After The Fall (Eclipse Phase) by Jaym Gates

After The Fall (Eclipse Phase) Reviews

• 
  Wealhtheow

  A collection of sf short stories set in the Eclipse Phase universe, in which you can "save" your mind and implant it into any kind of body you'd like...if you have enough money, at least. Like most short story collections, this is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of tone and quality. I love the questions of what aspects of identity, consciousness, or physical form matter, what value judgments are in play when people are almost functionally immortal, and all the casual gender bending and mind melding.
  
  Ken Liu, "White Hempen Sleeves." In the luxuriant society of Casey, one person has made their wealth through the ultimate taboo: creating an identical copy of a person's mind, putting it into lethal danger, and then allowing the original person to experience their own death. They reveal this secret business to their newfound lover, only to be betrayed. I love stories about consciousness and clones, about who gets to be considered "real" or "original" or "human," and this story does a good job of playing with those questions. The descriptions are poetic, but not so much that they hindered the imagination.
  
  Tiffany Trent, "Spiritus Ex Orcinus." All Rani wants to do is get back into a whale body and have a child. But as an indentured servant with a rebellious reputation, Rani has little chance of ever achieving their dream. Then they find a whale tooth from old, long gone Earth, and go on a mission to find the last whale of the original species. I felt the dissonance, disgust, and dysmorphia the narrator felt toward the human body they were trapped in, and the ending is a unexpected but, in retrospect, totally believable shocking twist. No one's form or mind is truly their own!
  
  Jack Graham, "Into the White."Inspector Nordqvist investigates a murder far below the surface of Iapetus. The use of Eclipse Phase concepts and jargon was pretty skillfully & naturally incorporated, but the new terms were so pervasive that it was a little much for someone like me, who doesn't already know this stuff. I liked the suspense and paranoia in the dark, icy tunnels.
  
  Fran Wilde, "The Thousandth Cycle." Hanni sells her emotions and sensations to an AI. But then the AI loses a bet, and Hanni must keep an even larger and more complex AI's attention for a thousand cycles. This is trippy and kinky (the way machine intelligences can be kinky) and I liked it a lot.
  
  Nathaniel Dean with Davidson Cole, "Interference." A professor is in town for a conference, but something unsettling is going on...I like the way this story deals with academia and ambition in a strange sf universe (the conference call between all the professors was the perfect combo of familiar and fantastical) and the lies we tell ourselves to mask our darker impulses.
  
  Kim May, "The Fukuda Cube." An AI investigates a ship transporting the minds of Earth refugees. I liked the ruminations on being un-bodied, but otherwise thought this was workmanlike prose at best.
  
  Rob Boyle & Davidson Cole, "Lack." Sava and a team of Firewall agents search the Kilimanjaro space elevator for a long dead courier. As they walk through halls full of corpses left behind by a past war, each of them has to make a choice whether to cut and run, leaving their latest experiences behind. For some, forgetting the last few days would be a mercy. For others, losing time is a horror.
  
  Georgina Kamsika, "Nostalgia." Charumati infiltrated a rich household in order to get access to their vault. When another faction makes a move on the vault, she has to choose between the mission and the baby she's been pretending to care for. I liked the way the old Earth artifacts are viewed by hackers like Charumati, and the way her opinion of an old school bodyguard changes as the story progresses.
  
  Jack Graham, "Nostrums." Jake Carter looks for Bobdog, finds a whole mess of a conspiracy to steal body parts from uplifted primates, and then an even bigger plot that might actually be too much to handle. This has some cool set pieces, but I'd have liked more personality from the characters.
  
  Andrew Penn Romine, "Prix Fixe." Jule Cortez is on a mission to find a long-lost metacelebrity chef. She's been a fan of his since she was a child (which we're told in a delightful little aside that reminds me of past children's yearning for an EZBake oven, but also just how different things are in a post-scarcity future:

  "Batuk's recipes were copied widely. Anyone with a half-way decent fabber could churn out his famous enoki-stuffed polenta shells or wet-print his divine poitrine de porc souffles with jus rouge.
  Growing up, Jule had fabbed whole feasts from his recipes, using her EZPrint from Prosperity Group, Batuk's chief sponsor. She had all the XPs, too."

  ). But as we all expect, the reclusive chef is up to no good. I liked the plot here, which is both creepy and kinda decadently enticing, and the writing does a great job of conveying futuristic haute cuisine.
  
  Stephen Mohan Jr, "An Infinite Horizon." Iftikhar is part of a team sent to investigate a research station that's gone dark. One by one team members are picked off...but by who? Or what? I liked this until the last few lines, which felt a bit trite.

  "The young man was glad for Firewall's existence. Transhumanity was at the center of a strange political struggle whose rules it couldn't begin to even guess. There would be great danger.
  But perhaps also great opportunity.
  Iftikhar Quraini looked up, past the trees, past the beach, even past the broad ocean, his gaze settling finally on an infinite horizon."

  
  
  F. Wesley Schneider, "Stray Thoughts." A PI and her nearly-adult kid take a job to track down a menton who's cut contact with his hyper-mind. Finding Vine takes on a more personal edge than either expected. I really liked this, particularly because the characters immediately intrigued me. I'd love to read more about Wehilani Lonoehu and her body-switching family.
  
  Rob Boyle and Davidson Cole, "Melt." Two mining corporations on Venus battle for supremacy, only realizing at the last moment that someone else is pulling their strings.
  
  Madeleine Ashby, "Thieving Magpie." Possibly my favorite of the collection. SO CREEPY.
  
  Karin Lowachee, "A Resleeving of Love." A spy transfers his consciousness into a common prostitute, but finds out to his horror that he's now part of a being he can't really control.
• 
  Trike

  I bought this on the strength of Jaym Gates' name on the cover. I had no idea these stories were tie-ins to a PnP RPG.
  
  I started to get a serious "this feels like a game" vibe after the first couple of stories. It had a bit of the feel of Mass Effect or the Call of Duty space war games, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Once they introduced psi powers out of the blue I was like,"Oh, right. Video game logic."
  
  A couple of the stories are okay, a couple are just complete messes, and a couple left me scratching my head wondering what the heck is going on. All of these concepts of transhumanism and personality uploading and nanotech and uplifted animals have been used before, but the mix here just felt off. I think because the idea is not fully realized, or at least not completely communicated.
  
  Some of the tales, like Ken Liu's and Karin Lowachee's, feel like translations of translations. I suspect the authors didn't fully comprehend the concept and the resultant mash-up with their style of writing didn't fit.
  
  The stories which were less fanciful and basically just riffing on classic genre tropes -- the bounty hunter, the private eye, the disillusioned soldier -- were more enjoyable, but they still failed to utilize the full extent of the concept. The stories which *did* fully embrace the potential of the idea, such as "Prix Fixe", which is about a chef who is illegally downloading personalities into human bodies and then using the nanotechnology to cook them from the inside as a form of cannibalism to entertain jaded rich immortals, aren't backed up by the other stories. The adventure tales are fine, but one gets the feeling that they are jumping around in time because the core concepts are more fully developed in some than they are in others. However, that feeling isn't supported by the text. These stories apparently occur within the same basic timeframe, but they don't feel that way at all.
  
  The basic idea is that we can record our brains and upload them to computers, then download them into different types of bodies. Either clones of our original selves or robots or generic bodies. It's not clear where the generic bodies come from or why they're blank. The implication is that they used to be people who somehow lost the right to exist, but it's never explored in any of the stories. they're basically throwaway bodies. And for all the talk of rich versus poor, haves versus have-nots, it is completely opaque as to how the economy works. Earth has been destroyed and humans are scattered throughout the solar system, yet the old type of economic system is preserved. Just feels poorly thought out.
  
  It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with this technology is hacking. They touch on it a couple of times, but imagine a corporation or country doing massive hacks of human beings as they're being uploaded. If they can produce clones and robots at will, what's to stop a rich megalomaniac from creating an army of mind-controlled slaves? Or, as in the movie Oblivion, an army comprised of multiple copies of the same guy who has no idea he's being manipulated? There's no reason they even have to be the same person; just download the same mind into a thousand different people. Heck, just have a villain download himself or herself into a thousand bodies. That would take conspiracies and collusions to a whole new level.
  
  The whole idea of free will is also touched on here and there, but again it feels like a missed opportunity.
  
  Ultimately I was just meh on the whole thing. This universe needs either more constraints on it or they need to just go full-throttle with all the endless possibilities.
• 
  Charlie

  When I get the five-star tinglies for a book, it's usually because it has set my mind on fire with curiosity and ideas for what is going on in the rest of the world. That's one of the reasons I love tabletop roleplaying games so much. Their entire purpose is to inspire people to tell their own stories within them. What roleplaying games aren't good at is being a book I want to read cover to cover, which is a shame, because many of them start with a short story. I love seeing and hearing about what the setting inspired in other people. And maybe that's why I love short fiction so much in general, I like to know what's happening in other people's heads. I get joy and delight out of being surprised at the turns another person's thoughts took that my own did not.
  
  Eclipse Phase: After The Fall is part collection of the appetizer stories from their other books and part original stories inspired by the setting. It isn't perfect; there are some choices I'm not sure I would have made and some that, as a fan of the game, I can't judge impartially as to their utility to the general science fiction fan. However, I enjoyed the collection immensely and hope that scifi fans give it a try even if they're not RPGers or familiar with the Eclipse Phase setting. Even skipping the setting introduction, to someone who has read transhumanist stories before (Altered Carbon, The Expanse series, the Uplift War series, anything by Peter F Hamilton, anything by Alastair Reynolds, a lot of Kim Stanley Robinson, Ancillary Justice, Lord of Light, the Old Man's War series, etc) the terms can be easily defined in context and jumping into the deep end will be rewarding.
  
  Here's my thoughts on a few of the stories:
  
  White Hempen Sleeves — Ken Liu
  
  A very good story that deals with voyeurism, depravity, boredom, intimacy, and the dark depths some people will go to know their own limits.
  
  Spiritus Ex Orcinus — Tiffany Trent
  
  I swear it's not just that I'm a sucker for space whales, but I really liked this story. One of the best things about a setting where we have simultaneously uplifted other species and can change bodies, is that we can imagine what it must be like to be an outsider in a human body (which reciprocally makes us examine what it must be like to be in, for example, a whale body). It's these kinds of things that are especially suited for exploration in a short story rather than in actually roleplaying. On the fly and in a group is not the time for an internal monologue on why fingers feel weird (which is actually the kind of navelgazing roleplay I like to do, but I understand why other people don't want to sit around while I have in-character philosophical discussions with other characters).
  
  Into the White — Jack Graham
  
  The Big Dumb Object and xenoarchaeology are always fun places to go with science fiction. I loved the ice moon/TITAN supercomputer remnant. It was creepy and wondrous at the same time.
  
  The Thousandth Cycle — Fran Wilde
  
  While I didn't like this story as a whole, I appreciated some of its ideas. The feeling I got while reading it was of digital processes being represented by metaphors that don't necessarily tell me what's going on. It felt like 80s movie hacking brought into the 22nd century.
  
  Prix Fixe — Andrew Penn Romine
  
  This story was so good but I wanted more. I wanted it to linger on the horror, pulling it like taffy until I wasn't sure if I was hungry or nauseous. I wanted to really explore the ethics of being voluntarily canibalized. Most of all, I wanted to really feel how the character felt at the idea of copies of herself being abandoned in that hab of horrors. But none of those things happened and the story was just good, but disappointingly so for not being great.
  
  Thieving Magpie — Madeline Ashby
  
  I really enjoyed a story from a TITAN's perspective. This is the kind of thing I want out of a collection like this. Stories that aren't practical to tell inside an RPG session.
• 
  H. Scott

  I adored the first story in the book, but realized that I might not be familiar enough with the Eclipse Phase tabletop game to fully appreciate the rest. I'm not unfamiliar with transhumanism, so I was able to grasp that side of things, but game specific references went right over my head and made things confusing.
• 
  Zéro Janvier

  Un recueil d’une quinzaine de nouvelles dans l’univers de science-fiction transhumaniste du jeu de rôles Eclipse Phase.
  
  Comme souvent dans ce genre de recueil, il y a des textes très réussis, et d’autres moins mémorables. La balance s’équilibre à un niveau plutôt moyen, en raison de quelques nouvelles que j’ai passé assez vite après de premières pages ennuyantes.
• 
  AJ

  It's an anthology so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that it's a mix. Mostly good (White Hempen Sleeves, Nostrums, Stray Thoughts, Prix Fixe, Lack), some fine (The Fukuda Cube, An Infinite Horizon, Melt), some tedious (Thieving Magpie, A Resleeving of Love).
• 
  Eddy

  #7 in my 20 in 2020 cyberpunk challenge. I’m entirely biased, since I’m friends with many of the people involved, so I’ll just say that this is an excellent anthology of deep space cyberpunk stories.
• 
  Christine

  This book is an anthology of 15 stories set in the world of Eclipse Phase, a pen and paper style RPG.
  
  Before you get to the first story, there is a brief overview of the setting. It's a bit of an info dump, but you can always come back to it later. It's useful information that helps frame the world though, but if you're already familiar with the game, you can skip ahead without missing anything.
  
  With 15 different stories/authors, there is easily something for everyone in this book. There were a few that jumped out at me as instant favourites that I'll definitely read again.
  
  Spiritus Ex Orcinus was a great story for getting a sense of what it's like to be an uplift, especially an uplift in a humanoid body. I'm going to be recommending this story to one of my players.
  
  Interference is a story that is in one of the game books, and I'm glad to see it reprinted here. I liked the story when I first read it, and still do. It's an interesting look at what we'll do to for a cause, and what the human mind can handle in this transhuman future.
  
  Stray Thoughts was a story I really enjoyed. The lead protagonist is a kick ass lady detective, and damn, I wish there was a whole book of her. The characters in this were really interesting, and I cried near the end. (Yep, on the bus, like usual.)
  
  
  Lack is another story that was in one of the game books, in this case the core book. When I first read this story, it left me with a lot of questions about the world and what had happened (and why) in the Fall. It was a great introduction piece for the game. Muses and Resleeving are shown in ways that make it easy to understand how these things are a part of regular life.
  
  Nostrums was an adventure and I could almost hear it being narrated by a pulp narrator. Interesting characters of many species and a great example of how different parts of Firewall work together (or don't).
  
  And that's just a small portion of the stories in this book. I left it feeling like I wanted more to read, to write some myself, or to kick my gaming group in the butt so we could finally get some play of Eclipse Phase in. (Well, all of the above really.) I hope this book does well enough that they'll consider doing another. And soon.
• 
  Michael Burnam-Fink

  From a group of RPG authors and contemporary sci-fi standouts (Ken Liu, Madeline Ashby, Karin Lowachee), comes a solid collection of stories set in the dark cosmos of Eclipse Phase.
  
  I've got mixed feelings on
  Eclipse Phase the RPG. On the one hand, the setting a cool mashup of my man Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, The Singularity, and H.P. Lovecraft. On the other hand, the rules are a mess that actively oppose the fiction of the game. And on the third augmented cyborg hand, it doesn't do a good job of giving people comprehensible and cool things to explore and do, or the sense that there's much life in transhuman culture. This collection does a little in that direction, but mostly just hits on the familiar tropes of action and horror. Firewall team investigates weird events, finds mutilated bodies, there's a shootout, reboot from backups and try again. On the plus side, there's a strong editorial vision that maintains consistency with the setting throughout. The flip-side of that is that the stories wind up feeling and sounding very similar, and I felt that a few could have been trimmed.
  
  The two stories that stood out were "Prix Fixe" by Andrew Penn Romine, where wealthy gourmet follows a celebrity chef to a hidden asteroid restaurant to discover that the next leap in cuisine is more than she bargained for, and "Stray Thoughts" by F. Wesley Schneider, which dials down the hypertech to focus on a noir story about a Venusian private eye and her son. "White Hempen Sleeves" by Ken Liu, leads the collection and puts the rest of the standard tales to shame.
  
  Fans of Eclipse Phase will like this collection, sci-fi fans in general less so.
• 
  Ken Ringwald

  A very solid collection of stories set in the transhumanist Eclipse Phase setting. It's a science fiction setting where humans can digitize their minds and make bodies to order, but haven't been able to solve all their problems.
  
  One of the problems that comes up with these collections sometimes is that they're too dependent on the original game books for the role-playing game. That is not the case here. There's a few stories where you'll miss a reference or two, but I wouldn't say any of them are ruined by not having read the EP corebook cover to cover.
  
  That said, the story "Lack" would be a great place to start if you hadn't read any other EP material. It opened the first corebook and it's still a great story that introduces some of the key aspects of the setting in an entertaining way.
  
  I'd rather not highlight each story individually, but I found most of the stories to be enjoyable or excellent. There were a few that didn't work so well for me - but they mostly just didn't quite come together for what they were trying to do.
  
  Overall, I enjoyed it a lot - both in the concept for the collection and in the variety of stories. Highly recommended for Eclipse Phase fans; regular recommended for fans of transhumanist sci-fi like the Altered Carbon novels.
• 
  Ricardo Signes

  I had high hopes, because Eclipse Phase itself is pretty good, but this was about as bad as every other RPG tie-in story collection I've read. The stories were mostly overwritten, and had feeling of "look how transgressive we can be!" without having enough to them to give anything much impact. Prix Fixe was probably the story I liked best. I'm still not sure whether I think even that one was a bit much.
  
  Oh well.
• 
  Marc Huete

  All solid stories, a few special gems. I really enjoyed Prix Fixe (Andrew Penn Romine), White Hempen Sleeves (Ken Liu), and a Resleeving of Love (Karin Lowachee) all had twists I especially enjoyed. The whole collection is great for anyone with a taste for the transhuman, both genre veterans and novices.
• 
  Jan-e

  As could be expected, the quality and style of each individual short story varies widely. Some are brilliant, some are nice, some are so-so. However, all of them highlight what a brilliant setting Eclipse Phase is. The potential is virtually unlimited!
• 
  Eric Brooke

  Some good stories. Some very abstract. All dark. Great Setting
• 
  Tobias Wolter

  Some good stories, some bad stories, most slightly above average.