Review: Echoes of the Future Edited by Aleksandr Voinov

I like stories set in the future.  I often find the way that authors of spec fiction write about how technological advances will affect our humanity in the future both depressing and uplifting, and I was interested to see how these four stories would fit into that mould.  In the end I found these stories to be four unique tales with each story having a very different tone, from the very serious warnings of how man's narcissistic nature affects basic humanity, to the more light-hearted tone of a 'straight to gay' story with a twist.

The anthology kicks off with Burn by Aleksandr Voinov.  This is a military set story of Chris, a pilot, who has had his body adapted to be able to fly a plane remotely from inside a tank.  After an error where Chris puts on the wrong flight suit, leading to a malfunction, Chris is shipped off on medical leave.  On the flight home he meets Cyril,  the man whose suit he accidentally wore and they form an attraction.  The strength in this story is in the technical details of how the pilots fly their remote planes.  There's also a cost to this as the more removed the military is from the actual target the less they seem to view the enemy as actual human beings which was a sobering thought.  There's lots of AV's usual grittiness to the sex scenes which may not appeal to all but I felt fitted in with Chris' character.  The way that the modifications of Chris' body are incorporated into his relationship with Cyril was cleverly done, making it more about the person of Chris as well as Chris as a pilot.  If I have any criticisms of the story it was the way that the ending seemed rather sudden, especially Chris' final decision.  However this was only a little niggle in what was an imaginative story.

The second story, Conduit by Kate Cotoner, was the longest and my favourite story in the anthology.  Set in Edinburgh of the future where humans with enough wealth and power can be 'upgraded' to become beautiful and immortal, it tells of fully human police detective Ismail who is called to the city museum. When he gets there he is greeted by his ex-husband who tells him that there is a lunatic AI portable personality, capable of implanting himself into any human with a interface socket, that wants to kill all the 'baseline' humans by poisoning the water.  What I liked most about this story was that many of the, frankly quite scary, ideas were very plausible.  Mankind has perfected itself so much that it sneers at those too poor or who don't wish to strive towards that perfection.  Therefore the baseline humans with no upgrades are treated like animals, forced to live in the poorer areas of the city, whilst the rich, beautiful and perfect upgrades live in opulence.  Politics is run by the rich and anyone who falls short of their ideal in any way is cast out of that society.  It was chillingly believable.  I also liked the relationship between Ismail and his ex husband Toki.  Their initial antagonism was underlined by hurt feelings and I enjoyed watching their love for each other blossom as they worked together to catch the mad-man.  Mostly though I just enjoyed the breadth and scale of the piece, which managed to incorporate politics, human relations and sociological ideas into what was also quite a taut thriller.  Marvellous.

The third story of the anthology, Rescue Me by Jude Mason, was, I felt, the weakest of the four.  It begins well with a tense opening.  Patch is deep undercover as a slave who is bought by the owner of a brothel.  His mission is to find the son of a wealthy governor to the Leetchi people, who also happens to be his lover.  His investigation has led him to this brothel where he intends to find Jad and rescue him.  The parts which worked well in the story were in the descriptions of the Leetchi people, the sweet relationship between Jad and Patch and the harshness of the conditions in the brothel.  The part that didn't work as well for me was the way that the story ended, it was a bit of a let down after the carefully built tension in the rest of the story.  This doesn't mean it was a badly written story, it wasn't, but in terms of rank order this one was my least favourite in the anthology.

The tone shifts rather in the final story, Reversal by AB Gayle.  Instead of the heavy themes and sociological ideas, this story is a light-hearted look at what happens when a computer genius is isolated on a off-world manufacturing plant and is sent a male domestic cyborg to help with the cleaning.  Sebastian lives a lonely existence and so when the package arrives from his mother, he can't help tinkering about with the cyborg's programming, especially when it looks to have quite a lot of anomalous coding.  Sebastian also finds himself strangely attracted to the Cyborg's rippling muscles and good looks and begins to wonder whether he's just very lonely or whether he may not be as straight as he thought he was.  This story was just a hoot from start to finish.  Sebastian is a very sympathetic character.  His acceptance of his isolated lifestyle was quite sad at first, but I enjoyed watching him changing the programming on the cyborg and fighting his growing lust and affection for the robot.  I was at times both touched and amused as Sebastian thinks through the moral implications of lusting and even having sex with a robot and I cheered on every change he made to the cyborg's programming.  After the serious themes of the previous stories in the anthology, this was the perfect way to end the anthology which left me with a smile on my face.

As with all anthologies Echoes of the Future was a real mix of themes and ideas which meant that there was probably something for everyone within its pages.  I greatly enjoyed reading it and would recommend the anthology, with a grade of 'Very Good', to all those who like m/m speculative romance.

Buy this book HERE.