Take Us to a Better Place: Who Gets to Imagine a Healthy Future?

Many visions of the future begin with an invention. Take Us to a Better Place begins with a less glamorous and more demanding question: what would have to change for people to live well? Its ten commissioned stories range from flooded coastlines to a space station, from refugee experience to a technologically supervised neighbourhood. They do not share a setting or a protagonist. Instead, they test a proposition that becomes more provocative with every change of genre: health is not simply something inside an individual body. It is also made—or unmade—by a society.

Published as a free anthology by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the collection places fiction in an unusual role. These are stories intended to generate conversation about a 'Culture of Health.' That purpose gives the volume its coherence, but also creates its chief artistic risk. Fiction can expose the human cost of a system more persuasively than a policy document. It can also start to sound like a case study wearing a character's clothes. The most interesting pieces here resist that temptation by allowing emotional contradictions to survive their social arguments.

The body is never outside the system

In Hannah Lillith Assadi's 'Paradise,' Rita's experience as a Syrian refugee in Arizona brings the practical meaning of access sharply into view. Her family has escaped one kind of violence only to encounter another set of vulnerabilities: injuries, money, suspicion and the everyday obstacles that stand between need and treatment. The title's promise is complicated by the details of arrival. A place can be called safe while remaining punishingly difficult to inhabit.

The story's strength is the distance between institutional language and lived experience. As Rita moves through spaces that ostensibly offer opportunity, belonging remains conditional. The narrative does not need a futuristic gadget to produce its unsettling effect. The ordinary geography of who can travel, who receives help and whose suffering seems credible already supplies a speculative moral landscape.

Achy Obejas's 'The Sweet Spot' approaches the problem from another angle. Isa's progressive hearing loss matters to the story, but the approaching end of her marriage matters too. Accessibility and intimacy do not sit in separate compartments. Assistance can be loving, exhausting, unevenly distributed, or difficult to ask for. When a relationship changes, the practical arrangements through which a person navigates the world may change with it.

This is among the anthology's more emotionally productive premises because it refuses to make health a purely technical issue with a technical solution. A device or accommodation can improve an immediate barrier; it cannot settle the questions of dependence, independence and dignity that arise between people who have built a life together. The story's domestic scale gives the wider project a useful counterweight to catastrophe.

When the public good becomes surveillance

Yoon Ha Lee's 'The Erasure Game' offers a more recognisably dystopian mechanism. Neighbourhood games and apparently benign tracking practices become tools through which people monitor and report on one another. What begins as participation in a collective project curdles into an argument about privacy, coercion and who has the power to define acceptable behaviour.

The distinction is crucial. A community's desire for safety or wellness is not inherently sinister. The danger emerges when the language of the common good obscures who collects information, who can refuse, and who faces the consequences of being deemed insufficiently cooperative. Here the speculative framework earns its place: the story makes visible the political bargain hidden inside a friendly interface.

Such stories are at their best when they unsettle a simple opposition between caring institutions and cold ones. Institutions can provide genuine support; they can also make participation conditional on submitting to measurements that should never have defined a person's worth. A reader may recognise contemporary anxieties about scoring, data extraction and administrative judgement without needing the fictional system to correspond exactly to any one real platform.

Climate, memory and unequal shelter

Mike McClelland's 'The Flotilla at Bird Island' shifts the frame to coastlines and shelter. A changing climate has not affected everyone equally. The contrast between damaged regions and better-protected enclaves transforms environmental crisis into a question of class, geography and who can afford distance from disaster. The reconnection of people with different histories gives those distinctions a human scale.

Calvin Baker's 'Brief Exercises in Mindfulness' brings a comparable sense of dislocation into housing. When Harry and Dean encounter Raquin, a former resident of their apartment, the apparently neutral fact of an address becomes an archive of loss. Gentrification is not treated as a purely visual change to a neighbourhood. The room now occupied by one person was once the centre of another person's life, and their unequal claims cannot be tidied away by an uplifting slogan about renewal.

These pieces show why the anthology's most successful recurring device is not a future technology but a contested place: a home, an island, a community or a route to medical care. Geography distributes security. A story can make that distribution felt by showing who has a door to close and who must keep moving.

Who is allowed to be a person?

Martha Wells's 'Obsolescence' takes the collection beyond Earth. On a station near Jupiter, an investigation involving the death of an augmented person exposes suspicion toward bodies that have been technologically changed. Readers familiar with Wells's Murderbot fiction may recognise her interest in the gap between legal or technical categories and the more untidy reality of personhood. The story is not a Murderbot instalment, however, and stands within this anthology's distinct world.

The speculative setting makes one of the volume's central ideas unusually clear: exclusion can be dressed up as classification. A system may claim it is merely describing a difference while using that difference to decide whose life matters, whose testimony counts or who belongs to the community. Wells is effective when she lets procedural questions uncover moral ones rather than announcing the message first.

Karen Lord's 'The Plague Doctors' supplies a more overtly collective emergency. In a future threatened by grey pox, researchers and residents of an isolated island confront the limits of medicine, supply and responsibility. Its scenario is particularly resonant in a post-pandemic reading, yet the story's concerns are not confined to any one outbreak. A crisis reveals which networks of care were resilient long before the crisis was visible.

The effect of reading these two pieces together is striking. One asks whose body is recognised as worthy of protection; the other asks what protection can look like when resources are scarce and every choice implicates more than one life. The anthology's title starts to sound less like a promise of rescue than a demand that somebody account for the route.

Not one tone, and not one answer

The remaining contributions widen the conversation in useful ways. In Madeline Ashby's 'Viral Content,' a reporter follows a mysterious illness while facing competing pressures from sport, media and her employer; information itself becomes a contested public-health resource. David A. Robertson's 'Reclamation' connects an Indigenous teenager's relationship with a horse and an elder to cultural continuity. Frank Bill's 'The Masculine and the Dead' investigates the difficulty of making care visible inside a masculine identity shaped by loss. Together with the other seven stories, they demonstrate that vulnerability is neither a single demographic nor a single narrative formula.

That breadth is also a weakness. Ten writers working across social realism, dystopia, mystery and science fiction produce different expectations of pace and closure. The book's editorial theme is stronger than any single shared aesthetic. Some speculative premises clarify a dilemma with elegant economy; elsewhere the intention to illustrate a social problem can be felt a little too clearly. A few pieces leave less room for ambiguity than their strongest characters deserve.

Commissioned fiction is especially exposed to this difficulty. A story can arrive with a question already printed on its invitation, and readers may feel the destination before the characters do. Yet judging the collection solely by the freedom of each individual story would overlook its most distinctive quality: the arguments between stories. The surveillance anxiety of 'The Erasure Game' complicates easy enthusiasm for well-intentioned systems. The intimate dependencies in 'The Sweet Spot' complicate slogans about individual autonomy. The material exclusions in 'Paradise' and 'The Flotilla at Bird Island' make the word choice seem inadequate unless we also consider available options.

Verdict: a conversation rather than a cure

Take Us to a Better Place works best as a collection to read comparatively, not as ten identical answers to a public-health brief. Its ambitious range asks a reader to notice how often supposedly private problems are constructed by housing, migration, technology, environment or the social recognition of other people. The result can be uneven in dramatic force, but its unevenness is not fatal to the experiment. Its best fiction shows the cost of systems without reducing its people to examples.

Readers seeking a tightly unified literary anthology may find the shifts in tone abrupt. Readers interested in near-future science fiction, social realism, disability narratives and the ethics of collective life will find unusually productive points of disagreement. It would be particularly well suited to a reading group willing to ask not simply whether a fictional society is healthier, but healthier for whom—and at whose expense.

About the contributors

The anthology includes stories by Madeline Ashby, Hannah Lillith Assadi, Calvin Baker, Frank Bill, Yoon Ha Lee, Karen Lord, Mike McClelland, Achy Obejas, David A. Robertson and Martha Wells. Their differences matter: this is not the work of a single author or a novel divided into ten chapters. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation publishes the complete English-language collection free of charge, with conversation guides for the individual stories. The edition carries a 2019 copyright notice and circulated as a 2020 book; the year shown above identifies that release, not the date of this review.