Josh Likes Sci-Fi Blah Blah Blah

So, I accidentally read more words that can only be described as speculative fiction. As has been said before, by me, right here, spec fiction is the fancy new term for sci-fi/fantasy, used especially to describe things that are not traditional rocket-to-the-stars (think Larry Niven) or sword-and-sorcery (think Robert Jor...well, most of last year's entries, I guess). In this case, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern issue 32. McSweeney's are cleverly packaged short story collections by popular and up and coming fiction writers, all writing on one theme. They come out, well, quarterly, and over the summer when I was working three jobs and making good money, I treated myself to a combination Believer/McSweeney's combo subscription. 32 was the first "issue" that came, and, coincidentally enough, this quarter's theme was simply "2024" (which turned out to mean that every story was set in the year 2024).

As this is a story collection, featuring 10 stories by 10 different authors (including names someone might recognize like Jim Shepard and Heidi Julavits), its hard to rate it overall. Besides being set in the not-so-distant future, and being written by popular indie fiction writers who tend to have some overlapping themes (two stories are set in East L.A. and deal specifically with that locations demographics and concerns, a number of them deal with natural disasters linked directly or indirectly to global warming), one story is not necessarily leading to the other, and it's hard to judge them as a unit. I enjoyed pretty much all of them, some more than others, certainly. What I love about spec fiction, especially this type, is it deals with human concerns on a level that is a bit fantastic. The more traditional sci-fi/fantasies are mostly about big broad themes...good vs. evil, exploration and conquest, political machinations and betrayal. Most of them don't have room for nuanced looks on human beings. But these stories were all about the everyday human struggles...aging, growing apart from your spouse, dealing with the fallout of a failed relationship, making decisions as a teenager, trying to find out where you belong, etc etc, but viewed through a futuristic lens. Secrets threaten a formerly happy marriage as floods threaten to submerge all of The Netherlands. A man wants to commit suicide because he cannot forget his lover, but he wants to do it by jumping into a mysterious hole that appeared one day on Nantucket, a hole that many believe to be an interdimensional portal. A teen becomes an outcast after her blackberry, which had previously predicted the probability and outcome of every decision she made, is broken by a friend. They are stories we recognize, set in a world that is slightly different. Its the only kind of fiction for me.
well, not the only kind. but i like it a lot, okay? I promise the next two books will have 0 sci-fi components. so sue me.