Tomorrowing
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular “This Month in History” column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events---four per month---each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future. From the first AI president to the first dog on Mars to the funeral of Earth’s last glacier, these stories are speculative SF at its most (and least) serious. Collected as a series for the first time, Tomorrowing will amuse, alarm, intrigue, entertain, and like all good science fiction, make readers think. Bisson’s short stories have won every major award in science fiction, including the Hugo and the Nebula, but never, ever anything for this series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This keepsake compilation brings together 20-years' worth of Hugo and Nebula award winner Bisson's "This Month in History" column, which, beginning in 2004, ran weekly in the sci-fi magazine Locus. Instead of recalling the past, Bisson's take on the format offers fragmentary glimpses of the future. April 24, 2102, sees the destruction of "all the works of art in the Louvre, the Met and the Prado." On May 26, 2117, a "disgruntled science fiction author" erases the entire Library of Congress. Cultural destruction is a prominent theme, along with environmental disasters and pandemics. July 5, 2044, marks the death of the planet's last elephant, the lone survivor of the year 2036's "Dumbo virus," and May 9–11, 2107, witnesses a "Ceticide," or mass extinction, of blue whales on Long Island's South Shore. Bisson's handling of doom is mostly tongue-in-cheek, while his entries on gender and racism are noncommittal, in keeping with the dry newspaper format he is parodying. Here and there, he drops a present-day clunker (for example, in the entry dated Sept. 4, 2011: "Reparations Day celebrated nationwide as Harvard, Yale... turn over their endowments to the trustees of the United Negro College Fund"). The snippets are comical but rarely poignant or presaging and there's little gained from reading the compendium cover-to-cover, rather than dipping in and out. Still, this will be a gift for Bisson's fans.
