Fiction Reviews
All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions that Disrupt
(2024) edited by Benjamin Greenaway and Stephen Oram, Cybersalon Press, £12.49, pbk, 328pp, ISBN 978-1-739-59393-3
In a blurb for this collection of twenty-five stories plus commentaries (and postscript), media theorist Douglas Rushkoff portrays it as an ‘inspiring alternative to the so-called world-building of today’s science-fiction industry’. However, the problem with ignoring the world-building in favour of what he calls the ‘real lesson’ is that you can end up with something that is more didactic essay than entertaining story. And so, the volume opens with a rather dour section on ‘Police and Justice’ in which AI features prominently and detrimentally, at least when it comes to that second conjunct (no surprises there). Both expert commentators – Trevor Burke KC and Jayen Parmar – seem happy to embrace the use of AI in this domain, as long as it is ‘properly monitored and regulated’ (p.70). Wherein lies the rub, of course. As is then made apparent in this section’s highlight: Sophie Sparham’s ‘All Born Machines’ in which the police are on trial for shooting three protesters on AI orders. Insisting that ‘there are procedures in place to prevent that from happening’ is perhaps not as reassuring as the commentators seem to think.
At the other end of the dystopia-spectrum and of the book itself is the section on ‘Learning and Education’, where again AI raises its head, although one that’s more kindly. In Paul Currion’s ‘These Meteorological Qualities’ it becomes a friend and help-mate to neuro-diverse student ‘AJ’, whereas in the equally affecting ‘Elephant Talk’ by Vaughan Stanger it allows a human researcher to access an elephant’s sensory experiences, albeit at a cost. That shift to the Other is taken fully on board in Jane Norris’ weird and wonderful ‘Euglena’, about the learning potential of a collection of single-celled organisms – i.e. slime-mould! In this case one set of comments, by Dr Elizabeth Black, are reflective and thought-provoking, whereas those of Dr Danbee ‘Tauntaun’ Kim, barely touch on the stories at all.
More engaging are the discussions at the end of Part 3, ‘Finance and Digital Money’, which use the stories as springboards to examine concerns regarding the very nature of money. Martin Walker and Izabella Kaminska use this opportunity ‘to look back to look forward’ (p.185). So, they note that Jesus’ ejection of the money-changers from the Temple had as much to do with economics as religion, as people arriving in Jerusalem from around the Roman Empire needed to change whatever financial tokens (i.e. coins) they had for local money. The idea of different monetary tokens being specified for different purposes is explored in Alex Buxton’s ‘Update Needed’ in which a personal crisis launches the protagonist face-first into the dire consequences of such economic tokenisation. As David Birch then notes, here AI may push its way in again, taking the place of the money-changers, so that money, as manifested via ‘stable coins’, evaporates as a financial intermediary in favour of ‘baskets of assets’.
To achieve a measure of stability in such a fluid economic environment, the use of biometrics is explored in ‘Heritage’ by Wendy Grossman. Written in the form of a civil service memo, this is a future-crime tale of ‘DNA writing’ for financial purposes leading to a child used as ‘wet ransomware’. Although Walker and Kaminska found it ‘unbelievable’, Birch thought about it half a dozen times while reading the latest report by MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. On the other hand, whereas he raised an eyebrow when reading Eddie Robson’s ‘Don’t Say That, You’ll Make it Happen’, Walker and Kaminska took it to describe an ‘eerily familiar point of view’ (p. 187). Here we are presented with the striking contrast between a government minister in the grip of ‘magical thinking’ when it comes to the ‘digital pound’ and the adviser who thinks that ‘the only thing that makes things better is boring sustained competence over time’ (p. 143). Were it not for the disturbing ending, I could easily see this as a futuristic episode from In the Thick of It!
The role of current financial arrangements in promulgating the climate emergency is examined in Prashant Vaze’s excellent ‘Daylight Robbery’, one of the stories in Part 2 ‘Power and Energy’. However, perhaps the most powerful story in this part is ‘The Bracelet and the Battery’ by Tim Kindberg which also emphasises how these arrangements generate and underpin crushing inequities. The commentaries by Richard Heap and Dr. Gabrielle Samuel usefully draw various connections between the issues involved.
The climate crisis also crops up in Part 4, ‘Health and Longevity’. Rosie Oliver’s ‘Signpost to Normal’ presents the protagonist, a ‘fluid sculptress’, with a critical dilemma: opt for an anti-aging treatment that will save her life but also purge her creativity or use what time she has left to model the restoration of disrupted Atlantic current flows. It is no surprise to discover which option she chooses but each involves potentially controversial engineering ‘tweaks’, as both David Wood and Professor Claire Steves note in their discussion.
Things are wrapped up by Dr Christine Aicardi’s postscript, ‘Cross-Cutting Reflexion on Foresight and ‘Applied Science Fiction’ in which she defends the practice of ‘engaged participatory foresight’ (p. 313), which, she argues, is better suited to our current uncertain and inter-related circumstances. It is this that she takes to intersect with the ‘applied science fiction’ stories curated here, which certainly propose ‘diverse and, at times, conflicting’ (p. 316) views of the future. However, their impact, in a number of cases, is undermined by the judgments of the commentators, suggesting there was less collaboration than might have been hoped for. Perhaps involving the experts at an earlier stage in the creative process would be a more productive approach, thereby truly ‘melding science and art’, as Claire Steves suggests (p.247), in a way that would give these literary thought experiments even more heft.
Steven French
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