Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction

July 30, 2018
Larson compiles a provocative collection of 23 strange futures that include poetry and pithy flash fiction as well as longer visits to fluid virtual realms and remote alien worlds. Some rework old ideas into new shapes, including the time-travel adventure “Every So Often,” the long con of “You Make Pattaya,” and the broken planet hidden by virtual reality of “Atrophy.” “All That Robot Shit” has a familiar friendship along the lines of Robinson Crusoe and Robot Friday, and parents use technology to “perfect” their child in “Edited.” Other stories, including “Extraction Request,” “Brute,” and “Capricorn,” deliver straight-up action and violence with gritty cybertech settings. Larson’s range spreads from the outrageous teen partiers of “Motherfucking Retroparty Freestyle” to the murky undersea world of aquatic aliens in “Innumerable Glimmering Lights.” His colorful settings create strong backdrops for characters striving for goals small and large. This vibrant collection will give thoughtful readers plenty of entertainment.

August 1, 2018
Tomorrow Factory is an apt description of the stories collected here, all of which explore how technological advances will shape humanity for good and for ill. You Make Pattaya is about blackmail and loyalty as a player tries to use a cyborged transgender hooker in his scheme. Extraction Request happens on an alien planet with a squad of soldiers who are wired together so that a fatally wounded one can, with the consensus of the others, be put down so not to hinder the performance of their mission. Capricorn is a caper story with a twist that explores the effects of tech on futuristic prisons housed on an asteroid. Innumerable Glimmering Lights features an octopus in charge of drilling through the ice at the roof of the world. The Ghost Ship Anastasia involves a maintenance ship's crew attempting to salvage a cephalopod-shaped bioship that has ceased its mining operations and gone sentient. The diverse sexual orientations represented add a refreshing dimension not often found in mainstream sf. A remarkable collection of stories by a highly original writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2018

At 25, Larson (Annex) proves to be already a prolific prodigy, as evidenced by his more than 100 short fiction pieces appearing in such publications as Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and more. Mixing elements of cyberpunk, speculative realism, and New Weird with hypervisual aesthetics and velocity, the 23 collected stories in this volume (including one poem) display a masterly awareness that should humanity's future survive, it likely won't be evenly distributed, but that freedom will endure--for those in the market. In "Datafall," illegal immigrants starved for communion risk detection--or worse--by rushing outdoors hoping to download content during the rare overflight of cloud computing made literal via flocking drones. "Razzibot" takes Instagram-induced narcissism to its logical extreme of "observing yourself in third person at all times"--a blackly comedic, cautionary tale. The blank verse poem "I Went to the Asteroid To Bury You" compares the isolation of grief and mourning to the icy void of space. "Every So Often" covers a confrontation between time travelers with conflicting agendas: ensure--or prevent--the catastrophic horrors of Auschwitz; protect--or assassinate--the child Hitler in order to preempt a future worse than either. VERDICT Recommended for collections where works by William Gibson, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Dempow Torishima circulate.--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

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