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    METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire
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    METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire
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    METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire
    Ebook463 pages10 hours

    METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

    By Jay Lake

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In a near future Pacific Northwest, the mysterious Tygre Tygre shows up unannounced at the hidden city of Cascadiapolis, and sets events in motion that lead to the destruction of that city—and the ultimate surfacing of an end-game millennium in the making.
    Who are the shadowy Bull Dancers? What part does the high-powered J. Appleseed Foundation play in their secret work? And how will a legendary security specialist, a dying billionaire, a disgraced cop, a minister who’s lost his faith, and a keen-eyed nonprofit accountant work together to prevent what looks suspiciously like ... the end of the world?
    From the award-winning Audible series, METAtropolis

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordFire Press
    Release dateMay 8, 2014
    ISBN9781614751557
    Unavailable
    METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire
    Author

    Jay Lake

    Jay Lake was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers' workshops he attended. His novels included Tor's publications Mainspring, Escapement, and Pinion, and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle - Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura. Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.

    Read more from Jay Lake

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    Reviews for METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

    3.5/5

    139 ratings11 reviews

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    • 1/5
      This book was so bad...I put hours into giving it a chance (a lot of time for an audiobook), and it still didn't get better.Other reviewers have said the collection improves after the first short story, set in the Pacific Northwest with a bunch of "green" techies. But, when I gagged on the second story, post apocalyptic Detroit, I quit. There was really no reason to continue on to story number three. It just did not grab me. I'll not continue to the second book in the series.
    • 3/5
      I think the concept behind the anthology is strong, but in execution it lacks a lot. The stories feel very much alike, particularly the first three. All of them rely too much on explication rather than story. In other words, I want my stories to tell the concepts needed, rather than breaks in the story where the narrator steps in to explain the concepts.
    • 3/5
      Summary: METAtropolis is a shared-world anthology, a collection of stories that take place in the same near-future version of Earth. They each take place in a city, but none are cities as we're used to thinking about them. This is a world after the fossil fuel collapse, a world in which the old ways of doing business have swiftly become obsolete, and struggling new economies have begun to emerge.In Jay Lake's "In the Forests of the Night" (read by Michael Hogan), a strange young man arrives at the anarchist stronghold of Cascadia, in the Pacific Northwest, but no one is quite sure whether his coming is a harbinger of miracles or disasters. In Tobias Buckell's "Stochasti-city" (read by Scott Brick), a Detroit bouncer gets a job working security to deal with an influx of troublesome protestors, but soon has to decide where his loyalties really lie. Elizabeth Bear's "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood" (read by Kandyse McClure) also takes place in Detroit, and involves a young mother unsure who she can trust, where a wrong choice means death for both her and her daughter. John Scalzi's "Utere nihil non extra quiritationem suis" (read by Alessandro Juliani) involves a young man in New St. Louis who is finally forced to stop slacking and get a job, only to find that his options are severely limited. And in Karl Schroeder's "To Hie from Far Cilenia" (read by Stefan Rudnicki), the city in question is not a physical place, but a virtual one, sprung from online gaming but suspected of being used to traffic very real and very deadly weapons.Review: I'm having mixed feelings about this anthology. It's a great idea, and I really liked the world that the authors created. It's pretty rare to have near-future sci-fi that is neither post-apocalyptic nor dystopian, and while the world of METAtropolis did have some bleak parts, its fundamental message seemed to be that human society can survive and adapt, even under the cloud of the looming energy crisis. Also, because it's near-future, a lot of what the authors came up with seems thoroughly plausible, although whether that was reassuring or terrifying depends on what part of the world you're focusing on.However, I think the shared-world aspect was also the source of some of my main issues with this collection. Oftentimes it felt as though the authors were so concerned with showing readers around this new world that they've dreamed up and less concerned about telling a really compelling story. The stories showcase a wide variety of societal organizations, but one of them would get into an explication of local economies, virtual economies, economies of scale and of reputation, and I'd be left wondering: yeah, fine, but what about the characters? A lot of (admittedly interesting) exposition, and not enough focus on the narrative, and in several of the stories, I felt like by the time the set-up was complete, the actual story part of the story had to be overly condensed in order to fit its allotted pages. Scalzi's story was an exception, in terms of weaving the exposition into a solid story, but it was an exception on a number of fronts; it was the only one to feature a protagonist who was an insider rather than an outsider, and it had a much lighter, funnier tone than the others.Also, for all the emphasis on shared worldbuilding, there were actually fewer shared aspects than I was expecting. They're all set in the same version of the future, but the stories are totally independent, typically only name-checking the other cities, or using some of the same slang. Even Buckell and Bear's stories, which were set in the same city, didn't have a whole lot of interconnection. I was hoping for an anthology where each story interweaves with the others, so that you understand more about story A by reading story B and vice versa, and I didn't find that to be the case with METAtropolis. I did definitely enjoy the audio production. METAtropolis is one of the rare (only?) books to be conceived as an audiobook first and a print book second, and I thought it was really well done (it probably doesn't hurt that I'm a huge Battlestar Galactica fan.) The professional narrators (Brick and Rudnicki) did an excellent job, as expected, but I was also impressed with the actors' readings. Hogan's was the least traditional, but he read it in his crusty-space-pirate-Colonel-Tigh voice, which suited the story really well. McClure's reading was smooth and professional sounding, and I was really impressed at Juliani's range at creating distinct but believable voices. Overall, I thought this world succeeded on the shared-world front more than on the anthology front; the world was interesting, but the stories never really grabbed me the way I wanted them to. 3 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: It's worth a shot for fans of near-future sci-fi, particularly if they also have an interest in economics or sociology.
    • 4/5
      Great sequence of linked stories that really fit together. The fact that the authors worked out the principles of the the world first really pays off. I had the audio version and the narrators, especially the ones from Battlestar Galactica are terrific - especially Michael Hogan. Of the five short stories I only hated one - I wont say who it was by but it did contain too many adjectives and adverbs!
    • 4/5
      Metatropolis is a neat concept even removed from its origins as an audiobook - a set of five stories set in a shared future world, all focused on the same idea without being necessarily set in exactly the same place or involving the same characters. The "future cities" concept is one I have a personal interest in, and the various takes on it - from closely-managed enclosed cities to hidden anarchoenvironmentalist collectives to the ongoing tragedy of Detroit to MMO-like virtual nations - are different enough from each other to stay totally fresh while still all clearly belonging to the same version of the future.

      A fun project, and worth looking at for some good crunchy near-future SF.
    • 2/5
      Yet another Anthology built around a collected consciousness of Science Fiction writers. The premise, one author begins the world building with a story and the next author takes the world further along with another story using the structure of the last and so on. This particular setting is a post-America that has fuzed the aftermath of massive global warming and capitalism run rampant. I can live with the overused cliches this world inhabits, but I can't abide with the overly preachy way the authors use the world. Three out of five of the authors use the stories as a warning about the environment and corporate/money/power run amuck. I can hang with that and even point to some live examples of this currently being played out. What I can't hang with is the way they do a disservice to science fiction. They are not faithful to their story. Instead they sacrifice story in favor of the preaching point being pushed. With this in mind, there were two authors that stood out. Tobias Bickell shows the other authors how to have social critique and commentary but remain faithful to the story even though he does drop some useless tidbits occasionally.The reason to pick this anthology up is the fourth story by John Scalzi. Definitely four stars. He describes a typical slacker whose stuck watching his life go by and the girl he secretly loves drift away. His story takes off once he's forced to get a job he hates because he slacked off through school. This one has loveable characters, good humor, subtle world building and a fun entertaining short story.
    • 4/5
      A collection of intertwined stories describing life in the future Northwest of America. Sci-fi at its best, this combining of stories by different authors but all in the same timeline and places makes interesting reading. I have the Kindle edition.
    • 2/5
      different authors takes on a post-industrial USA. Some good, some bad. I don't remember much except someone working in the sewage department who is the protagonist.
    • 4/5
      Why I Read It: How could I not? With it being an audiobook first, I was immediately salivating because it was something I wanted but could not have. I actually downloaded the audiobook when it was offered for free, but the format of it didn't work for me (no track listings on my iPod, yo) and even though I enjoyed audiobooks in middle school, I just don't have the attention for them now. So I was thrilled when Tor released a hardcover and was thrilled to pick it up ASAP. I just wasn't thrilled to read it right away, because despite the wealth of talent, I was worried this book would be more hype than not. Yet, when it made the April challenge poll, it moved infinitely higher in the TBR pile, and I decided it was time for some good SF, so read it I did.The premise: ganked from Barnes & Noble: Five original tales set in a shared urban future -- from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF:A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment...a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement...a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city...a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job...and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to Metatropolis.More than an anthology, Metatropolis is the brainchild of five of science fiction's hottest writers -- Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder, and project editor John Scalzi -- who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before.My Rating: 6 - Worth Reading, with ReservationsIt's a fascinating collection, and I love how each author brings something new and different to this collective future they've created, all while playing off each other's stories. This is one of those collections that should be noted by people who don't like short stories: if you're one of those people, and your problem is that once you get into the world, the story is over, this collection might be the answer to that. Sure, each novella takes place in a different city, but it's still the same world and the same future and therefore everything operates by the same rules. So this just might work for you. Those of you who don't mind short fiction may also find yourself pleased by having novella-sized pieces, though to be fair, some of these stories could've been shorter. For my buck, Scalzi's and Buckell's were my favorites, with Bear and Schroeder behind, and Lake at the bottom. Unfortunate, given that Lake's piece kicks off the whole thing, but oh well. As a whole, the collection works well. I'm also interested enough in this world that I'd happily check out the sequel, Metatroplis: Cascadia, but only when Tor releases their hardcover version of it. Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. When it comes to shorter fiction, I find it's cruel and unusual to spoil the stories, so you can read the full review without fear of spoilers. Thoughts on each individual story and the collection as a whole will be found below at the full review, linked to below.REVIEW: METATROPOLIS edited by John ScalziHappy Reading!
    • 4/5
      I read a great deal of fantasy, horror and slipstream/interstitial work, more than hard science fiction. That’s not because I don’t like hard science fiction, but because for me it takes a bit of work to keep up with the science. I like science fiction that really works; that is, I actually learn something about the real world. That doesn’t always happen, of course, because science fiction (as opposed to fiction about science) always extrapolates, and I can get some weird ideas about the state of science if I’m not paying sufficiently close attention. But often, I’ll learn about something like the nature of neutron stars (Robert L. Forward’s Dragon's Egg, for instance) or the implications of the theory of time travel (Gregory Benford’s Timescape).Metatropolis, John Scalzi’s latest project, is a book of stories about how the world works after globalization collapses all of the world’s great economies and global warming works its havoc. It is, if you will, hard science fiction in which the science is economics.Metatropolis was first conceived as an audio book for Audible.com. Five authors – Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi and Karl Schroeder – got together and created a vision of our world as it might exist not so far in the future. More specifically, they envisioned what cities might look like after the collapse of nations. Each story is enriched by every other story, so that when you close the book, you have a world in your brain that wasn’t there before. And what, you wonder, would be your contribution to such a world? Because this world could come about in our lifetimes, it is worth thinking about.Jay Lake’s story, “In the Forests of the Night,” opens the book. Lake obviously undertook to write a story specially shaped to be read aloud; I read this entire story with a voice in my head telling the tale. The cadences of the language lend themselves beautifully to a storyteller. The story itself is about Cascadiopolis, a new city-state that extends from Portland, Oregon up to Vancouver, British Columbia. Some of the city is a stealth city, where people live in the midst of the forest and make do with very little, all of which is shared; it is a world without personal material possessions, for the most part. Every scientific discovery made in this stealth city is liberated for everyone in the world to share (an open-source modality), rather than having every penny of profit wrung out of it by patenting it and licensing it to others. Not surprisingly, corporations are opposed to open sourcing, to technological advances available to the world for free. They want any kind of innovation for themselves, to manufacture new products, to sell them and to make as much money as possible, damn the consequences to those who can’t afford the technology. So the stealth city is the target of spies, and this story is about them.Tobias Buckell’s “Stochasti-City” is set in the remains of Detroit, which may well be a fully-failed city already, in our world. Here, many people make money by “turking” – obtaining a job through a directory similar to (but much advanced from) Craig’s List – or, much more simply, because an employer has left a job to be done in a place where a likely candidate will find it. The job can involve no more than delivering a package from one place to another (so the person who wants the package delivered would simply leave it at a street corner and depend on someone going in the right direction to pick it up and deliver it for the price shown on the tag). Or it can involve something much more involved, like providing security for a group that is attempting to take over a vacated skyscraper and turn it into a vertical farm. Buckell’s hero is trying to do the latter. The implications are vast: skyscrapers as farms is an idea that is quite wonderful all by itself, and Buckell explains it well.Elizabeth Bear’s contribution is “The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood,” about a woman who is trying to hide her stepdaughter from her ex-husband. But it’s also a story about another part of Detroit, where the inhabitants recycle absolutely everything and personally own absolutely nothing. Does everyone on your block really need his or her own lawnmower, for instance? It’s used for about two hours each week. What if each block had a communal lawnmower? Or what if one person mowed all the lawns one week, and then was off the hook for the next 10 weeks while others took on the chore? These people live in former cube farms without owning them; they stay while they need to stay and move to somewhere else when they need to move. The people who populate this – well, it’s really a commune, of sorts – know that communes don’t have the best history, but they’ve taken steps to make sure that everyone works in this one, and that everyone shares. There’s a part of me that would very much love to live in this version of Detroit.John Scalzi’s story, “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis” also lends itself to an oral reading with a great use of language, despite the tongue-twisting Latin of the title. Scalzi packs a lot more laughter into his story of New St. Louis, where everyone has to work or she or he is evicted from the city. No exceptions, not even for Benjamin Washington, the son of a member of the city’s executive board. Jobs are assigned on the basis of one’s performance on an aptitude test and an interview. Unfortunately, Benjamin didn’t take his test until a year after finishing school, and so didn’t perform well; and he came across as something of a jerk in his interview. The job he winds up with is not exactly a prize, but from that job hangs a tale, well told.The final story, “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder, is a true tour de force. It is about a city – or, rather, nested cities – that exist only in cyberspace, as an overlay on the real world. In these cities, currency has a different meaning and different uses; people dress differently; and people can “ride” other people, using a body in another location to accomplish a task, with the permission of the owner of the body. It is a marvelous vision of how something as simple as a role-playing game can turn into a genuine way of living. It is more realistic in its execution than other virtual reality stories I’ve read or seen in the movies, both because of its use of intelligent technology that seems genuinely possible and because it does not require that those who participate in the virtual reality completely abandon the “real” world. Scalzi says in his introduction to the story, “[I]f your brain hasn’t already been blown by now, it’s going to get cracked wide open here.” He’s not kidding. This story has me very eager to read whatever else Karl Schroeder has on offer, and I’m very happy to see Lady of Mazes and Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga are on my shelves.In fact, this entire collection makes me want to read whatever I can get from each of these authors. The imagination in evidence in this book of shared world tales is truly fantastic. The old “sense of wonder” you used to hear about as the province of hard science fiction is very much in evidence here.I have one serious complaint about the book: the proofreading is terrible. It pulls you right out of the story to see an error like a change in the person in which a story is told (Scalzi’s story, told in the first person, abruptly changes to third person and back again at one point). I have noticed this before about books published by Subterranean Press, a small press that publishes excellent work, often in beautiful editions and for premium prices. When one spends $30 for a book of five short stories in a “deluxe hardcover edition,” as this is billed, one expects a near-perfect product. The content of this book is indeed outstanding. It is a shame that technical details get in the way of the storytelling.
    • 3/5
      An interesting and ambition anthology. The central concepts that united the individual novellas is the city of the future. Specifically, the city in a post-peak-oil future.

      I didn't care so much for the narrative of Jay Lake's In the Forest of the Night. I did a great job of laying out the exposition needed to explain the common setting, but I found the Tyger Tyger character to be flat and poorly fleshed out. The story centered on his messianic charm, so that let some of the air out of the tires.

      The rest of the stories were solid and stood well on their own and even better as separate pieces of a loose collection. Scalzi's story about pigs was really good, but the final story by Karl Schroeder—To Hie from Far Cilenia-- was staggeringly good. I'd not read Schroeder before and I'm going to be seeking his work out now. He is a master of the kind of five-minutes-into-the-future speculative fiction pioneered by William Gibson.