Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny

Published by Tor.com (an imprint of Tor Books) on October 18, 2016

Everything Belongs to the Future is billed as a novella, although it might be more aptly classified as a long short story. It advances some interesting ideas but does so in a bare-bones fashion. The story would have benefited from additional meat.

Every day a user takes the fix is a day the user does not age. Most people cannot afford to be forever young, although Oxford doesn’t need to replace its dons as often as it did in the past.

Daisy Craver, who helped write the anti-aging patent, is 98 but she looks like a little girl. Daisy has a plan to make a version of the fix available as a generic, a plan that she furthers with a commune of subversive artists. Unbeknownst to Daisy or the group, one of the subversives is an undercover employee of the company that makes the fix.

Eventually the story becomes one of love and betrayal. It is the kind of story that asks a reader to parse the difference between political action and terror, to ask whether means are justified by ends. Even the story’s characters have trouble answering that one.

The themes are more interesting than the underdeveloped characters, none of whom gave me a reason to care about them or their cause. Laurie Penny calls into question the government’s use of informants as well as the cozy relationship between the government and big business, but those issues are nothing new, and the story doesn’t have the kind of dramatic power that is likely to open a reader’s eyes to injustice. There are broader implications to both issues that the story glosses over. Still, the questions raised in the story are important, even if the story is bit superficial.

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