It is a genre fiction tradition that anthologies should come with an overt thesis, philosophy or theme. This makes it easier for the editor, giving them something to hang their commissions upon, and for the reviewer, giving them something to measure the book against. From this perspective, Phineas Harper’s brief introduction to Gross Ideas is egregiously vague. After some non sequiturs about Asimov and robots, and drive-by mentions of Dick and Le Guin, Harper concludes that “we hope this book explores what makes a society”—which is , to be clear, a fine objective, but also arguably something of a low bar for literature in general, and sf in particular.

To be fair, Harper is not an anthologist but the alarmingly youthful deputy director of the Architecture Foundation, and curator of the 2019 Oslo Architectural Triennale, for which Gross Ideas is a sort of commemorative deliverable or intervention. So he might be forgiven for not framing his anthology as clearly as curmudgeonly critics might expect—though taken alongside the mixed bag of production values (in short: ambitious typography and internal design, and a nigh-complete lack of copyediting or proofing), it’s enough to make me saddle my quality-control hobby-horse. I mean, come on: if fiction writers and editors got together to build a tower-block, you can be damned sure that the neighbourhood architects would snark about its misaligned walls and leaky basement. It frustrates me that fiction attracts this sort of good-enough dilettantism from academics in other disciplines, and dents the pleasure in seeing sf speculation finally getting its due as something beyond mere entertainment.

That aside, the issue with Harper’s intro is that it doesn’t mention degrowth, which was the thematic topic of the Triennale, and thus of the anthology. The stories make a little more sense when seen in that light—though the partisans of degrowthist theory are unlikely to make Gross Ideas part of their canon any time soon, given its most degrowthy tales tend toward the dystopic.

Its most utopian tales, curiously, come from non-writers—and as such tend rather clunky, their fictionality so obviously a vehicle for exploring the author’s preferred future that you wish they’d just written a manifesto. Edward Davey’s “Oli Away” and Robin Nicholson’s “Growing the New Life” are admirable futures, but dreadful literature; structural engineer Steve Webb’s “Aqueduct”, however, has a formal ambition that almost distracts from the implausibility of its overconcretised metaphor.

The TOC’s biggest names do what we’ve come to expect them to: Cory Doctorow does a zippy kid’s-POV future where the present moment is a retro theme-park of material excess for Californian youngsters raised on virtuality and disposable printed garments, while Will Self shamelessly takes Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a template which becomes more Selfish with each iteration. The biggest name you’ve never heard of would be architects turned graphic novelists Mill & Jones, creators of the groundbreaking Square Eyes, whose “Exile’s Letter” (a graphic novelette, maybe?) is the most emotionally affecting piece in this book.

There’s a fair few fables and satires in the mix, some of which are rather tangential. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “Cat” is a neat little tale, for example, but an awkward fit; Joel Blackledge’s “Fountainwood” is an anticapitalist fable with an anachronistic wild-western setting, while Sophie Mackintosh’s “Placation” is a darkly degrowthist Wicker Man. Meanwhile Camilla Grudova’s “Deliberate Ruins” is a bleakly brilliant story of decline, both personal and civilisational, while Lev Bratishenko’s “You Wanted This” is a wormwood-bitter satire of top-level climate change policymaking with a hint of the Pynchon about it—two memorable stand-outs.

There are also some ambitious failures, giving greater cause to lament the lack of editorial influence. With Rachel Armstrong’s “Bittersweet Building”, a canny editor might have advised removing the bits at top and tail which strain to give it a moral impact, and instead lean in to the weird poetics of the biological that inform this piece and her other work. (They might also suggest that she ask DC whether they’re looking for someone to re-reboot the Swamp Thing backstory.) With Maria Smith’s “Lay Low”, meanwhile, a canny editor might have taken this well-conceived but poorly executed idea about a society based on resource credits and helped knock it into shape, starting with the over-naturalistic dialogue; at the very least, they might have made it easier to follow by doing a hard edit on the punctuation.

Besides a couple of poems and a hard-to-categorise piece by Lesley Lokko (creative non-fiction?) about migrants sending remittances back home, the most singular story in Gross Ideas is also by far the longest, at over four times the page count of its closest competitors. I may well stand accused of home-team favouritism when I point out that this piece, “In Arms”, is a multi-narrator novelette by none other than Vector’s own Jo Lindsay Walton, but it merits special attention for engaging most directly with the theme of degrowth. “In Arms” starts off as what seems like an awkward date at a coffee shop, but which turns out to be a terrorism investigation in a world that partakes in the posthumanist tropes which I associate with Schroeder, Rosenbaum, Rajaniemi et al. Of course, JLW being JLW, it’s stylistically unique: a demonstration of how naturalistic dialogue gets done right, for starters, and threaded through with breezy breachings of the fictional fourth wall. It may be too didactic for some short fiction fans—but of all the fictions in a book supposedly aimed at critiquing degrowth theory, JLW’s is the one that most ambitiously combines the intellectual and the aesthetic concerns in a harmonious whole. It may dismiss degrowth as a label, but it takes the concepts behind the label somewhere else entirely—and if there’s any good reason to use the sf toolkit for this sort of work, then that is surely it.