When asked about the lack of diversity in their books, English anthology editors all too frequently declare that the quality of the individual stories is all that matters. But if every story had the same plot and the same theme their individual quality would do nothing to stop the anthology from being very dull. Excellent books like We See a Different Frontier and The Apex Books of World SF have shown how diversity of contributors contributes to the quality of an anthology, not least because it tends to contribute to variety in the stories.
The stories in this new anthology address important and urgent themes, such as the environment, colonialism, digital privacy, social inequality and exploitation, and they make good points about them. There are more female contributors than male, and the contributors are from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It has an exuberant foreword by LeVar Burton of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who declares “I am a huge fan of science fiction!” And it has a beautiful golden cover by Yoshi Yoshitani. All of this was very appealing. Unfortunately, as this book demonstrates, such admirable qualities are not sufficient in themselves to produce a great anthology.
The best story by far is “The Robots of Eden” by Anil Menon, which outshines the rest in ideas and characterisation. The narrator has a device embedded in his head to regulate emotions, as does the wife who is leaving him for another man, and the young daughter trying to cope with it all. Whenever the unreliable narrator starts to feel sad, something clicks in his brain and he feels just fine. We are able to see the peculiar mood swings of which he is unaware. It takes being grown-up about a break-up to a new, psychopathic level, and is quite painful to read.
The daughter becomes upset enough to run towards a busy road; luckily she is stopped, but the children in other stories aren’t so lucky: despite the cover and title, this isn’t the optimistic Afrofuturist anthology some readers might have expected, and in fact it’s closer to horror in many places. In “The Shadow We Cast Through Time” by Indrapramit Das, a toddler wanders into a tower on a dangerous new world and is transformed into the first of a new race of demons, while “Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a brief story about a baby-killer.
The stories without dead children rarely lighten the mood. Steven Barnes imagines how euthanasia tourism might be advertised in the scabrous “Come Home to Atropos”, while Darcie Little Badger writes in “Kelsey and the Burdened Breath” about a woman who uses the spirit of a dead dog to hunt trapped souls; it’s readable in a Dean Koontz kind of way, but the climactic action happens off-page.
Endings are not the book’s strong suit. In “The Fine Print” Chinelo Onwualu writes about Nuhu, who made a deal with a djinn for a fox wife, in a world where wishes have been incorporated, and now has to hand over their first child. Nuhu spends three days deep in thought, leading the reader to expect clever rules lawyering, but instead his terribly unsatisfying plan is just to ask nicely if he can keep his son.
“The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations” by Minsoo Kang is similarly underwhelming. It has a good idea: two translators edit the intemperate edicts of their respective rulers to bring about peace. But after telling us that story, it tells us the same story again in more detail, and then ends with an exculpatory section that feels as if it were written in response to editorial criticism. The same goes for a bit about fatphobia in “One Easy Trick” by Hiromi Goto, in which a woman’s belly fat goes for a stroll, exactly like the adipose from Doctor Who.
For a short anthology, it was a struggle to get through: every listless story was a potential jumping-off point. And for a book from a British publisher, it feels very American. There are no stories, for example, from black or Asian writers from the UK. At least two-thirds of the contributors were either students or instructors at the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, including the editor, and her afterword says that she “never even got to issue a public call for stories because I received plenty merely by asking the writers of color I personally know”. Unfortunately, that shows: though there are very good writers involved, these don’t feel like stories that had to fight their way into this anthology. Stephen Theaker **
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