A review by beulah_devaney
Take Us to a Better Place by Mike McClelland, David A. Robertson, Achy Obejas, Hannah Lillith Assadi, Calvin Baker, Karen Lord, Madeline Ashby, Roxane Gay, Yoon Ha Lee, Martha Wells, Frank Bill

Despite skipping two of the stories I think this might be one of the best short story collections I've read in years? Maybe since The Bloody Chamber?? Just to unpack that a bit: I always skip at least one short story in a multi-author collection. So skipping in this doesn't mean anything beyond the topics dealt with weren't for me.

The theme of the book is vaguely-hopeful-dystopian-health-futures. So we've got rich white guys building their own altruistic bubble worlds, epic data-mining of individual health decisions, rising sea levels, content creators turning investigative journalists, climate change and plagues, plagues, plagues. It's a bizarre mixture of cynicism, doomsaying, optimism and truly gorgeous illustrations.

On paper I know why this worked for me: I love speculative fiction but I don't love being miserable. I like a complex theme with a clear story arc. I worry about climate change and privacy and isolation in a social media world but I also want to believe that there could be solutions to these problems. But also, on a more fundamental level, I'm genuinely surprised how much I loved this collection. I've been on a two year comfort-read kick and it was kind of a relief to read a collection of stories about such intense topics and come out smiling at the other end of it.