As with every anthology I read, my thoughts are a little mixed. Some of the stories I love, one or two I may hate, and everything in between. This one was net positive, I think. And, being by a single author instead of a mix, there’s more of a sense of ordering to the whole thing.
I absolutely loved Volatile Patterns. I’m always a fan of good worldbuilding, and this was a tour de force, a short story giving me so many fascinating glimpses into what feels like a very full world.
And here’s where the sequencing hits: part of what makes it a very full world is that it’s one entry in a larger collection about this shared world. So some of the details being hinted at are there to uncover, in other stories.
Power to Yield expands on that world. And while it left me some hope that, in the years after Power to Yield and before Volatile Patterns, the situation improved, it has a very… Omelas quality to it. That the utopian society I saw first was built upon something much darker.
Which is an effective arc, but I don’t think that I actually like it. There’s a pattern in our culture, thinking that for something to be “realistic” it has to be dark, grim, depressing. Treating those qualities as a necessary component of a story, rather than simply qualities that can be present or not, without that valence. A story can just be happy; fiction can give us utopian societies without necessitating that there be a twist, a darkness hidden beneath the candy-shell exterior. We can be hopeful. That’s allowed.
I did enjoy reading this collection, though, so I’ll have my usual Bookshop link here.1
- This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩