Cosmogramma

In the style of Ted Chiang, these are wonderful speculative short stories that paint chilling pictures of the (near) future. Most of them start out relatively mild and interesting, but unravel quickly and left me with a disturbed feeling, which is exactly what you want from these kinds of stories.

"Cosmogramma" is an absolutely fantastic collection of stories by the incredibly talented and skilled Courttia Newland. The writing is smooth as silk, the characters are incredibly vivid (especially considering we don't have much time to get to know them, since these are shorts), and the plots are perfectly formed and thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, if I could ask one person "What do you think of...?" it would be Courttia Newland - that imagination is priceless.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

I used to devour short story compilations as a kid, partially because they were a bite-sized way of getting the sci-fi thrills I was looking for, partially because my local library had a lot of them. In the 80’s a lot of the bigger SF authors had graduated by writing for the pulps, and then the more serious SF magazines. And quite a few of them let the stories be jumping off points for later novels and so on. And mixed author collections often set out a flag for people I would latterly enjoy more (hello Robert Sheckley).Perhaps I drifted from short stories because they weren’t things I bought, or because I liked the push of a long narrative. I have certainly enjoyed the recent resurgence in novellas, when I haven’t actually been buying them (the cost / word count ration shouldn’t be an issue to me but….is).

All of which is to say that Courttia Newland’s collection Cosmogramma, flexed reading muscles I hadn’t used for a while. Described as an Afro-Futurist writer in the blurb, whilst there is a strong black theme through many of these stories, it equally ticked a strong London voice with me, much of this taking place in and around various versions. I think of short story construction being a triangle – idea – voice – place, and on the most part Newland makes sure that at least one of these three are familiar whilst tweaking the others. So whilst there are a few idea heavy stories here, they tend to lean more on the individual story that threads through impact of the idea (Seed - a take on the seed pod version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers which works well just because the viewpoint character convinces, as the familiar unfolds around him). On the other side the first story here, Percipi, is broadly a narrated info dump of a future history of androids which become slaves which have their own uprising and succeeds with anything resembling a central character. Newland has range.

Short stories are an art in themselves and the hit to miss ratio here is very much on the hit side, though I am now interested in reading some of his longer form work (which appears to bounce around genre as much as my reading does). The stand out for me here was an accidental time travel story, The Sankofa Principle, which again is told from a distant third person narrator but getting to the heart of the difficulty of the moral imperative that underpins more austere, privileged sci-fi. Well worth dipping into, and has single-handedly got me requesting a few more short stories for my reading diet.

A fantastic collection of short stories, expertly written with gripping plots and memorable characters.