LIBERATION DAY

Freedom and why it matters

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All science fiction fans are grimly familiar with the idea that readers of literary fiction can be rather sniffy about the field.

What's less often acknowledged, at least from the science fiction side of this equation, is that some fans of the genre are just as guilty of snobbery.

Certainly, there are some good reasons to be sceptical of certain lit-fic writers' excursions into the future. There have, down the years, been plenty of examples of dilettante science fiction: books that take on a familiar trope, but don't do enough with it becaus the writer doesn't have the knowledge to realise that they're covering old ground.

But this kind of novel gets into print less often than in previous years. This is perhaps partly because editors are now more aware of the problem. More positively, it's because science fiction is far more central to mainstream culture than it was even 20 years ago. For a serious novelist such as Emily St John Mandel - to name but one science fiction is just one part of her toolkit.

We mention all this because there will be SFX readers who'll question whether we should be reviewing a book of short stories by George Saunders, a man best known for winning the Booker Prize for a historical novel, Lincoln In The Bardo (2017).

To understand why we believe we should, the opening story, which gives this collection of nine tales its name, is a good place to start. First of all, it's quite simply one of the best science fiction short stories to be published in the 21st century so far, concerning enslaved actors, who in crucial ways have lost their sense of self, reenacting Custer's Last Stand for the sake of a privileged audience.

It's a story where, as we noted when interviewing the author last issue, past, present and future play into each other in ways that constantly catch you by surprise.