Tildes Book Club discussion - May 2025 - A People's Future of the United States
This is the fourteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing A People's Future of the United States. Our next book will be A House with Good Bones by Kingfisher at the end of June
This was our first collection of short stories. Please feel free to discuss any story you read regardless of whether you finished the collection.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.
My thoughts:
I rated it the book 2.75 / 5 in my tracker. I try to keep my ratings normalized so that's just a tad below average. I tend to rate most collections of short stories towards the middle, kind of unavoidable that some stories jive and some don't..
The stories were really rough at the start. I found myself wondering after a couple of them why I decided to read this. But it picked up after a while and near the end you got a bit of variety. It's surprisingly mono-tonal for a multi-author anthology.
It reminds me of the book 2020 Vision, which was a collection of short stories from various authors in the 70s who were tasked to each come up with a story representing what the world might be like in the distant year 2020. They were asked to keep it somewhat grounded -- they were scifi authors after all. None of the stories came very close to the real thing (a distinct lack of covid for one). But I don't think they were really trying to.
2020 had a lot of cold war era anxieties about nukes and communism taking over. This book is even more full of anxieties, except with modern flavor. The core theme that's the same between 2020 and The People's Future is the fear of an oppressive government controlling us through the use of technology. I suppose it's comforting that things haven't really changed that much over the past 50 years.
I rated and noted/quasi-reviewed each story as I went as there would be no way I'd remember them all otherwise. Scores I give below are relative to the other stories and purely feels-based immediately after reading them.
Story breakdown
Bookstore at the end of America
2 star
Bit cheesy. Satire of both sides a bit on the nose/over the top. Mutual peace via fantasy novel is painful. Felt mixed on the representations of the two sides combined with the feigned neutrality. Also the mental picture of giant mech battles took me out of any tension.
Our aim is not to die
1 star
The one with the autistic person in the black mirror chinese social credit system with AI magically solving everything. Laid on a bit thick to be honest. The evil futuristic oppressive government is still allowing VPNs despite clearly having tracking inside the phone's OS itself? And your defense is to hide the icon that's otherwise plainly marked VPN? Wasn't impressed with the plot.
The wall
4 star
Mexican one about brain-controlled ICE and US going evil empire. Liked it. To the point and didn't try to be too much but left a feeling of there being a bigger world and story there. Good teaser. The cage bits reminds me a little of that bad movie version of I Am Legend.
Read after burning
3 star
The one with people copying books via tattoos to preserve them. Then they all have a mass immolation. It's a decent enough idea but wasn't too impressed by the story's implementation. Either needs to be shorter or longer, current length just says a bunch of pointless meandering since there's not enough words to actually establish anything. The character and world building side of it just didn't really work for me.
I think the story would be a lot more interesting if it was then followed up by the reverse angle. An extremist religious cult is discovered buried underground that believes in occult magic, defiles their dead, hides their children, uses the flesh of babies as books, then goes full Jonestown when law enforcement tries to intervene. The kid, Enry, would be saved and slowly realized he was lied to and there wasn't actually a world full of evil monsters outlawing books above him, his family was just sovereign citizen nuts. And probably Needles shot his dad to prevent him taking Enry away from the "lifestyle"
Chapter 5: Disruption and continuity
3 star
...review...neutral...@1338...almost sarcastic...
It was saturday night, I guess that makes it alright
5 star
The one where sex sends you to the upside down and Vermont/Mass are underwater, leaving Albany on the coast. Actually interesting and enjoyable to read.
Attachment Disorder
4 star
The one with aging former plague carriers being hunted.
Enjoyable to read. I don't entirely know that I understand the background plot. The government used them to make a disease that broke containment, then used them to cure it. The government let that be public knowledge then decided to set aside a reservation for them, let them live their life out free but on a leash, and even created test tube children to keep them happy. Why didn't the government just kill them? Or keep them locked up? Why spend many millions to give your crime against humanity freedom? They already cured the disease. Does the government think it could come back and they'd need to recure it? If so why not keep them locked up somewhere secure where "extremists" can't try to kill them? Just seems like a hugely expensive security risk for no benefit besides humanity by a government that clearly doesn't care about humanity.
By his bootstraps
1 star
Literally just that meme with the flying cars labeled "the world if Europe hadn't colonized America".
Riverbed
3 star
The one with a Sikh woman returning to an internment camp to recover her brother's remains.
Assuming it was intentional and not picked out of a hat, I liked the reference to Taft's executive order 1116 and Panama Canal Zone. Fit well with the conceit of the story.
The way Khadija treated the driver made me dislike her a bit but I suppose it's all meant to be a microcosm.
Also, damn that's some inflation.
What Maya Found There
2 star
Don't think I've ever read fugly in a book before.
Didn't care for this one very much. Weird to try and have something grounded and then throw in essentially TMNT enemies. And hard to have any sympathy for Maya when the main thing we know about her is that she roofies people. From what we see in the short story itself, putting aside the broader context of the book and even broader tropes, she seems like the main villain. And not on a way I feel like the author actually intended.
The Referendum
3 star
Felt incomplete. Like they had laid the world building and just starting the overall plot of them helping the boy... But then it stops. Like a teaser for the short story rather than the short story itself.
I assume this was written in 2018 given the 2019 copyright, setting it so close in the future is an interesting choice. Made it feel simultaneously more and less real.
"Darla said Darla-ly" was my favorite snippet and I was liking the characters/their relationship. Just sad it just stopped there.
Calendar girl
4 star
Enjoyable read. The very end was a bit cheesily happy but beyond that no notes. Good simple concept for a short story and good enough twist at the end. A solid story
The synapse will free us from ourselves
5 star
I like how the author used repetition. For the first half I was debating whether the main character was a robot before the meta aspect became clear. Also took me a second to realize it was a conversion therapy thing and not a more general brainwashing/compliance thing. Very good concept and obvious in hindsight, but excellent writing and use of tools behind it.
0.1
2 star
The one that's children of men but with Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
I appreciate this one tried to do something different from the other stories. And it came at a good time too, I was beginning to think all the stories were feeling the same besides like the first one. Good to have a very different sort of bleak dystopian future to mix things up. But it didn't land for me. It felt like it was trying to do too much and not really developing it, just throwing things out there that weren't really necessary and didn't add to the story.
The Blindfold
3 star
Sorta retro with the magnetic hard drives and Hackers style hacking, concluded with a ocean's eleven style reveal. Didn't love it but didn't hate it.
No algorithms in the world
4 star
There are non-dystopians stories in this book! The one with UBI post-scarcity where it all works out but the millenials/zoomers are the boomers now. Already feels a little nostalgic with the "top google result" thing, nowadays actual search results are rarely the first thing anymore. But a pleasant enough read, liked it didn't love it.
Esperanto
5 star
The one with mandatory AR avatars in an experimental commune.
I'm not sure how to feel, what more can you ask for? Simple enough concept. The end is pure cheese but it's written well.
Rome
3 star
A libertarian dystopia! Some real variety in the dystopias, finally! Title is interesting, I know "Rome burns" is a thing but feels like there's some deeper meaning there I'm missing. The endless wildfires over recent years makes this seem hardly future facing aside from the libertarian bit mentioned in side conversation. The relationship drama bit felt like filler or at least like an augment.
Give me cornbread or give me death
2 star
The dragon one. Not much to it. Dragons, including in modern day, has been done so many times in the past decade... hard not to judge this by the ones that did it better. And this one wasn't impressive to me.
Good news bad news
1 star
The one with racist iPhone robot. Was this meant to be funny? I felt optimistic at the first page as racial bias in ML models is a real thing. I thought "ooh this one might be painfully realistic." Then it went really weird and added Ents for some reason.
What you sow
N/A
Skipped due to lack of capitalization. (to be honest I was feeling a bit tired and grumpy at the time)
A history of barbed wire
4 star
The one with a dead boy in barbed wire.
Leaves a lot of world building loose ends but those don't really matter to the story. Like how it mixes in the scifi elements as just elements and leaves the core story timeless. The reversal of the reservation is interesting.
The sun in exile
3 star
On the surface it's a climate change related farce. But it's another one I suspect is a bit deeper than I'm consciously giving it credit for. I know there's some famous stories about suing God or similar non-human things, not quite sure if this is directly referencing one of them.
Harmony
3 star
When the HOA sucks so much that you move into a ghost town instead. Basically that nostalgic dream of buying a bunch of houses in a big clump with all your friends. Cozy but hardly feels like a complete story.
Now wait for this week.
4 star
An OK story, I do like time loops. Guessing the looping was a metaphor for the effects of trauma given the "me too" theme. Or maybe the constant deja-vu from hearing the same sort of stories over and over again. Or the fact that the stories come out but nothing changes so they keep coming. Probably the "best" story but didn't enjoy it subjectively as much as some others.
Thanks for putting in the time to share all of this!
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What was your favorite story and why?
The Synapse Will Free Us From Ourselves was great. Had a Black Mirror vibe that I’m sort of a sucker for. But I think Attachment Disorder might have been my favorite? I think I’m a sucker for the challenged mother/daughter relationship — The Broken Earth is probably my favorite book series. Also, I think that I had the easiest time suspending my disbelief. Near future speculative fiction feels so hard to get right!
I also really enjoyed Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death (it was just so fun), and A History of Barbed Wire was devastating but really well done. Damn, and also Harmony and Now Wait for This Week. I liked a lot of these!!
What You Sow was not my favorite story but I think I am the most curious about its world?? Like I would read a whole novel in that universe. Great world building.
What was your least favorite story and why?
0.1 by Gabby Rivera was the only story I didn’t read all of the way through. The writing felt really clunky to me, and the premise was so on the nose.
I just checked the publication date after reading this story because it felt so on the nose - February 2019. The plague stories' authors had no idea how close to the mark they were!
(So far this has been only one of a few stories I've liked but it also seems to be one of only a few hopeful stories, so...)
This is the one story that was difficult for me to read through. The way it was written was jarring to me and it felt a little incomprehensible.
What story do you want to discuss in this forum? Why?
Do you have thoughts about the collection? The editorial choices? Was this collection what you expected?
Ok so… I think I’m learning (from this collection and from The Ministry for the Future) that near-future fiction is really hard. The problem is that I had a lot of trouble suspending my disbelief, because ultimately I’m too familiar with the starting point for the universe. Like when we’re several hundred or thousand years in the future, authors can sort of make whatever decisions about technology they want and I can swallow it. But I know a lot about modern technology and culture, so when an author takes liberties with a story that takes place only a few generations from now, my brain really latches on to it.
Would you look for other work by any of these authors?
I actually did note down a couple authors who wrote stories I wished were longer. I have not yet gone through to see what longer format books they have written, but it's on my list of things to do.
Would you recommend more collections of short stories
to this book group? How did the format of short story collection work for you as a reader?
I love short story collections / anthologies and think they can actually work really really well for book club, since they can be read in much more manageable chunks, and can also provide more variety than a novella. But APFotUS unfortunately touched on so many dark and depressing modern American political themes which hit way too close to home for me, especially given the current political climate, that I simply couldn't handle it. :(
p.s. Speaking of short story collections though, as much as I adore Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle so am looking forward to rereading it in August, and discussing it here on Tildes... I kinda wish Welcome the Monkey House was chosen instead since it's my all-time favorite short story collection. Vonnegut was an amazing all-around author and essayist, but he really shone brightest as a short story author, IMO. The amount of amazing and interesting short story premises/concepts he came up with in his lifetime is truly staggering. He is up there with the likes of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Ellison, PKD, etc.
Yeah, this was just barely under the threshold for me. It was very dark. Even the stories that were “hopeful” were so grim — usually “people will keep fighting even when it gets much worse,” which isn’t exactly my definition of hopeful (especially in the current moment, where some of these stories felt particularly imminent).
Before this I hadn't really read a collection of short stories for maybe a decade. I'm maybe a third of the way through right now, and everything so far feels unfinished to me. It almost feels like the authors had a maximum word count and cut the stories off wherever there was a breaking point before then.
I think this may be a point in time thing for me, though. I used to love reading Ray Bradbury collections and I really enjoyed the Jeeves stories, as well.
I also felt this way about most of the stories toward the beginning — I can’t tell if it got better or I got used to it, but I enjoyed the back half of the collection much more!
There very well may have been one. This is a collection from multiple authors, so I'm guessing there were guidelines that included a maximum word count so that the book wouldn't get too long, and all the writers would have space. I've tried writing for contests with themes before, and I've definitely struggled to tell the story I wanted within the limited word counts. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened here too, especially with a theme that hits so close to home for everyone.
To that end, short story collections by a single author will probably have more variety in length since they're not sticking to a hard limit, which means the author will have the time to tell the story they want. I know Stephen King has anthologies that include both short stories and novellas. So you might still enjoy collections that aren't a bunch of authors trying to fit a specific theme.
I highly recommend Jemisin's How Long Til Black Future Month collection and Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories in a similar vein.
I like reading short stories online but prefer author collections generally to ones from multiple authors but it varies
I skipped out on this one (and admittedly all of them so far for varying reasons, but I plan to read next month's book!!), but I think anthologies can work really well. It's easy to read one story at a time, and you don't need to worry about forgetting key details if you have to stop for whatever reason. Then even if people don't finish the whole book for whatever reason, they can still discuss the parts they did read.
Though maybe in the future, we should avoid a heavily or super-specifically themed collection like this one? Since uh, seems like a lot of people decided against reading this one due to the themes hitting way too close to home with current events... One of the benefits of short story collections is there's usually a variety so some stories can appeal more to different tastes or have different moods. And this time... Well, seems like it's all just variations of dread for the near future.
What would you like to ask other people who have read this collection of stories, or readers of a particular story?
My big question for folks after looking up the publication date of this collection (February 2019): how do you think your perception of these works would have differed if you had read this before the covid-19 pandemic arose?