Best of British Science Fiction 2023 edited by Donna Scott (book review).

‘The Best of British Science Fiction’ is a regular annual anthology from Newcon Press that reprints the best science fiction stories published in the previous year by British authors. ‘The Best’ is, of course, a matter of taste, but editor Donna Scott generally has a pretty good selection.

Although Alastair Reynolds is more well-known for his large-scale space operas than his short stories, he excels in ‘Detonation Boulevard’. Corporate sponsors, whose flashing advertisements cover most of Io’s surface, fund Cat Catling’s 12,000-kilometer race across the moon. Her chief competition is a driver named Zimmer, who usually wins by taking a shortcut across Detonation Boulevard, a particularly unstable section of the moon’s surface. She has bionic legs, and he’s 43% augmented. Is there any room for humanity in such ruthless competition? Maybe.

For the first few pages, I didn’t enjoy Tim Lee’s ‘Vermin Control’, put off by the third-person, present-tense narration. However, I’m glad I persisted, for, despite the odd, choppy style, he tells an interesting yarn about a sentient starship carrying wealthy passengers to a far planet. There’s a hint of Schadenfreude for the less fortunate readers.

Adrian Tchaikovsky demonstrates in ‘Personal Satisfaction’ that in the era of social media, where everyone has a public profile, maintaining reputations and punishing insults is crucial. The scenario reminded me somewhat of the spacers in Asimov’s “The Naked Sun’, who never meet in person. It’s a clever story that slowly builds the world picture to a neat denouement.

In the wet United Kingdom of the future, people will live in isolated settlements, and travel between them will be extremely difficult. Chloë Quing is sent to Bluefirth, a community of domes made of microalgae and photovoltaic glass, first built as an eco-resort. They provide food and energy to other settlements, but they struggle to attract enough workers due to the unpleasant odor emanating from the bioreactors, which discourages people from settling there. “The Scent of Green” by Ana Sun is about decent humans solving problems to make a better world.

Rhiannon Gryst’s ‘A Change of Direction’ is also worth reading. In this future scenario, where the jet stream has stopped and we are all freezing, Eryn drives a diesel-powered vehicle to wind farms to keep the turbines turning. Cooper is a talented new apprentice, and it’s her first day on the job. Events reveal character in another compelling story about people at work. I’m sure humans will adapt to any climate change disaster, but it would be nice to make that unnecessary.

Machines work, too, like the supercomputer that lasts thousands of years watching humanity come and go. In Stephen Baxter’s ‘Gauguin’s Questions’, the AI operates the GLOC, the Gravitational-Wave Lunar Observatory for Cosmology, which is situated on the Moon and aims to investigate the fundamental questions of our origins and identity. What are we? Where are we going? We plan to build it in 2040, with a circumference of 200 kilometers, and it will be capable of achieving energy densities several hundred times higher than CERN. The story is somewhat reminiscent of Asimov’s ‘Multivac’ stories but from a different perspective.

There’s nothing more traditional in SF than humans landing on Titan to explore the fringes of the Solar System, as they do in ‘Boojum’ by Angus McIntyre. The Zheng He mysteriously stopped communicating sixteen years earlier, leading to the assumption that they had crash-landed on Saturn’s largest moon. Hydrocarbon snow makes up Titan’s sandy surface, while liquid hydrocarbons comprise the’sea’. What triggers the peculiar floral designs, and do they link to Zheng He’s disappearance? This first appeared in ‘Analogue’. John W. Campbell Jr. would have loved it. I did.

Tech billionaires are a reality today and likely will remain so in the future, making them suitable fodder for science fiction stories, rather than necessarily portraying them as villains. You have to admire Wayland Price in ‘Art App’ by Chris Beckett. After deciding to sell all his rare paintings, Wayland Price makes the following argument: “We create fetishes around art objects and then use them as a form of currency.” It’s sordid! It bears no connection to the realm of art. Price wants to make 3D surrealist landscapes. Gore Vidal said that the rich create their own reality, and that’s certainly the case in this intriguing tale.

There’s hardware, software, and wetware. That’s us. Professor Akai Tan and Doctor Zara Jaspin want to find a way to move human consciousness from one to the other and back again. Like all scientists, they need funding, which in this case comes from Pitka Vuorinen, founder and CEO of the Expanzior Corporation, disruptor of the disruptors who ‘took the ball off Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos and didn’t just run with it but popped it for fun and threw it back to them’. ‘Thus With A Kiss I Die’ by Robert Bagnall is about uploading human consciousness to hardware—great idea!—and undying love for The One, which I’m unsure about. Yes, it happens, but it’s very rare.

These stories piqued my interest the most, but different ones will appeal to different readers. They are all well-written and intriguing in some way. It’s beneficial to see which magazines or anthologies published each tale, as this can provide the reader with an idea of current publications they might be interested in perusing. ‘The Best Of British Science Fiction 2023’ is another anthology worth looking at for those few, those pleased few, who still like short fiction.

Eamonn Murphy

October 2024

(pub: NewCon Press. 299 page small enlarged paperback. Price: £14.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-910953-81-1. Ebook price: £ 4.99 (UK))

check out website: http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=242