Yzabel / June 25, 2013

Diverse Energies by Tobias S. Buckell

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

“No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. No one can doubt that cooperation in the pursuit of knowledge must lead to freedom of the mind and freedom of the soul.”
—President John F. Kennedy, from a speech at University of California, March 23, 1962

In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful.

In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds. Take a journey through time from a nuclear nightmare of the past to society’s far future beyond Earth with these eleven stories by masters of speculative fiction. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malinda Lo, Cindy Pon, Daniel H. Wilson, and more.

Review:

I got an ARC of this anthology through NetGalley last year, and have just realised I didn’t post a review back then—I suspect I finished it at a moment I didn’t have time to do so, and then it unfortunately slipped my mind.

Most of the works I read are pretty much Caucasian-centred, and I thought this book would provide me with a nice change, as well as with an opportunity to learn more about some cultures I’m not too familiar with—I’m utterly convinced that learning this way, for someone like me, is a solid bridge to wanting to learn more afterwards, and this han’t proved wrong yet. The different cultural points of view developed in the dystopian stories here turned out interesting, and shed light on some very logical aspects I probably wouldn’t have considered at first, due to my own ignorance.

Of course, as is mostly the case in anthologies, some stories I enjoyed more than others (“Next Door”, “Solitude” and “The Last Day” being my favourite ones), but as a whole, “Diverse Energies” holds its ground with a steady momentum, and doesn’t disappoint. At the same time, I also appreciated that this book didn’t give the impression of being the proverbial stone thrown to get the pond to ripple: it was, all that simply, logical, which is in my opinion a very strong point.