Metatropolis
Ed. John Scalzi
Subterranean Press, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-1596062382
264 pages; $30.00

I read a great deal of fantasy, horror and slipstream/interstitial work, more than hard science fiction. That’s not because I don’t like hard science fiction, but because for me it takes a bit of work to keep up with the science. I like science fiction that really works; that is, I actually learn something about the real world. That doesn’t always happen, of course, because science fiction (as opposed to fiction about science) always extrapolates, and I can get some weird ideas about the state of science if I’m not paying sufficiently close attention. But often, I’ll learn about something like the nature of neutron stars (Robert L. Forward’s Dragon's Egg, for instance) or the implications of the theory of time travel (Gregory Benford’s Timescape).

Metatropolis, John Scalzi’s latest project, is a book of stories about how the world works after globalization collapses all of the world’s great economies and global warming works its havoc. It is, if you will, hard science fiction in which the science is economics.

Metatropolis was first conceived as an audio book for Audible.com. Five authors – Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi and Karl Schroeder – got together and created a vision of our world as it might exist not so far in the future. More specifically, they envisioned what cities might look like after the collapse of nations. Each story is enriched by every other story, so that when you close the book, you have a world in your brain that wasn’t there before. And what, you wonder, would be your contribution to such a world? Because this world could come about in our lifetimes, it is worth thinking about.

Jay Lake’s story, “In the Forests of the Night,” opens the book. Lake obviously undertook to write a story specially shaped to be read aloud; I read this entire story with a voice in my head telling the tale. The cadences of the language lend themselves beautifully to a storyteller. The story itself is about Cascadiopolis, a new city-state that extends from Portland, Oregon up to Vancouver, British Columbia. Some of the city is a stealth city, where people live in the midst of the forest and make do with very little, all of which is shared; it is a world without personal material possessions, for the most part. Every scientific discovery made in this stealth city is liberated for everyone in the world to share (an open-source modality), rather than having every penny of profit wrung out of it by patenting it and licensing it to others. Not surprisingly, corporations are opposed to open sourcing, to technological advances available to the world for free. They want any kind of innovation for themselves, to manufacture new products, to sell them and to make as much money as possible, damn the consequences to those who can’t afford the technology. So the stealth city is the target of spies, and this story is about them.

Tobias Buckell’s “Stochasti-City” is set in the remains of Detroit, which may well be a fully-failed city already, in our world. Here, many people make money by “turking” – obtaining a job through a directory similar to (but much advanced from) Craig’s List – or, much more simply, because an employer has left a job to be done in a place where a likely candidate will find it. The job can involve no more than delivering a package from one place to another (so the person who wants the package delivered would simply leave it at a street corner and depend on someone going in the right direction to pick it up and deliver it for the price shown on the tag). Or it can involve something much more involved, like providing security for a group that is attempting to take over a vacated skyscraper and turn it into a vertical farm. Buckell’s hero is trying to do the latter. The implications are vast: skyscrapers as farms is an idea that is quite wonderful all by itself, and Buckell explains it well.

Elizabeth Bear’s contribution is “The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood,” about a woman who is trying to hide her stepdaughter from her ex-husband. But it’s also a story about another part of Detroit, where the inhabitants recycle absolutely everything and personally own absolutely nothing. Does everyone on your block really need his or her own lawnmower, for instance? It’s used for about two hours each week. What if each block had a communal lawnmower? Or what if one person mowed all the lawns one week, and then was off the hook for the next 10 weeks while others took on the chore? These people live in former cube farms without owning them; they stay while they need to stay and move to somewhere else when they need to move. The people who populate this – well, it’s really a commune, of sorts – know that communes don’t have the best history, but they’ve taken steps to make sure that everyone works in this one, and that everyone shares. There’s a part of me that would very much love to live in this version of Detroit.

John Scalzi’s story, “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis” also lends itself to an oral reading with a great use of language, despite the tongue-twisting Latin of the title. Scalzi packs a lot more laughter into his story of New St. Louis, where everyone has to work or she or he is evicted from the city. No exceptions, not even for Benjamin Washington, the son of a member of the city’s executive board. Jobs are assigned on the basis of one’s performance on an aptitude test and an interview. Unfortunately, Benjamin didn’t take his test until a year after finishing school, and so didn’t perform well; and he came across as something of a jerk in his interview. The job he winds up with is not exactly a prize, but from that job hangs a tale, well told.

The final story, “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder, is a true tour de force. It is about a city – or, rather, nested cities – that exist only in cyberspace, as an overlay on the real world. In these cities, currency has a different meaning and different uses; people dress differently; and people can “ride” other people, using a body in another location to accomplish a task, with the permission of the owner of the body. It is a marvelous vision of how something as simple as a role-playing game can turn into a genuine way of living. It is more realistic in its execution than other virtual reality stories I’ve read or seen in the movies, both because of its use of intelligent technology that seems genuinely possible and because it does not require that those who participate in the virtual reality completely abandon the “real” world. Scalzi says in his introduction to the story, “[I]f your brain hasn’t already been blown by now, it’s going to get cracked wide open here.” He’s not kidding. This story has me very eager to read whatever else Karl Schroeder has on offer, and I’m very happy to see Lady of Mazes and Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga are on my shelves.

In fact, this entire collection makes me want to read whatever I can get from each of these authors. The imagination in evidence in this book of shared world tales is truly fantastic. The old “sense of wonder” you used to hear about as the province of hard science fiction is very much in evidence here.

I have one serious complaint about the book: the proofreading is terrible. It pulls you right out of the story to see an error like a change in the person in which a story is told (Scalzi’s story, told in the first person, abruptly changes to third person and back again at one point). I have noticed this before about books published by Subterranean Press, a small press that publishes excellent work, often in beautiful editions and for premium prices. When one spends $30 for a book of five short stories in a “deluxe hardcover edition,” as this is billed, one expects a near-perfect product. The content of this book is indeed outstanding. It is a shame that technical details get in the way of the storytelling.