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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Better than the first 18,000 books you'd pass on the shelves
Review: Mosley here takes his outstanding studied, humanistic, almost "concrete" fictional prose style to the future-dystopia genre. I grabbed this book on an impulse buy, and have since read and re-read it several times, each time thoroughly enjoyable.
I see this book has been faulted here on a number of counts, particulalrly its narrative structure. It is true that the individual chapters/stories don't hold up ideally on their own, nor does everything tie neatly together as one would hope for in a novel. However, each section does make a unique contribution to one's understanding of the future land, and the more compelling characters and story lines do emerge to the forefront as the collection is viewed as a whole. If you want this to be a novel, FINE, it's a novel! Happy?
"1984" is one of my favorite novels of all time, as is "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned", and I honestly think this collection lives up to both standards. "Future Land" does expound, in some detail, on futuristic technology as a sign of these impending times, but the emphasis is on things like cognitive science, prosthesis and bionics, psychoactive drugs, and mechanical means to provide vision and insight into the very nature of God and of the human mind. In other words, there is still that VERY human element even in the techie portions of the narrative, where Mosley has clearly done his homework, and which he takes to with obvious gusto. This is hardly cyber punk for its own sake.
Imagine "1984" where there is heated, if not entirely open, competition for the shadow office of Big Brother. Or "The Matrix" without the battery fields and killer robots. In Future Land, the System is omnipresent, but we never actually confront its agents or rulers. The emphasis is on *life* within that system, and the potential and possibilities still available to its assorted inhabitants.
Two very different types of revolutionaries, rebel genius Ptolemy and corporate giant Dr. Kismet, pursue their respective paths to power, vying to manage the evolution, change, and eventual perfection of the system. Meanwhile, of course, there is the requisite hard-boiled invincible detective character, owner of the one detail of this book I'll never forget: a prosthetic eye with a wi-fi hookup! Instant access to an endless database of images and info, all presented directly in his field of "vision". An ingenious and utterly believable device in this age af cochlear and (soon) retinal implants and the info superhighway. And, for once, a logical reason some jerky private dick would seem to know everything.... Sci-fi indeed, but hardly the sort of childish fantasy we are so often treated to in the genre.
In short, if you like to read, your IQ is 100+, liked the Matrix or 1984, sex, drugs, violence, and something out of the ordinary, I think you could do a lot worse.
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