A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle

  A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers is one of those books. 25 different short stories about how liberals, gays, women, non neuro-normative people and people of color are abused or openly hunted by possible future American systems. And the regimes described are quite awful indeed, yet the overall feeling one gets from reading the book is just eye rolling disbelief. I only read it because I like how Victor LaValle writes, problem is he just edited this collection and wrote none of the stories inside and it was a grind to get this read.

  I blame the first story. It was so beautiful and reasonable, where a librarian shelters people from both sides of a divided America and they come together in discussing a single book they had all read. It set a tone that I couldn't wait to get more of. And the second story was the most strident, hysterical, yet at the same time bland piece of literature I've ever read! And it was followed by a lot of similar stories, where everybody who was gay, of color, autistic, female and sometimes all of the above was openly and legally terrorized by a system run by the evil conservative Whites. The tonal shift was so brusque I felt literary whiplash!

  Maybe when your subject is systematic abuse of minorities and you're also part of one or multiple of these minorities, it's pretty hard to get openly rejected. That's the only reasonable explanation I could find for the wide variety of quality in these stories. There were some that were really good. Unfortunately, only a few of them and most of the others could only kindly be called mediocre.

  I just couldn't believe it! The same people who were afraid of an ever more improbable future (The Handmaid's Tale feeling heavenly in comparison) in which non-normalcy is illegal, were describing with glee how the wheel was turning. For example, there was one where a genetic time travelling bomb backfired and all of America was now diverse. That kind of laughable diversity, with no national identity, just a bunch of people all being different from each other, looking different, yet having a united community and all of the American problems magically gone.

  I couldn't shake a quote from my head: slaves don't dream of freedom, but of becoming masters. The same people that were afraid of intolerance wrote short stories about us vs them, where "them" were caricaturesque inhuman villains and deserved everything coming to them.

  For sure there is some emotional catharsis to imagine a terrible future in which everything you hate is openly evil, thus giving you permission for all the fear and hate and extreme fantasies. Imagine Death Wish, but now the hero is a gay woman in a wheelchair killing fraternity bros. How is that not a movie already? Barf!