Comp copies of DEEP DREAM from MIT Press arrived, a handsome collection edited by Indrapramit Das.
From Indra's introduction:
I’m humbled by the stylistic variety and talent on display in these stories, by the generosity of these skilled, award-winning writers from across the world in imagining a future where our self-destructiveness as a species cannot ever entirely win out, because we have the memory of the beauty we made.
Vajra Chandrasekera’s dazzling metatext “The Limner Wrings His Hands” brings the politics of art (and of his home country, Sri Lanka) to the forefront with an intricate hybrid of fiction and essay, testing as he often does the limits of our definitions of genre. Samit Basu brings levity to the proceedings with a nimble, humane satire of, “The Art Crowd,”, exploring the dynamics of artistic power in an authoritarian future India (and a protagonist) shared with his brilliant novel The City Inside (Tordotcom). In “Immortal Beauty,” genre legend and co-progenitor of cyberpunk Bruce Sterling strays from his roots to imagine a post-capitalist future shorn of most tech, in which a Court Gentleman wanders a Europe of city-states and warring aesthetocrats under the eye of distant celestial computers.
In a number of moving stories, there is a recurring theme of art as a framework medium for processing grief—unsurprising in an era of mass trauma from both the unraveling of our tenuous social and ecological stability and one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s “Halfway to Hope” takes us into the personal struggle of a VR engineer who helps patients in a near-future Bangalore recover from their pain by visiting virtual worlds, but must contend with a horrific tragedy that forces her to the limits of what her craft can do. Cassandra Khaw’s “Immortal Is the Heart” follows a poetic keeper of memories wandering the American Midwest in a world ravaged by global warming, finding a tenuous hope for, and in, the outcasts of our present society in its ashes. Aliette de Bodard’s beautiful “Autumn’s Red Bird” shows us how a sentient “mindship” might grieve in the wake of unimaginable loss, and share this experience with one of her human passengers, whose art may yet bring them succor. Renowned Egyptian artist Ganzeer gives us a vision of a U.S.A. where the production of art is forbidden in “Unauthorized (Or, The the Liberated Collector’s Commune),”, bringing his vibrantly playful counter-cultural sensibilities to the beloved science-fictional story of robots given to identity crises by the existence of their human creators. Visionary writer and artist Sloane Leong’s “No Future But but Infinity Itself” delivers a mysterious dream of art reflecting humanity’s monstrosity and empathy in a post-apocalyptic future, diving deep into both the intimacy and vastness of its creation and import. The incredibly prolific and creative Lavie Tidhar takes us further into the future with “The Quietude,”, a tale of high high-pulp poetry that imagines art forms never before seen in a human-settled solar system brimming with cultures old and new. And recent Hugo nominee Wole Talabi takes us further still, to distant extrasolar spacetime, in “Encore,” following a sentient AI ship wandering the gulfs between stars while trying to fulfill its purpose as artist to the various life forms in the galaxy.
In these ten stories, our writers both embody and visualize the future of art.
