Metatropolis

[sawyl]

It's been a while since I posted a book write up so here, in an attempt to get back into the habit, are a few thoughts on Metatropolis, an collection of five stories by five different writers that examine a series of possible urban futures within the context of a shared world. Although only loosely connected, the stories share the a common interest in self-organising communities and investigate how apparently ordinary individuals can come to grips with the alienation of urban (or post-urban) living in a way that allows them to discover what they are truly capable of.

The collection opens with Jay Lake's beautiful and meditative In the Forest of the Night. Set in the forest community of Cascadiopolis, it tells the story of the arrival of Tygre, a Christ-like figure, and his attempts to bring the ideas and technologies of the community to a wider audience.

The second and third stories, by Tobias Buckell and Elizabeth Bear, both take place in Detroit with the action separated by a couple of years. Buckell's Stochasti-City follows a disillusioned soldier and former bouncer as he reevaluates his life and becomes involved with a bike obsessed zero-footprint group determined to rescue the centre of the city from a Gordian knot of legal and corporate neglect. Bear's The Red in the Sky is Our Blood, while less obviously dramatic than Stochasti-City is more personal, following Cadence Grange, a bike messenger, as she comes to terms with her troubled past and throws her lot in with a self-organising communitarian group interested in building new relationships based on trust and reputation.

Unlike the rest of the stories, which focus on outsiders, John Scalzi's Utere Nihil non Extra Quiritationem Suis focuses on the ultimate insider: Will Washington, the son of a member of New St Louis' executive board. But after cruising through his first twenty years, trading heavily on his mother's reputation, Will has finally been compelled by his city's laws to get a job. Having blown off his aptitude tests and come out with a poor psych-eval, he discovers that the only job he can find is as a pig farmer on a vertical farm. As might be expected, the job proves the making of him, helps him to win his girl back, and ends with a wedding that features a pig called Lunch on the list of invitees.

The collection is capped off by Karl Schroeder's dazzling To Hie from Far Cilenia, which, with echoes of Spook Country and Snow Crash, investigates the idea of role playing games as a geolocative overlays and contrasts physical separation with virtual closeness. The story itself follows a shy Ukranian nuclear materials specialist as he get caught up in an Interpol investigation into a plutonium smuggling operation apparently being directed from deep within a series of nested virtual worlds. Teamed up with an anthropologist who is searching for her lost son, Gennady finds himself becoming more real and more self-realised as he goes further into the virtual.

As might be obvious by now, I absolutely loved Metatropolis. I thought all the pieces really worked and I liked the relay from one author to another, and found that their different and distinctive styles really complemented each other well. I also liked the way the authors tackled the various possible post-urban, post-capitalist modes of living in terms of their impact on otherwise alienated individuals — something that reminded of me of William Gibson or Kim Stanley Robinson. Yes. It really was that good.