An Illuminated History of the Future
Edited by Curtis White
1989
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-0-932511-26-3
In the stories which follow, the future is no longer merely one of the usual suspects to be rounded up.
New stories from new and established writers, blending the postmodern, the surreal, the cyberpunk, and other uncharted forms. Features stories from R. M. Berry, Gerald Vizenor, Constance Pierce, Don Webb, and many others.
Dark, disturbing scenarios abound in this arresting collection. Beverly Brown’s allegorical “Gardener” conjures up a threatened and threatening paradise where the menacing overlord, obsessed with his goal of “parasite control,” brutalizes plants and subordinates rather than nurturing them. Constance Pierce’s “In the Garden of the Sunbelt Arts Preserve” depicts an artists’ colony that is a home where no one belongs, certainly not the narrator, who filches a beer with someone else’s name on it. And art overruns life in Conger Beasley Jr.’s “Japan Invades America”: Asian performers crawl off a stage “like a swarm of insects … wave after ragged wave” and engulf rows of submissive theatergoers. Gerald Vizenor, Edward Kleinschmidt, David Wong Louie, and Martha Baer are among the contributors.
Editor
Curtis White has published fiction with the Fiction Collective, Sun and Moon, and Dalkey Archive Press, and a major work of non-fiction, The Middle Mind: Why Consumer Culture is Turning Us Into the Living Dead, with Harper San Francisco. His FC2 books include Anarcho-Hindu, and Heretical Songs.