Eight Billion Genies Deluxe Edition

3.5 stars

The premise of this story was super compelling: once the world hits a population of 8 billion, each human gets their own individual genie to grant them a single wish. Simple, yet compelling, right? I definitely thought so, and I was totally addicted to the story that came out of this. I wanted to know what these various characters would wish for. Plus, the creators clearly wanted to give it more thought than the cliche of having people's wishes backfire because they mis-worded them, or get twisted into payback for their innate greed. Instead, we get to see a world where people immediately get to transform reality all around them, and the conflicting wishes would cause catastrophic problems. I love it when writers really try to think through fantastical concepts. In this story, they even imagined a kind of dystopian path that the world would take, where after the world was kind of messed up by the effect of too many crazy wishes, various safe havens and enclaves would form. Sadly, that's when the story kind of lost my initial fervour. The wishes themselves kind of lost their meaning. They became commodities and objects of power in another post-apocalyptic story. It was nice to read about the characters that we'd followed since the beginning, but the timescale also started to speed up (felt like they were just trying to get to the end) and reach the final wish. At that end point I found things got a bit preachy and unfortunately I didn't find the ending very satisfying. I realize that everyone prefers a story arc, rather than jumping around vignettes of various characters exploring their wishes, but I wish (no pun intended) that this particular story had gone wider that way instead. Maybe that would have been too much also, but in the end I think this story tried to take its core concept in too many different directions and didn't quite succeed in tying them all together. Nevertheless, the genies looked cute.