Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction

Science fiction isn’t just about spaceships or aliens or weird technology. It’s about answering hard questions, about not only the future but about who we are. It’s about exploring incredible possibilities, about twisting and turning a prism and seeing all the possible facets, then shooting it with a laser and discovering new ones.

Rich Larson “gets” science fiction. His stories can be funny or devastating, steeped in lore and alien jargon or hauntingly familiar and close-to-home. However, what makes all of these eclectic tales singularly his is that they always boil down to the root of science fiction: talking about people, how they change, how they grow, how they learn and how they fail to learn.

Whether it’s a grandfather’s spirit living in his grandchild’s head, club-going tech-heads trying out the newest diseases, a guy trying to save his sister’s memory from a hungry spaceship or an AI program on a train taking care of people long dead, these are characters and scenarios that will fascinate and engage the reader. They demand attention and interaction. They make you wonder what you’d do in these scenarios; these are powerful connections, and Larson manages it time and time again.