FUTURE ARTIFACTS: Stories
KAMERON HURLEY
Apex Book Company (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook, available now
Rating:
The Publisher Says: Brutal. Devastating. Dangerous.
Join an investigation into a cruel and heartless leader … crawl through filth and mud to escape biological warfare … team up with time-traveling soldiers faced with potentially life-altering instructions.
Kameron Hurley, award-winning author and expert in the future of war and resistance movements, has created eighteen exhilarating tales giving glimpses into the warfare of tomorrow.
A bleak future, yet there is hope for us. With Hurley’s characteristic grim optimism, her characters fight for what they believe is right. They exhibit degrees of humanity only possible in the worst of circumstances. It is these characters, driven by a murky sense of honor and written with sincere, deep empathy, that make Future Artifacts: Stories a powerful collection you won’t soon forget.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Kameron Hurley is one badass speculative fictioneer. I can't think of too many writers active so long and with so many subgenres under their belt who would straight up write war stories in a science-fictional future. "Bold" sums it up. She isn't faking for the "optimism = pacifism" false dichotomy. No future with humanity in it won't have some sort of war. Low-tech or high-, it will involve killing strangers and mourning lovers and not one damned thing will change because of it. Just like war here-and-now.
The wars her characters fight aren't all external, or even visible. Wars they are nonetheless.
As I know you're expecting to happen, the Bryce Method affords us the opportunity to check in with the bits that make the whole battleship bob along.
Sky Boys plopped the first wet, steaming w-bomb on my resisting, complaining head at 5%.
"You think you can exploit our bodies without any consequences? That is a fool's dream. A tyrant's dream. The people on the continent have the same dream about you, you know."
"It's another thing entirely."
"Someday you will wake from that dream."
Abijah is a tired, PTSD-ridden former child soldier and veteran of a dead war that her side didn't win or lose by enough to do more than make the status quo work while shoving the catastrophic collapse far enough off to keep herself in work and booze. She is doing a job for a sleazy operator, dealing with a spoiled, selfish teenaged daughter, and trying to cope with a dying relationship that gives her more than she wants but not what she needs. Death has her communication-fob pattern on fast dupe. Gimme more. 4*
Overdark feeds a soul into the unforgiving maw of Knowledge but without information. A woman with a terrible job on a generation ship makes the discovery that will change her life; unlike those who've made that discovery before her, she makes a fuss about it. No one can sleep through this kind of ruction, she reasons.
Can they? Lesson for The Resistance. 4*
The Judgment of Gods and Monsters
Broker of Souls
The One We Feed
Corpse Soldier
Levianthan
Unblooded
The Skulls of Our Fathers
Body Politic
We Burn
Antibodies
The Traitor Lords
Wonder Maul Doll
Our Prisoners, the Stars
The Body Remembers
Moontide
Citizen of Elsewhen
