Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future (Twelve Tomorrows)

All of the MIT "Twelve Tomorrows" anthologies have been good, high-quality collections of contemporary SF, and this one is no exception.It does, however, start with a filter.The first entry isn't a story, but is an interview with Ytasha Womack -- apparently the author of a 2013 book on Afrofuturism -- about the contemporary state of Afrofuturism. Though interesting at times, this interview was poorly edited and extremely superficial, mostly because the interviewer's questions were the sort that you'd expect a precocious middle school student to ask, and those questions were typically leading, in that the questions themselves often contained their own response.(e.g.: Interviewer: "I'm a Marvel fan, so I've got to ask you about Black Panther . . ." And "[d]o you think there's a prospect that the challenging events of 2020 will challenge American communities to find ways to repair inequality . . .?")It gets worse. The very next story, "Little Kowloon" by Adrian Hon, wouldn't pass muster as a precocious middle school student's creative writing project. It is, by a HUGE margin, the worst story I've ever seen in a "Twelve Tomorrows" collection. It lands the trifecta: (1) It is very poorly written, with zero narrative flow, (2) the story itself seems largely pointless, as nothing interesting happens, and there's no real discussion of any interesting and viable technologies or events, (3) its core purpose appears to be political propaganda. It's the sort of fiction that makes people hate fiction.If you can get past the filter, though, the rest of the anthology is excellent. But it is deeply dystopian in ways which have only become clearer over the past few months. It's "horror fiction" in certain respects, to be sure -- the worlds contained herein are, for the most part, ugly -- but it's also thought-provoking and interesting.It's worth a read, especially if you skip the filter.The print version also contains interesting art, though, interestingly, the artist appears to be uncredited.In all, I'd give this 4.5/5, but will round up.