Review | Four new provocative science fiction visions of the future

Glenn Taylor won the Juniper Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Songs of Betty Baach,” about a 300-year-old woman who narrates her life story in 2038. Betty is not your lovable grandma; she’s a bomb-thrower, nudist and reformed murderer. Set in Taylor’s native West Virginia, this novel is divided into “songs” that tackle different aspects of Betty’s life, jumping around in time and slowly revealing a complex pattern of loss and renewal. This non-chronological structure teases out connections between the world of slavery into which Betty was born and the chaos that accompanies climate change in the 2030s.

“Betty Baach” has an aggressive quirkiness (many chapters end with an aphorism like, “I am a llama and you are too”) that peels back to reveal a core of rage. It demands to be read more than once, if only to appreciate such passages as “Imagination is like memory, only stronger. It is equal parts mercy and hurt.”

Lavanya Lakshminarayan breathes new life into dystopia with her debut, “The Ten Percent Thief” (previously published in India as “Analog/Virtual”). This set of linked short stories features a host of characters who struggle to fit into a rigid hierarchy — or plot a rebellion. In Lakshminarayan’s future version of Bangalore, known as Apex City, the top 20 percent enjoy a VR-enhanced wonderland while the rest of humanity lives in relative squalor.

While this volume might leave you craving a single compelling protagonist, its clever worldbuilding and sardonic wit more than compensate. In one tale, a virtual program reconfigures a character’s opinions about pop culture, allowing him to move up in society. In another, a brain implant nudges Aditi to break up with her lower-status boyfriend. “The Ten Percent Thief” slyly suggests that what we call “meritocracy” might just be conformity and status games.

You’ll find a similar separation of humanity in Al Hess’s “World Running Down”: Salt Lake City has become a high-tech wonderland, surrounded by a bandit- and scavenger-populated wasteland. Despite its gloomy title, “World Running Down” is primarily a sweet romance between a transgender scavenger named Valentine and an artificial intelligence named Osric who’s been placed in an android body against his will. Both are uncomfortable with their bodies for very different reasons, lending their flirtation a nervy vulnerability.

Many of the best futuristic stories of late have dealt with the ethics of treating self-aware virtual minds as property. Hess finds some fascinating new ways to explore these topics through the story of Osric and Valentine searching for missing android sex workers in the wilderness. Hess’s dystopia is kinder than Lakshminarayan’s, but he satisfyingly explores the complexity of building your identity in a world of winners and losers.

Visions of the future almost inevitably touch on our fraying relationship with nature, but it’s rare to find such a bold exploration of this topic as we do in the novella “Feed Them Silence” by Lee Mandelo. A scientist named Sean has an experimental procedure to link her brain with that of one of the few surviving wolves, so she can experience what it’s like to be a wolf. It’s all fun and games — until winter comes and the wolves starve.

Mandelo raises tough questions about scientific ethics, but his depiction of a wolf pack sliding toward extinction, and the scientist who begins to identify too much with one of them, leaves a mark. If “Feed Them Silence” leaves you with uneasy questions rather than neat epiphanies, that’s probably ideal. After all, the best thing a story of the future can do right now is leave you wondering — and perhaps give you some inspiration to help avoid some of these worst-case scenarios.