Shine

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Authors: Jetse de Vries (ed)

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SHINE

An Anthology of Near-future, Optimistic Science Fiction

Edited by Jetse de Vries

Including stories by:-

Jason Andrew

Madeline Ashby

Jacques Barcia

Eva Maria Chapman

Ken Edgett

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Eric Gregory

Kay Kenyon

Mari Ness

Holly Phillips

Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard

Alastair Reynolds

Gord Sellar

Paula R. Stiles

Jason Stoddard

Lavie Tidhar

First published 2010 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84997-166-9

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84997-167-6

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

Introduction

Jetse de Vries

T
here's a thing like weed: it grows everywhere, despite the common wisdom that it
can't
grow there. In the most barren, destitute and desperate places, it springs up. It flowers, against the grain. It raises its head at the most unexpected of times, even when--often
especially
when--most people think it's dead and gone.

It's hope. Hope fed by optimism.

Now, optimism and an upbeat attitude have been given short thrift in written SF over the last few decades, and especially the last one. Yes, there are novels and short stories with a positive outlook, but these are far and few in between. As an exercise, list five downbeat novels per year from 2000 to 2009. Then make a similar list for five upbeat novels per year (upbeat defined as a story where the future is a
better
place than today, not a story where over 90% of humanity is killed and where the survivors eventually make do): I know which list will be the hardest to make (or even
complete
).

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has been trying to get an anthology of upbeat SF called
Up!
going since 2002, but it has never got off the ground. Word at the
Anticipation
WorldCon had it that he simply didn't get enough stories (I can empathise: I had to extend the
Shine
deadline). It's become so bad that Gardner Dozois remarked, in the July 2009
Locus:

...although I like a well-crafted dystopian story as well as anyone else, the balance has swung
too
far in that direction, and nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future have become so standard in the genre that it's almost become stylized, and almost the default setting, with few writers bothering to try to imagine viable human futures that somebody might actually want to
live
in.

Yet, in the real world, 'study indicates people by nature are universally optimistic.'
¹This concurs with what I see in my day job: I train people who come literally from around the world in my company's equipment, and the vast majority of them are very optimistic. So in this matter, written SF is greatly out of step with the real world. Which raises some doubt when SF claims that it is 'a mirror of today's world.'

Now I am not against dystopias, apocalyptic and downbeat SF per se: I have certainly enjoyed many such novels and short stories. However, right now, the balance is gone: in I estimate at least 90% of written SF today is downbeat.
Shine
is an attempt to redress that balance somewhat.

Shine
is also my attempt to show the world that SF can do more than merely say: if this (horrible trend) goes on, we all go down the drain. Yes, it's good to show people the consequences of their behaviour. However, written SF almost exclusively shows the consequences of
bad
behaviour, and almost never the consequences of
good
behaviour. Dire warnings and doomsayings, being told over and over again
ad nauseam
, lose their effectiveness. With
Shine
I hope to show the other side of the coin: SF that actively thinks about
solutions
to the problems plaguing humanity today. To show readers that written SF does something more than either provide escapism (which can be nice, once in a while) or wield the whip: that written SF can actively think in a constructive manner.

So, an anthology of near-future, optimistic SF. An anthology where the future is a better place than today (even if that progress is hard fought, as you will see in most of the stories). This was not an easy task, as Jason Stoddard had it: 'There's nothing like taking on two kinds of impossible.'

Impossible part 1 is getting SF authors to write an optimistic story. Impossible part 2 is getting them to write about the
near future
, which is immensely hard to do right, as well. Hence I've been constantly shelling out examples on the
Shine
blog (real world and imagined), posted--or tried to post--controversial articles and even a guest-blog series of 'Optimism in Literature around the World, and SF in particular' just to inspire, provoke or even shame writers into writing such stories for this anthology. Which they eventually did.

Then I needed to clarify which kind of stories I was
not
looking for, and even had to extend the
Shine
deadline in the hope of finally getting enough of the type of stories I
was
looking for (as I mentioned above, I can surely empathise with Patrick Nielsen Hayden's problems with
Up!
).

And if that wasn't enough already, I got it into my head that
Shine
should also be a representation of the world at large: in settings, characters and hopefully also authors.

Why make my editorial life even harder? We might as well get Freudian on my arse. For most of my adult life, I have travelled the world extensively. I've been to a wide variety of places, experienced a great diversity of cultures and seen awe-inspiring places. What it comes down to is that
Shine
may very well represent my belief that this world is a place that is both beautiful and scary, inspiring and frightening, full of wonder and full of danger; and that
we can make it work.
Correct that: it is already working in many places, but we can make it work
better
. We can do better, we can make it a better place to live in, even given the huge problems we're facing.

That is what
Shine
is about. So fasten your mental seatbelts as
Shine
takes you on a trip across the world and beyond. Stops on the way to a better future include:

A West Africa where boys' toys become girls' gadgets...
A world so over-focussed on recycling that it fails to see that innovation often means embracing-the-new, exploring-the-unknown, even--or especially--when it's shining just above them...
A Paris where an expat programmer has to grease a semi-scientific cult's virtual prayer wheels just to get by until she's confronted by activists whose agenda is more widespread than she could ever surmise...
A pacific island nation that transforms from being the
Lazarus
of the world into becoming its
Maecenas
...
A Tanzania where a prodigal son returns, in a way, with plans for the future. However, it's the vision of his past that
truly
paves the way...
A Recife where a retired eco-fighter must advise the teenager board of a huge wikindustry about a new company that's about as dodgy as it is hot, and he needs to get that advice out
fast
, and risk wrecking
the
(and his personal) future if he gets it wrong...
A look behind the scenes of tomorrow's music industry, where bigger often indeed
is
better...
An Iran where a spirit of stories past merges with the technologies of today to create an Islamic society of the future...
A China where the ground swell of change almost literally comes from the ground, and goes all the way from the ground up...
A place in the heart of the Caucasus where spoiled American nerds clash with seemingly naive Russian naturalists, until they find they have a common enemy...
Adrift on the North Pacific gyre on an artificial island meant to combat pollution while the world around it seems to care less and less, until things seem to get a mind of their own...
A trip to the asteroid belt to mine a rare metal finds something else, as well, with highly unintended consequences...
A visit to the corridors of political/ecological power in The Hague--which are not exactly in parliament--by a group of activists who are not only out of their depths and out of their league, but out of their minds, as well...
A Mexico where the seeds of change spread faster and quite different from what their GM masters intended...
An artist taking a tentative step forward by moving to an unnamed West Coast town where the memory of winter is melting from the collective mind like an ice sculpture in summer...
An Afghanistan where the next generation of surveillance is tested, and where the unlikely friendship between two very different men uses the tools of intrusion for something completely different...

It's been a hell of a ride getting this anthology together, yet I wouldn't have it any other way. Another great help was Twitter: through my @outshine Twitterzine I discovered several new and exciting writers. In that spirit, there will be both intro and/or outro tweets before and/or after every story that will provide new angles or fresh insights. So join me in this kaleidoscope of visions where problems huge and small are tackled, immense difficulties are overcome, and where our futures become somewhat more bright!

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