Short SF Marathon Day 11: Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, N. K. Jemisin, Xia Jia

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, “Where the Trains Turn.” Tor.com, November 19, 2014.

Because I didn’t really look at the link and skipped the introduction at Tor.com as it tends to spoil the stories being introduced, continuing a long introduction tradition, I only realised the author was Finnish when I got distracted by his slightly awkward English. Actually, if I’m completely honest, I first thought he was German, because the main character, the overtly strict, literal mother is such a German type, though apparantly her type is known in the Nordic countries as well (and indeed, over here in the Netherlands as well). She reminded me in fact of a certain poster to the rec.arts.sf.written.* newsgroups of a decade and a half ago, completely incapable of understanding anything that wasn’t flat, literal truth but still convinced she herself was completely logical and it was the rest of us that were ignorant and not making sense. It’s a type of person you don’t encounter quite as much in Anglosaxon countries, these being too romantic in nature to breed these people.

The slightly clumsy translation by Liisa Rantalaiho (especially compared to the Xia Jia story below) both hinders and helps the story. It helps because it’s just alien enough to “proper” English to showcase that this isn’t set in the familiar UK or US, hinders because it makes for awkward reading at the start.

I’m not sure what I thought about the story as a story: it felt overtly long to me, but again, that may have been the English as well. In one way this is based on the similar conceit as Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children, as the protagonist remembers her son who never existed; in another this is a horror fantasy stories about trains and the idea that some trains can leave their tracks and are hungry to kill. The mixture of the two didn’t quite hold together for me, but the second half of the story was better than the first.

N. K. Jemisin, “Stone Hunger.” Clarkesworld, July 2014.

A short fantasy story about a girl in a post-apocalyptic world, who can eat energy, all sorts of energy, who is on the trail of a man who can do the same and by doing so killed her city. A story of revenge and survival and perhaps moving beyond it. Some interesting ideas here, a neat setting that I’d be curious to see Jemisin do more with.

Xia Jia, “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, September 2014.

It’s interesting to read this translated story after the previous one. Here, if you hadn’t been told this was a translation, you’d be hard pressed to notice. Is this because Ken Liu is Chinese-American, at home in both languages and cultures to an extent Liisa Rantalaiho isn’t, or did the latter make a deliberate choice in translating the way she did?

In any case, what you have here are five vignettes centered around Spring Festival or Chinese New Year, slice of life stories about family, all revolving around the ways technology interfaces or intrudes into our social lives. It’s neither celebratory nor condemning, which is rare in science fiction.