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Projections
Alternate, special edition cover version here: special edition
Projections is an anthology of sci-fi stories that in some way predicted life in the present day. Edited and introduced by renowned rare-book dealer Rebecca Romney, these pieces are gathered from across the genre’s rich, diverse history. Collectively, they help illuminate both past and present alike.
The 12 individually bound booklets are packaged together in a custom box with a die-cut window and include:
Mary Griffith, Three Hundred Years Hence (excerpt)
Mark Twain, “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904”
Edward A. Johnson, Light Ahead for the Negro (excerpt)
Begum Rokeya, “Sultana’s Dream”
Murray Leinster, “A Logic Named Joe”
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (excerpt)
Doris Pitkin Buck, “Birth of a Gardener”
J. G. Ballard, “The Intensive Care Unit”
Pablo Capanna, “Acronia” (translated by Andrea Bell)
James Blish, We All Die Naked (excerpt)
L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (excerpt)
Projections is an anthology of sci-fi stories that in some way predicted life in the present day. Edited and introduced by renowned rare-book dealer Rebecca Romney, these pieces are gathered from across the genre’s rich, diverse history. Collectively, they help illuminate both past and present alike.
The 12 individually bound booklets are packaged together in a custom box with a die-cut window and include:
Mary Griffith, Three Hundred Years Hence (excerpt)
Mark Twain, “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904”
Edward A. Johnson, Light Ahead for the Negro (excerpt)
Begum Rokeya, “Sultana’s Dream”
Murray Leinster, “A Logic Named Joe”
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (excerpt)
Doris Pitkin Buck, “Birth of a Gardener”
J. G. Ballard, “The Intensive Care Unit”
Pablo Capanna, “Acronia” (translated by Andrea Bell)
James Blish, We All Die Naked (excerpt)
L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (excerpt)
237 pages, Unknown Binding
Published September 1, 2020
3 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Rebecca Romney
7 books411 followersRebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 26, 2020
Received this interesting collection of science fiction short stories as a gift. The editor's introduction gave a fantastic overview of the different stories and provided helpful context. In particular, it was intriguing to read some of the older stories from the early 20th century.
Some of my favorites from the collection include:
-The Intensive Care Unit by J.G. Ballard - a world where all interaction, including family life, is exclusively done via screens. This 1977 short story quite intriguing imagines the age of COVID-19 social distancing and a long term adoption of screen-based interaction might play out.
-A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster. This 1946 short story was amazing. It poses incredible "what if" questions about search engines and malfunctioning artificial intelligence. What if a computer could tell you anything you wanted to do, even illegal activities? That's part of what you will find here.
-The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth. This was fun! It was like "Mad Men" in the future and with marketing Mars. After having rewatched Mad Men in 2020, I very much enjoyed this story.
-Acronia by Pablo Capanna. This was quite the discovery as I've read relatively little science fiction from Spanish. An interesting take on the implications of AI and the strange persistence of bureaucracy.
-The Forbidden Words of Margart At by L. Timmel Duchamp. What if the government became so terrified of a person that they locked her up and changed the Constitution? Well told as a journalist's report.
-Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler. Despite being published before 2000, this story felt like it could have been written during the dark days of the Trump administration.
Some of my favorites from the collection include:
-The Intensive Care Unit by J.G. Ballard - a world where all interaction, including family life, is exclusively done via screens. This 1977 short story quite intriguing imagines the age of COVID-19 social distancing and a long term adoption of screen-based interaction might play out.
-A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster. This 1946 short story was amazing. It poses incredible "what if" questions about search engines and malfunctioning artificial intelligence. What if a computer could tell you anything you wanted to do, even illegal activities? That's part of what you will find here.
-The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth. This was fun! It was like "Mad Men" in the future and with marketing Mars. After having rewatched Mad Men in 2020, I very much enjoyed this story.
-Acronia by Pablo Capanna. This was quite the discovery as I've read relatively little science fiction from Spanish. An interesting take on the implications of AI and the strange persistence of bureaucracy.
-The Forbidden Words of Margart At by L. Timmel Duchamp. What if the government became so terrified of a person that they locked her up and changed the Constitution? Well told as a journalist's report.
-Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler. Despite being published before 2000, this story felt like it could have been written during the dark days of the Trump administration.
October 25, 2021
A good collection, probably could have been rated higher, but I just wasnt in the right mid-set for a short story collection.
November 23, 2020
The future is now.
The voices of the past are projected forward, exploring the imagined futures of our 2020 reality. Worlds where women are more equal to men, no racial basis exist, life in isolation and the rise of the demigod in modern America.
Over 12 distinct and separate stories covering this unique curated collection, writers from the 19th century onwards imagine the future today.
For when ‘Projections’ and reality co-exist, the marrowbone chill is real....
‘A science fiction writer job isn’t to predict the future’. Curator and Rare Book dealer Rebecca Romney contention seems at odds with the central ethos of this curated collection ‘Projections’. Yet while genre writers imagine future worlds, sci-fi main contention is to ‘..purpose a hypothesis of our world today and use...artistic experiment to test say ‘...if women were granted the access to scientific education, then what would happen’.
Our reality in new worlds can provide the ‘distance to interrogate what can otherwise be to familar’
The ideas explored span over 200 years from writers that purport the future mostly optimistically but others eerily relevant to today. How does Mark Twain predict a world similar to web conferencing in his murder mystery ‘From the ‘London Times’ of 1904’? His ‘telelectroscope’ sounds like the ‘Zoom’ calls I make to college friends in the UK.
What surprises is predictions from the past that must have been fanciful at the time but ring to true today. As early as 1953, authors Pohl and Kornbluth (‘The Space Merchants’) predict the power of corporations to take over control of whole continents for profit and control. ‘If nature had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn’t have given us niacin or ascorbic acid’.
Author James Blish (‘We All Die Naked’) shows a world in serious decline from Global warming where half of New York is underwater. This written at the height of cheap oil and big cars in 1969.
It is two more recent stories, written in the last 40 years that strike a cord to our present pandemic reality. Master sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard tells of one families life lived with non social and physical contact but reliant on televisual connection. The ironically titled ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) suggests that repression can only last so long.
Aspirations to a familiar and simpler past witness the rise of a charismatic and dangerous demigod in ‘Parable of the Talents’ by Octavia E. Butler. 22 years before the rein of the egotistical Trump, a Texan Presidential candidate named Andrew Steele Jarret encourages mob violence (think ‘Proud Boys’) against anyone under the label ‘Other’ to ‘...make America great again’. The unbounded limits of science fiction allows space to predict the unbelievable as a warning to all.
This unique collection brings together voices of the past that projected the possible from their historic viewpoint. ‘Projections’ demonstrates that unbounded, science fiction allows the space to predict the unbelievable leaving us to heed that warning. Or not. 8/10
The voices of the past are projected forward, exploring the imagined futures of our 2020 reality. Worlds where women are more equal to men, no racial basis exist, life in isolation and the rise of the demigod in modern America.
Over 12 distinct and separate stories covering this unique curated collection, writers from the 19th century onwards imagine the future today.
For when ‘Projections’ and reality co-exist, the marrowbone chill is real....
‘A science fiction writer job isn’t to predict the future’. Curator and Rare Book dealer Rebecca Romney contention seems at odds with the central ethos of this curated collection ‘Projections’. Yet while genre writers imagine future worlds, sci-fi main contention is to ‘..purpose a hypothesis of our world today and use...artistic experiment to test say ‘...if women were granted the access to scientific education, then what would happen’.
Our reality in new worlds can provide the ‘distance to interrogate what can otherwise be to familar’
The ideas explored span over 200 years from writers that purport the future mostly optimistically but others eerily relevant to today. How does Mark Twain predict a world similar to web conferencing in his murder mystery ‘From the ‘London Times’ of 1904’? His ‘telelectroscope’ sounds like the ‘Zoom’ calls I make to college friends in the UK.
What surprises is predictions from the past that must have been fanciful at the time but ring to true today. As early as 1953, authors Pohl and Kornbluth (‘The Space Merchants’) predict the power of corporations to take over control of whole continents for profit and control. ‘If nature had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn’t have given us niacin or ascorbic acid’.
Author James Blish (‘We All Die Naked’) shows a world in serious decline from Global warming where half of New York is underwater. This written at the height of cheap oil and big cars in 1969.
It is two more recent stories, written in the last 40 years that strike a cord to our present pandemic reality. Master sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard tells of one families life lived with non social and physical contact but reliant on televisual connection. The ironically titled ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) suggests that repression can only last so long.
Aspirations to a familiar and simpler past witness the rise of a charismatic and dangerous demigod in ‘Parable of the Talents’ by Octavia E. Butler. 22 years before the rein of the egotistical Trump, a Texan Presidential candidate named Andrew Steele Jarret encourages mob violence (think ‘Proud Boys’) against anyone under the label ‘Other’ to ‘...make America great again’. The unbounded limits of science fiction allows space to predict the unbelievable as a warning to all.
This unique collection brings together voices of the past that projected the possible from their historic viewpoint. ‘Projections’ demonstrates that unbounded, science fiction allows the space to predict the unbelievable leaving us to heed that warning. Or not. 8/10
November 1, 2020
A stirring, if idiosyncratic, collection -- beautifully designed as ever by the team at Hingston & Olsen.
Rebecca Romney's introduction makes clear that while this collection is about science fiction, not all of these stories easily fit into that categorization. These are stories that, in one way or another, made an accurate prediction about 2020... be it as simple as "women in science!" or as stirringly sudden as "everybody wears masks outside" -- but while several of them lean hard into the most speculative of areas, others are more complicated in that regard. What's more, they're all at least 20+ years old (the oldest, circa 1836, being closer to 200 years old) and while that's part of the fun, there's also something off-putting about the ways in which so many other aspects of these stories are *wrong* about our present.
Still, the right/wrong dichotomy is the wrong way to engage with this box. I read these stories over more than a month and taking time between them was important in allowing me to appreciate the wildly different tones and voices present here. I was particularly fond of the latter additions (James Blish's "We All Die Naked" is a story I need to read the rest of, immediately; and the inclusion of an excerpt about Make America Great Again from "Parable of the Talents" is as chilling as ever) but I also appreciated the historical scope. Including Mark Twain and Mary Griffith (who I'd never heard of before, but who was writing sci-fi in 1836! wild!) makes for a larger sense of American interactions with these issues -- and also, you need a moment to let those older stories sink in and settle, their tones being so very different from anything being published in the last sixty-seventy years.
Anyway, I could go on forever but instead I'll just say: this is another beautiful collection from H&O that may only appeal to a narrow swath of readers but if it *does* appeal to you, why, get on it!
Rebecca Romney's introduction makes clear that while this collection is about science fiction, not all of these stories easily fit into that categorization. These are stories that, in one way or another, made an accurate prediction about 2020... be it as simple as "women in science!" or as stirringly sudden as "everybody wears masks outside" -- but while several of them lean hard into the most speculative of areas, others are more complicated in that regard. What's more, they're all at least 20+ years old (the oldest, circa 1836, being closer to 200 years old) and while that's part of the fun, there's also something off-putting about the ways in which so many other aspects of these stories are *wrong* about our present.
Still, the right/wrong dichotomy is the wrong way to engage with this box. I read these stories over more than a month and taking time between them was important in allowing me to appreciate the wildly different tones and voices present here. I was particularly fond of the latter additions (James Blish's "We All Die Naked" is a story I need to read the rest of, immediately; and the inclusion of an excerpt about Make America Great Again from "Parable of the Talents" is as chilling as ever) but I also appreciated the historical scope. Including Mark Twain and Mary Griffith (who I'd never heard of before, but who was writing sci-fi in 1836! wild!) makes for a larger sense of American interactions with these issues -- and also, you need a moment to let those older stories sink in and settle, their tones being so very different from anything being published in the last sixty-seventy years.
Anyway, I could go on forever but instead I'll just say: this is another beautiful collection from H&O that may only appeal to a narrow swath of readers but if it *does* appeal to you, why, get on it!
February 20, 2021
Enjoyable collection of short stories and excerpts from authors I have read before, and also new authors (to me).
Great variety.
Great variety.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews