Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird
Edited by Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski
Revolution means many things in literature as it does in the world. Fighting for change in the world more often than not means envisioning the world we want to see. In most cases of both mainstream and radical speculative fiction, it means shining a light on a world we hope never to ever see. Broken Eye Books have released steampunk ghost and Lovecraftian anthologies including two volumes of books about campus life at Howie’s made-up university. All fun and exciting stuff but this book which has an activist feel is the most exciting to me.
It features several authors I was aware of and interested in such as Nick Mamatas and Nadia Bulkin and new discoveries like Bogi Takacs. That is what the best anthologies do, give you a few authors you know and respect while opening your eyes to new talent.
From the back cover:
“Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back.”
My favorite stories in the collection were the stories by Bogi Takacs, Nick Mamatas, and S.B. Divya. Let’s start with my favorite the Takacs tale “A Technical Term, Like Privilege.” This delightfully strange story could be called Bizarro, Surrealist, or Absurdist. I am not such any of those are exactly right but the story is a very unique piece with biological homes, body horror class warfare, and probably more I could identify with a closer look. In this story, the main character lives in a housebeast.
What do I mean by class warfare body horror…
“I glare at the dark purple walls, the rugged, ribbed interior of the housebeast. Why does it need me? I can’t even hate it. I feel bad for it. It’s trapped same as I am. It needs my cheap blood filled with magic and whatever power comes out of a hot dog after it’s digested. I’m surprised my terrible diet hasn’t poisoned it already.
Well, that would certainly be a way to take Revenge on the rental office.”
Yes, this story is the reason I have the Dead Kennedys song “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” stuck in my head. This story is a wonderful metaphor for me to read when the eviction ban was being over turned and debated nationally.
Nick Mamatas story The Nth International is a comical piece that savagely mocks the billionaire space race and features a communist Alexa AI assistant. It would be easy to laugh off this story as a goofy satire but it is no less radical than anything else in the collection. S.B. Divya writes the most emotionally rich story in the collection, it is subtle but a poetic story that really worked for me.
I loved almost all the stories in one way or another.WC Dunlap’s opener Salt Water to Wine played with mythology in a cool way and Nadia Bulkin’s story Purity was short but more evocative than some novels.
The exception of Rachel Pollock’s Sarah Memory and Evan J. Peterson’s #wondercabinet. They were both fine stories that I didn’t connect with. Peterson’s story that takes place all in tweets is an interesting experiment just me personally turned me off. I get what he was doing and saw that he executed it fine, there is plenty of excellent commentaries. That said for this structure geek I had a hard time following it.
Whether Change is a great collection. The revolutionary spirit is something that science fiction more often than not happens upon by accident. This is not an earth-shaking genre-redefining collection like Dangerous Visions in the 60s but it doesn’t need to be that. Whether Change is a home for overlooked voices in mainstream publishing, that is as just as important tossing over the table and redefining a genre. So thank Broken Eye Books by checking out this bold anthology.
If enough of you do, maybe you all can prove me wrong and change everything. I would welcome a future not like these stories but one where these types of voices are mainstream.
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