I recently read three Twelve Tomorrows anthologies from MIT tech review, which was a bit of trip down memory lane, and a trip back in time. I’d like to talk about them.
Twelve Tomorrows is a theoretically-annual collection of short stories released by MIT tech review, trying to show plausible visions of the future. I was gifted several of these anthologies as a child by a family member, starting with Twelve Tomorrows 2013 and ending after Twelve Tomorrows 2016. Recently, I have been reading a lot of short stories, and I dug out these old anthologies and went through them.
Overall, I was generally pleasantly surprised. I remembered these collections being mediocre in quality, and some of them definitely were, but there were a lot of really interesting ideas in there. I’m going to talk about each collection in chronological order, which isn’t the order I read them in but is the order I was gifted them when I was younger.
First of all, Twelve Tomorrows 2013. This collection, in my opinion, mostly focuses on the interaction between the emerging social media space of the internet and society and culture. Insistence of Vision is about a future where criminals are punished using restrictive surveillance and augmented reality technology. In Sight talks about cybercriminals hacking crypto wallets to redistribute money to the impoverished. Pathways by Nancy Kress is set at the intersection of diseases (being cured by advanced technology), rural Americana, and the perceived growing dominance of China in technical fields. The Revolution Will Not Be Refrigerated by Ian McDonald is set in the Middle East in the future, where the historical technology and politics of the Arab Spring combine with futuristic smart-devices and trash recycling. Zero for Conduct by Greg Egan is about a young woman in Pakistan who invents a room temperature superconductor and commercializes it with the help of her family.
In my opinion, these stories show a pretty optimistic view of future technology that can be jarring from the perspective of someone living in a future just a bit sideways of the ones they depict. The stories set in the Islamic world felt particularly strange, given that the Arab Spring movements pretty much completely failed and the years since the ones depicted have involved significant conflicts in the Middle East. In Sight is also rather strange, as cryptocurrency is popular with cybercriminals—but nowadays, that mostly means financial fraudsters and inside-trading politicians.
Twelve Tomorrows 2014 had a somewhat more cynical tone. In Slipping by Lauren Beukes, transhuman athletes are used up and abused by the corporations that sponsor them. Countermeasures by Christopher Brown is a lovely story by an author I greatly admire but it also falls into the big bin of “can’t stop the system” literature that peaked in the 2010s. Business as Usual is a strange story about surveillance and smart appliances. Persona by Joel Garreau is about people who split themselves up into many copies to become more productive, a story that would work a lot better if it worked as a story and if the idea hadn’t been done a few times before. Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico by Paul Graham Raven is a fun story about biotech and corporations gone wild. The Various Mansions of the Universe is about a very transhuman couple shopping for a strange house to fit their strange bodies.
Here, I think that there are a lot less “our social movement uses the internet and therefore it will win” stories, which I appreciate. I think it’s a bit of a played out genre. Of the three, I think this one was probably my favorite, and there were a lot of good, heartfelt stories.
Twelve Tomorrows 2016 is probably the worst of the bunch, and I think that it takes on a tone that focuses heavily on transhumanism and the fate of humanity, compared to the others
Boxes by Nick Harkaway is about a woman who swaps part of her brain with her husband’s, after he passes away, which was a lot of fun. Life’s a Game by Charles Stross is another derivative “you can’t stop the system” story, which seem to have been a dime a dozen in that era. All the Childhood You Can Afford is a very strange future dystopia that influenced me a lot when I read it as a teenager, but which I don’t think holds up very well as a story now that I’m reading it as an adult. The Lexicography of an Abusive but Divine Relationship with the World is an evocative but unclear depiction of an apocalypse, which feels like a worse version of the vignettes from Phantom Williams’s 500 Apocalypses. The New Us by Pepe Rojo is a very transfemimine-coded story about a woman who has had implants put in her body that are forcibly masculinizing her, played for horror and with a good bit of psychosis. The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You is about a young girl who is creating new mental illnesses for herself with the help of the internet while living through a very difficult and scary life, and I enjoyed it a lot as a sort of snapshot of a chunk of internet culture at that time. The Design Doyenne Defeats the Dullness by Paola Antonelli is probably one of the worst pieces of science fiction I have ever read, which is a shame coming from the author of the excellent (nonfiction) book Humble Masterpieces.
This collection had a few good pieces. I really enjoyed The New Us and The Internet of Things for their powerful, psychotic energy. It had a whole lot of stinkers, too. I think part of this is that the nihilistic, self-referential moment of 2015 has passed and instead we have a different kind of nihilism today. The Design Doyenne Defeats the Dullness is a designer complaining about how her work isn’t included in STEM (perhaps not an unreasonable complaint) and then attempts to convince everybody to commit suicide, which is a boring and not very well-executed twist. The story is also used as a platform for the author to call out other designers that she personally (dis)likes, which I found somewhat obnoxious. All the Childhood You Can Afford is extremely compelling in its dystopian future, where people have to wait decades to be born because of financial issues, but the ending basically just wraps up as “and then they worked in a union job” which is not great and doesn’t really reflect any stance towards the dystopia depicted, except “maybe it will work out okay actually”.
I think that this whole collection also suffers a bit from avoiding a lot of traditional plots. A few of the stories, such as The Ancient Engineer by Bruce Sterling (which was one of the stronger pieces, but not one of the notable ones) and The Internet of Things are more conventionally structured, but a lot of the others are all chopped up and turned inside out. The Design Doyenne Defeats the Dullness is basically a speech followed by the protagonist committing suicide. The New Us is basically just the protagonist having a horrible episode and losing her grip on reality periodically, which can be compelling reading but not exactly a story.
Like with The Year’s Best Sci Fi 17 and The Best Science Fiction of the Year 2004 (reviewed here), I think that these stories are reflective of the times that they were written in. It’s my understanding that each collection was written in approximately the year before the anthology was published, and it shows.
Twelve Tomorrows 2016 has several stories that feel like they could only come from smack dab in the middle of the ‘10s, especially The Internet of Things and The Design Doyenne. Both have a lot to say about social contagion, and the latter is infused with a deep ennui and contempt for contemporary society that feels exactly on-topic for 2015. The New Us and All the Childhood You Can Afford also seem to reflect a growing anxiety about certain social issues, such as poverty, wealth inequality, and (in the former case) gender. I’ve seen some people online saying that Life’s a Game is about GamerGate, but to me it seems to fit with works like Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Daemon by Daniel Suarez, or Where You Lead, I Will Follow by Erica L. Satifka, which span a much wider segment of time and all reflect a changing pop-culture landscape.
Twelve Tomorrows 2014 seems to have a generally cynical tone, perhaps reflective of political disappointments in that era, while Twelve Tomorrows 2013 is optimistic to a fault.
Beyond that, throughout the anthologies I see a lot of common themes, instead of division. Many of these stories are really heavily focused on climate change. Piratas, The Design Doyenne, The New Us, Mansions of the Universe, and Zero for Conduct all discuss people negatively impacted by climate change, and I think that all of these stories reflect the 21st Century growth in awareness around climate issues.
Would I recommend these anthologies? I think I’d recommend the 2013 and 2014 issues as works of literature. There are some really good stories there, and a lot of it is really interesting. 2016 has a much worse quality of writing, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it for its literary merits alone, but I do think that it continues the trend of just having a lot of interesting and timely ideas.
After all, the point of the Twelve Tomorrows anthologies isn’t to present the best science fiction of the year, it’s to present plausible and interesting near-future visions, and in that, I think that these anthologies mostly succeed.
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