My enormous thanks to Isabelle Kenyon for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for Stephen Oram’s short story collection Extracting Humanity and for sending me a copy of the book in return for an honest review. It’s my pleasure to share that review today.

Extracting Humanity was published by Orchid’s Lantern on 27 July 2023 and is available for purchase here.

Extracting Humanity

In this remarkably perceptive collection, Stephen Oram blends cutting-edge science and tech with everyday emotions and values to create 20 thought experiments with heart.

Extracting Humanity is a skilful exploration of smart currencies, memorials, medical care, treatment of refugees, social networks, data monitoring, and justice systems. Always without prescription or reprimand, these stories are simply the beginning of the conversation.

From an eerie haptic suit that Tommy must call Father, to a protective, nutritious bubble that allows Feng Mian to survive on a colonised Moon; from tattoos that will earn their wearers a mini-break in a sensory chamber, to Harrie anxiously awaiting AI feedback on her unborn child… These startling, diverse narratives map all-too-real possibilities for our future and the things that might ultimately divide or unite us.

My Review of Extracting Humanity

A collection of 20 short stories.

Extracting Humanity is slightly outside my usual reading preference being quite futuristic, and I did wonder if I’d engage with it, but I found this collection absolutely fascinating. I’m not entirely sure I can say I enjoyed Extracting Humanity because Stephen Oram writes with such skill that I found several of the stories unsettling and disturbing. I think it’s the fact that the different scenarios are presented with a poised balance of clinical, factual writing that simultaneously has huge emotional impact, that I found so disquieting. This is such clever writing. I experienced a wide range of emotions from horror through anger to fear, and yet the abiding sensation at the end of the collection was hope and the concept that life is there to be lived even if we have to make difficult decisions on the way.

Whilst the stories are brief, they are packed with situations and people that made me wonder how I might respond to the actions and knowledge presented. Scratch beneath the surface of these intelligent and carefully crafted narratives and they aren’t truly futuristic at all. Rather they embody universal modern dilemmas, moral choices, and themes relevant to today’s society from immigration to trust, substance abuse to healthcare, private medicine to single parent families, loyalty to the role of AI, and community to isolation. All life, present and possible future, is presented here in an engaging and entertaining collection.

What I think works so well is the way the author’s voice doesn’t impinge. Stephen Oram simply presents, leaving the reader to layer their own beliefs, tenets and humanity over the narratives, making this a collection that I suspect will be more than usually affected by the reader themselves and that if the reader returns to it at different times of their life, the experience and impact of reading Extracting Humanity will equally be different on every occasion. 

Indeed, Extracting Humanity couldn’t have been better titled. Reading Stephen Oram’s words encourages – or perhaps even forces – the reader to contemplate not just humanity in general, but to extract a greater depth of understanding of their own humanity. From being initially unsure that this was a book for me, I now think Extracting Humanity is a real find, as it explores all life from birth to death and it truly made me think. Extracting Humanity transpired to be a collection I found excellent.

About Stephen Oram

Stephen Oram writes near-future science fiction – his collections Eating Robots and Biohacked & Begging have been praised by publications as diverse as The Morning Star and The Financial Times. He works with artists, scientists and technologists to explore possible future outcomes of their research through short stories and is a writer for sci-fi prototypers SciFutures. He is also published in several anthologies and has two published novels – Quantum Confessions and Fluence. He is a founding curator for near-future fiction at Virtual Futures and a member of the Clockhouse London Writers.

For further information, visit Stephen’s website and follow him on Twitter/X @OramStephen. You’ll also find Stephen on Facebook and Instagram.

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