Tomorrowing

This keepsake compilation brings together 20-years’ worth of Hugo and Nebula award winner Bisson’s “This Month in History” column, which, beginning in 2004, ran weekly in the sci-fi magazine Locus. Instead of recalling the past, Bisson’s take on the format offers fragmentary glimpses of the future. April 24, 2102, sees the destruction of “all the works of art in the Louvre, the Met and the Prado.” On May 26, 2117, a “disgruntled science fiction author” erases the entire Library of Congress. Cultural destruction is a prominent theme, along with environmental disasters and pandemics. July 5, 2044, marks the death of the planet’s last elephant, the lone survivor of the year 2036’s “Dumbo virus,” and May 9–11, 2107, witnesses a “Ceticide,” or mass extinction, of blue whales on Long Island’s South Shore. Bisson’s handling of doom is mostly tongue-in-cheek, while his entries on gender and racism are noncommittal, in keeping with the dry newspaper format he is parodying. Here and there, he drops a present-day clunker (for example, in the entry dated Sept. 4, 2011: “Reparations Day celebrated nationwide as Harvard, Yale... turn over their endowments to the trustees of the United Negro College Fund”). The snippets are comical but rarely poignant or presaging and there’s little gained from reading the compendium cover-to-cover, rather than dipping in and out. Still, this will be a gift for Bisson’s fans. (May)