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.”
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.
The present keeps catching up to the near-future that Tim Maughan presents with insight, empathy, and skill in Infinite Detail, and yet that near-future remains just out of reach up ahead even as it seems closer than ever before.
All pretense of a democratic India has collapsed after large-scale de-citizenings and unpersonings, voter-list erasures, internet shutdowns, news censors and data-driven home invasions.
