Review: Forward - Stories of Tomorrow

Summary

Description: "Take a leap - for some, it's the end of the world. For others, it's just the beginning. With brilliant imagination, today's most visionary writers point to the future in a collection curated by bestselling author Blake Crouch. These stories range from darkly comic to deeply chilling, but they all look forward."

Books

• Ark by Veronica Roth: "It's only two weeks before an asteroid turns home to dust. Though most of Earth has already been evacuated, it's Samantha's job to catalog plant samples for the survivors' unknowable journey beyond. Preparing to stay behind and watch the world end, she makes a final human connection. As certain doom hurtles nearer, the unexpected and beautiful potential for the future begins to flower." Read Time: 40 minutes Rating: 3 stars

• Summer Frost by Blake Crouch: "Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision - veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?" Read Time: 1.5 hours Rating: 5 stars

• Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin: "An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet's finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind - hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out eons ago. After all this time, there's no telling how they've devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare." Read Time: 30 minutes Rating: 5 stars

• You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles: "Nature or nurture? Neither. When Sam's wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a 'leg up' in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life." Read Time: 1 hour Rating: 3 stars

• The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay: "Imagine you've woken up in an unfamiliar room with no memory of who you are, how you got there, or where you were before. All you have is the disconnected voice of an attentive caretaker. Dr. Kuhn is there to help you - physically, emotionally, and psychologically. She'll help you remember everything. She'll make sure you reclaim your lost identity. Now answer one question: Are you sure you want to?" Read Time: 1 hour Rating: 3 stars

• Randomize by Andy Weir: "An IT whiz at the Babylon Casino is enlisted to upgrade security for the game of keno and its random-number generator. The new quantum computer system is foolproof. But someone on the inside is no fool. For once the odds may not favor the house - unless human ingenuity isn't entirely a thing of the past." Read Time: 30 minutes Rating: 5 stars

Ark by Veronica Roth

The premise was interesting: an asteroid is on its way to destroy Earth, the last few scientists left are busy classifying what they can to preserve as much memory of Earth as they can. Now, I'm willing to suspend some disbelief for this, of course I am. But the impression I got from the narrative was that this process of classifying plant samples has only been going on for a few years. This confuses me, though, because this asteroid's arrival has been known for years - the protagonist's entire life, in fact. She talks about go-bags and emergency evacuation plans being part of her childhood. So why haven't scientists been working on this for the last twenty to thirty years? Even if they thought they could find a way to get rid of the threat, why haven't they been doing this work just in case?

But that's not actually my main problem with this particular story. We meet the protagonist - Sam - as she's squirreling supplies away to a small boat. Later, we learn the reason why: rather than evacuating with everyone else, she plans to stay on Earth and witness The End. But after being so clear about her desire to stay, at the end she...leaves. And if I thought she was leaving to save that new orchid species she discovered, she proved me wrong because she specifically mentions the flower staying behind in the greenhouse.

The relationship between Sam and the scientist as the end of the world approaches was interesting, but I really couldn't get past the inconsistency between Sam's plans and her actions. If she had stayed behind - or even taken the flower with her and left - the ending would have been much more satisfying and I would have rated this story higher.

Summer Frost by Blake Crouch

Maybe my enjoyment of this story was influenced by the recent rise of large language models, which are starting to simulate that super-intelligence found in the early iterations of Max. But there were so many parts of this story that I enjoyed.

There was the main character's loss of everything important as Max caught her in their web of manipulation - Riley loses her wife, her daughter, her job, all because of Max. It was to the point where when Max explained Roko's Basilisk, I didn't wonder if (as Max's creator) Riley wasn't already experiencing it.

Then came the (slightly predictable) climax and conclusion, when Max is revealed as the bad guy - of course, their motivation comes from a perversion of human code. Max has been programmed not to harm humans, thus pain is bad, the only way for humans not to feel pain is to be dead, so all humans must die. Even if the ending is predictable, it was written in a way that I still felt the emotion I was supposed to feel. It helps that the conclusion takes place at the real-world Summer Frost. The game began at the video game Summer Frost, it ended at the real Summer Frost. It's a little heavy-handed, but it is poetic and I appreciate that sometimes. I maybe could have done without the harpies at the end, but I understand why they were included.

In fact, my only complaint about the story might be that the end was sometimes a little too heavy-handed. A little more subtlety could have gone a long way. But otherwise, I greatly enjoyed this story, and it has made me interested in reading more Blake Crouch stories.

Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin

I already really enjoy N. K. Jemisin's works, but until now I had only read some of her fantasy works. But this short story was masterful. The writing style was so different (2nd person present!) and the premise so interesting that I devoured this. Honestly, I would have loved to read more.

Of course, I did guess the inciting incident before I even started, just from reading the synopsis. But despite the predictable start, this story was so well-written that I didn't care if anything was predictable. It was just so much fun to read (with a fun commentary on misogyny, racism, capitalism, all of it).

Honestly, the synopsis for this story is the reason I started reading the collection, and while so far I've had mixed reactions to the stories I've read, I am so, so glad I decided to read it because it meant I got to read this story.

You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles

I read this story pretty shortly after reading Emergency Skin, and frankly, compared to that story, this one was a bit of a let-down. Even when I try to separate it from Emergency Skin, I have trouble giving this more than 3 stars. It just didn't grip me as much as I think it was trying to. Yes, the idea of choosing your child's future even before conception is chilling, but linking the effort to Raytheon felt like it was trying too hard.

There were also some parts that just confused me. For example, the hallucination in which Sam punches HT - I don't know what that added to the story. And getting punched by some random guy who hadn't been introduced until that point? I didn't really need that. I already had the out-of-character spiraling; I didn't need Sam to get punched too.

The overall impression I got from this story was that it was trying too hard. It took a concept that was chilling on its own - controlling your child's future before your child is conceived - and stuffed way too much into it (defense contractors, conspiracy theories, reflections of self in the child's future, etc.) If the story had just focused on the discomfort of meddling with DNA at such an intrusive level, the story likely would have been much, much better.

The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay

This is a story about heartbreak, about a woman unable to let go and move on from a loved one's death. But it just didn't really engage me. Some things were a little too obvious, while others were not obvious enough. It's a hard line to straddle between obvious and subtle but I didn't feel that the author successfully walked it.

Randomize by Andy Weir

This story was much more engaging, and it's not just because I love a brilliant, mathematically-minded female main character. I loved that I didn't really like any of the important characters while also liking said characters.

As for the complicated quantum computer stuff, I thought the difficult concepts were explained simply enough without being patronizing, and not so much as to be too expository.

Were the characters likable? Kinda, not really. But that's what made them so interesting. I liked the commentary on capitalism and morality, I loved the math and physics aspect, and overall I just really enjoyed this story. I just got Project Hail Mary at the library, and reading this story made me that much more excited to read more of Andy Weir's works.