I really enjoyed this book! The writing style created a nice flow and the storytelling really pulled me in. I read this in one sitting, and completely lost track of time.

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC of Future Bright, Future Grimm

I really enjoyed the idea of reading a book of fairy tales. It has been a while since I read a book if proper 'short' stories.

Whilst some stories were more gripping and haunting than others, overall it was a good book.

Unfortunately, Future Bright, Future Grimm was not my cup of tea. The writing was interesting, imaginative and unique, but the short story format didn't work for me. The stories were a mix of either too short and a tempting teaser or too cerebral and I didn't get it. Would love to see some of them expanded into a novella or novel. I'm super curious to see what D.J. MacLennan creates in the future and will be keeping an eye out for more of his work. Definitely a lot of potential for weird, offbeat and unusual stories.

Recommended for fans of: speculative fiction, Jeff VanderMeer, Blake Crouch, Station Eleven, Ubik, Altered Carbon

Thank you to Netgalley, BooksGoSocial Publishing and D.J. MacLennan for the reading copy.

Transhumanism – the rising global movement to supercharge human evolution with radical tech – heralds body- and mind-bending personal transformation. Yet it feels curiously familiar, like the dizzying fears and fantasies we probed in Germanic folklore as children.

Future Bright, Future Grimm draws upon the odd, abrupt, often violent tales of the Brothers Grimm to summon transhumanist tomorrows of astounding grace and danger. The adventurers, magicians and monsters who lurk here are we and our mind-children – amplified, augmented, immortalised in rebooted fables with the edgiest of twists.

This is magical realism inspired by the transfiguring technological sorcery that our species seems driven to conjure. Where the improbability of traditional fantasy meets the wildest possibilities of modern science and the coming ‘Singularity’.

Open doors – some dazzling, some dystopian – to enchanted mindscapes, unhinged. A storybook for changelings whose humble once-upon-a-times now spell truly outlandish ever-afters.

I found myself reading chapter after chapter without realising how late it was getting. I started in the evening and couldn’t stop till I’d reached the conclusion!

I liked the premise of the book, extruding Grimm fairy tales through a futuristic funnel of philosophy. As with any anthology, it was a mixed bag of wins, some truly inspired and some that left me stale. The post-tale analysis might be considered pretentious but explained some of the choices made and teased out some references I had missed.

My overall impression is just that there were a few too many tales. "Always leave them wanting more" would have trimmed a couple and kept the quality and imagery high.

Transhumanism is a very interesting book. However it is extremely hard to get into and can cause alot of misunderstanding. Comparing it to the brothers grimm is a big no for me it's not similar at all. This book explain what happens as time goes on in the fairy tale relam.

Rating: 4/5
Published Date: 11/15/2021
I was given an eARC from NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for my honest review.

Transhumanism – the rising global movement to supercharge human evolution with radical tech – heralds body- and mind-bending personal transformation. Yet it feels curiously familiar, like the dizzying fears and fantasies we probed in Germanic folklore as children.
Future Bright, Future Grimm draws upon the odd, abrupt, often violent tales of the Brothers Grimm to summon transhumanist tomorrows of astounding grace and danger. The adventurers, magicians and monsters who lurk here are we and our mind-children – amplified, augmented, immortalized in rebooted fables with the edgiest of twists.
This is magical realism inspired by the transfiguring technological sorcery that our species seems driven to conjure. Where the improbability of traditional fantasy meets the wildest possibilities of modern science and the coming ‘Singularity’.

This book was both dark/twisty and philosophical, out of this world but at the same time worldly. I do have to say I normally do not read books, and I was disappointed nor was I hooked. I do believe that it is all up to the person who reads the books if that is something that they really like. I am not a huge sci-fi fan, but I know when to appreated well written sci-fi. The different POV on a classic written Grimms Brothers Fairy Tales was well done and a lot of the stories had me saying hmm, and definitely left me thinking. I really loved how the author took time after each story to explain the rationale behind each story and gave a small backdrop of where it stemmed from. Overall I would recommend this book to any that has read Transhumanism/ Sci-Fi and loves them.

I want to Thank NetGalley and BooksGoSocial publishing for the chance to review this eARC for my honest opinion .

Honestly....Not sure what to say about this one. I don't know if it was the writing style or the (sometimes very forced and stilted) elements of transhumanism, but I just could not get into any of these retold stories.

Or it might just be me.

***Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.***

I knew this was going to be a 50/50 one for me. On the one hand, retelling Grimm fairy tales is a big plus. On the other, I can go either way on transhumanism and transhumanistic themes (Love Altered Carbon and Bladerunner, hate Robocop and Judge Dredd etc). This was more a miss than a hit for me but think that was more down to personal preferences. It was an innovative collection, told with skill but it just left me cold. As a side bar, gorgeous cover but it’s not aiming at the books target audience. An ambivalent 2.5 – 3 stars from me.

D.J. MacLennan explores what happens if you allow time to move on in a fairy tale realm. He redefines death, time and gender to create new fairy tale worlds, stepping away from the traditional medieval setting. In the introduction he explains the role of transhumanism in his stories. And indeed, in his stories you read about humankind’s accelerating transition to a qualitatively different, more marvelous mode of being.

Bending fairy tale reality
You dive into the stories with certain expectations, trying to notice all the winks to the future. Because of this attitude, the first stories you read don’t seem subtle at all, as there are multiple references to something futuristic, a modern trend (like minimalism) or school of thought in every paragraph.

Not all transitions are for the better, as is clearly illustrated by the story Asha which is based on Cinderella. Another fun story is Gingerbread, which unmistakably draws from Hansel & Gretel. Despite this being one of the “easier” stories, I won’t attempt to write a summary. Little Night Shard shows how “naming things – wresting them from the chaotic, unpronounceable background – may grant them immense, sometimes unwarranted, causal power.” This quote makes the story sound simple, but don’t let that mislead you.

D.J. MacLennan did something unique with all the original fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.The predictability of the fairy tale motifs remains, but it is fun to read how differently things can turn out in another world.

Fairy tale manual
The stories don’t read as easily as the fairy tales I’m used to. This is partly because of the terminology, but also because of the writing style in general (long, detailed sentences). I noticed this less in the second half of the book. However, you do need to be relatively knowledgeable about transhumanism and technological advances to really understand what is happening in the story. And even then. I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand every aspect of them.

At the end of each story, the author explains the fairy tale that inspired it and the concepts he added to the story. You’ll also find references to characters from books, philosophical conventions, and other sources. I really looked forward to these explanations, sometimes even more than to the next story.

Recommendation
While Future Bright, Future Grimm is a fun book to read, it is certainly not for everyone. To illustrate that point, does the following short take-away from a story interest you? In the story The Foundling, checksums are performed based on the past predictability of a fairy tale data block, in the same way that a computer performs checksums.

It helps if you know (or look up) something about transhumanism and singularity, but you should also be familiar with the technology vocabulary. Without that knowledge, you won’t understand everything in the story, and that might hamper your reading experience.

Regardless of how much you understand, this book is an interesting showcase of how fairy tales can evolve into modern times. It shows how stuck we are in our expectations of things like fairy tale settings and the ways to move a story forward. If death is not the end, and time can go on indefinitely, I see many more creative ways to transform human storytelling. Having said that, if you reflect on the thoughts in the previous sentence, these concepts are not unknown to fairy tale worlds.

Transhumanism. Back in the early 1990s, my dad got us all a video cassette that contained a couple of episodes of 'Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future'. My sister, cousins and I watched it to bits for years, not wholly understanding the reasons behind Lord Dread's reign of terror (neither did it occur to us to figure it out). It was many, many years later, when I found the whole season available on YouTube that I watched it and understood the rather nerve-chilling agenda behind this villain's actions. Essentially, Lord Dread was trying to build a machine world where the human brain was fused within the body of machines to reach a state of immortality. Only now have I learnt there is a term for such a belief -- transhumanism.

In 'Future Bright, Future Grimm', D.J. Maclennan rewrites the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers, with this transhumanistic theme in mind. He spends a while, before the retellings, explaining his thoughts and ideas on transhumanism. Quite a bit of it has to do with time and space and how we perceive it. He has read widely and has pooled in his thoughts about this philosophy (or would it be belief-system?) as a lead-up or explanation of what is to follow. Nevertheless, while I was prepared for the strange and the weird, I don't think I was as prepared for the strangest, weirdest, creepiest ideas that I came across in the retellings.

At this point, I must stop and say that it has been many years now since I have read fairy tales. While once I thought my sons would grow up with them just as I did, I have deliberately kept them away from them because my reading of the fairytales as an adult showed me how frighteningly dark these fairytales actually are. Maclennan uses the same darkness of these fairytales and twists them into something that transhumanists (is that a word yet?) would call futuristic. Maclennan's retellings are brief (considering those I read) and deeply disturbing. He offers up an explanation after each story and what exactly he was going for in the elements of the story that he changed. These tid-bits were interesting to read, and it is fascinating how he was able to retain the original stories while reshaping them.

On the whole, however, this was not a book that worked well for me at all. I think had I bothered to look up what transhumanism meant before picking up this book at NetGalley, I would have definitely thought twice about it. The general reviews were intriguing, and perhaps, if this were your type of jam, you might like it too.

I can’t say if this is bad or good. It’s both simplistic and complicated.. just really not my cup of tea. I do like how the author seemed to have chose lesser known tales

This book hit a little close to home at times, to remind us of what we might face in the future.
The author has chosen to 'modernise' 24 Grimm fairytales into futuristic tales where humans have 'improved' themselves using advances in medicine and technology.
This a great, quirky book. Not an easy read for me, but still very interesting and scary.

There are twenty four retold fairy tales selected from the Brothers Grimm repertoire in this book, all of them remade with Transhumanism in mind, an idea that, if I understood the author's intro correctly, proposes to improve on humans through technological advances inserted into the body; not to fix what's malfunctioning as is the current practice but to make what's functioning well even more powerful and efficient.

I can't say that there was a story here that made an impression on me, more because of the style than anything. Most of the tales are very quirky, very weird, and dark, and some have a questionable veneer of eugenics that might not be intentional, whilst others are funny and lovely. The length varies, but on average they are very short. One of them is so short, barely one paragraph long, that it reads more like authorial commentary on the original fairy tale than a retelling of it. That's the main issue for me, that a few of the tales are more a venue for the author to comment on themes than a traditional retelling, and the shortness of so many of them doesn't allow for much depth. I would've done away with the dense introduction as well, or at least made it less confusing for readers not familiar with the driving philosophy behind these stories.

This is such an interesting book, it is not a quick or easy read by any stretch of the imagination but that doesnt take anything away from the book. It is very cleverly written and definaitely worth reading.

First of all, can we give it up for this cover? I absolutely adore the cover! That's what caught my eye, and it being retelling of brothers Grimm stories? Yes please! However, I don't think I'm the target audience for this books since I've never read anything about transhumanity, nor do I know any of the scientific background or any of the terms. While some of the stories were very innovative, interesting and fun, most of them made me utterly confused and I had no idea what I was reading. Unfortunately, this book was not for me.

Future Bright, Future Grimm is unlike any other book I've read. It was both futuristic and creepy; philosophical and dark. My favorite part was how MacLennan explained his rationale behind each short story at the end of each chapter. I found a lot of this book confusing (probably because of the futuristic ideas that went over my head), but it was an interesting read that def kept me thinking! I appreciate the opportunity to read this e-ARC. Thank you netgalley!