Short SF marathon Day 1: Anders, Arnason, Bailey

One of the impetuses behind this little project was reading Jonathan McCalmont’s series of posts about the state of short story SFF, especially his theory that it has shifted from being idea driven to emotionally driven:

In each of these stories, the genre elements sit somewhere between the metaphorical and the literal; aspects of a fictional world that seem to mirror the contours of real emotional lives whilst leaving the world unchanged and the metaphor unresolved and shrouded with the kind of ambiguity that renders precision anathema[…]

Gradually, and with almost no discussion, the aesthetics of genre short fiction appear to be shifting away from stories that explore ideas and towards stories that seek to use genre elements as a way of encouraging readers to feel a particular way. In this bold new world, genre elements are easily excised or subsumed because the emphasis is always upon the characters’ emotional lives.

From my limited foray in reading the Hugo nominees last year, I can’t deny that he has a bit of a point here — a story like Wakulla Springs has no real genre elements but does evoke the right sort of emotion, was written by the right sort of people to be taken into science fiction. But what I wonder is a) how pervasive this really is and b) if this is anything new. In some ways it’s understandable if science fiction and fantasy writers feel comfortable with writing stories in which the fantastic elements are no longer the point, twohundred years after Shelley and ninety after Gernsback. There isn’t much that you can do with pure idea driven stories in SFF that hasn’t been done before, but there’s plenty of emotional terrain still largely unexplored.

And if science fiction is about metaphors made concrete, something like The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere, which could have easily been written as a memetic, coming out story is still made different by its fantastic elements, even if its consequences aren’t explored much beyond what John Chu needed to tell the story. That’s not particularly new in science fiction after all; take “The Cold Equations” frex, which also built its world up around the morality it attempted to sell rather than really explore the ramifications of its setting.

Charlie Jane Anders, “The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick.” Lightspeed, June 2014 (“Women Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue); reprinted at Tor.com.

Roger, Mary’s boyfriend has broken up with her, her best friend Stacia suggests she should ask for his memories of their love together, from before it turned sour, then steals them and uses them on herself out of jealousy or a misguided attempt to understand their love. Mary cuts off contact with Stacia, finds a new potential boyfriend, then Stacia starts stalking them…

Now here you do have a story that does depend on a sfnal gimmick, the ability to copy and absorb other people’s memories, to drive what’s essentially a memetic plot revolving around relationship issues that could’ve been set at any time since the fifties. This is a smart drug, bio-engineering future but with what look a bit too much like mid-20th century gender relations and dating rituals, but it is undeniably science fiction. I liked it, perhaps because of its mundanity, but also for its humanist core: these are actually nice people.

Eleanor Arnason, “The Scrivener.” Subterranean, Winter 2014.

I never parables or allegories and this story has a bit of that here, inspired by a discussion whether a plot and such is really necessary for a story. So here we have a Scrivener who names his three daughters Imagination, Ornamentation and Plot, which, ugh, is a bit too much on the nose. It also started off arch and with that sense of knowning that it is telling a story which has to do a lot to win me over. In the end however Arnason does do something mildly interesting with this, but it’s a slight story nonetheless.

Dale Bailey, “The End of the End of Everything.” Tor.com, April 23, 2014.

Now if we do want to talk about science fiction aping memetic, mainstream fiction, the worst it could do is to ape that cliched standby of fanboy sneers, the English professor with a midlife crisis contemplating infidelity. It’s the end of the world, the Ruin is creeping up on the artist colony Ben and his wife Lois have been invited to, but he can’t help thinking of his friend’s gorgous new wife or the mutilation artist living a couple of houses over. Bailey does have a way with a turn of phrase, but the dillemma at the heart of the story didn’t convince me, the allure of torture, death and mutilation was too bland, too safe when it doesn’t matter anymore because the world is ending anyway.