Ebooks: from parallel universes to a map of Discworld

‘Good science fiction strives to predict how a novel technology will run its course and affect culture and society as a whole.” So writes Lewis Dartnell in Synthetic Neurobiology, an illuminating essay that appears in Strata (£2.99), a new sci-fi anthology from Penguin Random House that uses digital technology to create two parallel universes with equally disturbing outcomes.

Conceived by the renowned comic-book artist Tommy Lee Edwards, it features eight original pieces from leading speculative fiction writers and scientific researchers. There are four short stories in the collection, each twinned with a nonfiction meditation on real scientific concerns for the future.

Strata is stylishly designed with dark murky visuals and brooding music by I Speak Machine. This sets a distinct and ominous atmosphere that greatly enhances reading. The illustrations for the chapter index present the image of a burnt-out tower block: the reader travels up through the floors to explore the fictional universe and below ground to penetrate the scientific analysis. The fiction is inspired by the overarching plot device of a series of eugenics experiments designed to cure overpopulation. In all of the stories the failed experiments have created a two-tiered society that nicely echoes the metaphorical resonance of the collection’s title.

In Affection Lavie Tidhar’s teenage protagonist looks out from her “sterilised bubble in the sky” at “the down-below [where] the surfacers toil at their inexplicable tasks of rust and soil . . . soot-black avenues like impossible mandalas swirling, fires burning in the open, thick oily smoke rising high into the sky . . . and the people shambling like zombies”.

In this postpandemic setting the narrator becomes so bored of the enforced quarantine that she takes the huge risk of physically connecting with a stranger.

In Laurie Pennie’s Outreach the world is similarly stratified along class and health lines. Her central character, Rosie, lives where the “city is shades of dark”. She once had access to the skyward-thrusted middle classes, but her dependency on Hush, a state-sanctioned drug, for “emotional armour” has cut her off from her family. When supplies of Hush begin to dwindle it looks as if the undesirables will wipe themselves out.

The nonfiction pairings offer accounts of the future of food production, pharmaceuticals, neurology and policing. The links to the stories are broad enough to be not quite didactic, but their findings do spoil some of the sense of originality in the fiction.

The exception is Misha Glenny’s Law Enforcement, in which the author frames his predictions about how policing “has adapted to the development of automated surveillance” in an engaging futuristic frame.

Strata is easy to navigate. Readers can determine the structure of their engagement by switching between science and fiction at any time, with hexagonal shapes on the left of the screen activating pop-up illustrations.

The seamless design and provocative subject matter make for an easy-reading, immersive experience.

The reader needs to work pretty hard to create the world of All This Rotting, by Alan Trotter (£3.59). Produced by Editions at Play, which continues to explore the possibilities of fiction in digital form, Trotter’s experimental short story sets a tale of mental instability against an unstable interface that disappears as quickly as it reveals itself.

Loosely sharing the tale of twin deaths, one sudden and one slow, it is a story of impressions rather than narrative explication, as the words begin to judder, fade and disappear within moments of the page loading.

What the reader takes from each page are Beckettian fragments of mundane domesticity and philosophical challenge. It is not exactly a read-for-pleasure experience – and, indeed, can be nauseating if you stare at the screen for too long – but as an example of the possibilities of future fiction in virtual spaces it is certainly intriguing.

Late in his prolific writing career, the British fantasy author Terry Pratchett turned to sci-fi, in a collaboration with the sci-fi veteran Stephen Baxter. Pratchett died in 2014, but the final novel in their five-part series was published only earlier this year. The Long Cosmos (ebook version £9.99) is set in 2070, half a century after its protagonists, the orphan Joshua Valiente and the intelligent machine Lobsang, began their adventures by stepping out of Long Earth to explore possible Edens. In The Long Cosmos they discover several more but decide that the imagined possibilities are far greater than any alternative reality. This discovery is completely unsurprising and extremely sentimental, yet the optimism is an unexpected joy in the sci-fi genre, which is not known for an uplifting outlook.

For Pratchett devotees there are sly allusions in The Long Cosmos to Discworld that will have them reaching for one of Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels again, or for Discworld: The Ankh-Morpok Map (£9.99), which functions as an interactive map of Ankh-Morpok, the city state where most of the action in the books unfolds. The big boon of the app is the ‘living map’, which takes a Google Street View approach, and allows you to zoom in on hundreds of Pratchett’s characters going about their daily lives, providing background information and storylines at a touch.

The audio tour, narrated by Helen Atkinson-Wood, brings to life Pratchett’s distinctive worldview with a perfect balance of sincerity and humour. It has just been updated to include details from the final instalment of the Discworld series, The Good Shepherd, published posthumously last year. The Pratchett estate has just confirmed that The Long Cosmos will be the last publication under Pratchett’s name, so the app is a good investment: a definitive guide to the now bounded Discworld.