The post A Bitcoin Fictional Anthology Review appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

“It’s hard,” Harry Turtledove declared in 2001, in his Introduction to The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, “to write about the effects of technology before there’s much in the way of technology to write about.” Two decades on, futurism remains as hard an endeavor as ever, and it’s precisely this problem of envisioning what comes next that animates the body of stories in 21 Futures: Tales from the Timechain, a new anthology of science fiction out this month. These aren’t, mind you, your grandfather’s tales of tomorrow. Konsensus Network, the publishers behind the project, have been pitching it as a kind of urtext, decidedly proto-, the “first-ever” as far as specifically bitcoin-oriented story collections go. And with twenty-one authors offering up twenty-one different takes on a future distinguished by the flourishing of decentralized digital currencies, editors Philip Charter and Niko Laamanen appear to have achieved just that. It should be noted from the start that their mission is only obliquely evangelical, an editorial decision for which serious readers will be thankful. In the case of 21 Futures, the very real potential for the proliferation of brain-rotting agitprop has been wholly avoided. What we have instead is the product of a principled approach to artistic selection: a crop of stories both enjoyably immersive and intellectually stimulating, each of them wrangling in its way with the tantalizing question of “What if?” After all, as Charter points out in his own Introduction, “to unite interest in bitcoin, we must be better at telling its stories.” Which isn’t exactly to say, “Listen up, maxis!” Because, although some of the stories (indeed, some of the very best) in this collection establish only a glancing relationship to bitcoin, the truth of the matter may just be that a policy of artful attraction, rather…

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Filed under: News - @ December 5, 2023 3:24 pm