Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

With great tenderness, poet and critic Robert Peters recalls the brief life and sudden death of his son Richard, a four-year-old called 'Feather' by his sister Meredith and brother Rob. Feather returns home ill one day from nursery school, spends the afternoon in bed with his father and his stuffed toy seal, and dies that evening. Looking back after decades on that February day in 1960, when the skinned knees, colds, and fevers of childhood were obliterated by the unthinkable-fatal meningitis-Peters see with harrowing clarity the image of that little boy in the tugboat pajamas lying still on a gurney, one bare foot visible at the edge of the sheet.

Futureland is bestselling mystery author Walter Mosley's first science fiction book since Blue Light, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Futureland's nine linked stories will provide an accessible and intelligent introduction to written science fiction for mystery or mainstream fiction fans who do not normally read the genre.

Experienced science fiction readers, however, may be less than satisfied with Futureland. Reading it, you might decide Mr. Mosley grew up reading SF, respects the genre, and still watches SF movies, but has read little SF written during or after the New Wave of the 1960s. However, something more may be going on here than a genre newcomer making beginning-SF-writer mistakes. Mr. Mosley may be deliberately, and craftily, creating SF accessible to his large non-SF readership and to others who are strangers to this genre.

Some have labeled Futureland cyberpunk, and it does present a dark, infotech-saturated, corporation-controlled future; but it is in fact an inversion of cyberpunk. Instead of that subgenre's cliche of cool, cutting-edge, street-smart, but not very believable outlaws who out-hack and outwit powerful multinational corporations, this Dante-esque collection presents outlaws and outcasts who may be street-wise, but who have little chance of overcoming the corporations and governments that control, and sometimes take, their lives. Like shockingly few other SF works, Futureland directly examines the lives of the working and the nonworking classes, the poor and the marginalized, the criminal and the criminalized. In other words, Futureland is set in a world quite alien to many veteran SF readers, and is therefore a book they should try. --Cynthia Ward