Vital Signals: Virtual Futures Near-Future Fictions edited by Dan O’Hara, Tom Ward, Stephen Oram

(NewCon Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Duncan Lawie

The introduction to this collection left me with a heavy heart. It is full of sentences: “We are attempting to provide tentative situations that may be manufactured by the activities of the present.” So academic. Nevertheless, the idea of the book is intriguing. Vital Signals is a compilation of many short, short stories on the near future by writers from a variety of backgrounds, including some familiar SF names.

One of the advantages of stories of no more than four pages is that they are out of the way quickly. It’s no great effort to read several mediocre stories in a row. However, this also led to my gradual lowering of expectations as I worked my way through this volume. Perhaps tortured sentence structures or passive voice have their own tale to tell about disconnection from reality or the narrator’s own fears, but the multiple stories written in this way were difficult to enjoy or appreciate.

Continue reading…

Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.