Book Review: Ab Terra 2021: A Science Fiction Anthology Edited by Yen Ooi & Dawn Ostlund

 

Ab Terra 2021: A Science Fiction Anthology Edited by Yen Ooi & Dawn Ostlund
280 pages
Brain Mill Press, 2021

I sorta got tricked into accepting a review copy of this book. I wasn’t accepting new books to review except in very rare cases. I was contacted by one of the authors in this collection – Angus Stewart who does  The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, a great podcast that I have listened to in few times I have read overlapping work. I had Stewart on Dickheads when we did a panel on Asian SF in translation. So Angus wrote me an e-mail describing his story in the collection and asking if I wanted to read the anthology.

Well, I was under the false impression that this was an anthology of Chinese Science Fiction. A topic I am very interested in. Don't get me wrong, this TOC includes very exciting and diverse writers I admit I was a little bummed out of the gate that this was not a collection of Chinese writers.  Oh well, I discovered several writers I like.

The book comes with an excellent forward by Princeton Historian Haris A. Durrani who ties this socially relevant SF to the master Octavia Butler and Leguin. I love that this forward took the book and genre seriously often when people outside the genre are given assignments like this they clearly have not read SF or the book in question. Not the case here Durrani excellently sets the stage.

Like any collection, there are bangers and a few duds. This is a normal thing. Personally, there were four stories that hit me enough that I dog-eared pages and want to write about them. That is actually fairly good for me. None of the stories were boring, and almost all of them had a point. I think people who enjoy socially aware genre fiction will enjoy this book.

The first of the ones that hit was "The Somerset Provision" by Thomas Pace. It is interesting as a story about Humanoid androids and rights is something the genre has been recycling since before Hugo Gernsbeck gave this genre a more marketable name. So it is easy to re-hash and I am not saying this story re-invented the wheel but I liked the idea that a political wave came to the increase in humanoid domestic androids being developed.

Probably my favorite story in the bunch was Gavin Boyter’s subtle but wicked smart “Aloha.” Which ended being a more clever title than I expected for a first-contact story. This is a neat story that uses hard SF to play with the contact in a way that kinda reminded a tiny bit of Lem’s genius underrated novel ‘His Master’s Voice.’

A delightfully weird tale that takes place right here in San Diego is "Planets without Borders" by Jonathan Worlde. It is a great example of writing about what you know. He has worked as a lawyer in immigration courts. In this story, he lampoons this system with an SF set-up and this story put a smile on my face throughout.

Now back to Angus Stewart, the writer of the story Meta-Shanghai. This author is a Scot who lived for some time in China and was also "writing what you know." In this sense the story was set in a meta-simulated version of the city. The story leaps through time in a smart way and explores some interesting issues by exploring the game world of city sims, and takes them to interesting conclusions.

These were my four favorite stories in the book. I think they were all worth reading this book for even if I didn’t love all the stories. These four were top-notch SF. No idea this will be a series but I liked this book overall. I think it is worth checking out.