McSweeney's Issue 32: 2024 AD

This one is fantastic--terrific art by Robyn O'Neil and Michael Schall and terrific stories throughout. The stories all take place in 2024 AD, and across the globe. In the future, everyone's worried about water. First and best is Anthony Doerr's novella "Memory Wall," which may be the best novella I've ever read. It's a story of three intersecting lives in Cape Town, one of a widower who keeps a memory wall of tapes she can plug into her head, her servant, and the hired young man who sneaks into the woman's house in secret to find the tape with a lucrative paleontological secret known only to the woman's husband. It comes together masterfully and even challenges itself to a last-act finale that betters an already incredible ending. Wells Tower also outdoes himself in "Raw Water," about a couple arriving at a new community built around an inland lake created with excess ocean water. The community, of course, falls apart under Tower's knack and singularity for perception and detail. Chris Bachelder writes about the castaways of a flood in Houston struggling to re-create civilization in the Astrodome, told in 40 small segments. Chris Adrian writes about a black hole appearing in Nantucket that allows people to enter and die painlessly. J. Erin Sweeney writes about the Eastern European offspring of an infamous dictator being shipped with rare dolphins back to their fictional homeland of Karabakh. Sheila Heti writes about Mothers, or devices that advise owners on their most probable destinies, creating a world of amateur physicists frustrating real ones. Jim Shepard writes about Dutch hydraulic engineers called on to design flotation devices to sustain the sinking of the Netherlands. The stories are outstanding one after the next; only two, Heidi Julavits' and Sesshu Foster's, disappoint. The stories are extremely creative, instituting interesting research and clever speculation into imaginative not-too-distant futures. The stories are also fully developed, the writers given plenty of space to explore their worlds--this is one of the most content-rich issues yet. With three extremely solid issues thus far, the 30s is looking to be McSweeney's best decade yet.