Let me tell you the most revolutionary science fiction novel I have ever read.

That was a few years ago. 2018. When I stuffed it into my bag and went out, I didn't think much about it. This is a trivial matter, a weird title from an author who just made his debut on the adult list. For me, it was just something I read during the working day, when I had no other more urgent things to do.

I remember to open the book, fold the cover, and read the first line--

The machine said that this person should eat oranges. It also lists two other recommendations, for a total of three. Pearl promised the man when she announced the list on the screen in front of her: one, he should eat oranges regularly; two, he should work at a desk with morning light; three, the top part of his right index finger should be amputated.

after that? I am leaving. Those lines, with their perfect plain, strange specificity and the WTF kick of the entire finger, made me fall like a punch. What should I do if I don’t study? Why don't you need to know who, like, how, for God's sake, why after such a thing.

I spent most of the day listening to Katie Williams telling the machine good night. I read it straight through, and when I read it, I read it again-take your time, linger in one of the most mundane, credible, and heartbreaking science fiction novels I have ever read than I remember For a longer period of time. I wrote a review for NPR, and I think it failed to elaborate on the extent to which this book shocked me.

The reason Tell The Machine hit me so hard—the reason it entered my brain like a virus and never really left; I think it’s one of the most revolutionary types of reading in the past decade, at least Because it answers a question I have been asking science fiction: Why can it be more normal?

You will see a thousand literary novels about brothers and sisters returning home for funerals years later. You see a thousand stories about marriage failure and the carnage that followed. You will see generational stories about families in crisis, about growing up, and about getting old. I have always wondered why science fiction can't do the same thing. Why can't it handle its humans as carefully as it does with speed drives and time machines?

Williams said it can, idiot. just looking.

The most important thing about Tell The Machine is about people. No robots, no rockets, no car chases or space wars. The stakes are small (work, marriage, eating disorders), and the action is quiet. It is devastating, joyous, hopeful and sad, all on a purely human level. It asks the basic questions of all science fiction (what if...) and expands it into a technology: If there is a machine that can tell you 100% accurately, what makes you happy? Everything else is just people.

Among all types, science fiction is the type that should cause trouble. It aims to ask unpleasant questions and burn things.

It was a revolution. It's rebellious, just like the neuromancer is saying that the future can be now or the story of being a maid said that the future can be yesterday or the rebellion when Dahlgren said the future can be a place, there are more fucking d It's higher than you think.

Among all types, science fiction is the type that should cause trouble. It aims to ask unpleasant questions and burn things. Just as the kid at the back of the classroom sketched a rocket ship in the pages of his history book, another kid chopped off all the tires of the teacher's car in the parking lot.

In the past ten years, these two children have always had a say. Williams changed the rules of my game by "telling the machine", showing me that what I thought might be impossible was actually just a matter of writing words on paper. Of course she is not alone. Want to know who else is making trouble and making science fiction better?

You want to talk about a serious revolution in science fiction. When Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was released in 1979, it was a highly public (and very successful) pants of the genre—a huge bubble middle finger dedicated to the panting ghosts of the golden age. All space heroes after.

Cat Valente's space opera? The same energy. The shelves are full of dark dystopias, Valente gave us decibel Jones-omnipresent, gender fluid, eliminated former British pop rock singer (with band member Oort St. Ultraviolet) was selected to participate in Pan Galactic Europe The TV network determines the fate of the earth’s song contest. This book was (and is) completely crazy, full of long and absurd digressions about the history of the Milky Way, flora and fauna (in fact, different from HGTTG). "All great ideas are written in flash," I said at the time. There are wormholes, murderous hippos, huge space monsters, love, sex, tears. It is very strange and interesting, and its existence reminds people that science fiction, although heavy at times, can also be strange and interesting, not serious at all, but can still get the job done.

Nothing can make you lose your taste in fiction like living in a true dystopia, right?

For decades, science fiction has been obsessed with the countless ways in which we humans will destroy the planet. Although I do like many of these stories (such as many), any well that returns with the frequency that science fiction writers have visited will eventually be destined to dry up.

Enter Becky Chambers, super nerd. She looked at the gray and poisoned literary landscape in front of her and said: Okay, what about the future, but is it happy?

What's the future, but competent?

How about the future, but... okay?

In her Wayfarers series (initially self-published and later acquired by a major publisher, but only adding an additional revolutionary driver to the model), she proposed a vision for a multi-species universe, working together for the common good . She provided us with experts and used their knowledge to improve everyone. She gave us spaceships, robots, adventures, but (like Katie Williams) focused on the characters and their personal struggles.

Chambers wrote what can be called "a utopian novel"-a group of characters who strive to be good, although not always successful; the best minds and the best intentions tend to share a common goal, but Sometimes it's unbelievable. They are largely light plot, character, thoughtful, close and contemplative—all of which are very different from the ordinary science fiction before it, it is almost a single expression of form.

Cycle Story, by Simon Stålenhag Skybound hide caption

Stalenhag is loved by people for his art-mainly because his endless vision of Sweden in the 1980s is full of robots, dinosaurs and what happens around a fictional particle accelerator/science laboratory/wormhole generator called The Loop Unusual things.

I? I love his words. There is no doubt that art is cool. But the reason I always put his three books on my desk is because no other writer (except perhaps Michael Poole in the reincarnation blues) is better at telling huge stories in a small space than Stalenhag.

The world of Tales From The Loop is constructed visually, but it is alive to me in the vignette written in the margins. E.g:

It stood under the oak tree in the yard—a greasy, sad little tin can, whose head was entangled in some kind of canvas cover. It spotted me, and stood motionless, with its head in my direction. When I approached, it shook nervously back and forth where it stood. Every time the snow creaked under my boots, it would shrink back, and its wires would rustle. Soon I was approaching, so close I could reach the cap hanging on one of the lenses. I leaned forward, managed to grab the canvas, and then pulled it down. The optical system below it quickly focuses. It is marked FOA on the side, which means that this is Munso's fugitive. Then our front door rattled and the robot jumped three times quickly and disappeared. The door opened, and my father stood on the steps.

That's it. 143 words. A complete story, beautiful and unforgettable. Stalenhag does this over and over again on almost every page. His works are both solid and dreamy, and are very suitable for our modern people's taste for appetizer-sized ideas. More importantly, Loop (published in 2015 and funded entirely through the highly successful Kickstarter campaign) proved the feasibility of crowdfunding in the increasingly isolated traditional publishing world and heralded the genre of flash memory and micro-fiction we are seeing now .

There are many reasons why NK Jemisin deserves to be on the list, but her short story "Those Who Stay to Fight" tells a very specific rebellion, which is important.

This story is a direct and confrontational rebuttal to the 1973 Ursula K. Le Guin classic story "The Man Leaving Omelas". In Omelas, Le Guin is playing a game of philosophy. She presents a perfect utopia, where everyone is always comfortable, happy and peaceful. Catch? All these good things depend on the systematic imprisonment and pain of a child. Most citizens of Omelas were terrified when the truth was revealed, but they stayed. A few of them walked away. In a sharp dialogue with the original, Jemisin overturned the entire system and set up a game with the same stakes, but then gave the central child of the story organization and interacted with the community born out of suffering.

Neither story is comforting. It won’t make you feel good after reading. Both have caused huge internal problems. But within the framework of this list, Jemisin's direct participation in a genre classic and remaking it for the current era is revolutionary. If literature is a dialogue that spans time, then Jemisin’s reincarnation into the microphone is enlightening. For everyone who wants to see privileged white liberalism disappear from Heinlein or wipe out the stain of positive racism from the Cthulhu myth, Jemisin’s story heralds how to achieve it.

Watkins' cyclical, bizarre, almost illusionary story about the future of California has been lingering in my mind since the first time I read it. Just a few lines laid the foundation for every apocalyptic climate nightmare I might encounter. These are them:

Now, enough money can allow you to buy fresh agricultural products, meat and dairy products, even if what they call cheese is Day-Glo. It is packed in jars. Most of the fish are poisoned and smelly. Beef is gray. It can also rot under conditions. Once the apple season, even if you pay extra for the Bartletts in the Amish Orchard, the pears are very dirty. Hard sour strawberries and dusty blackberries. Loose carrots, off-white spinach, crushed olives, wounded one-hundred-dollar mangoes, whole pith oranges, shriveled lemons, boozy oranges, deflated aphids curled in raspberries, and a kind of avocado. Taupe internal organs used to make you cry.

Now, writing dystopian climate novels hardly seems like a revolutionary act. Not today, when all this is essentially just the history of tomorrow. But when you can feel its pain, incredibly boring, futile, soft, dry, bloodless horror, tired, and strange at the same time? That is something special. That is the real thing.

This is what Watkins did. The scary thing is that she didn't make me want to save the world. She makes me feel that it is too late to do anything and can only wait for the end.

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall Rosarium Publishing hide caption

A long, long time ago—in another era where genre novels needed a good shock and some slaps—Harlan Ellison compiled an anthology called Dangerous Visions. Its catalog is scattered with the who's who of the time, big-name speculative graffiti and a few rising stars, who gathered together to write original stories, aimed at sharp jabs and wild swings of this genre. d becomes obsolete, predictable and boring. On its own, it may not be as completely swaggering and rogue as it wants to claim, but as far as its era is concerned? Quite dangerous. This danger is compounded when it is discovered (and read and re-read) by the young writers who constituted the pioneers of the New Wave in the 1970s and 1980s. They learned from its examples that taking risks is valuable. Sometimes just hearing your voice is enough.

In the past decade, one of the most groundbreaking (and long overdue) revolutions in science fiction has been the addition of new voices. Especially those from BIOC writers. As early as 2013, the editors Bill Campbell and Edward Hall put together the "Mothership" anthology, and today, the anthology has the same purpose as the 1967 "Dangerous Vision".

It is not only an explanation of most of the main voices in speculative novels around the world, but also an introduction to some lesser-known people eight years ago, and an evil introduction to African Futurism. It allowed Rabih Alameddine to write about Beirut’s sex and death, witches, 9/11, and childhood; Victor LaValle and murderous trolls in modern Iceland; Carmen Maria Machado (Carmen Maria Machado became weird like an animal farm, offering downloadable food and hybrid animals, while Daniel Jose Older played a policeman and a ghost, Junot Diaz talked about The epidemics from Haiti and the Dominican Republic seem to have unusual foresight today. Tobias Buckell wrote about ghosts. NK Jemisin tells a love story about broken time, alternate reality and email. Ernest Hogan took the gang to the moon.

If the biggest revolution of the past 10 years was an attempt (not yet successful) to make the stories before you look more like the world they reflect, then Mothership may be like a catalog of future science fiction novels. It is incomplete. It's not even all science fiction. But this is the beginning.

Every revolution must start somewhere.

Jason Sheehan knows everything about food, video games, books, and the Star Trailblazers. He is a restaurant critic for Philadelphia Magazine, but he spends time writing books about giant robots and ray guns when no one is reading them. The story of the radiation age is his latest book.