Quick Sips - Terraform May 2019

It’s a fairly full May from Terraform, with five short stories taking on superheroes, robotic soldiers, historic justice, mental health, and death tourism. These are some interesting and largely bleak looks at the future, though not without exception. Though most of the stories look at a future with some huge and fundamental problems, there remains in most of them a hope. Not necessarily that humans are going to fix everything. But that people might find a way to break free of the cycles of oppression and injustice that lock the planet on a trajectory toward destruction and tragedy. They’re some cutting looks at the present through the lens of future speculation. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Terraform SF June 2018

It’s a substantial month of science fictional visions at Motherboard’s Terraform this June, with four pieces (including a novelette told in two parts). The visions of the future focus on transportation and violence. In many, people seek to navigate a world made deadly through corruption, through public and private institutions being twisted to the goals of a very few, not to make the world better but to maximize profits and avoid culpability. The stories are by and large grim and difficult, but offer some hope as well. Mainly, in saying that it might not be too late, that by tackling the issues the stories identify head on, the future could turn out brighter than this. Better. Whether or not that will happen, though, is squarely up to us. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Motherboard's Terraform March 2017

There are only two stories (that I found) from Motherboard's Terraform this month, but they pack a nice one-two punch of near-future worries. In one, art and artificial intelligence meet in a mesmerizing tale of gaze and intent. And in the second, masculinity is indeed so fragile, and apparently needs to enforce a gun culture that requires compliance or death. The pieces look at characters struggling with their environments, with the artifacts of a culture that is harmful. And things in both…don't really go as expected. It's a pair of interesting stories that I'm just going to jump right into reviewing!