The Future We Wish We Had edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Rebecca Lickiss
DAW, $7.99, 306pp, pb, 9780756404413. Science fiction anthology.
Warning: this review contains some spoilers.
I’m kind of disappointed that some of the futures we foresaw in the 1950s and 1960s (and 1940s and 1970s…) didn’t come to pass. As the refrain currently goes: “It’s the future; where’s my flying car?” Of course the answer is “You don’t need a flying car, but how about this internet? and cell phones? and medical improvements?”
Well, The Future We Wish We Had is also disappointed that some of those things didn’t come to pass. There’s a sense of wistfulness, starting with Rebecca Lickss’s introduction. Unfortunately, for me, there’s also a sense of melancholy pervasive in this book. Most of the stories have it, and it kind of bummed me out.
I admit, I had some preconceptions going in. I wanted the alternate futures with the flying cars and people living in space and all those other things we expected, and I wanted them to be cool and neat; I wanted the people living in them to really love where and when they were. But in too many cases in this book, the characters who do have some of that neat stuff are just as wistful as we are. There’s George Jetson, realizing that living in a completely automated future might not be all it’s cracked up to be. There’s the stay-at-home boyfriend of the space-exploring woman, trying to meet up with her in the future using cold-sleep. There’s the poor girl who discovers that Daddy was rich, but he squirreled it all away to pay for his cryogenics. The wide-eyed intern realizing just how important television can be to show us slobs real culture. And the otherworldly aliens on the colony planet proving that man in nature is nasty and brutish, and the teenager buying his first personal submarine, and all the rest.
Everything we expected of the future when today was sometime past that great barrier of 2000 (or was it 1999? or 2001?); it’s all here. And most of it is very well-written. But is it just me, or are we missing some of that wide-eyed optimism that pushed us to try to build those futures? Sure, it’s mature to be blase; hip to be cool; politically sophisticated to be unhappy. But dammitall, the only way we’re gonna get to the future where we get to be happy is to picture it as something we want, and then to build it ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some upbeat, funny stories in here. Esther Friesner always knows what she’s doing with comedy, and P.R. Frost showed us some good that can come from nanotechnology with the proper training. But even Dean Wesley Smith’s heroic space adventure came across with a dollop of sadness for lost opportunities.
It’s not fair to damn a book for failing to live up to my expectations, and there’s no one story in this volume that was bad. If you’re mature, hip, sophisticated, you’ll probably enjoy this book, realizing just how naive we were then. But if you’re still wide-eyed and optimistic like me, you may see this book as yet another clarion call to go out and make a difference.
Contents:
“Introduction” by Rebecca Lickiss
“A Rosé for Emily” by Esther M. Friesner
“Waiting for Juliette” by Sarah A. Hoyt
“Boys” by Dave Freer
“Trainer of Whales” by Brenda Cooper
“Good Old Days” by Kevin J. Anderson
“Kicking and Screaming Her Way to the Altar” by Alan L. Lickiss
“Alien Voices” by P.R. Frost
“Inside Job” by Loren L. Coleman
“A Small Skirmish in the Culture War” by Mike Resnick and James Patrick Kelly
“Dark Wings” by Lisanne Norman
“My Father, the Popsicle” by Annie Reed
“Destiny” by Julie Hyzy
“Cold Comfort” by Dean Wesley Smith
“The Stink of Reality” by Irene Radford
“Yellow Submarine” by Rebecca Moesta
“Good Genes” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch