Kameron Hurley‘s engrossing MEET ME IN THE FUTURE is an absolute gem
The impending release of Kameron Hurley’s wonderfully imaginative MEET ME IN THE FUTURE spawns excitement.
Fred McNamara’s 10/10 review for STARBURST.
MEET ME IN THE FUTURE is an absolute gem. It’s an empathetic collection of star-spinning adventures whose initial grim-faced vibes are resolved by a yearning sense of hopefulness by the time each story reaches its end. The sense of scale it packs in is at odds with Hurley’s dry, biting sense of humour, yet the two collide together with joyous, hook-filled stories that keeps the reader engaged throughout. It prowls and pounces in all the right places. It’s the literary sci-fi equivalent of a progressive rock album for punks. A work of literary art, MEET ME IN THE FUTURE confirms that Hurley’s is a voice that must be heard by all.
5 of 5 stars
It’s totally engrossing. 🙂 Taken on its own without knowing any of the other novels, it completely works and showcases so much fungal growth, corpse making, body-horror, sexual-orientation-swapping, space-opera, disease-ridden, dog-loving joy as anyone could possibly want. And the worldbuilding is always extremely intense. 🙂
Hurley has the ability to catch you within the first paragraph. Her writing is full of humour, sarcasm and heart. She uses her writing to ask what happens next, what will the future look like. Most of her stories have a sense of darkness. They are set in worlds ravaged by war, she shows the consequences of war and how really when one war finishes a new one is started.
5/5 stars
This excellent collection of weird feminist grimdark stories tackles challenging themes in wonderfully imaginative ways.
Both B&N SCI-FI & FANTASY BLOG and AMAZING STORIES recommend the collection.
Kameron Hurley has emerged as one of the best and brightest writers in modern SFF, winning a Hugo for her non-fiction and being shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and plenty of other awards for her fiction. This new collection brings together 16 short stories that are as much about breaking rules and subverting tropes as entertaining the reader. Hurley tackles your assumptions about military SF (‛The Red Secretary’), monster hunting (‛The War of Heroes’), and identity (‛The Fisherman and the Pig’) among many other things, all rendered with the author’s evident skill and grim imagination. (One of the stories, “Garda,” is a novelette that was first published on this blog.)
With a broader range than her 2017 collection, APOCALYPSE NYX, starring a bounty hunter in her God’s War trilogy universe, this collection messes with the future with stories that are as weird as the cover art promises. The collection includes a story about time-traveling soldiers, which inspired her upcoming novel, The Light Brigade, originally published in Lightspeed Magazine’s Nov. 2015 issue
CIVILIAN READER interviews Hurley.
Your new book, MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, will be published by Tachyon. It looks really interesting: How would you introduce it to a potential reader?
MEET ME IN THE FUTURE is a collection of my best short fiction to date. It’s got everything: a body-hopping mercenary who avenge his pet elephant, an orphan who falls in love with a sentient starship, fighters who power a reality-bending engine, and a swamp-dwelling introvert who tries to save the world from her plague-casting former wife. And that’s just off the top of my head. I wrote many of these stories with the support of my Patreon backers, and these are the best gems of the lot.
For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story