Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn

by Brian Merchant (Editor), Claire L. Evans (Editor), Cory Doctorow (Introduction)

An anthology of near future science fiction from VICE's acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform--in print for the first time.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we're hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we'll end up next.

Section by section--Watch/Worlds/Burn--the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents--from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno--it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Anthologies, Dystopia, Technology, Audiobook

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2022

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 4.5/5

This collection was a delight to read and very consistent in quality for a short story anthology. Obviously like with any anthology there will be hits and misses but the fact that all of these short stories were less than 20 pages and I could easily read one a day for 10-15 minutes and have a well paced short story was a delight. My experience was also enhanced but reading a story a day with two of my friends for a month and half. Its always fun buddy reading short story collections cause you really see different experiences and perspectives even for stories that didn't land. Of the three parts my favorite was probably Watch since it focused on the relationship between new tech and society and I love exploring those questions but there were hits throughout this collection for me. Highly recommend if you want some bite-size sci-fi.

[Veronica RB · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent anthology featuring prominent sci-fi writers delving into topics such as climate change, surveillance, and alternate realities. More than a futuristic collection of short stories, it’s a sobering reflection on what awaits humanity if we don’t change our ways. Some stories are more imaginative than others, but overall the thematic bundle feels like a warning, if not a prediction.

[Kristenelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really enjoyable collection. Not every story was a hit, but overall I had a lot of fun. The wonderful thing about these stories is that they are all very short. So picking it up and reading a story is a very low commitment.

There was a good mix of authors. There were some more well known names alongside names I've never heard of. I was really excited to see Meg Elison, Jeff Vandermeer, and Sarah Gailey among the authors included. Some of my favorite stories were by authors unknown to me though!

I think the first section worked best for me overall. I enjoyed all the explorations of different kinds of technology and the impacts that tech could have on the nearish future. My favorite story was in this section and explored the possible benefits of surveillance being a part of Alexa-type tech. I enjoyed the humor and snark of the prose style in this one.

I didn't love every story, but there were only a couple stories out of the whole collection that I actually disliked. So on the whole, I'd say this is a very strong collection and great for discussing with friends!

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced reader copy!

[Keegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love sci-fi and short story collections so this was like a lil treat for me, especially considering it had stories from some of my favorite authors. It's a massive short story collection from a very diverse array of sci-fi authors, including bigger name ones like Jeff VanderMeer, Sarah Gailey, and Tochi Onyebuchi.

The stories themselves range from all sorts of topics, but follow the 3 overarching themes: Watch (surveillance), Worlds (alternate possibilities), and Burn (the world is on fire).
They're about things like capitalism, feminism, climate change, singing robot heads, gentrification of death, sleeping as a job, exploiting ghosts, beautiful aliens, new vs. old humans, cats, etc. I think the topics tended to lean a bit more humorous rather than hard sci-fi, but there was still a lot of serious or interesting concepts brought up. Also a lot of weird ones, loved all the weird and out there ones. The stories are pretty short, typically 5-15 minutes long each (but there's like 50-60 stories). The shortness of them I think is partially why I enjoyed this collection a lot, I think the length is perfect for getting the point across and just giving a taste of each world/subject and how each author writes.

I really enjoyed how diverse the authors and the stories were also! I definitely picked up some new names to check out through this, I think they were chosen very well and there's something for every sci-fi lover out there. There's also some that read more like poetry, and a comic as well.

Some of my faves:
-Ernest by Geoff Manaugh
-A Song For You by Jennifer Marie Brissett
-The Fog by Elvia Wilk
-Science Fiction Ideas by Tao Lin
-Mall School by Porpentine Charity Heartscape (this was absolutely nuts)
-The Binding of Isaac by Tochi Onyebuchi
-The Wretched and The Beautiful by E. Lily Yu
-Virtual Snapshots by Tlotlo Tsamaase
-One Thousand Cranes by Zora Mai Quynh
-Always Home by Jeff VanderMeer

Honestly there was way more I enjoyed but it'd be too long to list them all. Really enjoyed this, would def recommend it to others looking to branch out to new sci-fi authors or just to those who enjoy short stories. Only 4/5 stars since out of the 50-60 stories, there was bound to be some that just didn't grab my attention as much as the others.

[Alex Wagner · Rating 2 out of 5]

could not stand this book tbh

[Zade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be the first anthology I've ever read that doesn't have a single bad story, nor a single one that doesn't fit. Comprising a great many authors from a variety of backgrounds, it somehow manages to stay on topic throughout its 500+ pages, presenting a wealth of visions of where we are now and where we might be headed.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terraform is Vice Media's speculative fiction arm, and these stories are internet age provocations, short, sharp, often intriguing. Divided into three sections, Watch on the panopticon, World with classic scifi alternative worlds, and Burn focusing on disaster, there are a lot of winners in this collection, and surprisingly little dross. My only overall thought is that with the stories coming in at around 7 pages (about 2.5 kilowords, if my memory is correct), at lot of these stories feel like the first acts of something bigger, trading a conclusion for a punchline. But on the other hand, I read them all, and any short fiction collection has at least one story that just doesn't vibe.

Some that stuck with me:
Busy - Omar El Akkad. The dystopia of make-work in a world where human labor is unnecessary, but dignity is still required.
Flyover Country - Tim Maughan. Maughan imagines an American maquiladora under a fascist regime, and the small risks that people will take for one moment of human contact.
Warning Signs - Emily L. Smith. A clever deconstruction of a vile main character in the age of #MeToo, app-enabled dating, and female-gendered AI assistants.
The Prostitute - Max Wynn. A new kind of tricking, with telepresence operated humans, and a very unusual client.
The Duchy of Toe Adam - Lincoln Michel. Dog-eared space opera with a punchline that lands!
An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried - Debbie Urbanski. Climate fiction in the vein of J.G. Ballard on at his best.

[Leah Morin · Rating 5 out of 5]

impressive to create a book of short stories where every short story is extremely depressing but the book remains readable. the world is ending and i feel fine

[Max Kimble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story anthology. Sci-Fi, speculative fiction. Most of the stories I enjoyed, some were kind of hard to get thru. A lot of them made me think about the future we're building.

[Caitlin Zurowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could only read a few of these per day because they would get to me. flyover country was so good it ruined my day and I ended up going to bed at like 8pm

[Евгений Бурмистров · Rating 3 out of 5]

Прочитал треть примерно.

Это чёрное зеркало или любовь смерть роботы: дистопичные наброски

собственно проблема та же: есть хорошие, но больше половины проходные

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD x FSG Originals for an ARC of this title.

This is the type of sci-fi anthology I love - focused, snappy, and bursting with ideas. There's a murderer's row of contributors here, with both established names and new internet favorites (since these originally appeared as part of Vice's website), organized into three somewhat focused sub-collections (Watch, Worlds, and Burn), which provide a nice throughline from story to story. Like any anthology, there are going to be stories that just. don't. work. for you (sorry, story set in a mall in borderline indecipherable future-speak), but that's par for the course, and the length of these stories means that you don't feel too bad about bailing mid-story if something wasn't for you.

The editors have done a great job curating this collection, stating their viewpoint, and delivering a collection I didn't want to put down any time I picked it back up.

[Steve Wegman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was at the library and thought I'd pick up a sci-fi short story collection. The title, "Terraform" looked interesting, but I should have read more about it before I borrowed it. The subheading is "Watch/Worlds/Burn", which should have been a clue that it might be distopian themed.

There are 43 stories, some fascinating, some clever, some that gave the sense of wonder of "how did an author think of something so bizarre", which good sci-fi can do. But most were tedious, dark, hopeless stories of how humanity has messed up the world and how the damaged remnants are mucking around. If you like that kind of thing, then this is your book. It wasn't mine.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty good set of stories with a nice amount of variety. It includes some big names, which is great. Recommended to sci-fi anthology fans.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

[Shannon (That's So Poe) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of extremely short (generally 5-10 pages) stories was really interesting in the way that it tackled a lot of dystopian ideas. Some of the stories didn't work for me, but since they were so short, it wasn't too much of an investment when that happened. Some of the stories that did work for me were fascinating in the way they examined how technology or ecological changes might impact humanity. The variety of authors and topics was also really good. Worth picking up if you're interested in short SFF works!

Content Warnings:
worker exploitation, child labor, imprisonment, enslavement, violence, gun violence, injury, war, death, genocide, body horror, dismemberment, assisted suicide, depression, suicide, illness, addiction, medical experimentation, unwanted pregnancy, forced sterilization, death of a family member, family separation, deportation, isolation, toxic family relationships, bullying, abuse, verbal abuse, sexual assault, trauma, ableism, sexism, racism, colonialism, ecological disaster, gentrification, animal cruelty/death

[Efrén Ayón · Rating 2 out of 5]

No me complace admitir que la mayoría de relatos de la colección me han decepcionado. Si bien hay unos cinco o seis que son genuinamente buenos y estimulantes, son la excepción y no la regla. Me parece razonable que la selección sea la que es y que una temática y una vibra intente relacionar todos los relatos, pero eso termina agudizando la sensación de hartazgo y hasta de cringe que algunos me dejaron. En el vacío un cuento sobre un futuro hipotético con un Uber mucho más grande y estandarizado en un escenario casi apocalíptico por el excesivo dominio corporativo es malo pero ignorable, a lado de otros cuentos que hablen de cosas similares (¡una compañía que lucra con videos de animalitos en internet! ¡un futuro donde todos trabajan para amazon!) hace que me duelan los ojos de lo mucho que los giro para arriba.

Me remito a esos cinco o seis que rescato y considero excelentes y sin los cuales este libro sería infumable.

[mica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me long enough to get through this anthology. I found the stories themselves to be, like any collection, up and down. I liked some much more than others. Overall, however, it took a while because this book is pretty grim. (I kind of want to compare it to Black Mirror). That's going to be a good selling point for some folks, but for me, I think I just got frustrated reading it over time.
I will say, I have a major side eye for whoever did the interior design of the book. I understand that this collection was initially published online, but what is the point of including double-page spread illustrations if the publication is in black and white and the illustrations look like they NEED their colour? PLUS the details and focal points are all hidden in the book's gutter! I really hope the illustrators got paid WELL, because their work was not done justice in this publication.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of very short stories collected into three sections - Watch, Worlds, and Burn. Sought this after reading Claire Evans' book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, which I really enjoyed.

I appreciated the clustering, and didn't enjoy many of the stories in the Burn section - primarily dystopian and depressing. The stories I liked the most were from authors I already read, even though I usually glanced at the author name only after finishing the story. Read this book primarily in ebook form, though I started it with the hardcover - some of the layouts just don't work in an electronic format. Both types of book were borrowed from the library.

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-rounded collection whose occasional misses are easily offset by the consistent quality of the bulk of the contributions, Terraform is also bolstered by the novelty of having several nonfiction writers try their hand at the format.

I don't think many of these stories will stay with me the way a novel like Ministry for the Future or a novella like N.K. Jemisin's Emergency Skin has, but there are several true standouts. I particularly enjoyed James Bridle's The End of Big Data, Tim Maughan's Flyover Country, Omar El Akkad's Busy, and Jeff Vandermeer's Always Home.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The overall quality of the stories, and their placement within the three main sections of the anthology, and very good. This is not a collection to be blasted through quickly if you have any tendency to depression or negativity about our future as a successful civilization. There is a ton in here that is quite on the nose, and much prognostication feels more than plausible. I don't have a lot of confidence in our current systems and institutions to make things better. I suspect many of the authors in this collection are in the same boat.

[Tyler Nam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A captivating, lively, simultaneously all too real and unrecognizable bleak look at many aspects that make up modern society - taken to the extreme. This anthology has highs and lows; some stories are captivating, clever, and with just the right amount of poignant irony, others are heady conceptual pieces that, for example, tell a story through status update notifications, others still fall flat… still, the stories that stick with me keep me thinking.

[Lucy Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

For a collection of short stories, the quality is really high. There was maybe 2 in the whole book (and there's like 50 total) that I didn't really vibe with.

Some favourites:
Exemption Packet by Rose Eveleth
The Fog by Elvia Wilk
A Song For You by Jennifer Marie Brissett
An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried by Debbie Urbanski
One Thousand Cranes by Zora Mai Quynh
Always Home by Jeff Vandermeer

[Daggry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another of my periodic attempts to appreciate the short story form. I'd thought this one would be hard, sure, but also more... hopeful. Some were on the less hopeless side, but for the most part this was pretty grim. Effective, though. Some were so effective that I moved on to the next without finishing. Still, a worthwhile collection for readers who appreciate short-form fiction and heavier themes around a changing planet.

[Cassi · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. This is a short story collection so some of my favorites were:

“One Day, I Will Die On Mars” - Paul Ford
“Warning Signs” Emily J. Smith
“Blue Monday” - Laurie Penny (cried)
“The Counselor” - Robin Sloan
“Two People” - Gus Moreno
“The Wretched and the Beautiful” - E. Lily Yu
“Always Home” - Jeff VanderMeer

[Kelsey Weekman]

Had a hard time getting into this one, and that's entirely the fault of my tiny pea brain that demands every short story collection have an audiobook so I can fall asleep listening to them like bedtime stories. Still, I enjoyed these short and smart stories penned by some of our best and smartest science-fantasy-nightmare minds.

[Ivan Josic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall a mediocre compilation of sci-fi, with vague gestures at socialist leanings, but nothing concrete in its ideology. The art is good, the styling amazing, but the actual content is lacking. Vandermeer's story is great, as well as an interesting retelling of Orpheus from Jennifer Marie Brissett, but it's not worth the 400 other pages of bleh.

[Arabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart, this collection covers an immense amount of ground envisioning what our world may look like in the coming days. The stories are mostly quite short, allowing the mind, the heart, and the spirit to breathe in between them.

[Mark Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cornucopia of great science fiction concepts, almost none of which are “stories,” with a beginning, a middle, and an end that pays off. Stand out exceptions are Emily J Smith’s “Warning Signs” and Marlee Jane Ward’s “Who’s a Good Boy?”—both of which deserve to be read and anthologized elsewhere.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are too short. Period. And there are too many of them.
I would so much prefer an anthology of fewer entries where the writers are able to explore their ideas in depth. There are quality writers and interesting premises here but that's just it... they're only premises.

[Jacob Blank · Rating 3 out of 5]

An alright collection of short science fiction. More than enough incredible authors contributing stories that offset the duds. The stories were short enough that I didn’t mind sticking with them. Mixed bag. Found myself sharing several stories with friends