Review: 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills

In this timeline, I’m a reviewer who really loves it when people dangle a story in front of me and then substitute a series of impressionistic fragments that don’t really have affectations like “plot” or “characters” or “consistency” and this is my favorite short story ever.

In this timeline, I’m more like the real me and didn’t care for it. Yeah, yeah, the pandemic was stressful, all that baking bread and playing board games, I remember it too.

In this timeline, I kinda want to be in complete denial of that story I was supposed to read and instead talk about one of my own personal soapboxes. For example, the practice of “slipstreaming,” where one writes a piece ostensibly about some popular thing that gets a lot of search engine activity, but it’s actually just a disguise for your own agenda. Like for example, let’s say my task is to get attention for somebody running for city council, but I’m fully aware that zero readers would be willing to click on a lede that says “should Janice Shmo be elected?” However, they might be tempted to click on something more like “Sorting Politicians Into Harry Potter Houses – Is Janice Shmo a Kind Hufflepuff or a Sneaky Slytherin?” Or maybe “Which K-Pop Demon Hunter Reminds You of Janice Shmo?” Or perhaps you could find reasons to link good old Janice to the latest Disney/Pixar flick, or one of Taylor Swift’s more popular songs. Slipstreaming is very dishonest, and I’m doing it right here to demonstrate: sometimes you click on a headline that purports to be about media, like that Samantha Mills story where she just keeps jumping timelines but they’re never anywhere drastically different, very poetic, but it really turns out to be some writer going “muahaha, now that I’ve baited you with something popular and enticing, you’re just going to have to listen to my Aunt Tilly’s Candied Brussels Sprouts recipe.” So everyone, be sure to pay attention to my message, which is a very morally correct one, and eradicate slipstreaming now.

In this timeline, I kind of want to smack the alternate smart-ass me who wrote that last paragraph with a sack of stale donuts.  And I recognize that my hostility to the story centers around it being a Cthulhu story that wandered into a science fiction bar, sat down, had a drink, and commenced disassociating. I don’t really dislike it though, it conveys things, and the writing is competently done. Samantha Mills appears to be a nice person, worthy of being a Hugo owner. Her story is the first one I read, so I'll judge all the others against it. 

Here, judge for yourself.