Meet Me in the Future

With snapshots of futures that haunt, obsess, or tantalize, this collection from Hugo-winner Hurley (The Light Brigade) offers 16 hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic. Undermining the admiration for military adventure that pervades much science fiction, “The Red Secretary” presents a world that indulges in war and then purges all its practitioners, cyclically. In “The War of Heroes,” underdogs who rise up to defeat the oppressor discover that “[a] Hero is one who not only slays monsters, but creates monsters to slay.” The stories that celebrate fighting monsters acknowledge that losing is no shame (in “Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!”, a callback to the work of SF legend James Tiptree Jr.) and that identity is a matter of choice more than genetics (in “The Fisherman and the Pig”). Hurley works at the edges of genres, mixing SF with detective noir (“The Sinners and the Sea,” “Garda”), military adventure (“The Light Brigade,” “The Improbable War”), and fantasy quest (“The Plague Givers”) in ways that refresh the motifs of the mixed fictions. In “Tumbledown,” the benefit of making hard choices is getting to tell the stories “about the world we’ll make together,” and readers will eagerly follow Hurley into these possible worlds and many more. Agent: Hannah Bowman, Liza Dawson Assoc. (Aug.)