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Reading: Meet Me in the Future
Aug. 12th, 2019 03:06 pmKameron Hurley is someone whose work I've been meaning to read for ages. I was going to buy The Stars are Legion after hearing it described at Nine Worlds a couple of years ago as "lesbians in space", which seemed very relevant to my interests, but then it turned out that it's no longer available as an ebook in the UK, so when I received a e-ARC of her new short story collection, Meet Me in the Future, via Netgalley, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to give her work a try.
There are sixteen stories in Meet Me in the Future, all set in far-distant futures. Some are clearly set on other planets, some in space, some might be on far-future Earth. Some of the futures feel like the future, with spaceships and imagined technology; some are futures which feel more like fantasy, set in more low-tech societies. The latter category includes two stories which I particularly liked, 'Elephants and Corpses' and 'The Fisherman and the Pig', which are about the same character, body mercenary Nev, who has the ability, at the moment of death, to transfer his conciousness into any corpse within range. Other favourites included 'When We Fall', an absolutely delightful love story about an orphan and a spaceship; 'The Sinners and the Sea', which is set in a society of floating islands above a drowned, dead world and reminded me rather of Le Guin; 'The Plague Givers', set in a world of steamy, plesiosaur-haunted swamps, with a wonderful too-old-for-this-shit middle-aged heroine racing against time to prevent the lover and enemy she defeated thirty years earlier from unleashing a plague that will destroy everyone in their world, with bonus multiple and fluid genders; 'Tumbledown', the story of a paraplegic woman racing across a frozen planet to try to deliver a vital serum to a plague-threatened community; and 'Warped Passages', which I gather from Hurley's introduction is a prequel of sorts to The Stars are Legion, set on a hige space fleet which has been trapped for three generations by an anomaly which holds their ships in place.
Hurley's writing vividly evokes the very different worlds her stories are set in; her characters are sympathetic and human and interesting. Some of the stories make for difficult reading; there's a lot of war and violence and destruction in them, and some body-horror which I struggled with ('The Corpse Archive' was almost too much for me), but they are often beautiful and generally hopeful stories, ending with the prospect of better things to come even where the futures they describe are darker. The collection is also delightfully diverse; there are lots of queer, trans and non-binary characters, women in traditionally 'male' roles such as soldiers and priests, and societies where women are privileged over men, and there are also explorations of disability and race issues through a science fictional lens. I liked this a lot, and will definitely be reading more of Hurley's work in future.
There are sixteen stories in Meet Me in the Future, all set in far-distant futures. Some are clearly set on other planets, some in space, some might be on far-future Earth. Some of the futures feel like the future, with spaceships and imagined technology; some are futures which feel more like fantasy, set in more low-tech societies. The latter category includes two stories which I particularly liked, 'Elephants and Corpses' and 'The Fisherman and the Pig', which are about the same character, body mercenary Nev, who has the ability, at the moment of death, to transfer his conciousness into any corpse within range. Other favourites included 'When We Fall', an absolutely delightful love story about an orphan and a spaceship; 'The Sinners and the Sea', which is set in a society of floating islands above a drowned, dead world and reminded me rather of Le Guin; 'The Plague Givers', set in a world of steamy, plesiosaur-haunted swamps, with a wonderful too-old-for-this-shit middle-aged heroine racing against time to prevent the lover and enemy she defeated thirty years earlier from unleashing a plague that will destroy everyone in their world, with bonus multiple and fluid genders; 'Tumbledown', the story of a paraplegic woman racing across a frozen planet to try to deliver a vital serum to a plague-threatened community; and 'Warped Passages', which I gather from Hurley's introduction is a prequel of sorts to The Stars are Legion, set on a hige space fleet which has been trapped for three generations by an anomaly which holds their ships in place.
Hurley's writing vividly evokes the very different worlds her stories are set in; her characters are sympathetic and human and interesting. Some of the stories make for difficult reading; there's a lot of war and violence and destruction in them, and some body-horror which I struggled with ('The Corpse Archive' was almost too much for me), but they are often beautiful and generally hopeful stories, ending with the prospect of better things to come even where the futures they describe are darker. The collection is also delightfully diverse; there are lots of queer, trans and non-binary characters, women in traditionally 'male' roles such as soldiers and priests, and societies where women are privileged over men, and there are also explorations of disability and race issues through a science fictional lens. I liked this a lot, and will definitely be reading more of Hurley's work in future.
