Good questions :-)

I won't speak for Alisa, but I think for me capturing the spirit of the anhtology was more important than literal timeframe... we wanted some hard, believable science, but were also open to fantasy or horror pieces which were less physically possible but more metaphorically apt...

If I'd had my ideal mix, I would keep all the stories we had but add another three or four hard sf near future stories, to tip the balance more that direction... but you can only print what people write :-)

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Indeed.

I did find the political near-futures were generally more 'credible' than the scientific ones, but they had their moments too. I did like the variety.

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I dunno. I think I tend to read and think differently to a lot of readers, especially of this book.

People seem to say, well, from where I stand looking down 4 years into time, that's impossible. But could we ever have thought we would be here in July 2001? Dramatic things happen that rapidly change the course of the path we are on. And it also presumes that we know everything that is happening everywhere. I didn't really have a problem with most of the stories' believability. I think the Livings is not believable but the issue of image/appearance and the commentary of the music industry was relevant to the time frame.

I think for me, discussion like this around 2012 comes more back to what we think science fiction is. Does it fail if when we hit the future, it doesn't happen?

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I don't think anything has changed that much in the last seven years. Not in science or technology. Politically, yes -- but even then it's mostly the pendulum swinging as it has done forever.

Events like 9/11 and the growing recognition of climate change have directed where public monies have been spent, and the texture of public fears, but have they changed society dramatically?

The US has had a large city half destroyed by mother nature (that and mismanagement of protective measures), and then mostly abandoned by its government. Is that the future?

I think one of my problems was that you concentrated on the near future and on current concerns, but a big concern is climate change, and it's not that fast. In one story there are human mutants roaming the outskirts of a dessicated city, and I don't think we're quite there yet. Angela actually apologises for the science in 'I Love You Like Water' (for better or worse), but she nonetheless presents a powerful metaphor. Frontloading that with 'this is important, pay attention' seems to to me to burden the story somewhat. It doesn't allow the nuances of the metaphor to sink in.

In that regard, I thought 'Skinsongs' (and of course 'The Last Word'), was less of a stretch, and worked better in context.

You are of course right about 'hitting the future'. I remember in the 1984 yearbook for our high school, one of the comments was 'George Orwell was wrong'. Someone could have added 'so far'.

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I might talk a little on my contribution, "Soft Viscosity". I must admit writing a story set only four years in the future and to make it speculative was a challenge. So what I ended up attempting to do was write a tale that is both plausible in the modern world and then sprinkle it with spec fiction elements. I always wanted to write a hard SF contribution, as that's what I thought the anthology was going to be about, and because that's what I like writing.

As for the story, I spent time in South America a few years ago, part of it in Ecuador and the Amazon where the narrative is set. There are pipelines pumping oil out of the country. Having worked in the engineering profession for many years I got to know many former defence personnel, some of them marines who had spent time in the South American jungles. They told me there are literally US bases everywhere, and their ultimate intention is to control the world's largest supple of liquid fresh water. Whether this is true or not, it seemed plausable to me, and a great idea for a story. So these two ideas gave me the basis for "Soft Viscosity", because for me it could happen today.

To make it speculative, I read widely on a whole lot of new technologies just around the corner, and then extrapolated, trying to find new tech ideas that could be made today if someone out there had the know-how, resources and cash to make it happen, but nothing that would need new science to make it work. Some of those ideas were jetsurfing the Amazon headways, cigarette packets with animated advertising, designer happy pills and helijets. I was planning on incorporating a new gun just out on the market which can shoot around corners, but I just couldn't make it work in a jungle setting.

I was saddened earlier this year when Colombia, Ecuador and Venezula almost went to war. And I felt a little chilled that a future Amazon that I had imagined seemed about to become a reality. Thankfully it did not.

Like Ben, I would have liked to have seen more hard sci fi in the collection, as sci fi is to me more the world we live in than some of the fantasy and horror tales included in the collection. However I think this is a reflection of short story sci fi writers in Australia, there just aren't enough of them.

That said, I really enjoyed reading this anthology, and the ideas presented.

David Conyers
www.davidconyers.com

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Thanks greatly for coming by. It was 'Soft Viscosity' I was thinking about (along with 'Oh, Russia') when I said the politics was credible. Sad but true.

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The stories that hit the mark for me were Deborah Biancotti's "Watertight Lies", "Oh, Russia" by Simon Brown, "The Last Word" by Dirk Flinthart, and "Oblivion" by Sean McMullen. The other stories were good, but not how I envisaged 2012 to be like.

David Conyers

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I'm not getting the same thing out of 'Oblivion' that everyone else seems to be.

I thought 'David Bowie' did a very clever thing by keeping on subject in an unexpected way. And 'Ghost Jail' was beautiful and evocative, even if I'm not entirely sure what it was evoking.

Edited at 2008-04-30 01:52 am (UTC)

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