Seeds of Change [Hardcover]

This collection edited by slush god John Joseph Adams contains stories of paradigm shifts in the future (this review is based on an Advanced Reader Copy; the anthology is scheduled for release late August 2008). From his introduction:

"I asked the contributors to this anthology to write about paradigm shifts - technological, scientific, political, or cultural--and how individuals and societies deal with such changes. The idea is to challenge our current paradigms and speculate on how they might evolve in the future, either for better or for worse."

Many of the stories, instead of being about future paradigm shifts, are projections of current issues or ailments (racism, global warming, corporate spies and piracy) into the future but also contain new shifts brought about by new technology and ethical issues about usage (how should we or even should we not) of these new technologies.

The anthology starts with a bang, with a story of future prejudice. Of the nine stories Endosymbiont by Blake Charlton, Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu and Drinking Problem by K.D. Wentworth were my personal favorites.

* N-Words by Ted Kosmatka; eloquently captures the passion and pain of past and current prejudice and echoes them onto a future where a certain type of clones have become the latest persecuted ethnics.
* The Future by Degrees by Jay Lake; a solution is developed for efficient energy usage (little waste heat, high efficiency) and everyone will kill to get it;
* Drinking Problem by K.D. Wentworth; DNA coded one-per-customer-per-lifetime beer bottles with AI chips and various conversational modes make this story more horror than scifi for a committed beer drinker like myself.
* Endosymbiont by Blake Charlton; virtual medicine plus the ability to upload people's consciousness into "nueroprocessors" are the technology that supports Blake Charlton's story of creating a new type of post-human. The main character is a young girl who was suffering from cancer, and was the first "uploaded", before the technophobes pushed through laws governing such creatures, to make sure they didn't pull a Terminator and take over the world. This was a superbly written story revolving around well-defined characters with excellent science to back it up.
* A Dance Called Armageddon by Ken MacLeod; the fifteenth winter of the Faith War, a reminder of the never-ending struggle between Christianity, Muslims and Jews fighting for who's interpretation is most correct, and a reminder that though only a small percentage of us are there, wars affect us all. Nice description of the Sony Ericsson Cyber-sight upgrade glasses as well.
* Arties Aren't Stupid by Jeremiah Tolbert; genetically manufactured classes of "humans", some braniacs, some tin-men, some thicknecks and some arties (artistic), break out their mold, freeing themselves and inflicting change upon the order of their world. The wording of the conversation got in the way a little (arties aren't stupid, but they do talk funny), but the story was quite excellent.
* Faceless in Gethsemane by Mark Budz; if you could have surgery to remove the impression of faces, would you? What would you see, and how would not jumping to first impressions about how someone looked or what color their skin is change you? There is an air of prejudice and persecution in this story that I'm not sure I agree with (would people really protest because other people modified how they perceive other's faces?) but the concepts are interesting, the story well written...and it reminds me of when I rubbed my closed eyelids and saw colors and visions (Mr. Budz, I thought it was just me.)
* Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu; a beatutifully written story about man (woman) and machine, set what Nigeria is and may continue to become: a country raped and pillaged for it's oil, where it's people lose hope but continue somehow to search for hope...and find it amongst the aritificially intelligent keepers of the pipelines. Music soothes the savage AI beast, it seems.
* Resistance by Tobias S. Buckell; Pepper, of Mr. Buckell's Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin and the forthcoming Sly Mongoose, is hired to take out the dictator of a techno-democracy. Similar to a society in Sly Mongoose, this world (Haven) gave everyone a vote on everything; but they tired of that and created AI's to vote as they would. Then the AI's created the ruler "Pan". Was it their own vote, or did the AI take over? The only Pepper story I've read with a low (zero) body count.

Seeds of Change is an anthology that contains nine short stories confronting issues that our society faces today such as: racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. All with a Science Fiction twist. This is a book that activist will enjoy, and if as readers, we don't understand the problems our world faces, Seeds of Change can really open our eyes to them. I really enjoyed what John Joseph Adams has done here. As an author and editor he has put this information out there in an entertaining way, in an attempt at making people more aware.

The authors are knowledgeable about the issues, and have taken the time to write intelligent Scifi stories for readers to enjoy. Seeds of Change is a fantastic addition to anyone's book collection, and I highly recommend it to all readers to check it out. John has also put together a great website for Seeds of Change that contains three free stories (with excerpts of the rest), as well as interviews, author bios, and a book trailer featuring dramatized excerpts of each story and an original musical score. http://www.seedsanthology.com/ Don't forget to go there and check that out :)

"How did my body die?" asks 14- year- old chemo patient Stephanie of Jani, a pediatric resident at a virtual San Francisco Children's Hospital. By now, the reader is fully aware that author Blake Charlton has taken us into the dystopian world of virtual medicine, where patients' minds can be reset at the sound of a word, technophobes worry about "posthumans" gaining too much power and abusing it and neuroprocessors take over the brain in a dead body, turning people into "endosymbionts", the equivalent of a bacteria that borrows life by feeding off its host organism. The precocious, knowledge-hungry Stephanie embarks on a cyber quest for truth that involves "unprogramming" a nurse, seeing a "cyber shrink" that breaks the rules of psychoanalysis by threatening to "delete" patients (what shrink doesn't wish they could sometimes?) and concocting a Borgesian, pre-existing plan for allowing neuroprocessors to endocytose morality. Little does Stephanie know yet what a key role in her own farfetched idea she'll play. In yet the last and most important symbiosis of the story, her plan will engulf her turning her into a martyr of the moral neurotech evolution that promises to make the world a better place. The symbol for this interdependency is perhaps best illustrated by the ubiquitous image of the snake eating its own tail that opens and closes the narrative and reinforced by the last name "Mandala", a Buddhist circular diagram, emblem of cosmic order and harmony. Charlton is skillful at making the perfect circularity of these recurrent motifs transcend the thematic aspect to contaminate, like the bacteria at the heart of the story, the textual structure: opening and closing with the same image the story itself becomes a perfect circle that envelops us. The young author crafts a thought-provoking story at the intersection of medicine and technology but manages to bring both fields of knowledge in manageable doses for the lay reader. Our consciousness as readers is thus momentarily uploaded too, and we are forced to suspend our disbelief to imagine a possible, alternative world that may not reside too far into our future.

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