Mary Branscombe reviews All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions that Disrupt

Explore where technology might take us and what that might mean for how we live with this anthology that brings together experts and writers. 

It’s easy to view fiction as merely entertainment and escapism (both important in their own right), but stories – especially science and speculative fiction (SFF) – are also wonderful tools for exploring and learning, imagining possibilities and seeing how they might work. It is serious play and playful thinking. 

It’s almost a tenet of SFF that technology is secondary to the story. While SFF writers tend to explore ideas and the stories those ideas generate, their technology may be plausible but there’s no requirement for it to be. There are, however, countless movies and TV shows where an interesting premise is undermined by technology that absolutely doesn’t work. Futurists and researchers explore possibilities and trends, making predictions that are intended as realistic extrapolations of real or expected technology, with none of the Hollywood handwaving and convenient MacGuffins, but while fictional case studies illustrating predictions are so common that you’ll find them in IKEA’s latest research about homes and living, they rarely have the kind of characters, plot and drama that makes for compelling fiction.

What if you could combine the two, with experts and authors collaborating to write about possible futures in ways that are not just plausible but creative, with equally strong stories and technical chops? Like Cybersalon’s previous anthology, 22 Ideas About the Future, All Tomorrow’s Futures is predicated on (mostly) plausible technology and the impacts such technological developments might have on justice, energy, digital money, health and education. 

The range of stories in an anthology gives you a different experience than a single novel: you don’t get the depth or complexity of plot, and the writing can sometimes be uneven, but you get to explore a lot more viewpoints and scenarios. That’s very much the case for this collection, but along with the stories in each section you also get commentary from the experts the writers were paired with: lawyers, doctors, economists, futurists and researchers offer complementary analyses of the social, ethical, political and legal issues that form the backdrop to the stories as well as the technology presented. 

This makes for an effective blend of fiction and fact. The stories will make you think about things like the responsibility of AI when it causes human deaths and the impact on humans trying to clean up the mess, a false conviction that isn’t overturned even when the actual criminal is found, the different way law enforcement might treat the rich and poor affected by climate change, smug criminals who manage to take advantage of intrusive surveillance and a paranoid and racist police officer who is very ready to believe inaccurate racial profiling algorithms (complete with implausible acronyms as a very obvious and knowing giant wink to the reader). The commentaries ground the stories in current legal and technical realities and help give you a feel for how plausible they really are.

Some of the stories have significant emotional impact. I enjoyed the vicious little story about New York fully on the blockchain where virtual reality meets real emotions and the safety system in your software-controlled car stops protecting you if you miss a payment, because with tokens you never really own anything. There’s some fun cyberpunk: real-time payments for data tracking can fund city-wide air filters and pre-crime drones until hackers get in and divert the funds, but are the people clinging to cash doing it for privacy or just resenting the competition?

Other thought-provoking pieces expose ineffective international approaches to climate change, pollution and refugees with attempts to jolt comfortable people out of their ability to deny the issues without flinching from the dark side of progress. Nearly-free energy is as likely to increase consumption and turn the moon into a combination mining site and trash dump as it is to create a green future; capturing and modelling the consciousness of everything from coral to elephants might create an AI that wants humans to (virtually) experience what extinction feels like; and creative accounting that has more of an impact than typical international aid only avoids being shut down by a clever sleight of hand that reflects the growing influence of Africa in European politics. 

The five categories might sound rather limiting, but the stories are wide-ranging, often with engaging characters. A fascinating fragment from a world where a monitored digital currency with an AI guiding the market improves not just the economy but how people feel about it ends with politicians and spin doctors treating credible death threats against activist artists (bearing something of a resemblance to the KLF) as both a terrible thing and an excellent opportunity. A dryly written pitch-perfect official government report documents how public response to a high-profile crime can lead to policy changes that don’t catch kidnappers but do get people breaking the recycling rules prosecuted. 

There are gentle musings about what society and relationships look like when everyone looks like they’re in their twenties till they die, or whether the granny who teaches neighbourhood kids to take off their smartglasses and learn to grow food might also be using AI for a more direct approach to income redistribution. A frustrated slime mould computer meets an ethical natural computing researcher who can’t get anyone to listen to his solutions. 

But my absolute favourite story is a delightful wish fulfilment fantasy about the exploitative billionaires sailing off in a floating sovereign nation for which they’ve forgotten to arrange proper plumbing and end up hoisted by their own propaganda petard. 

The commentaries add background and expertise to the issues raised in the stories: as with the previous volume, they sometimes run the risk of talking down to the reader by telling them what’s in the stories they’ve just read but the 25 stories here are longer and more substantial than those in 22 Ideas About the Future, and there’s more for the experts to dig into (although I did wonder if replies from the writers would have added an extra layer). 

One essay combines a fascinating potted history of gold, barter, and commodities with the trenchant criticism of the extractive ‘own nothing’ world of financialization (explaining tokens in a way that made me understand them much better and like them even less) to form a perceptive critique of the rather simplistic broad brush depiction of resistance in one story, which would be a better reminder that not everyone will like a system of social credit (even if it benefits them) if it gave a better account of where they got the money to build the resistance from. Another, places realistic developments in energy production firmly in the context of national interests, climate refugees and social tensions.

There’s also welcome pushback to some rather irrational fears about overly interventionist medical technology that paint hormone replacement technology as altering people at so fundamental a level they turn into someone smooth and artificial. Many stories dig into the ethics of AI: augmented reality and assistive AI help autistic children navigate a confusing world that’s too loud and too fast, but what happens when they have to leave school and leave the proprietary technology behind? The commentary here asks perceptive questions about power imbalance and whether it matters if we perceive AIs as if they experience emotions and desire.

Some commentary sadly dates very quickly; in the short time since writing, the question of ‘who would try to argue now that we should ban IVF’ turns out to be the Republican party. Similarly, one or two of the imagined fictional futures lag behind experiences that are already widespread. Also, the delightful discovery of Victorian predictions of not just credit cards, but women with credit cards, within an unusually clear explanation of what money actually is, is slightly spoiled by introducing some confusion over the date of Edward de Bono’s somewhat prescient description of what we’d now call digital tokens. 

As with the first collection, many of the stories here are dystopian to some degree, describing ‘green capitalism’ and often authoritarian approaches that concentrate suffering and misery on the poorest. Of course, tension makes stories compelling, utopias are hard to make interesting and many of the stories offer hope and possibility in the cracks. The luxury of imagining a future isn’t always possible for people finding the present hard enough to deal with and some of the stories try to give that perspective, which isn’t always easy to read.

The SFF fans may not entirely recognise the potted history of the genre in the introduction, but this is certainly an interesting moment to look back at the progression from predictions of gleaming technological utopias to the gritty but still glittering cyberpunk, that now seems rather optimistic, and on to the possible futures of a world that might be dominated by somewhere other than America. 

In the end, the commentaries underpin and unify the wide range of stories here. They don’t encompass all tomorrows, but they will leave readers with plenty to ponder.

Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk), writer and technology journalist.

All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt – https://mybook.to/atf

ISBN: Hardback: 978-1739593926; Paperback: 978-1739593933; eBook: 978-1739593940