Twelve Tomorrows Read online

  In 2011 MIT Technology Review produced an anthology of science fiction short stories, TRSF. Since then MIT Technology Review has produced three more volumes, renamed Twelve Tomorrows. Beginning in 2018, the MIT Press will publish Twelve Tomorrows in partnership with MIT Technology Review.

  TRSF, 2011

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2013, edited by Stephen Cass

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2014, edited by Bruce Sterling

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2016, edited by Bruce Sterling

  Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush, 2018

  Wade Roush, Editor

  Mark Pontin, Assistant Editor

  The MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  London, England

  © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-262-53542-7

  EPUB version 1.0

  d_r0

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Profile: Samuel R. Delany

  Mark Pontin and Jason Pontin

  2 The Woman Who Destroyed Us

  SL Huang

  3 Okay, Glory

  Elizabeth Bear

  4 Byzantine Empathy

  Ken Liu

  5 Chine Life

  Paul McAuley

  6 Fields of Gold

  Liu Cixin

  7 Resolution

  Clifford V. Johnson

  8 Escape from Caring Seasons

  Sarah Pinsker

  9 The Heart of the Matter

  Nnedi Okorafor

  10 Different Seas

  Alastair Reynolds

  11 Disaster Tourism

  Malka Older

  12 Vespers

  J. M. Ledgard

  Contributors

  Preface

  Welcome to the 2018 edition ofTwelve Tomorrows.

  From its start in 2011, the purpose ofTwelve Tomorrows has been to zero in on today’s most important emerging technologies—the same kinds of inventions chronicled in the pages ofMIT Technology Review—and recruit talented science fiction authors to play with their implications. But this isn’t science fiction (SF) in the fantastical mode we’ve come to expect from Hollywood. It’s “hard” SF grounded in today’s technological developments and applied science research.

  Why is that useful? For that matter, what is science fiction reallyfor?

  It’s a fraught question. You might as well ask what poetry or novels or comics are for. But here’s my attempt at an answer. SF makes us think harder about the present, what makes it different from previous eras, what futures the present might be heading toward, and what agency we have in this change. It does all that by imagining specific advances in science and engineering and gaming out the consequences. It uses settings that are familiar enough to be relatable, but different enough to be discomfiting.

  It’s storytelling about the possible but the not-quite-yet. Because it’s fiction, it can get inside characters’ heads in ways journalists can’t, and invent whatever scenarios and conflicts are useful.

  The added constraint onhard SF, though, is that the scenarios must be plausible; it is speculation grounded in what we already know. So, in this book you’ll find no dragons, no sorcery, no time travel or warp speed—in fact, nothing outside the realm of known or achievable science. That’s what makes it part of the same project in which MIT Technology Review is engaged: understanding a world shaped by technology.

  This is the fifth anthology in theTwelve Tomorrows series, but in at least a few ways, it’s a first.

  For one thing, the 2018 edition you’re holding is the first one produced in collaboration with the MIT Press. The previous anthologies—TRSF in 2011, andTwelve Tomorrows in 2013, 2014, and 2016—were published and distributed by MIT Technology Review directly. But it’s a book, and should be treated as such, so we’re delighted to be publishing in concert with one of the world’s top university presses—an imprint that virtually rules the field in areas from architecture and design to economics and computer science.

  Twelve Tomorrows is a first for the MIT Press as well, in that the press rarely publishes fiction, and has never published contemporary science fiction. (I’m not counting a remarkable 2017 annotated edition of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein.)

  I’m pleased to report that this is the first edition ofTwelve Tomorrows to include a graphic novella, Clifford V. Johnson’s “Resolution.”

  It’s also the first time since 2013 that the volume has been edited by a journalist, rather than a science fiction writer. And for me, it’s the first time I’ve ventured outside nonfiction.

  I believe I was asked to lead the project this year because I know my way around the world of technology. I was a senior editor at MIT Technology Review from 2001 to 2006. I came back to MIT as acting director of the Knight Science Journalism program in 2014–2015, and my podcast,Soonish, asks how our visions of the future of technology gel into reality.

  That kind of experience helps when you’ve been hired to assemble and edit a volume of hard SF. My aim was to re-embody the best aspects of the hard-SF craft in the mode of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke without bringing back its worst. I’m all in favor of the rigorous and credible use of current technical ideas. I’m pretty tired of protagonists who are white, straight, male, American, and wooden. (Raise your hand with me if you preferred HAL to Dave Bowman, Leia to Luke, Rachael to Deckard, Morpheus to Neo.)

  There is no lack of New Wave-style literary experimentation in today’s hard SF. You’ll get a taste of that in “Vespers,” our story bySubmergence author J. M. Ledgard, as well as a look into its origins and impact through Mark and Jason Pontin’s profile of the pioneering author and critic Samuel R. Delany. And the characters you’ll meet in these pages are astonishingly diverse, from the brilliant computer scientist Beth in Clifford V. Johnson’s “Resolution,” to college-roommates-turned-frenemies Jianwen and Sophia in Ken Liu’s “Byzantine Empathy,” to Glory, the eponymous computer in Elizabeth Bear’s “Okay, Glory,” the story of a house that’s both too smart and not smart enough.

  But the volume’s central mission is to use fiction to explore questions that technology journalists like me can only take so far. Will deep-brain implants enable us to erase essential aspects of our personalities? SL Huang investigates in “The Woman Who Destroyed Us.” Will telepresence technology lead to voyeuristic detachment, as Malka Older suggests in “Disaster Tourism,” or to unexpected new friendships, as Alastair Reynolds sketches in “Different Seas”? What will it take to inspire a new wave of human exploration of the solar system? Liu Cixin, the Chinese science fiction writer famed for hisRemembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, includingThe Three-Body Problem, offers a provocative answer in “Fields of Gold.”

  Along with progressive protagonists and big ideas, I like my SF with a dose of hopefulness. Every society needs its Cassandras, but pessimists don’t invent vaccines or build moon rockets. So I more or less banned dystopias from this volume. But in Paul McAuley’s “Chine Life,” we do get a glimpse of a world riven by climate change and AI that has outgrown its creators. In “Escape from Caring Seasons,” by Sarah Pinsker, it’s easy to see how drones, gamification, and the Internet of Things could end up imprisoning us rather than liberating us. And in “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafor wonders whether the development of artificial organs will make u
s less human—and how our fears about such change might be manipulated. But even these stories finish on (mostly) hopeful chords.

  Before I finish I would like to say thank you to a few key colleagues. Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review from 2005 to 2017, was kind enough to recruit me for this assignment. Mark Pontin, the assistant editor of this volume, was also an invaluable resource on fiction editing and hard SF’s current and past practitioners.

  Ken Liu did double duty as the author of “Byzantine Empathy” and the translator of Liu Cixin’s “Fields of Gold.” My friends Michèle Oshima, GrahamRamsay, and Tracy Staedter helped me think through several tricky aspects of the project. At MIT Technology Review, I got valuable help from David Rotman, Giovanna Bartolamedi, and Katie McLean. And it’s been an enormous pleasure to work with Susan Buckley, Noah Springer, Jermey Matthews, Amy Brand, and all of their colleagues at the MIT Press.

  Telling stories is our best way to connect, inform, and persuade. And those stories don’t have to be true to betrue, if you know what I’m saying. I hope you find this collection of tales as compelling and eye-opening as I have.

  Wade Roush

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  1

  Profile: Samuel R. Delany

  Mark Pontin and Jason Pontin

  As his twenty-second birthday approached in 1964, Samuel Delany realized that without ever deciding to be a science fiction writer, he had become one. Somehow, he’d written and sold five science fiction novels since he was nineteen. Over the next four years, he very consciously produced four more SF novels of mounting ambition, which subtly and smartly reflected a period of great change around the world (because science fiction, set in an imaginary future, always reflects the then-present when it’s written). By 1968, intelligent people were calling Delany the world’s best SF writer at a time when competition for that title was intense. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J. G. Ballard—amongmany others—were all in their working prime.

  It was precisely then that Delany (depending on your prejudices) either turned away from SF or vastly expanded its possibilities by taking seven years to publish his next novel,Dhalgren (1975), an 879-page postmodernist doorstopper set in a fictional Midwestern city called Bellona where the population has been evacuated after some undefined disaster. Ultimately selling more than a million copies,Dhalgren found an audience beyond the usual SF readership. But reviews fromwithin the SF community were frequently negative—and sometimes deeply hostile.

  Thereafter, Delany would complete one more science fiction novel,Triton (1976), and half of a problematic two-volume space opera,Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984). His writing increasingly focused on literary criticism and transgressive, sometimes pornographic gay-themed fiction, while he earned his living as a member of various university English departments. Still, the man’s influence on the field remained immense. The first line of William Gibson’sNeuromancer in 1984, for instance, would intentionally paraphrase the first line of a mid-1960s Delany novel,Babel-17: “It was a port city. Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought,” Delany’s book begins, suitably for an industrial-era novel, whileNeuromancer, written as the digital age took off, continued, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Likewise, cyberpunk’s central premise of man-machine interfaces stands in clear descent from similar notions in Delany’s last 1960s-era SF novel,Nova. “Those books Delany was writing when he was twenty-one were my favorite books when I was fifteen,” Gibson has testified. His original title forNeuromancer wasJacking In, a phrase introduced inNova.

  In 2013, the Science Fiction Writers of America finally named Delany a Grand Master. Today, he’s seventy-six, having retired from teaching in 2015. If he relates more to his recent writing than the science fiction he produced forty and fifty years ago, that wouldn’t be surprising. In fact, he’s forthcoming enough when people ask him about his SF. Still, one gets the sense he sometimes wishes people would stop, and we felt slightly ashamed of ourselves for starting again.

  Copyright James Hamilton, Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

  Which we did by asking Delany: when you began, to whom were you saying, “Science fiction—or, the world itself—isn’t likethat, it’s likethis?”

  “When I first began withThe Jewels of Aptor andThe Fall of the Towers,” Delany told us, “I wasn’t interested in making a world different from the real world. I was interested in how my made-up world in each book was like the world that was the case. There were simply things I left out inJewels and Towers to foreground the similarities.”

  In fact,The Jewels of Aptor, Delany’s first published novel in 1962, started simply as an entertainment for his newlywed wife, Marilyn Hacker, a friend from the Bronx High School of Science (and later a National Book Award–winning poet). Since New York State still had anti-miscegenation laws in those pre–Loving v. Virginia days, Delany (who is black as well as gay) and Hacker had gone to Detroit (which didn’t have those laws) to marry, then returned to New York where Hacker was hired as an assistant editor at Ace Books, a mass-market paperback publisher. Because Hacker then came home complaining about the terrible writing she saw at work, Delany started writing a novel to please her; and because Ace was a genre publisher specializing in science fiction, it was an SF novel. When Delany finished it, Hacker handed it to Ace’s editor-in-chief, Donald Wollheim, telling him it came from the slush pile. Wollheim liked it—even after learning that Hacker’s husband had written it—and bought it, and Delany accordingly decided to write another SF novel, which turned into a trilogy,The Fall of the Towers.

  And so that was how Delany became a science fiction writer without deciding to. How, we asked, did Delany develop the lapidary style that eventually resulted in novels likeNova?

  “Because I was dyslexic,” he explained, “I had to retype and rework, and then rework some more, just to get the basic mechanics correct.” As he looked for dropped, misspelled, and transposed words in his early drafts, Delany naturally found himself strengthening an antithesis here and clarifying a parallelism there. “So the sentences became … lapidary, to use your word.”

  Still, such exhaustive effort exacted its toll. In 1964, Delany had a nervous breakdown—complete with hallucinations—and was hospitalized. We wondered whether all that immoderate effort was worthwhile.

  Arguably, yes. Not only do Delany’s early novels remain in print today, but when they appeared they served notice that here was a writer striking out in new directions for the genre. Delany nowadays criticizesThe Fall of the Towers trilogy as being “soggy” with politics. But a reader in 2018 is likely to be struck by two things. First, Delany tried from the start to take a Balzacian approach: his invented future city-state is depicted comprehensively, through the experiences of characters existing at its highest and lowest levels: aristos, technocrats, and the middle class, as well as the poorest and most marginalized. Second, a central plot strand features a government declaring war on a foe that may not exist, inventing an enemy to maintain social control. For readers during the 1960s, parallels to the Vietnam War and domestic American conflicts over matters like desegregation were apparent. Simultaneously, the young Delany wrote the whole thing well enough that it retains resonances in our real-world 2018.

  Ironically, the literary types at the 1960 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where Delany had gained a fellowship after winning a couple of national writing awards in high school, would doubtless have advised him that it was a fool’s game to pour any energy at all into books published in a genre then widely viewed as trash—especially when the publisher was Ace Books. Here in the twenty-first century, as the mass-market paperback passes into history, it’s probably necessary to explain what Ace Books’ volumes once were and what theylooked like. Terry Carr, Donald Wollheim’s main assistant from 1964 to 1971, used to joke that if the Bible had been published as sci
ence fiction, it would have been cut down to two texts of twenty thousand words each, with the Old Testament retitled “Master of Chaos,” and the New Testament “The Thing with Three Souls.” What Carr didn’t add was that if Ace published those two texts, they’d be bound in a single-volume format known as the “Ace Double,” with one text rotated 180 degrees relative to the other. Thus, a reader reaching the end of “Master of Chaos” would find the next page was the (upside-down) last page of “The Thing with Three Souls.” Such a paperback book had no back cover but instead a single spine with two titles andtwo front covers. And if it were an Ace Double, it would have two covers—with one likely painted by the redoubtable Ed (Emsh) Emshwiller—that looked likethis …

  Dual cover of the 1963 Ace Double edition of Captives of the Flame and Towers of Toron. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller. Courtesy of Ace Books.

  When Delany was hospitalized, it was because he’d been churning out books in this format—six of his first seven novels initially appeared as one-half of an Ace Double—for the relatively small amounts Ace Books paid. Yet for all its trashiness, Ace employed intelligent editors and was the mainstay of many SF writers during the 1950s and 1960s, bringing out more of Philip K. Dick’s forty-some novels than any other publisher. Similarly, it introduced significant new talent, publishing not just Delany’s initial novels, but those of Ursula K. Le Guin—includingThe Left Hand of Darkness—and later, in the 1980s, of William Gibson—includingNeuromancer—as well as Kim Stanley Robinson, among others.

  We asked Delany: Who were the writers back when he began who persuaded him that science fiction could be both worthwhile literature and a way of grappling with contemporary trends?

  “My main SF influences were initially Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and, I suppose, Robert Heinlein,” Delany said. “Then, the contemporaries to whom I felt closest—the early Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, and Thomas Disch.”