alexxkay | Review: _One Million A.D.

I have been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, on and off, for decades now. Back in the day, it was one of the best and cheapest sources of mail-order SF, especially if you wanted hardcovers. If you were willing to be a little unethical (which, in younger years, I was), you get books *really* cheap by signing up a new "friend" who happened to share a mailing address with you every time you had bought the minimum number of books at "the regular club price."

I dare say that the SFBC is struggling these days. Certainly, many of the things about them that used to appeal to me no longer do. Amazon is easier and cheaper. As storage space continues to be an issue, I actually *prefer* softcovers these days. And it's not like I am worried about running out of things to read any more. I have about 10 cubic feet of unread books; I try to only buy new books that will go very near the top of that stack -- even with that restriction, I have merely succeeded in mostly keeping its size stable, not in shrinking it considerably.

So what has the SFBC got left to offer me? As it turns out, books that I can't get anywhere else. Mostly anthologies, either originally commissioned, or originating in small presses (where SFBC's price often *is* cheaper than Amazon's, even with shipping).

Most recently, I got _One Million A.D._, an original theme anthology of six novellas on the title topic, commissioned by the SFBC, and edited by Gardner Dozois. Two of the authors represented, Egan and Stross, are on my "buy on sight" list, so I figured it was worth getting. And it mostly was, though not all of it was to my taste.

The first two stories, Robert Reed's "Good Mountain", and Robert Silverberg's "A Piece of the Great World" each reminded me of Gene Wolfe. Many people would say that that was a compliment, but I've generally found Wolfe impenetrable and dull. Both featured a cyclic sense of history, where the people of One Million A.D. were actually at a *lower* tech level than today, and had dim legends of past glories. That sort of thing is *not* why I read SF, *especially* in an anthology with this sort of theme.

Luckily, the back four were better. Nancy Kress' "Mirror Image" had some extreme amounts of magic handwavium in it, but it was at least set in a future where progress had clearly gone on in a generally-forward direction. I found the protagonists unappealing, though.

Alistair Reynolds' "Thousandth Night" actually projected far *beyond* 1,000,000, and was extremely engaging. Interesting characters who were still recognizably human, despite being functionally immortal. An intriguing mystery story, and a grand sense of scope. I haven't read much Reynolds yet, but he seems like someone that perhaps I should read more of.

Charles Stross' "Missile Gap" had one of the oddest settings. The continents of Earth in the 1960's are plucked up and placed down upn the surface of an Alderson Disc out on the edge of the Milky Way. Or so it seems to the inhabitants; there is significant astronomical evidence that the Milky Way is at least a million years older -- and undergoing some sort of very-large-scale construction project. Are they actually historical recontructions by some unknown alien power? There are other continents on this vast surface, besides those of earth, and the US and USSR are continuing their cold war by trying to colonize these other land masses faster than each other. Each side is concerned that there must soon be a First Contact situaton -- but neither of them anticipates what form it will eventually take.

Greg Egan's "Riding the Crococile" is the one with the most clearly optomistic sense of the future. Humans are as immortal as they want to be, ending their lives eventually out of boredom, but not until they are thousands of subjective years old. One couple, growing bored of life, decide to do one last, interesting thing -- try to solve a cosmological mystery that has resisted all investigation attempts for eons.

The Egan and the Reynolds were my favorites, each optimistic, and with a large dose of sensawunda. The Stross was quite good, and the Kress had some good points. So, about a 50% hit rate. Not bad for an original anthology, but not worthy of a very strong recommendation.