


Luckily, most of the 23 authors here, all Canadian, forgo this brand of shrill alarmism to give us stories that cast sometimes cynical, sometimes melancholy and very often humorous looks at a social landscape not all that different from our own. Given Gartner’s tone of 1990s-style millennial anxiety - her concerns include “enetic engineering, cosmetic pharmacology, avatar sex, Google-brains, melting ice caps, and everything virtual, nothing private” - it might take a moment to remember that what she’s talking about has already come to pass. It’s been a while, after all, since Y2K turned out to be a bust, and even longer since William Gibson invented cyberspace.

Reading Zsuzsi Gartner’s introduction to “Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales From Tomorrow,” you might get the idea that the future’s gotten old.
