Wheeler’s book is an angry one. It should be. We should be sticking our heads out our windows and, like Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network, shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Our fantasy and science fiction structure exists in a system that tries to convince its inhabitants that the world is binary, that everything is the group that is Us, and everything else, which is Them.
The rise of one civilization doesn’t have to mean the fall of another; if two civilizations can find a way to engage meaningfully, they can coexist peacefully.
While looking for national representation in any Year’s Best might be a matter of folly, as it happens there are, in this volume at least, common trends.
Apart from a few lapses into trope, The Book of Koli was compelling and poignant—the kind of apocalypse we might actually need in the midst of our own.
