two of the fifteen that I didn't really enjoy. I think the best Kickstarter I've backed this year!
December 16, 2017
‘2084’ is a collection of specially commissioned short stories edited by George Sandison, set a century after the titular year of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Since its publication, the themes, stories and language of Orwell’s novel have become part of popular culture in ways even its farsighted author could not have imagined. Populations willingly acquiesce in self-surveillance as part of their own easily manipulated personal narratives and Room 101 – the infamous ‘worst thing in the world’ – has become a comedy show. The terrifying, omniscient Big Brother is now best known as the name of a format for exploitative reality TV, while the bleakly all-powerful state whose extremes Orwell depicted has dwindled, replaced by absurd corporate interests that are either naïve or psychopathic, not that the outcomes differ much. How, then, should we approach this unique commingling of fiction and reality?
Only one of the fifteen stories appears to be an actual sequel. In Jeff Noon’s ‘Room 149’, the hero roams an old satellite, trying to gather lost elements from the lives of people who disappeared under the regime of the original Big Brother. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is, among many other things, a love story and so too is ‘Room 149’, via a spooky quantum link that reveals the influence of the past, even when titanic forces have worked to destroy it. There is a profound sense of almost desperate regret running through this story, which is brilliantly framed by its setting on a orbital archive that has served its purpose and is about to be decommissioned.
‘Room 149’, like several of the other stories in the collection, touches on the tricky subject of determining truth. Similarly, ‘March, April, May’ by Malcolm Devlin follows the attempts of a group of social media users on a platform called The Space to work out whether or not one of their number, the entertainingly troublesome April, is dead, has signed off (‘downtimed’) or indeed if she ever existed in the first place. The story is full of well-observed virtue signalling and the Doublethink we all employ to process exposure to the endless atrocity we always turn out to be somehow complicit in. The Space implies both total freedom, but also vacuity, as the characters subtly and willingly follow the same path as Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth, carefully retro-writing Big Brother’s speeches after he has made them so they’re more prophetic.
Cassandra Khaw looks at this political process actually taking place in ‘Degrees of Elision’ as an unnamed apparatchik edits archive footage, not to change the words so much as the mood; a recognition of the contemporary triumph of emotion over reason. The story is written like a film noir script with references to ‘reframing’, and is well-titled: ‘elision’ can mean omission or insertion. It’s a duality suited to the wholly compromised central character as he attempts to impose work processes on his personal life with markedly less success.
Transformation is a major theme in both the original novel and the short story collection. Orwell’s book famously begins with a clock striking thirteen, and there is a piercingly relevant question about whether the year events in the novel take place is really 1984 at all. Meanwhile, Winston’s hatred for Big Brother and love for Julia exchange places with the same grim inevitability as the switching of Oceania’s alliance with Eurasia to Eastasia (and back again). 2 + 2 = 5 because, as O’Brien says, “We control the laws of Nature”.
Many of the stories in ‘2084’ involve nature and control, or lack, thereof and the transformations that result. Desirina Boskovich’s ‘Here Comes the Flood’ combines contemporary themes of climate change, refugees and generational hatred with a post-Orwellian reality TV justice system. A family lives in a leaky city that is slowly failing to stop catastrophic water ingress following the expected huge rise in sea levels. Displaced persons (DisPers) from outside the city wage a drearily familiar war of terrorist attrition, while the old guard (millennials from our time) lament the days when you could just shoot them. The city determines the right to breed according to a lottery, a similar luck-based system that lies behind what passes for jurisprudence when Gran is summoned to a televised court hearing for failing to prevent humanity’s current predicament. This trial, at once very funny and steeped in despair, uses as evidence images from the past, aka the ‘deep web’. These show Gran as a young woman in 2017 or thereabouts conspicuously consuming the goods whose production has so depleted the Earth. It’s this last element, in which data is presented as a kind of geology, that related this story to many of the others, particularly “Room 149’ and ‘March April May’. Here though it’s the meaning and emotion linked to the images that has changed, from joy at the time to guilt in the future.
Refugees and the theme of transformation inform Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Babylon’. ‘Babylon’ shares with ‘Here Comes the Flood’ the idea of a first world continental fortress against those desperate to escape the predations of climate change and resulting poverty. Its hero, Da’uud, hails from ‘War-torn Somalia, where even the populace could not be certain, from year to year, who was running things, or if things were even being run at all.’ ‘Babylon’ follows Da’uud’s journey and that of the technology he uses to gain access to Fortress Europe. I won’t give the twist of how he does this away; suffice to say that appearance and reality change places in a manner that gives literal credence to O’Brien’s claim to controlling the laws of Nature. It also has in common with ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ the aspect of a subversive political thriller, although with a more ambiguous ending. Da’uud may not be destroyed in as obvious a way as Winston Smith, but is he still Da’uud?
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ does villainy so well its antagonists are part of our language: from the treacherous shopkeeper to the harsh genius O’Brian; from Big Brother to Winston himself as he willingly becomes the thing he hates.
Prize for most hateful bastardy in ‘2084’ goes to the mysterious organisers of EJ Swift’s ‘The Endling Market’. Like Big Brother, we do not meet them, but their facile pronouncements and almost mindlessly evil deeds inform every aspect of the story. The Endlings of the title are the last animals of a species, particularly beautiful ones like snow leopards. The Endling Market peddles cod-Chinese nonsense about the properties of wild animals, especially the predators we so fear and admire despite our slaughter of them to extinction. Here’s a bit from the sales pitch for a sawback angel shark: ‘Sawbacks are particularly effective against vengeful spirits, coastal inundations and drowning’. There’s climate change and rising sea levels again, as well as the dig at collective guilt with ‘vengeful spirits’, because the Endling Market has only come about because of human predation over many years. Like ‘Degrees of Elision’ this story has a powerful media theme; as well as the Endling Market ads, it describes the abortive attempt to film a snow leopard, takes the form of an interview and is thus a few removes from reality.
Further out still are the characters in Oliver Langmead’s ‘Glitterati’, adrift in a rarefied media universe as untethered from the actual world as O’Brian’s soap bubble. If you’ve ever found yourself reading the ‘Standard’ because you’re on the late train and too pissed to do anything else, you may have noticed the anachronistic ‘society pages’, filled with the vacuous, entitled muppets we’re all meant to aspire to. Well, ‘Glitterati’ puts them in charge of the world. While there’s much sly humour at work in the collection, ‘Glitterati’ is the only actual comedy, which is perhaps just as well. A grotesque tale of those at the far reaches of reason, it’s also very touching in the way it depicts its hero’s terror at putting on the wrong coloured suit one morning. The rules of this asylum-in-anything-but-name are as random and absurd as anything Winston Smith cuts and pastes together in the Ministry of Truth. The last line is very affecting too, harking back to themes of memory and significance explored elsewhere in the collection.
There’s another great joke in Anne Charnock’s ‘A Good Citizen’, in which there is a compulsory referendum every week. Whether these referenda actually change anything is never made clear; they seem to focus on making small adjustments to allowances. However, the offer of euthanasia to life-term prisoners taxes the decent but naïve heroine who appears to want to do her civic duty, but really just wants her thoughts to herself. Her friend Roly has a good solution: he always just votes for Option 1. Who is right, really? That Roly ends up kicked out of his flat and sent to a grim dorm suggests it isn’t him. ‘But we haven’t taken a vote’ blurts the narrator, as if that would make a difference. There are also sly digs at things like ‘fitness fascism’ and ‘A Good Citizen’ is not the only story in the anthology to show how we have absorbed Orwell’s language and made it acceptable with irony that quickly wears thin. Although life for the narrator is not exactly pleasant, this subtle tale keeps the grinding misery in the background; like our own likely near-future, it’s similar to now but just a bit more rubbish.
I’ve mentioned the love story and thriller elements of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, but it is also superlative horror; indeed, for me among the best ever written simply because of its lacerating emotional and political honesty. At the other end of the horror scale from the bleakly familiar confusion of ‘A Good Citizen’ is ‘Fly Away, Peter’ by Ian Hocking. Sometimes you feel an author needs a really good cuddle, but it probably wouldn’t help in this case. If ‘The Endling Market’ deals in distorted bits of folklore, ‘Fly Away, Peter’ is ‘Hansel & Gretel’ filtered through a dystopia informed by that famous ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ image of a boot stamping endlessly on a human face. What makes ‘Fly Away, Peter’ so devastating is its understandable message of how brutality and abuse will always beget more of the same, in ways that can never be predicted. Worse still is the profound empathy, even sympathy, we feel for all the characters. I had to have a lie down after this one.
Tales involving artificial life are always a good means of exploring humanity, or the lack of it, and there are three such stories in ‘2084’. ‘The Infinite Eye’ by JP Smythe is about an unemployed man called Pietro who signs away his physical self in order to blend his mind with a surveillance drone. This story echoes ‘Babylon’ and ‘Here Comes the Flood’ in that Pietro is an immigrant and thus unemployable because however well he completes the required forms he is never accepted. The fake camaraderie of his notional employer, Adam, reflects the chapter in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in which Winston observes that the most important element of the fact that half the population’s children are without shoes is that the Ministry of Truth knows about it. That caring/not caring Doublethink becomes a problem for Adam once Pietro finds ways to make the surveillance machinery work for him There’s hope in the proles all right, but is it hope of the approved sort?
The blend of human and machine goes further in Irenosen Okojie’s ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’. The title reminds us of the nonsense maths of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and the story inhabits an eerie hinterland informed by the kind of reality in which 2+2 really does equal 5. Identical boys are dispatched across a region of North America that feels post-apocalyptic but could just be Alabama. A woman who seems haunted by more than just memories is expecting him, and they begin a strange, vulnerable relationship on a ranch inhabited by her stillborn children, brought back to life as cyborgs. Despite that image, this story is not horror in the ‘Fly Away, Peter’ is, although both narratives deal with maternal loss. Rather it inhabits a dreamy physical and emotional landscape that feels weird not so much because of the human/machine blend itself but because of the characters’ acceptance of, or perhaps resignation to, the status quo.
The ending of ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’ brings to mind the work not just of Orwell, but of a later author who similarly blends everyday bleakness, technical innovation and penetrating foresight: Philip K Dick. Courttia Newland’s ‘Percepi’ goes further in this direction with a full-on robot uprising, although no one reading it can blame the robots because, like Orwell’s proles or immigrants in our contemporary Western societies, they do all the really awful jobs no human wants to do. ‘Percepi’, as the title implies, really messes with reality or at least our perception of it. This is a deliberately dizzying story that speeds up as it goes in the same way our culture is doing. Clever signposts like the reference to ‘Metropolis’ – a blonde female revolutionary is replaced by an identical robot – prevent the reader getting too lost, but there’s a very science fictional sense of dislocation at work. You want to say, ‘stop before it’s too late’ but, of course, it already is.
Thus we find ourselves in the deserted theme park of Aliya Whiteley’s ‘Uniquo’, which takes the ‘Big Brother as entertainment’ idea to its ridiculously logical conclusion. This story has in common with ‘Here Comes the Flood’ the theme of generational conflict. ‘Uniquo’ includes the line ‘Fear of youth is quite common among the elderly’, although significantly it’s something protagonist Sally’s psychiatrist says in a flashback. As with the chronological ambiguity of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, people in this story seem to have lost touch with time. It isn’t even clear if Sally is that old; she acknowledges that age has less to do with passing years than an accumulation of knowledge that makes everything terrifying. This story has real resonance after recent political decisions by Daily Mail-reading Brexit supporters of an advanced age, who find they rather like the fascism their parents died fighting against. Like the old Uniquo rollercoaster in the ‘2084’ story, Nazism is still inexplicably popular after all these years.
Another thing guaranteed to get your average Telegraph subscriber foaming at the mouth is lolspeak; that convenient distortion of language favoured by the young for convenience when using mobile devices. Is lolspeak a harbinger of the Newspeak of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’? Newspeak is Big Brother’s way of controlling not just language but the thoughts it informs, while in ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ some of the condensed lines are from Francis Ford Coppola’s film ‘Apocalypse Now’, itself adapted from the novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. The entire story is like this; a textual kaleidoscope of ironic references that open out into a kind of linguistic free-association. Instead of sentences compressed into words, we have entire films condensed into fragments of a story. Is this approach in any way better than Newspeak though? Well, the narrative of ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ has much in common with ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’ in its blend of human and machine characters, its enigmatic, numerical title and final resolution. However, the emotional payoff of ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ is very different; like ‘The Infinite Eye’ we sense that here is a revolution that might actually work.
Christopher Priest’s ‘Shooting An Episode’ ends with a resolution that is in no way final; a sense that, as in the tonally opposite ‘Glitterati’, the point of the whole thing is merely to temporarily distract its lesser characters from some even greater horror. ‘Shooting An Episode’ takes the current TV reality Big Brother format and extends it to its logical conclusion, which is that instead of residing in a studio, cameras follow contestants around the country in ‘tours’, which always go profitably wrong. Everywhere is now the studio, with ‘players’ engaging with the drama in search of ever-greater ‘reality’, via VR headsets. The unnamed narrator is dispatched to a bleak, post-industrial town to cover a tour, and ends up in a moral quandary posed by someone who is simply more committed than her. As with many of these stories, the protagonist does her job through lack of any meaningful choice. Instead of Big Brother’s iron grip, the narrator exists in a state of ennui every bit as debilitating. Freedom is slavery, indeed; for we are all Big Brother now. Rejoice.
Only one of the fifteen stories appears to be an actual sequel. In Jeff Noon’s ‘Room 149’, the hero roams an old satellite, trying to gather lost elements from the lives of people who disappeared under the regime of the original Big Brother. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is, among many other things, a love story and so too is ‘Room 149’, via a spooky quantum link that reveals the influence of the past, even when titanic forces have worked to destroy it. There is a profound sense of almost desperate regret running through this story, which is brilliantly framed by its setting on a orbital archive that has served its purpose and is about to be decommissioned.
‘Room 149’, like several of the other stories in the collection, touches on the tricky subject of determining truth. Similarly, ‘March, April, May’ by Malcolm Devlin follows the attempts of a group of social media users on a platform called The Space to work out whether or not one of their number, the entertainingly troublesome April, is dead, has signed off (‘downtimed’) or indeed if she ever existed in the first place. The story is full of well-observed virtue signalling and the Doublethink we all employ to process exposure to the endless atrocity we always turn out to be somehow complicit in. The Space implies both total freedom, but also vacuity, as the characters subtly and willingly follow the same path as Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth, carefully retro-writing Big Brother’s speeches after he has made them so they’re more prophetic.
Cassandra Khaw looks at this political process actually taking place in ‘Degrees of Elision’ as an unnamed apparatchik edits archive footage, not to change the words so much as the mood; a recognition of the contemporary triumph of emotion over reason. The story is written like a film noir script with references to ‘reframing’, and is well-titled: ‘elision’ can mean omission or insertion. It’s a duality suited to the wholly compromised central character as he attempts to impose work processes on his personal life with markedly less success.
Transformation is a major theme in both the original novel and the short story collection. Orwell’s book famously begins with a clock striking thirteen, and there is a piercingly relevant question about whether the year events in the novel take place is really 1984 at all. Meanwhile, Winston’s hatred for Big Brother and love for Julia exchange places with the same grim inevitability as the switching of Oceania’s alliance with Eurasia to Eastasia (and back again). 2 + 2 = 5 because, as O’Brien says, “We control the laws of Nature”.
Many of the stories in ‘2084’ involve nature and control, or lack, thereof and the transformations that result. Desirina Boskovich’s ‘Here Comes the Flood’ combines contemporary themes of climate change, refugees and generational hatred with a post-Orwellian reality TV justice system. A family lives in a leaky city that is slowly failing to stop catastrophic water ingress following the expected huge rise in sea levels. Displaced persons (DisPers) from outside the city wage a drearily familiar war of terrorist attrition, while the old guard (millennials from our time) lament the days when you could just shoot them. The city determines the right to breed according to a lottery, a similar luck-based system that lies behind what passes for jurisprudence when Gran is summoned to a televised court hearing for failing to prevent humanity’s current predicament. This trial, at once very funny and steeped in despair, uses as evidence images from the past, aka the ‘deep web’. These show Gran as a young woman in 2017 or thereabouts conspicuously consuming the goods whose production has so depleted the Earth. It’s this last element, in which data is presented as a kind of geology, that related this story to many of the others, particularly “Room 149’ and ‘March April May’. Here though it’s the meaning and emotion linked to the images that has changed, from joy at the time to guilt in the future.
Refugees and the theme of transformation inform Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Babylon’. ‘Babylon’ shares with ‘Here Comes the Flood’ the idea of a first world continental fortress against those desperate to escape the predations of climate change and resulting poverty. Its hero, Da’uud, hails from ‘War-torn Somalia, where even the populace could not be certain, from year to year, who was running things, or if things were even being run at all.’ ‘Babylon’ follows Da’uud’s journey and that of the technology he uses to gain access to Fortress Europe. I won’t give the twist of how he does this away; suffice to say that appearance and reality change places in a manner that gives literal credence to O’Brien’s claim to controlling the laws of Nature. It also has in common with ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ the aspect of a subversive political thriller, although with a more ambiguous ending. Da’uud may not be destroyed in as obvious a way as Winston Smith, but is he still Da’uud?
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ does villainy so well its antagonists are part of our language: from the treacherous shopkeeper to the harsh genius O’Brian; from Big Brother to Winston himself as he willingly becomes the thing he hates.
Prize for most hateful bastardy in ‘2084’ goes to the mysterious organisers of EJ Swift’s ‘The Endling Market’. Like Big Brother, we do not meet them, but their facile pronouncements and almost mindlessly evil deeds inform every aspect of the story. The Endlings of the title are the last animals of a species, particularly beautiful ones like snow leopards. The Endling Market peddles cod-Chinese nonsense about the properties of wild animals, especially the predators we so fear and admire despite our slaughter of them to extinction. Here’s a bit from the sales pitch for a sawback angel shark: ‘Sawbacks are particularly effective against vengeful spirits, coastal inundations and drowning’. There’s climate change and rising sea levels again, as well as the dig at collective guilt with ‘vengeful spirits’, because the Endling Market has only come about because of human predation over many years. Like ‘Degrees of Elision’ this story has a powerful media theme; as well as the Endling Market ads, it describes the abortive attempt to film a snow leopard, takes the form of an interview and is thus a few removes from reality.
Further out still are the characters in Oliver Langmead’s ‘Glitterati’, adrift in a rarefied media universe as untethered from the actual world as O’Brian’s soap bubble. If you’ve ever found yourself reading the ‘Standard’ because you’re on the late train and too pissed to do anything else, you may have noticed the anachronistic ‘society pages’, filled with the vacuous, entitled muppets we’re all meant to aspire to. Well, ‘Glitterati’ puts them in charge of the world. While there’s much sly humour at work in the collection, ‘Glitterati’ is the only actual comedy, which is perhaps just as well. A grotesque tale of those at the far reaches of reason, it’s also very touching in the way it depicts its hero’s terror at putting on the wrong coloured suit one morning. The rules of this asylum-in-anything-but-name are as random and absurd as anything Winston Smith cuts and pastes together in the Ministry of Truth. The last line is very affecting too, harking back to themes of memory and significance explored elsewhere in the collection.
There’s another great joke in Anne Charnock’s ‘A Good Citizen’, in which there is a compulsory referendum every week. Whether these referenda actually change anything is never made clear; they seem to focus on making small adjustments to allowances. However, the offer of euthanasia to life-term prisoners taxes the decent but naïve heroine who appears to want to do her civic duty, but really just wants her thoughts to herself. Her friend Roly has a good solution: he always just votes for Option 1. Who is right, really? That Roly ends up kicked out of his flat and sent to a grim dorm suggests it isn’t him. ‘But we haven’t taken a vote’ blurts the narrator, as if that would make a difference. There are also sly digs at things like ‘fitness fascism’ and ‘A Good Citizen’ is not the only story in the anthology to show how we have absorbed Orwell’s language and made it acceptable with irony that quickly wears thin. Although life for the narrator is not exactly pleasant, this subtle tale keeps the grinding misery in the background; like our own likely near-future, it’s similar to now but just a bit more rubbish.
I’ve mentioned the love story and thriller elements of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, but it is also superlative horror; indeed, for me among the best ever written simply because of its lacerating emotional and political honesty. At the other end of the horror scale from the bleakly familiar confusion of ‘A Good Citizen’ is ‘Fly Away, Peter’ by Ian Hocking. Sometimes you feel an author needs a really good cuddle, but it probably wouldn’t help in this case. If ‘The Endling Market’ deals in distorted bits of folklore, ‘Fly Away, Peter’ is ‘Hansel & Gretel’ filtered through a dystopia informed by that famous ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ image of a boot stamping endlessly on a human face. What makes ‘Fly Away, Peter’ so devastating is its understandable message of how brutality and abuse will always beget more of the same, in ways that can never be predicted. Worse still is the profound empathy, even sympathy, we feel for all the characters. I had to have a lie down after this one.
Tales involving artificial life are always a good means of exploring humanity, or the lack of it, and there are three such stories in ‘2084’. ‘The Infinite Eye’ by JP Smythe is about an unemployed man called Pietro who signs away his physical self in order to blend his mind with a surveillance drone. This story echoes ‘Babylon’ and ‘Here Comes the Flood’ in that Pietro is an immigrant and thus unemployable because however well he completes the required forms he is never accepted. The fake camaraderie of his notional employer, Adam, reflects the chapter in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in which Winston observes that the most important element of the fact that half the population’s children are without shoes is that the Ministry of Truth knows about it. That caring/not caring Doublethink becomes a problem for Adam once Pietro finds ways to make the surveillance machinery work for him There’s hope in the proles all right, but is it hope of the approved sort?
The blend of human and machine goes further in Irenosen Okojie’s ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’. The title reminds us of the nonsense maths of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and the story inhabits an eerie hinterland informed by the kind of reality in which 2+2 really does equal 5. Identical boys are dispatched across a region of North America that feels post-apocalyptic but could just be Alabama. A woman who seems haunted by more than just memories is expecting him, and they begin a strange, vulnerable relationship on a ranch inhabited by her stillborn children, brought back to life as cyborgs. Despite that image, this story is not horror in the ‘Fly Away, Peter’ is, although both narratives deal with maternal loss. Rather it inhabits a dreamy physical and emotional landscape that feels weird not so much because of the human/machine blend itself but because of the characters’ acceptance of, or perhaps resignation to, the status quo.
The ending of ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’ brings to mind the work not just of Orwell, but of a later author who similarly blends everyday bleakness, technical innovation and penetrating foresight: Philip K Dick. Courttia Newland’s ‘Percepi’ goes further in this direction with a full-on robot uprising, although no one reading it can blame the robots because, like Orwell’s proles or immigrants in our contemporary Western societies, they do all the really awful jobs no human wants to do. ‘Percepi’, as the title implies, really messes with reality or at least our perception of it. This is a deliberately dizzying story that speeds up as it goes in the same way our culture is doing. Clever signposts like the reference to ‘Metropolis’ – a blonde female revolutionary is replaced by an identical robot – prevent the reader getting too lost, but there’s a very science fictional sense of dislocation at work. You want to say, ‘stop before it’s too late’ but, of course, it already is.
Thus we find ourselves in the deserted theme park of Aliya Whiteley’s ‘Uniquo’, which takes the ‘Big Brother as entertainment’ idea to its ridiculously logical conclusion. This story has in common with ‘Here Comes the Flood’ the theme of generational conflict. ‘Uniquo’ includes the line ‘Fear of youth is quite common among the elderly’, although significantly it’s something protagonist Sally’s psychiatrist says in a flashback. As with the chronological ambiguity of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, people in this story seem to have lost touch with time. It isn’t even clear if Sally is that old; she acknowledges that age has less to do with passing years than an accumulation of knowledge that makes everything terrifying. This story has real resonance after recent political decisions by Daily Mail-reading Brexit supporters of an advanced age, who find they rather like the fascism their parents died fighting against. Like the old Uniquo rollercoaster in the ‘2084’ story, Nazism is still inexplicably popular after all these years.
Another thing guaranteed to get your average Telegraph subscriber foaming at the mouth is lolspeak; that convenient distortion of language favoured by the young for convenience when using mobile devices. Is lolspeak a harbinger of the Newspeak of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’? Newspeak is Big Brother’s way of controlling not just language but the thoughts it informs, while in ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ some of the condensed lines are from Francis Ford Coppola’s film ‘Apocalypse Now’, itself adapted from the novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. The entire story is like this; a textual kaleidoscope of ironic references that open out into a kind of linguistic free-association. Instead of sentences compressed into words, we have entire films condensed into fragments of a story. Is this approach in any way better than Newspeak though? Well, the narrative of ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ has much in common with ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’ in its blend of human and machine characters, its enigmatic, numerical title and final resolution. However, the emotional payoff of ‘2084 Satoshi AD’ is very different; like ‘The Infinite Eye’ we sense that here is a revolution that might actually work.
Christopher Priest’s ‘Shooting An Episode’ ends with a resolution that is in no way final; a sense that, as in the tonally opposite ‘Glitterati’, the point of the whole thing is merely to temporarily distract its lesser characters from some even greater horror. ‘Shooting An Episode’ takes the current TV reality Big Brother format and extends it to its logical conclusion, which is that instead of residing in a studio, cameras follow contestants around the country in ‘tours’, which always go profitably wrong. Everywhere is now the studio, with ‘players’ engaging with the drama in search of ever-greater ‘reality’, via VR headsets. The unnamed narrator is dispatched to a bleak, post-industrial town to cover a tour, and ends up in a moral quandary posed by someone who is simply more committed than her. As with many of these stories, the protagonist does her job through lack of any meaningful choice. Instead of Big Brother’s iron grip, the narrator exists in a state of ennui every bit as debilitating. Freedom is slavery, indeed; for we are all Big Brother now. Rejoice.
December 16, 2017
2.5/5.0
November 27, 2017
I quite liked the premise of this book. If you were to roll forward the world of 1984 by a century, what would the world of 2084 look like? The book is an anthology of views of this world. They are described as predictions, but they aren't. They are visions of a future. One that we wish, in some cases, never come to pass.
I funded the book on Kickstarter, so I received a slightly different edition to the one described. However, it contains the anthology of fifteen short stories. Some are very short, whilst others are less so. There are some which I could read around much further, and others that didn't quite capture my imagination. Of the collection, there was only one that I didn't like at all. There were several that I will quite happily enthuse about to my friends.
As with any anthology, various writers adopted various styles of writing. I had the good fortune to have read the works of some of the authors before buying the book, so I had a foretaste of what to expect, secure in the knowledge that I would like some of the writers. It is a huge bonus to find out that I like most of them. One could say that there is a degree of inconsistency in the writing between some of the pieces, but I found that it works because it adds another dimension to the book.
The subject of the pieces differed between writers, but they fell into three main themes - humanity -vs- humanity (an obvious one perhaps?), humanity -vs- technology (perhaps displaying our contemporary anxieties about runaway technology?), and humanity -vs- the environment (perhaps displaying our anxieties about climate change?). As a set, they worked quite well. They weren't 'futuristic' in that they projected contemporary social themes a century ahead, but that made them a bit more believable as visionary pieces.
I enjoyed the book a great deal. I am indebted to the editors for organising the volume, corralling the authors, and moving the idea to print. It must have been quite a daunting task. They have succeeded very well, and if they propose to repeat the process, I will certainly back it.
I funded the book on Kickstarter, so I received a slightly different edition to the one described. However, it contains the anthology of fifteen short stories. Some are very short, whilst others are less so. There are some which I could read around much further, and others that didn't quite capture my imagination. Of the collection, there was only one that I didn't like at all. There were several that I will quite happily enthuse about to my friends.
As with any anthology, various writers adopted various styles of writing. I had the good fortune to have read the works of some of the authors before buying the book, so I had a foretaste of what to expect, secure in the knowledge that I would like some of the writers. It is a huge bonus to find out that I like most of them. One could say that there is a degree of inconsistency in the writing between some of the pieces, but I found that it works because it adds another dimension to the book.
The subject of the pieces differed between writers, but they fell into three main themes - humanity -vs- humanity (an obvious one perhaps?), humanity -vs- technology (perhaps displaying our contemporary anxieties about runaway technology?), and humanity -vs- the environment (perhaps displaying our anxieties about climate change?). As a set, they worked quite well. They weren't 'futuristic' in that they projected contemporary social themes a century ahead, but that made them a bit more believable as visionary pieces.
I enjoyed the book a great deal. I am indebted to the editors for organising the volume, corralling the authors, and moving the idea to print. It must have been quite a daunting task. They have succeeded very well, and if they propose to repeat the process, I will certainly back it.
October 24, 2017
Great collection. Buy it, read it, be shocked, amused, entertained. All these excellent shorts have Something To Say. Stand out pieces for me: Hocking's Fly Away Peter (chills), A Good Citizen by Anne Charnock and The Endling Market by EJ Swift & Devlin's March, April, May (a reflection of all *this* in a broken mirror).
November 9, 2017
The short stories in this book are way too shallow and predictable. Having seen black mirror on TV has set new standards in dystopian futures. Unfortunatley this book did not make me think a lot about the presented issues in the projected future. The book lacks subtleness, it mostly presents every story in black and white good and evil.
November 22, 2017
All good stories, with Langmead's bizarre "Glitterati" permanently lodged in my head with flashes of scenes hitting me months after reading it.
Great job to George Sandison for putting this together. I wish I had had the opportunity to contribute the kickstarter campaign. I really must pay more attention to these things...
Great job to George Sandison for putting this together. I wish I had had the opportunity to contribute the kickstarter campaign. I really must pay more attention to these things...
September 25, 2017
Science fiction shouldn’t necessarily be about predicting the future. First and foremost, it should be about telling a story. For my full review, see:
https://theforgottengeek.wordpress.co...
https://theforgottengeek.wordpress.co...
October 4, 2017
"Fifteen predictions, seventy years in the future. By 2084 the world we know is gone. These are stories from our world seven decades later."
Interesting concept & good stories
Interesting concept & good stories
March 29, 2019
Short novels boring to death. Exceptionally poor collection...
October 21, 2019
Been a while since I enjoyed an anthology as much as this one.
July 16, 2021
Some good stories by known authors but most a bit mediocre
June 2, 2022
Some I loved, some I skipped. The good ones were excellent though.
July 31, 2022
A really cute collection of short stories inspired by Orwell's 1984. Some are truly fantastic, some are less so - but an interesting project!
April 27, 2020
A solid but standard anthology of dystopian fiction. My favourite stories were by E.J. Swift / Irenosen Okojie / Lavie Tidhar.
Worth a read. Absolutely. Unsung are doing good things.
Worth a read. Absolutely. Unsung are doing good things.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews