Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories edited by John Joseph Adams

…Brave New Worlds is as perfect an anthology as you could hope for… One of the great things about a broad anthology like this one, collecting 33 different stories that still all fall under the umbrella of dystopian SF, is that you get the chance to sample a large variety of styles and approaches. Classics and brand new stories, short vignettes and longer tales… Almost anything that could conceivably go wrong with our world goes wrong in one or more of these stories… There are a few stories in Brave New Worlds that will simply stay with you forever… It doesn’t happen very often that you find an anthology that’s perfectly executed from start to finish, but Brave New Worlds is exactly that. The stories in this collection are science fiction in the truest sense of the word, starting from an often painful sociological premise and extrapolating it to the most private and emotional aspects of our lives. The only reasons I can think of for not liking this book would be if you have an aversion to either dystopian SF or short fiction. If you don’t fall in either of those categories, you simply won’t find a finer anthology than Brave New Worlds. Read the rest.

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Kilgore Trout, who appears in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, is a science fiction writer whose ideas and stories are interesting even though his plots and characters are dreadful. My favorite Kilgore Trout story is summarized in Breakfast of Champions. Here, Trout writes about extra-terrestrials that come to earth to prevent nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately, they rely on tap dancing and farts to communicate, so the confused humans immediately kill their furiously farting and tap dancing visitors. This depressing depiction of humanity is common in both Trout and Vonnegut’s writing.

Trout is Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego. Vonnegut acknowledges that Trout isn’t a very good writer, and consequently publishes all of Trout’s work in pornographic magazines. So Kurt Vonnegut must have been surprised when he realized that had become one of the most acclaimed satirists of the 20^th century, even though his writing strongly recalls Kilgore Trout’s.

In fact, just minutes after reading Galápagos, I was already struggling to remember who was in the novel – let alone what they did. As per usual, the world happens to Vonnegut’s characters rather than vice versa and even their most heart-breaking loss is little more than another piece of evidence confirming Trout’s view that “the more you learn about people the more disgusted you’ll become.” Galápagos has any number of disgusting tragedies, ranging from the abusive relationships to a revaluation of national currencies that leads to starvation in Central America.

But don’t feel sorry for any of these people.

After all, Darwin’s great book The Origin of Species has done “more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome.” A sober understanding of these people as evolutionary failures is more accurate than an analysis tainted by feelings of compassion or pity. Vonnegut takes a moment to hammer home how incredibly mundane every death is in Galápagos by placing an * in front of the names of the characters that will soon die.

Before long, all but a few members of *humanity can be included on the list of casualties.

Galápagos is set in 1986, but our narrator is explaining these events to us from a million years in the future. By this time, the only representative of the human race, as we understand it, is a ghost that explains the evolutionary processes that he has observed. He explains that the last humans continued to evolve on the Galápagos Islands. Humanity is now a furry, seal-like species that survives by fishing. Thankfully, the brain cavity of the average human has been streamlined to facilitate fishing, so humanity has finally rid itself of its greatest handicap: the “oversize human brain.” Now, people live far shorter lives and they are not nearly so cruel, jealous, or destructive.

These are the survivors that live to see the future. These seal-like humans are the success stories.

Or are they?

Galápagos is a dystopian novel that explains how seals, more or less, come to realize all of humanity’s highest ideals. They are a utopian society, though nothing very interesting happens anymore.

Vonnegut often mocks his work through Kilgore Trout. However, his ability to organize a dystopian story around evolution rather than government control is impressive. I will not remember any of the characters in Galápagos, but Kilgore Trout’s alter ego is clearly a talented writer with a knack for writing interesting stories.