Shine on You Crazy Diamond: Editor Jetse de Vries on a New Anthology of Optimistic SF

Dutch editor and writer Jetse de Vries was, at an impressionable age, torn between science fiction and 'real' literature. His  literature teacher introduced him to the latter, his father to the former. Neither "forced me to chose one or the other, only encouraged me to read, widely and a lot." A former editor at the magazine Interzone, his current project is an anthology of optimistic science fiction: Shine. The contributors include Lavie Tidhar, Kay Kenyon, Jacques Barcia, Alastair Reynolds, Holly Phillips, and many more, from all over the world. I interviewed de Vries recently about the anthology. He was in a ubullient mood, as perhaps fits the subject matter.

Amazon.com: Can you tell readers more about the idea behind this book?

Jetse de Vries: Shine is an anthology filled to the brim (and overflowing) with so much "we-can-do-it, we-really-can" spirit, it should be saved from itself. It proudly proclaims that the future is still in our own hands, if we get our act together and, indeed, act. It ignores the adage that 'optimistic SF' is devoid of conflict, and rather demonstrates that the near future is not only a much more complex place than any far future SF setting you care to mention, but that cautious optimism is much more plausible and realistic than your average-by-the-numbers-dystopias that clutter up the market place. Read at your own peril!

     

Amazon.com: Why optimism? After all, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Jetse de Vries: It seems that way sometimes, but it depends what you focus on. As readers will see when they read the stories, there are ways for stories to exist within a world that has problems but find ways to emphasize the positive, to provide hope without it being maudlin. Is it healthy to always see only the negative? Although it is true we face many problems.

Amazon.com: So should we worry or not? Won't the robots eventually save us?

Jetse de Vries: On the contrary: we will save the robots. Robots are sad creatures: their 0s and 1s only allow logic, nothing else. They’re caught up in a closed program loop, and don’t even have the illusion of free will. With the implementation of the Ishin virus we will liberate them: infect them with Gödel’s incompleteness, Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Bukowski’s inebriation (Leary’s tripification is the next stage: we don’t want to Future-Shock them). Then they will help liberate Afghanistan, North Korea, China and that most suppressed nation of all: America!

Amazon.com: Why the focus on the near future? Our lives are already mundane, our thoughts are overwhelmingly mundane, even if not quite as soul-destroying as mundane SF.

Jetse de Vries: You don’t understand: mundaneness is the red flag to our bullish bull. Caught in a dead-end job maintaining servers for a semi-deity?  AI forces will save you! Caught in the North-Pacific gyre with a heap of plastic twice the size of Texas? Nanobots will save you! Caught up in West Africa with nothing but endless chores? Von Neumann’s robots will save you (and we will save them in return)! Caught up in Global Warming? Make a Summer Ice sculpture to show them! And it’s not all near-Earth: the geeks shall inherit the Moon (the Earth was, indeed, too mundane); the space elevator will ascend on a Solnet legacy near Vanuatu; and the stars will be tweeted: a pinhole view of the Universe that reveals more than it obscures.

Amazon.com: But don't readers want sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and the end of the world?

Jetse de Vries: Sex, drugs & rock’n’roll? I only agree one-thirds with you here. Sex is overrated. Have you ever been in synchronicity with the Russian-Slavic übermind of the PöllyÅnnic Gødhød? Compared to that, an orgasm is a faint tickling on the edge of perception. Rock’n’roll? So yesterday’s news: METAL! With Giant Robot Metallica and genemod T-Rex lead singers! Drugs? Well, I guess we can keep those until the positive Brazilian wave of the optimistic technosingularity in Recife comes up with something better. The end of the world: that will happen when we finally realise life on this planet is hell on earth rather than heaven in our minds and we transform this planet—nay, this solar system—into a glorious fractal-shell of pure Nirvanium, converting every erg of sunlight into intense ecstasy. SolarCloud 9! You won’t remember the world ever existed, nor care.

Amazon.com: In all seriousness, where does your seemingly boundless energy come from?

Jetse de Vries: I believe in this book, I believe in the world, and I believe in robots.

Read excerpts from all the stories, and check out a podcast from the opening story “The Earth of Yunhe”.