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[skygiants]

Diverse Energies is a sci-fi short story collection featuring protagonists of diverse backgrounds -- well, okay, fair warning, what it actually is is a dystopia short story collection featuring lots of crushingly depressing ways the world can and will go wrong, because that's what all the cool kids are writing these days.

But it also features a short story by my friend Rahul Kanakia, so I was willing to risk crushing depression! And also for the goal of supporting the anthology and what it's trying do. (With the exception of "Freshee's Frogurt," none of the stories feature white protagonists; several of the stories are not set in the US and two have gay protagonists, all of which is pretty cool.)

. . . and then I read the anthology and, plot twist, I was crushingly depressed. But this is par for the course and it was generally worth it!

So, going story-by-story:

"The Last Day," Ellen Oh: This one is set in Japan and basically seems to be an AU of World War II where everything is basically the same, except less complicated and worse? And "Hiroshima, but worse" is not something I personally felt like I needed. Depression scale: 10/10

"Freshee's Frogurt," Daniel H. Wilson: ROBOT GOES BERSERK. That's . . . basically it. I think this one is a novel excerpt, which may explain why it feels so slight; either way, not really my thing. Depression scale: 5/10

"Uncertainty Principle," K. Tempest Bradford: As she grows up, the heroine becomes aware that the timeline is shifting around her, and for the worse. After enough things she cares about have disappeared, she decides it's time to take action. I really, really liked the concept and protagonist of this one, and I wish it had been novella or even novel-length; towards the end there was a lot of plot in too little space. Depression scale: 4/10 (the story actually ends with proactive change! \o/)

"Pattern Recognition," Ken Liu: Kids are raised in a creepy environment, attempt to break their conditioning. The setup is fairly standard, but well-executed; I especially liked the depiction of teenagers extrapolating a real/past world from a dictionary. Depression scale: 4/10

"Gods of Dimming Light," Greg van Eekhout: I was not expecting NORSE GODS RECRUITING PEOPLE FOR RAGNORAK in the middle of this collection, but . . . I think I really liked it? Like, there is a sad quiet apocalypse of inevitable doom going on, and in the middle of the sad quiet apocalypse, VALKYRIES POSING AS SCIENTISTS. I'm down! Depression scale: 7/10

"Next Door," Rahul Kanakia: So Rahul is a friend, but aside from that, he is also a great writer with unique and bizarre ideas. In a world that is INFESTED WITH MUTANT BEDBUGS, and also where everyone who is rich is so plugged into VR all the time that they don't care that squatters are living right around them, the protagonist and his boyfriend try to find an uninfested place to live happily ever after. And then there is a HEIST. Depression scale: 7/10 (For the curious, here is Rahul's blog post about writing the story and participating in the anthology! And how all the cool kids are writing dystopias these days.)

"Good Girl," Malinda Lo: Mixed-race marriage is illegal, so everybody whose bloodlines are not pure (it doesn't matter in what direction, just that they're not mixed) lives underground. The protagonist, who is secretly mixed-race but passing, hires an outsider girl to look for her missing brother, and then they make out. I liked this a lot too; it's as complicated as it should be. Depression scale: 4/10 (hope exists!)

"A Pocket Full of Dharma," Paolo Bagicalupi: A sad, starving street urchin gets caught up in a conspiracy surrounding the Dalai Llama, which does not noticeably improve anything in his life. I was not super into this one. Depression scale: 7/10

"Blue Skies," Cindy Pon: The world is divided into two classes of people, those who are rich enough to wear special suits and have clean air and those who are poor and breathe gross air and die young. One of the latter kidnaps one of the former in an effort to make enough money to class jump; romance does not ensue. I appreciated the not! And also the narrative voice. Depression scale: 6/10 (everything is doomed generally, but maybe the protagonist isn't?)

"What Arms to Hold," Rajan Khanna: Kids work long, hard hours piloting robots that are plugged into their brains and are told that it will eventually lead them to a better life. Spoiler: it won't. On the other hand, at least the protagonist ends up getting to be sort of proactive about it. Depression scale: 8/10

"Solitude," Ursula K. LeGuin: This was my favorite in the collection. Coincidentally, it is also the least depressing! An anthropologist takes her kids to a planet to study the culture there; the kids assimilate way better than the anthropologist anticipated or wanted, especially her daughter, who is the narrator. Lots of super interesting culture-building and cultural clash all around. Depression scale: 3/10

Comments

[coffeeandink]

"Solitude" is my favorite work of fiction by Ursula Le Guin ever. I actually did not much like her books as a kid, although I've come to like many of them better since. But I remember reading "Solitude" when it first came out, and it was love at first sight.

[skygiants]

It's so great! I actually -- to my shame -- have not read any LeGuin at all since the Earthsea books when I was a kid (though I did really like those at the time, especially The Tombs of Atuan.) So then I read this story and thought "oh, that was amazing! I should actually . . . . read more LeGuin . . ."

[damselfish]

I like her short stories more than her books, TBH, and while I loved Left Hand of Darkness I am not that enamored of Earthsea (reading them now, actually). I read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" for a HS lit class and it changed my worldview, even though it fits with a lot of dystopic utopian stories and I read LOTS of them at the time.

[skygiants]

Oh man, I always forget "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is LeGuin -- it just feels like such a fundamental piece of work, that I almost forget to associate it with an author in my head, if that makes sense. I read it in a high school lit class too (uh, although not actually for the class -- that prof kept a lot of stories around the place and had a very, er, lax attitude about whether students were actually required to pay attention in lectures) and was blown away.

[damselfish]

Yeah, same. Though it may have been a social studies class, come to think of it (freshman social studies was my intro to anthropology, though I didn't know it at the time, with lots of philosophy thrown in). Anyway!

Thinking back on it I can't see why it struck me like it did-- I read lots of stories about, essentially, the grossness of utilitarianism and the suffering of a few to benefit the many and if it's worth that. ...Though put that way it's different from top down utopias like The Giver or Anthem* which were all about forcing compliance and hiding the evidence, while Omelas was all about complicity.

Agh it's been well over a decade and it still gives me feelings.

*Hilariously I read Anthem and put it in the same grouping as 1984 and so on... then read The Fountainhead and realized that 1) everything I took from Anthem pretty much violates all Ayn Rand stands for, and 2) dystopic writing from the right vs. the left is often in the same packaging.

[skygiants]

I think maybe it's because "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" just boils it down so much to its essence -- like, it feels foundational because it just kind of goes "here is a metaphor for a stark truth, DEAL WITH IT" instead of dressing it up with characters and conflicts and all the things that generally go into fiction. It's more an essay than a story, really.

[sanguinity]

Freshee's Frogurt is an excerpt from Robopocalypse. Which I loved, even though it was a bit too horror-genre for my comfort. (I remember that yogurt shop scene being particularly agh-agh-trying-to-read-while-not-looking-agh.) But the novel is written as a compilation of primary source documents documenting the course of the war, and the meaning of any given document is constructed in good part from its juxtaposition with the other documents, so yeah, excerpting one would feel very thin.

...ooo, and edited by Tobias S. Buckell! Yay!

[skygiants]

Yes! He has a great essay in the beginning, too, which I should have mentioned and forgot to.

And ahh, that makes "Freshee's Frogurt" make a lot more sense. (Although, hah, I had the same reaction to that scene really. TOO MUCH HEAD-BASHING AAGH!)

[sanguinity]

There is a lot of cool shit in that book about race and class and social structure, and how that plays into who-all survives the robopocalypse long enough to become key sites of human resistance. F'rinstance, the US military is more-or-less wiped out by their own drones, but the Afghani insurgents are relatively unaffected by the robot takeover: a military robot is a military robot, whoever is running it, and they have lots of experience with surviving military robots.

Indian reservations become a key site of resistance, too, because the tribal governments came through the robopocalypse mostly intact. So the fact that the cop taking the testimony in that excerpt is Native will become important, later.

...but for all that coolness, there is a lot of gore along the way, yes.


And definitely snagging a copy of the antho, thanks for the rec!

[skygiants]

Oh, that sounds cool! The one thing about the story I really loved was the brief mention at the end about tribal governments becoming important sites in resisting the robopocalypse -- I was like, "but I wanted a story about that!"

And you're welcome - hope you enjoy it! :)

[hebethen]

I was originally going to be like huh this Ken Liu story sounds pretty interesting (but then again so did the others and I wasn't a big fan of their execution)

then LeGuin and anthropologists :3

The Khanna story sounds like Evangelion, or at least it sounds like the blurry, osmosed security-camera-still of Evangelion that I have in my brain courtesy of frandz.

[skygiants]

Hah, I can definitely see where you would get that from! It did not remind me much of Evangelion when I was reading -- much more "grimdark child slave," much less "surrealistic hallucination" -- but, uh, it's also been a veeery long time since I've seen Evangelion and mostly what I remember is "Lance of Longinus wtf?!"

[thewickedlady]

What's that, depressing short stories? MY FAVORITE. *adds to read list*

Yeah, Robopocalypse just did not do it for me. I was very surprised it didn't! Explosions, focus on cultures not normally the center of human survival. It just... didn't work for me. I think I wanted more culture, less explosion? (:O Who am I and what have I done with myself?!)

[skygiants]

SPECIAL RECOMMENDATION FOR YOU. :D

I had to stop and reread this comment to make sure that it was coming from who I thought it was coming from. *loling* LESS EXPLOSIONS? What is this?!

[thewickedlady]

I WANTED MORE CULTURE FEELS!

I mean, there was some, talking about young men on the reservation with nothing to do before they started fighting the robots. But I wanted... more? I have no idea. There were pieces I really liked (the entire Afgan section was really interesting and it seemed very heavily thought out), but others that... well, things exploded and people died, but are people such robots now that you can't even feeling anything any more?

I have no idea. I am babbling about feelings today, apparently!

[skygiants]

YES GOOD I always want to hear your feelings about books!

I did get a bit of that sense from the excerpt, but I wasn't sure if that was because of the specific section selected, or if that was the feel of the whole book.

[thewickedlady]

I think I have been spoiled by World War Z which, while zombies, is the best form of documenting the world after it gone totally altered that I have come across (in that particular style). And it wasn't World War Z. Therefore, I had a lot of feelings. (And I don't even go here)

[sanguinity]

Well, it was Skynet (or whatever it was called in the book) doing the documenting, was it not? Sad to say, I don't think Skynet was all that interested in feels. ;-)

[jinian]

Greg van Eekhout also has an entire novel in that setting, Norse Code. I recall it as rather pulptastic.

[skygiants]

Hah! Pulptastic sounds about right. And by the time I hit that point in the collection, I was about ready for some pulp . . .

[luzula]

I do really like that Le Guin story. But then, I am a big Le Guin fan in general.

Since I saw you haven't read a lot of her stuff, may I recommend The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed? They are some of my favorite books of all time, and also they make me cry. Not because they are depressing, because they are totally not! They just give me lots of feelings (apparently solidarity makes me cry).

[skygiants]

You may indeed! :D The Left Hand of Darkness I actually own, stolen from my parents' library, but have yet to get around to reading. But it has just jumped up my list!

[rachelmanija]

I love that you did a depression scale for these stories. I felt the exact same way about the entire collection, down to which stories I liked and didn't.

Did you also get the impression from the mutant bedbug story that the protagonists were going to die of pesticide poisoning about two hours after the story ended? There seemed to be an awful lot of set-up about how toxic the pesticide was for that to not be the intended implication.

I would love to see a similar anthology - with the same writers, even - where the theme is something like "space opera" rather than dystopia. Because wow, did this set of writers take "dystopia" seriously.

[skygiants]

Man, PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE WARNED. I was not expecting to get the most depressing of depressing stories straight off the bat!

I think the protagonists in the bedbug story dying of pesticide poisoning seems not only possible but VERY PROBABLE. I just want to spend five minutes being happy about the protagonist making the decision to help his mom. :( Five minutes, that's all I ask!

I would buy that space opera anthology in a red-hot second.

[swamp_adder]

I liked "Solitude", too -- I encountered it in a collection of Le Guin stories called The Birthday of the World, which I recommend. The others in it are very good too.

I'm a little surprised it was classed as a "dystopia", though; I don't think the society in it was supposed to be seen as "bad" particularly, just different. If I remember correctly, Le Guin said in the introduction something about how she wrote it because "nobody ever has anything good to say about introverts" and she wanted to rectify that.

[skygiants]

Well, if my understanding is correct, the anthology was not actually initially planned as a dystopia -- but all the invited authors ended up writing dystopias, so they just kind of went with it. (Dystopias are super in now anyway!)

But rachelmanija also has an interesting reading of how "Solitude" could be classed as a dystopia in her review.

[cordialcount]

Oh, thank you for the descriptions!

(A Ken Liu story! I love how he takes standard-looking setups and blows past all my emotional defenses against written sadness, and seems incredibly sincere all the way, but if you're not looking for that kind of story, not fun. I love dark & depressing stories-- so long as they're fictional-- and the recent grim/dystopian trend in sf, but it's a bit disappointing that almost everything that comes out these days is dark unless it's explicitly labeled the Optimist Anthology.)

[skygiants]

(Heh, if you love dark and depressing then this is INDEED a god book for you . . . I don't really have anything against grimdark stories, exactly, but this many in a row was a bit overwhelming!)