Welcome to Dystopia: 45 Visions of What Lies Ahead by Gordon Van Gelder (Editor)
English | 2017 | Science Fiction | ePUB | 1.2 MB
Contributing authors: Harry Turtledove, Brian Francis Slattery, Don D’Ammassa, Ron Goulart, Richard Bowes, James Morrow, Geoff Ryman, Robert Reed, Matthew Hughes, Eileen Gunn, James Sallis, David Marusek, Michael Kandel, Barry N. Malzberg, Paul Witcover, Yoon Ha Lee, Jane Yolen, Ray Vukcevich, Ted White, Ruth Nestvold, J. M. Sidorova, J. S. Breukelaar, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Janis Ian, Jay Russell, Scott Bradfield, Heather Lindsley, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Marguerite Reed, Paul La Farge, K. G. Anderson, Elizabeth Bourne, Becca Caccavo, Stephanie Feldman, Eric James Fullilove, Leslie Howle, Thomas Kaufsek, Michael Libling, Lisa Mason, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Madeleine E. Robins, Deepak Unnikrishnan, TS Vale, Leo Vladimirsky, N. Lee Wood.
After seventeen years of editing a science fiction magazine, I’m awfully familiar with stories that offer dire predictions of the future. The post office box abounded in them—they’re one of the four or five most consistent themes I saw in story submissions.
In fact, when my friend John Joseph Adams assembled an excellent anthology of dystopian stories, Brave New Words, I was bemused to notice that twenty percent of the stories in it were tales I had published. (No wonder I consider the book to be excellent, right?) I guess I have a taste for such tales.
So, when I had lunch with John Oakes on Inauguration Day, 2017, it was not shocking that the concept for this book should arise. Perhaps the bigger surprise was that I hadn’t thought of it sooner. The atmosphere had been thick with dire predictions.
In forming this book, I deliberately sought a lot of short pieces, rather than a handful of longer ones (as in my anthology of climate change stories). There are so many alarming trends at play right now that I reckoned three dozen short considerations of them would make for a better book than ten to twelve longer ones.