Metatropolis: 5 takes on the urban near future
June 12th, 2010 at 1:11 am ETI finished reading Metatropolis tonight, an anthology of interrelated dystopian-future urbanist short stories edited by John Scalzi. (I heard about it on his blog.) The book is just out in the US — I preordered it in hardcover, which gives you a sense of how eagerly I awaited it — and I bumped it ahead of everything else in the queue, even the books that I’d already started, and read it beginning to end.
I wasn’t disappointed. This is a kind of sci-fi I’ve always liked: urban and social in orientation, set in a future or alternative present that’s a recognizable evolution (or imaginary transformation) of our own. In this case the transformation is far less than you’d see in, say, Ursula Le Guin; this is fully recognizable as our realistic near future, the way that (say) Oryx and Crake is.
It doesn’t hurt that there’s nanotechnology here and there, along with Internet goggles (described in detail as to their function) that would fit right into a Rudy Rucker or Cory Doctorow story.
The basic premise is that we’re in a postindustrial near future, or at least that resource shortages and climate change and the inevitable social strife have started taking their toll. The oil-based industrial economy is obviously still functioning in the background, to some degree for some people, but we’re a fair distance along a long road of decline toward Jim Kunstler’s post-industrial America. And those who can are taking refuge in isolated, protected urban arcologies — built around or on the bones of the old American cities — that are very different from one another.
According to Scalzi’s intro, the five of them got together ahead of time to set the ground rules and define the rough social structure of their not-too-distant-future world, and although the five stories are very different, there’s enough thematic continuity running through them that you do indeed feel like they’re five different takes on the same set of social conditions in the same world at the same time. Great job.
Bonus: implied gay social relations in two of the stories, in both instances treated so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it and had to back up to be sure. Go team!
Incidentally, this project was an audiobook first and a book afterwards; to some of you that will be notable, but as I will never have either the time or the patience for an audiobook, it’s merely one fact among many others to me.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
