A science fiction anthology imagines our post-pandemic future

Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems to pop up a lot in the history of science fiction literature. Most famously, the father of modern SF, John W. Campbell, studied there, and there’s no counting how many MIT students have been SF fans, nor how many genre protagonists have claimed affiliation with the school.

In 2013, MIT Press formalized the spiritual alliance with the debut of the Twelve Tomorrows series of original anthologies. The current iteration, “Make Shift,” is the sixth installment and a particularly strong one, focused on our post-pandemic future. All the stories stress the maxim that our species must adapt or perish.

Editor Gideon Lichfield, who helmed the MIT Technology Review until recently, kicks off the volume with an editorial that toggles ruminatively between SF’s two favorite antithetical modes, utopian and dystopian, and the stories generally follow suit.

First up, however, is some provocative nonfiction: “A Veil Was Broken” is an interview by Wade Roush with

Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

Edited by Gideon Lichfield MIT Press. 192 pp. $19.95

Ytasha L. Womack, whose area of interest is Afrofuturism. She comes down squarely on the utopian side of things: “I would like to see more visions that reflect what a healthy society looks like . ... Healthy societies can have issues, conflict, and all the drama required of a story . ... I’d like to read a sci-fi story and say, ‘Gee, I’d like to live there.’”

Science fiction has devoted a considerable amount of thought to the future of the arts, from robot authors to cloud-sculpting, and Adrian Hon’s “Little Kowloon” explores this theme. In a U.K. flooded with Hong Kong refugees and suffering from a new pandemic, the Edinburgh Festival goes on, but only thanks to the clever software hack of “dynamic distancing.” “The idea was that you could reduce the safe distancing requirements for respiratory diseases to a fraction of the usual two meters by predicting the exact movements of respiratory droplets that might carry the H1N3 virus.” And thus meatspace intimacy is restored!

Slightly reminiscent of John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision,” Madeline

Ashby’s “Patriotic Canadians Will Not Hoard Food!” zeros in on an idyllic boutique farm dogged by corporate suitors who want to buy the place and harassment from locals with different political views but it’s also a love story.

Ken Liu deploys a glittering bricolage of multimedia materials to chart out his future of telepresence tourism in “Jaunt” and discovers surprising sociopolitical consequences in the new recreational tech.

Especially for a younger writer, Rich Larson pulls off an amazing portrait of lonely and bitter senior citizen Ivan, an expat resident of Prague, who plans to snitch on lockdown violators in “Koronaparty.” But old-man fistshaking leads to a touching epiphany this time.