Jetse de Vries, who was part of the Interzone editorial team from March 2004 until September 2008, has been very busy promoting near-future, optimistic SF all on his own initiative. Firstly there’s the Shine anthology itself, dedicated to positive SF to counteract all the doom-mongering that de Vries finds far too prevalent in contemporary SF, whether due to fashion, zeitgeist, irony, despair, or laziness. Originally taken on board by Games Workshop’s Solaris imprint, the Shine anthology will now come out in Spring 2010 under the aegis of Rebellion who have bought Solaris from GW.
Perhaps it’s a little ironic that Rebellion’s other, more established imprint, Abaddon, boasts a banner line of “Extreme Action! Aggressive Excitement!” (“the best in high-action Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy”), yet the world is full of paradoxes, consequently cheerful and affirmative Shine should actually get much more exposure than if it came out from a more perceivedly ‘literary’ imprint, where it might only preach to a small rank of the converted. Abaddon is part of Rebellion, Europe’s principal independent games developer. I gather that the purchase of Solaris completes an arc from games through comics to books; and with the purchase of Solaris comes the important Simon & Schuster book distribution network. So this all looks very positive.
Recently, in MindMeld, de Vries wrote about the difficulties of putting Shine together, one principal problem being that most SF writers seemed unwilling or uninterested, or even constitutionally incapable of producing optimistic SF set in the near future. Evidently Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden tried to initiate an upbeat SF anthology, to be called Up!, in 2002 but he couldn’t get enough upbeat stories.
Lou Anders said to de Vries at Anticipation: "Jetse, tell me how to get authors to write more exuberant fiction." Sheila Williams wrote in her editorial in the July 2008 Asimov’s, “I know that it will be hard for writers to resist turning inwards and that there is great value in holding a mirror up to our lives, but I'd also like to see stories that uplift us, show us some way out of our current circumstances, and offer us some grand new vistas of the future." Gardner Dozois wrote in the July 2009 Locus: "...although I like a well-crafted dystopian story as well as anyone else, the balance has swung too far in that direction, and nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future have become so standard in the genre that it's almost become stylized, and almost default setting, with few writers bothering to try to imagine viable human futures that somebody might actually want to live in."
Well, here’s a funny kettle of fish, with writers refusing to supply what editors would like to publish.
De Vries also casts a critical eye upon the eight flash-fictions in the September 19 2008 “Sci-fi special” issue of New Scientist prefaced by a laudable crusading article by Kim Stanley Robinson, “whose fiction is mostly upbeat”, Stan Robinson’s essay being a veritable manifesto for the vigour, variety and originality of current British SF as the true literature of our time, which literary types should pay some attention to. De Vries rates only one of the flashes as being cautiously optimistic, while five are either dystopian, apocalyptic, or both at once, and the two satirical ones (um, one by me; guilty as charged) are downbeat.
But anyway, despite problems caused by authors, the table of contents for Shine “will run the gamut from cautiously hopeful to upbeat to gloriously optimistic; settings and characters from literally all over the world (and some in space) with a good balance between western and non-western locales and points-of-view; and even a few – if never quite enough – non-Anglophone authors.”
I look forward to good cheer in Spring 2010.
Meanwhile, de Vries has established a fabulous website at http://shineanthology.wordpress.com with truly gorgeous sunshiny photos on it, and sidebar links to a wealth of resources ranging from the Japan Space Elevator Association, through Treehugger and Ecofriend and New Internationalist, to the Brookings Institute and the Foresight Institute and KurzweilAI Net – it’s like the Whole Earth Catalog! But also there’s a lovely Twitterzine, Outshine (at http://twitter.com/outshine) publishing prose poems, for which De Vries pays $5. And now there’s also the webzine DayBreak (http://daybreakmagazine.wordpress.com) which is the on-line fiction part of the Shine anthology, where de Vries publishes stories which he couldn’t fit into the print anthology itself but which he liked so much that he bought them anyway out of his own pocket. Certainly the first, Jeff Soesbe’s “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” is a complete delight (even though I did naughtily guess the ending). From late December DayBreak will also feature excerpts from Shine itself.
The energy and enterprise of Jetse de Vries deserves a lot of attention. And there’s also important information about good beers in his Twitter updates…