Right around the time I usually make my SF book haul, Motherboard (Vice’s tech vertical) released this collection of the short novels it published in the past years on the platform.

Two main points stand out:

  • It’s anticipation, forget about far away lands, take what we have now, push the potentionmeter to 150 and describe what happens.
  • not all authors are professional authors but come from a variety of backgrounds

Which leads to very interesting points of views and stories. I won’t say all hit me the same way. Some of them I forgot a soon as I started reading the following chapter. More precisely, the book is split in three parts which gives it its subtitle (Watch/Worlds/Burn) and I especially liked the stories in the Watch part. The ones that mostly stayed with me are the one from an alien perspective and by that I mean from the point of view of the system (the stories with the drones or the incubator) or with split point of views (and especially one of the first ones, “One day I will die on March” which is split between a delivery app customer, the corresponding coursier and the voice given to the platform arbitrating the relationship… this one really hit me hard and hooked me to the book)

Final word

A very nice book. Bit-sized stories perfect with some hard hitting themes.