Rating: 
Summary: These are vignettes ...
Review: ...not stories. They are not complete, but rather seem to have been truncated. They progress, developing an idea, then suddenly stop without closure or release. The ideas explored are quite interesting, to be sure. In fact, I'd like to see this world developed as a novel. But the rythmic problems of this writing will have to be addressed. Give me a reason to keep reading.
To be fair, the ideas in the book may be given closure in the final stories. I'll never know, as I've found the experience so unpleasant that I won't finish the book.
Rating:
Summary: These are vignettes ...
Review: ...not stories. They are not complete, but rather seem to have been truncated. They progress, developing an idea, then suddenly stop without closure or release. The ideas explored are quite interesting, to be sure. In fact, I'd like to see this world developed as a novel. But the rythmic problems of this writing will have to be addressed. Give me a reason to keep reading.
To be fair, the ideas in the book may be given closure in the final stories. I'll never know, as I've found the experience so unpleasant that I won't finish the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: A tight, taut collection of interrelated vignettes, this near-future hard-sci-fi by veteran mystery author Walter Mosley is a joy to read. As any good near-future book does, it examines current issues of race, corporate growth, virology, and politics in an "if this goes on" vein. The clarity and pace of the writing makes it a quick read, but it's packed with dense and well thought out social commentary and a holistic presentation of a fairly dismal future (especially if you're white). The characters are well-drawn, and the science is well-described without being inaccessibly techie.
Rating: 
Summary: Mosley Scares Me -- And He Does It Well!
Review: Dystopia seems to be the word for unhappy visions of the future. As I understand it, Mr. Mosley is well-known for the Easy Rawlins novels, and one previous sci-fi effort, Blue Light (with which I'm not familiar). However, I've re-read Futureland three times now, and I'm here to tell you that Mosley is the real thing.
I have been reading science fiction on and off for the last 40 years, and no one has quite frightened me like Walter Mosley has. I'm not talking about squealing at a horror film, or on the downslide of a roller coaster. I'm talking about thinking, "Oh, my God, this has got to be the way it is all going to happen!"
So what do you need this for? Well, if you like to do some thinking along with your sci-fi reading, and certainly if you enjoy seeing tough (though not always "good") characters bucking the odds, you'll want to hear what Mr. Mosley has to say.
He begins the journey with Ptolemy, the genius child, who might just be tuning in God on his home-made radio, and takes us to meet a woman boxer who can beat any man, a mad doctor who likes to wager for high stakes, the prisoners of Angels Island, and more. The background is there is 3D and vibrant color; you can almost smell it.
The jacket says "nine stories of an imminent world". This is one future world I hope remains fiction.
Rating:
Summary: An Important, if Flawed, Work
Review: Having though 'Blue Light' one of the most fantastic new SF novels of recent years, and having been amazed at its poor reception from Mosley fans, I was delighted and surprised to see him back with another work of SF, and one which deals with many of the same themes as his previous genre work, but in markedly different ways. The worst thing about Futureland is its title - I suspect an editor wary of making the book too innaccesible to non-SF readers (or perhaps even Mosley himself worrying about such problems), but whoever made the choice, it does not excactly sparkle with originality or invite wonder in anyone approaching the book. It deserved better. The book itself is composed of nine linked stories set in a world where corporations have divided up the planet, and people are forced to live according to strict socio-economic and geographic constraints, even to the extent that New York, for example, is divided into three horizontal layers, where the poorest never see the sunlight. America remains the dominant power but it is forced to export many of its social problems: the growing prison population is now housed on privately-run islands where the drug-controlled prison population is used as slave labour. And of course, those who bear the brunt of this crusshingly divided world order are black. Race and gender politics are everywhere in this book, from the new opportunities generated by a world champion boxer who is a black woman (clearly drawn as a female Muhammed Ali) who can beat the best male fighters, to the onward march of the International Socialists, a depressingly realistic neo-Nazi movement. The latter are dismissed by various characters in the book as unimportant, marginal or simply 'conservative' (a justification used by a member), however they gradually assume a central importance as the trajectories woven in the various separate tales are threaded together towards the final stories. As in Blue Light, the tone of the conclusion is downbeat, the final story almost an epigraph, despite the overt hope of renewal. As an SF setting, and even as a collection of short stories, Futureland might not stand up to close examination were it not for three factors. The first is Mosley's righteously angry politics (mentioned above), the second is his obvious love for the genre, and his knowledge of its past. Another reviewer compared Futureland very unfavourably to the work of William Gibson, as cyberpunk fiction. However I feel this misses the point. Gibson also understands the context in which SF is written, witness his fabulous early story, The Gernsback Continuum, which mixes Twilight Zone style plotting and the 'airships and aryans-in-togas' imagery from the 1930s pulp magazines, yet which makes a very contemporary point about memory and its relationship to our visions of the future. Mosley also mixes all sorts of iconic SF images into his work: there are the info-monks, with their blue cloaks and their brains made visible by plastic domes, there is a superintelligent megalomaniac attempting to rebuild Atlantis and colonise Mars, and an equally gifted child prodigy who finds ways of speaking to God through radio noise. There are also SF images from the New Wave period: a world-weary 'electronic private eye', a man suddently startled to find his dull existence turned downside-up by a fortune he struggles to understand, a prisoner who can liberate himself and others only through his own death and so on. The final factor is Mosley's ironic sensibility. These iconic SF devices are skillfully strung together with (also like Gibson) a delightful and sometimes disturbing use of irony: for example, Vietnam which has struggled to liberate itlsef from the French and then the Americans, and then (some might argue) from its own form of communism, has succeeded, only to find itself divided up and owned by trans-national corporations. Futureland doesn't succeed entirely, and this is largely dues to the variable quality of the stories. Some, like the opener Whispers in the Dark; the prison drama, Angel's Island; the future private detective tale, The Electric Eye; and the multi-layered both hopeful and disturbing closer, The Nig in Me; are superb - others read more like fillers. Perhaps this is simply personal preference. The only work I can think of that compares to Futureland is John Brunner's massive New Wave dystopia, Stand on Zanzibar, another ambitious brilliant-but-flawed work packed with irony, from an equally angry and socially-aware author. Two messages, then:
To Walter Mosley - I can only beg you to ignore the occasional detractors and keep writing science fiction alongside the brilliant crime writing.
To everyone else - read this book, it's important.
Rating:
Summary: Really Tiresome
Review: I agree with everything the reader from New Jersey said. A black whining about the mistreatment of blacks. I read until the end hoping for something better. Now the book goes to Goodwill and I know not to read Walter Mosley again.
Rating:
Summary: Really Tiresome
Review: I agree with everything the reader from New Jersey said. A black whining about the mistreatment of blacks. I read until the end hoping for something better. Now the book goes to Goodwill and I know not to read Walter Mosley again.
Rating:
Summary: Scary vision of what may lie ahead...
Review: I am glad I picked this book up the other day. I thought the description on the back looked decent and I had no expectations going in, so I was very suprised when I discovered an extremely well written science fiction book about the future. This book has several main characters and they are all interesting and well written and the secondary characters are almost just as good. The possible future that Mosley has laid out is terrifying and sad at the same time. Parts of this book simply scared the #$@! out of me. My city just started putting camera's on stop lights and this book had me thinking.....The author has some very fresh takes on the future, such as at work everything is translucent so every move you make can be filmed and analyzed, camera's are in your monitor's and your bosses watch you etc. I am probably making this book sound a little 1984ish and it's not. There are some similarities but really this is a story about people and the human race and the slow but steady slide toward stagnation that we may be traveling. Also Race is a big part of this story but I did not think it overshadowed the main feel of the story. An excellent read and I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Good solid science fiction
Review: I came to Mosley's science fiction without having ever experienced his mysteries (can't stand mysteries). As an long-time, avid science fiction reader, I found much to like in Futureland. Each of Mosley's stories contained for me the two elements I love finding in well-written science-fiction: excellent characters and the exploration of an idea. I found none of Mosley's stories lacking in originality or interest. Written in the tradition of Cordwainer Smith (see, "The Rediscovery of Man"), the stories weave in and out of each other, old characters reappering in new stories, each story moving the book towards a definate point (if not conclusion). Try this book, I think you'll really enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great stories, spare me the racial politics
Review: I enjoyed Walter Mosley's "Futureland." The nine stories portray a bleak, "Blade Runner" future of economic hardship, biowarfare, political instability, and technology that both enslaves, and frees the human race. This book is filled with cool technology and plenty of food for thought for the amateur think tank member, medical ethicist, and sociologist that resides in every sci-fi fan. I did not care for the author's constant reminders that his hero's were black, and the villans and doofuses were white. This turned the otherwise great stories into a pedestrian cross between a bad "Outer Limits" story and an Al Sharpton speech.
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