Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Walter Mosley (Author), Richard Allen (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2002

Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black. But the world still turns and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as: Ptolemy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q.- and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever... Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis... Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her... Dr. Ivan Kismet: The world's richest man, Macrocode's CEO is a tycoon, tyrant, and messiah who is evidently more powerful than God. So it's too bad for everyone that Dr. Kismet is utterly insane... Walter Mosley brings to life the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks, oppressors, and revolutionaries who inhabit a glorious all-American nightmare that's just around the corner. Welcome to FUTURELAND.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Futureland is bestselling mystery author Walter Mosley's first science fiction book since Blue Light, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Futureland's nine linked stories will provide an accessible and intelligent introduction to written science fiction for mystery or mainstream fiction fans who do not normally read the genre.

Experienced science fiction readers, however, may be less than satisfied with Futureland. Reading it, you might decide Mr. Mosley grew up reading SF, respects the genre, and still watches SF movies, but has read little SF written during or after the New Wave of the 1960s. However, something more may be going on here than a genre newcomer making beginning-SF-writer mistakes. Mr. Mosley may be deliberately, and craftily, creating SF accessible to his large non-SF readership and to others who are strangers to this genre.

Some have labeled Futureland cyberpunk, and it does present a dark, infotech-saturated, corporation-controlled future; but it is in fact an inversion of cyberpunk. Instead of that subgenre's cliche of cool, cutting-edge, street-smart, but not very believable outlaws who out-hack and outwit powerful multinational corporations, this Dante-esque collection presents outlaws and outcasts who may be street-wise, but who have little chance of overcoming the corporations and governments that control, and sometimes take, their lives. Like shockingly few other SF works, Futureland directly examines the lives of the working and the nonworking classes, the poor and the marginalized, the criminal and the criminalized. In other words, Futureland is set in a world quite alien to many veteran SF readers, and is therefore a book they should try. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

After the qualified success of his first science fiction novel, Blue Light (1998), Mosley (best known for such mystery fiction as the Easy Rawlins series) returns with nine linked short stories set in a grim, cyberpunkish near-future. Unfortunately, heavy-handed plotting and unconvincing extrapolation weaken the collection's earnest social message. "Whispers in the Dark" introduces prodigy Ptolemy Bent, who will grow to be the smartest man in the world in spite of his poverty-ridden childhood. Ptolemy reappears in "Doctor Kismet" as an adviser to assassins trying to kill the richest, most corrupt man in the world and as the brains behind a series of global plots to overthrow the status quo in "En Masse" and "The Nig in Me." Champion boxer and much-hyped female role model Fera Jones steps away from the ring to take hands-on responsibility for the influence she wields in "The Greatest." With its easily befuddled talking computer justice system, "Little Brother" is more Star Trek than high-tech cyberpunk. In more familiar territory for Mosley, PI Folio Johnson investigates a series of murders linked to Doctor Kismet in "The Electric Eye." Although packaged as SF, this book is likely to disappoint readers of that genre who've already seen Mosley's themes of racial and economic rebellion more convincingly handled by authors like Octavia Butler. Mystery fans, on the other hand, are far more likely to embrace this latest example of Mosley's SF vision, with its comfortably familiar noirish tone and characters, than they did Blue Light. (Nov. 12)Forecast: With a five-city author tour and national print advertising, both mainstream and genre, this title book should be slated for solid sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio Paperback Audiobooks; Abridged edition (November 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587889889
• ISBN-13: 978-1587889882
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,890,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and dark look at the near future, December 27, 2001

By 

booksforabuck "BooksForABuck" (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Important, if Flawed, Work, January 11, 2002

By 

flying-monkey (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the dark mirror of reality, December 4, 2002

By 

Y. Nakai (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (Hardcover)

This is a masterwork that far surpasses much of William Gibson's writing. Unlike much SF that obsesses about Trekkie-cool details of "realism" in a purely hypothetical technological tomorrow, Futureland goes straight to the point: we are racing heedlessly into a future where technology is a tool for the dark side of humanity to control everyone else. And it does so with an artist's brush, mixing subtle shapes and colors into a sometimes nightmarish surrealism that serves not only to wow people with sheer imagination, but more importantly, to bring the essentials of the world into glaring focus. The darkly gleaming picture that emerges from this distorted world is not much different from today - the tools are simply more advanced. With the paranoia in the world today about terrorism and nuclear threats, we are not that far away.

As far as race is concerned - the people who feel threatened by insinuations that black people are not treated fairly in today's world should seriously examine their assumptions. In Futureland, there is no hardcoded institutional racial discrimination - no Jim Crow laws - just like today. In Futureland, overt racism only comes from individuals, not government - just like today. In Futureland, most of the people in power are individuals who are racist yet believe that there is a level playing field - just like today. In Futureland, the cumulative effect of hegemony and class biases is a devastating one for blacks - just like today. Every single issue raised in this book is really one about people who happen to use technology, not technology. That makes some people nervous, but that is the genius of Futureland; its sharp focus on the essentials does not give quarter for intellectual complacency.

And all that while weaving a brilliant tapestry of interwoven stories.