UbiquiCity by Tod Foley

UbiquiCity Reviews

• 
  M.M. Wedin

  Great collection of stories, well suited for lovers of SciFi.
  It is not a genre I often read, but I found myself getting lost in it, very talented writers come together in this piece!
• 
  Adrian McCauley

  Full Disclosure: I contributed to this anthology. It is a fantastic collection of stories by authors from different continents who collaborated to build a functioning, living city to set the stories in. Inspired by cyberpunk and transhuman sci-fi the collection aspires more to the social-science stories of Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov, exploring a realistic vision of the future where AI, drones, social media and augmented reality have changed society and global culture, economics, religion and even sexuality. With terms like Fractopian and Ubipunk, the book stands apart from other sci-fi collections by focusing on a little-explored niche. You won't find aliens or biomechanical demons here. The stories are all of a smaller, more intimate scale, like Logan or Deadpool - action, drama, and lesbian mermaid sex....
• 
  catty_big

  [Disclaimer: I’m known personally to the editor and compiler of UbiquiCity]
  
  In a corridor in the main admin block of University College London – the ‘Godless University’ – is a glass case in which reposes the clothed, taxidermed body of Eighteenth Century political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, bequeathed to the University on condition that his head be placed on the table during Council meetings. I don’t know whether or not this stipulation is actually followed, but it’s fitting for the man who in the 1780s conceived of the Panopticon, a type of prison where inmates could be watched at all times. Bentham also wrote about legal philosophy and various types of representative Government, but it’s his idea of the Panopticon that interests us here. A panopticon is a round building where prisoners – inhabiting the perimeter of the circle – could be guarded by a single watchman located in a central tower, from where he or she could observe the inmates but couldn’t themselves be observed, the idea being that, although it was impossible for the watchman to see all the prisoners at once, the latter had no means of knowing whether and when they were being observed, and thus would in theory self-regulate their behavior.
  
  But what does all this have to do with UbiquiCity, you may be asking. Well, the name itself gives you a clue: UbiquiCity is set in a world a hundred years from now, where we are all connected via a multiplicity of devices and networks, the totality of which is called The Fog. This is an interesting tweak on the pervasive interconnectedness we currently call The Cloud, i.e. an online world where data overload makes any kind of meaningful understanding, interpretation and analysis all but impossible. But is this a panopticon? Well no, not in the traditional sense, but it comes to much the same thing. Imaginers of dystopian future worlds from the recent past – 1984, Equilibrium, the TV series Person of Interest - almost always saw surveillance and control in visual terms, with a fascistic Government observing everything we do at all times; and indeed, this prediction has partly come true in our own era: the prison that Jeremy Bentham envisaged is not too dissimilar to the myriad CCTV cameras we have in shops, supermarkets and public spaces today, with banks of monitors in a poky room somewhere, some, any or none of which may or may not be being watched by the security guards at a given time.
  
  However, what UbiquiCity reveals is that in the Fractopian future the panopticon will not consist of buildings, banks of monitors and micromanagement by a faceless and shadowy centralised Government. No, it will consist of a vast ocean of shared information, with everyone able to access everyone else’s data at all times, and from a bewildering array of devices – the Internet of Things gone mad as it were. And, of course, this being the future, many of those devices will be of the Deus Ex type: implants and body mods etc. Total data openness is only now beginning to be discussed, but in reality it’s been creeping up on us for years, and is both much more efficient and much more insidious than the nightmarish future described by George Orwell and others. With store cards and other forms of chip and pin-based identification containing increasing amounts of our data, personal information that we’re blithely allowing various organisations to store, the realisation is growing that a literally totalitarian future is both achievable and not far off. We laugh at the check-shirted, shaggy-bearded survivalist in his log cabin up in Montana, but actually the joke’s on us, we who have willingly opened ourselves up to an access all areas level of prying.
  
  But surely, you’re thinking, it will be possible to go off-grid, like it is now? Why yes indeed, and some of the best stories in this anthology are based around characters who do just that. There are abandoned churches, allotments, pubs, and other relics of our analogue Twentieth Century existence, and in fact there are characters – known as Scrumblies (analogous to the hippies of our own period) – who spend a lot of their time there, in addition to ones who somehow manage to straddle the two. On top of that there are characters called Wilderlanders, who live outside the city. So yes, there _is_ an off-grid section of UbiquiCity, but for most fog-bound people, living off-grid is simply unthinkable and unimaginable, in much the same way as it is for many people today. Not on Facebook? Don’t have an Internet connection? What’s _wrong_ with you??? I know people who don’t own a television, and yet are somehow able to exist.
  
  And at this point you may be thinking so far so Cyberpunk. No, not at all. The thing this anthology totally nails is that, again, unlike what might be called the ‘standard model’ of futurology, where everything is neon lights, hovervehicles, and scruffy teenagers hacking into security systems on battered laptops, the reality is that the future will be for the most part merely an advanced version of what we have today. So it won’t be so much ‘Dude, where’s my jetpack?’ as ‘Cool, thanks for my smart refrigerator and solar-powered car’. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of amazing tech in UbiquiCity, and the anthology is from that point of view a fascinating read, and that brings me to my final point, which is that it’s above all a work of fiction. The stories are well-written and engaging; you really feel drawn into the world, and the characters are totally believable.
  
  Here you will find people such as Vidcaster Isaac, who is forever on a daily quest for more social credit; K8T and Temperly, Tube Rat and rat-catcher, engaged in a deadly dance among the tunnels and skyscrapers of UbiquiCity; psychotic businessman Harn, disaffected worker ant Nerita, who we follow on her journey from workstation to augmented home, catching glimpses of daily life in Ubiquicity along the way; Nadim, who has his eyes opened by a friendly colleague to a world outside The Fog, and many, many others. There are stories of work, love and self-discovery, of human relationships, and of groping towards an understanding about what it means to be alive.
  
  UbiquiCity is truly a book for our times, both present and future. Go buy it!
• 
  Al

  This book starts out with a map of Union City. All of the ten stories in this anthology take place in this shared story world. The map and the stories also share some terminology to describe things in the shared story world, for example sprawl zones and squatter towns are what might be thought of as the slums (to use terminology from our times) of Union Town. This also takes places in the future where artificial intelligence is widespread and those that populate the planet where Union City is located are as likely to be a robotic creature as anything else. (Be aware that there is a glossary at the end. If you find yourself wondering about the meaning of some terminology then scanning the glossary before continuing might be a good idea.)
  
  Cyberpunk, the genre label used to describe these stories, happens in a dystopian future and, like the dystopian genre, these stories make you think about the potential downsides of some directions the world is headed. I found it interesting, yet logical in many ways, that those who lived in the slums of Union City often seemed like the happier characters. As with any collection of stories from multiple authors, some of the stories grabbed me more than others, but overall I found them to be good reads that succeeded in getting me to wonder about what the distant future will bring.
  
  **Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
• 
  Adrian McCauley

  Full Disclosure: I contributed to this anthology. It is a fantastic collection of stories by authors from different continents who collaborated to build a functioning, living city to set the stories in. Inspired by cyberpunk and transhuman sci-fi the collection aspires more to the social-science stories of Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov, exploring a realistic vision of the future where AI, drones, social media and augmented reality have changed society and global culture, economics, religion and even sexuality. With terms like Fractopian and Ubipunk, the book stands apart from other sci-fi collections by focusing on a little-explored niche. You won't find aliens or biomechanical demons here. The stories are all of a smaller, more intimate scale, like Logan or Deadpool - action, drama, and lesbian mermaid sex....
• 
  Hayley Woolf

  There's a reason one of the 5-star reviews was one of the authors. What a waste of time.