Future Americas by John Heller & Martin Greenberg
ByFuture Americas
Author: John Heller and Martin Greenberg, Eds.
Publisher: Daw Books
ISBN-13: 9780756405083
Rating: 8/10
Chewing over the past is easy. Predicting the future is hard, and no matter how easy New Age mystics and futurists make it look, pinpointing what will happen 5 years, 10 years, even five minutes from now is tricky stuff. 
Which is why "Future Americas" is so interesting. Spanning 17 stories of possible USAs, from picturesque ruins to misguided utopias, this is one of the most entertaining anthologies written in a long time. It is also one of the more provocative.
This book spans decades as it immerses the reader in worlds hardly imaginable today. From a tropical wilderness set in a stratified society worthy of an Umberto Eco novel, to a futuristic L.A. marred by terrorism and Balkanization, we get a glimpse of worlds that might be. There are many things that will seem recognizable to the reader, from the present of a jacked-up World Wide Web, to the familiar remains of the U.S. Capitol. Graceland even gets a shout-out, in a gory action-adventure story that sees the South finally rising again–sort of.
Sometimes, the slick storytelling and compelling characters can be fooling. Case in point: “Family Photos”, a provocative–and tough–story of a sister of a sex abuse victim who gets poetic, or rather, artistic revenge on her mother. Such stories aren’t unusual, but for every tense story, there is an equally fantastic one in the true sense of the world that is as escapist as anything on TV these days. It’s all relative, and as always, a matter of taste.
"Future Americas" is worth jumping into the Time Machine.
John Winn – Staff Writer
Buzzy Multimedia – Sci-Fi & Fantasy Audio Books & Funny T-Shirts
|
 |
I don’t usally buy anthologies as you mostly get 2 or 3 winners and a bunch of duds but you make this one sound worthwhile. I mean isn’t this what Science Fiction used to be about? Seeing the future through different filters and speculating on where the world is heading?
I think the relatively recent tag for these kinds of stories are speculative fiction. While I don’t like to relabel genres just for the sake of doing so, speculative is a better fit than simply science fiction or fantasy. It is what attracted me to this kind of thing while I was still a child. All the different ways people can imagine worlds to be or worlds that have been before. 17 you say? Sounds like I need to give tis one a shot.
I have heard this sort of fiction call “Alternative Earth” or “possible future” fiction, something like that.
I was under the impression that Spec Fic was any fiction that can not happen in our reality.
Example: Rambo (yes, it was a kick-ass book first) is fiction because as unlikely as it all is, everything written in the book is within the scope of our reality. Add a vampire or magic spell or alien or super solider drug and it becomes Spec fiction.
I like all the posts on fiction