Futureland

Rating:
Summary: Completely Predictable & Poorly Written
Review: I had the opportunity to explore this title via audiocassette on a recent weekend drive. After several hours, in spite of valiant attempts to like this work, I gave up. Driving in silence seemed a great relief. I found the stories to be highly predictable in their plot and outcome. The characters and plot lines were poorly developed and fragmentary. Adding to the agony was a narrator who's vocal talents were highly limited. Attempts to mimic accents or speech impediments resulted in nearly unintelligible results, adding "insult to injury". The juvenile nature of this work along with the poor narration results in an unacceptably poor overall experience. While the written version of this work may alleviate the limitations of the narrator, I remain highly doubtful that attempts to slog one's way through these unremittingly (and VERY predictably) dark and poorly written works would be worth the time investment.

Rating:
Summary: A very intriguing world
Review: I have been reading Walter Mosley's detective stories for years and have really enjoyed them, especially the Easy Rawlins. My mother from Florida recommended them to me. Through Rawlins, Mosley reveals an interesting and compelling world in a way that makes you want to know more. When I heard he had a "science fiction" collection of short stories out I was at first skeptical. I am not a true fan of the typical sci-fi stuff. All those other worldly names, places and fantastic devices sound like so much gobbly-gook. Sargon Lord of the Twelfth Moon of Argolancia piloting his nuclear hyper-drive thermo-ion teleporter through the blue ice dust clouds of the Fengali Sector just doesn't play with me. I tune it out. But Futureland is something completely different.

The story comes first. Each story has a beginning, middle and end. Interesting, believable characters. Love stories, good against evil stories and murder mysteries. The futuristic aspects are just intertwined into the stories and do not overwhelm the purpose which is to tell a good story. While we don't know exactly how long in the future these stories come from, enough is the same that you could imagine Futureland as one possible evolution from where we are today. Some stories build on characters from others, so it is best to read the book from front to back. While the stories are enjoyable separately, together they illuminate a captivating, but very disturbing world. Intelligence is considered a national natural resource and the most promising young minds are compelled to serve the state. Body parts can be sold for massive amounts of money on the black market. Corporations control everything including countries. Today's Wall Street mergers and acquisitions are taking to the extreme as whole cities and even countries are bought and sold. New York skyscrapers are 300 stories tall with the classes distributed between the top, middle and bottom. Below is the wasteland of Common Ground where you go when you are unemployed and sleep in a tube like some Japanese businessmen today. If you are not employed you loose most privileges of citizenship. You screw up too many times and you become "White Noise", bereft of all privileges, any possibility to regain them and forgotten by everybody. This world is revealed layer by layer through the daily lives of the characters in each story. It is much like learning about another city by reading a mystery novel set there. The conflict and challenges of the characters are engaging you as a reader and the backdrop of their world is adding spice. That is the way is should be. Very satisfying. I will probably read them all again in 10 years and see if we are still heading in Mosley's predicted direction or have found another path. While entertained by Mosley's vision of the future, I hope we find another way.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but compelling work
Review: I think Walter Mosley is one of the top writing talents working today. It is deceptive how easy he makes it seem, but he draws you into his stories (nine of them in this case) each time with a few spare paragraphs. Futureland is an example of what all writing students should study, regardless of whether they are interested in the story, to see how he does it.

Futureland is not a place anyone would want to live in. Mosley's vision of the future is not very optimistic, but what I find most depressing is how he always always always makes race the central issue in what is going on. He is clearly capable of other plot motivaters, but he is so good at sketching racial attitudes and politics his stories fall into black-folk-po-victim-rich-white-folk-is-de-debil themes no matter what. Mosley socks you in the jaw over and over again with the race conflict. It gets old.

Fortunately, Mosley has a lot more in Futureland than that to think about, so the result is worth reading. Imagine a civilization with a population so dense that prisons become fully automated, the nonworking population have virtually no civil rights, and rich corporations write all the rules, even to the point that CEOs can style themselves God-on-Earth. Mosely's characters live in their niches in such a world, sometimes managing to do more than merely survive.

At times Futurescape dips into farce and satire, often enough that makes me wonder if that was what the whole story was originally intended to be, or if Mosely changed his mind while writing it. Perhaps he meant to lighten what otherwise would be a fairly grim text.

Four stars.

Rating:
Summary: Completely Predictable & Poorly Written
Review: I was quite surprised by this book, because the blurbs on the jacket do not reveal exactly what is in store. This is a very creative and engrossing collection of interrelated sci-fi short stories, and the key is the very strong African-American perspective. That's not really newsworthy with a black storyteller, but the real surprise is Mosley's unforgiving take on race relations in a dysfunctional future, although the commentary on racial matters gets a little heavy-handed at times. Regardless, in this future landscape, the more things change the more they'll stay the same. Technical advances and a supposed utopia will still leave minorities behind, even when the majority is equally brutalized by the technocracy. Some reviewers have claimed that Mosley is behind the times when it comes to modern science fiction, as he usually works in other genres, but that's not the case. His visions of a technological dystopia in the near future, as the result of total corporate control of society and the relentless pursuit of profits at the expense of human rights (for all humans), has been showing up in a lot if recent sci-fi and speculative fiction. Mosley's vision of total corporate dominance and social breakdown is both far-fetched and frighteningly possible, if current trends in real life aren't curtailed soon. But Mosley is also well versed in classic sci-fi, as his sense of creeping social dread and human restlessness in the face of technology shows a strong Bradbury influence. In the end of Mosley's nightmare vision, most of humanity is destroyed and there's still prejudice and hatred. The complete destruction of humanity by technocratic domineering and megalomania won't stop the worst strains of human nature. [~doomsdayer520~]

Rating:
Summary: The More Things Change...
Review: I was quite surprised by this book, because the blurbs on the jacket do not reveal exactly what is in store. This is a very creative and engrossing collection of interrelated sci-fi short stories, and the key is the very strong African-American perspective. That's not really newsworthy with a black storyteller, but the real surprise is Mosley's unforgiving take on race relations in a dysfunctional future, although the commentary on racial matters gets a little heavy-handed at times. Regardless, in this future landscape, the more things change the more they'll stay the same. Technical advances and a supposed utopia will still leave minorities behind, even when the majority is equally brutalized by the technocracy. Some reviewers have claimed that Mosley is behind the times when it comes to modern science fiction, as he usually works in other genres, but that's not the case. His visions of a technological dystopia in the near future, as the result of total corporate control of society and the relentless pursuit of profits at the expense of human rights (for all humans), has been showing up in a lot if recent sci-fi and speculative fiction. Mosley's vision of total corporate dominance and social breakdown is both far-fetched and frighteningly possible, if current trends in real life aren't curtailed soon. But Mosley is also well versed in classic sci-fi, as his sense of creeping social dread and human restlessness in the face of technology shows a strong Bradbury influence. In the end of Mosley's nightmare vision, most of humanity is destroyed and there's still prejudice and hatred. The complete destruction of humanity by technocratic domineering and megalomania won't stop the worst strains of human nature. [~doomsdayer520~]

Rating:
Summary: Decent writer who nonetheless gets too much wrong
Review: I'd never heard of Mosley before I picked up (t)his book @ the library. My first warning of the bias to come was that its dedicated to Danny Glover, who has taken the ultra-liberal stance of loons claiming America "deserved" 9/11.

I read eight of the nine stories; two were character-driven and excellent, the rest were passable.

Futureland takes place around 2030. There is no privacy. Citizens are monitored at all times, or can be as needed. Corporations run the government; a software titan, quite mad, runs a great deal of the world from an island called Home (he's nothing like Bill Gates). A permanent, official underclass of Unemployed--including those prevented from working if they disobey company rules--sits under New York. Offshore corporate prisons house inmates completely stripped of their citizenship. Cloning is well out of its infancy with all the attendant promises and horrors to come. A drug called Pulse, which creates ultra-real fantasies and illusions but is virtually guaranteed to kill its users by collapsing their brain tissues, is legal. And the World's Greatest Boxer is a 6'9" coffee-skinned woman.

In this fascinating yet unlikely world Mosley weaves his tales. Sometimes the prose is shaky, and I disliked the way the overt (and unlikely) racism is portrayed with a chip on the author's shoulder. Mosley, who is black (and unsmiling in the jacket photo) seems to have it in for Whites, but compared to the Mosleyverse, the amount of real world power Whites wield, now and in the future, is shrinking along with the worldwide White population; by 2030 Whites will be a tiny minority (and globally, already are). There's not a single Hispanic in the book, and they're the fastest-growing American minority!

I can't understand how an otherwise skilled author, easily capable of illustrating the monstrousness of gigantic and abusive governments, doesn't realize that free markets are what bring people out of poverty; nothing else. Hope you eventually come out of the communist fog you're in, M Mosley.

Post-script: I agree with the reviewers who suggest Futureland should've been a novel and not a collection of stories. Word to your mother.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent and dark look at the near future
Review: In the not-too-distant future, major corporations have taken over the functions of the state and most workers have been reduced to a perpetual treadmill between subsistence work and a barely livable unemployment. For criminals and anyone who opposes the omnipresent corporate state, punishment is swift, certain, and enforced with dispassionate unconcern for rights or human dignity.

Author Walter Mosley's nine inter-related stories tell of this near-future and, especially, of the position of blacks in a supposedly racially integrated world. While occasional anarchistic resistance can slow the forces of capitalism run beyond any rules (and FUTURELAND is filled with stories of this resistance), the overall tendency of history cannot be stopped.

Although FUTURELAND was written before the events of 9/11, the encroachments on liberties that Mosley forecast in these stories appear far less paranoid and far more near at hand than they could have to the average reader when Mosley wrote them. Readers do not have to agree with Mosley's dark message, nor share his fears about neo-Nazis ready to cleanse the world of non-white blood, to see the frightening possibilities that Mosley shares.

In the initial story in this series, Whispers in the Dark, Mosley adopts a dialect-heavy style that makes reading difficult. Stick with FUTURELAND. The payoff is worth the effort and Mosley's later stories are far more approachable, from an ease of reading perspective, if even darker from their take on the world.

Rating:
Summary: Really tiring
Review: Is it possible for any african-american to write anything other
then about being an african-american? Or stories about future
afro-americans and how they have always and will always be
treated in what they have been programmed to believe is less
then they deserve? I thought this book was science fiction.
It isn't - it's another infinite lamentation about how bad the black man has it, in the beginning, now and forever. Frankly,
if I ever read a book written by an afro-american that isn't race
related I will bronze the book.

Rating:
Summary: It's worth your time...
Review: Let's get something straight right here at the start; I am a Walter Mosley fan but I don't like everything thing he has written. Unlike "The Blue Light" and "Fearless Jones" this one is a good one. It has a dark dreary creepyness that kept bringing images of "Blade Runner" but, understand this, he tells the story well and that's what makes it cool.

Go, read for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: topnotch science fiction!
Review: Life in America a generation from now which isn't that different except the drugs are better & the daily grind worse. The world's legal knowledge can be stored on a chip in your little finger & the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system - meanwhile justice is delivered by automated courts.

The world still turns & the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks & revolutionaries still have to get by with the hands they're dealt.

This near-future science fiction thriller held me firmly in its grasp from the fly leaf to the last page. Every chapter is an individual story yet when all is read & done - it is very well done!