Jessica Barber, “Coma Kings.” Lightspeed, February 2014.
This is the first thing I’ve read of Jessica Barber, a decent story that doesn’t quite come together. I think this is one of the sort of stories Jonathan McCalmont was talking about, in that the sfnal element is only there to facilitate what could just as well be a mainstream story, isn’t examined beyond this. Coma is a new virtual reality game that, well, locks you in your own brain while playing. Jenny is the secondbest player in the sate, save only her sister Annie, but Annie doesn’t play with her anymore. The reasons for why Jenny is desperate for her sister to play and the refusal of Annie to do so might be obvious considering the title, but Barber allows her story to reach that revelation naturally.
It’s just that the story doesn’t really progress after that, not so much ends but stops. Perhaps that was the only way that it could end, without resolution or change but it’s still slightly unsatisfying, even if it hits its emotional high. The game itself doesn’t convince, anything that you need complete concentration for to this extreme seems unlikely to take off in the way it apparantly has done here. Yes, there’s the Oculus Rift, but that doesn’t put you in a, well, coma.
But than the technology isn’t the point here, is it. It’s the emotional situation it makes possible, which could’ve been written in a more mundane way, with a sister in a real coma, but there that hope of her waking up and coming back to the world of her own accord would be far less, there wouldn’t be the possibility of contact, that why Barber needs the game there. Maybe she could’ve done more with it, had she had more space to do so.
Elizabeth Bear, “Covenant.” Slate, September 11, 2014.
Elizabeth Bear, “This Chance Planet.” Tor.com, October 22, 2014.
I first read one of Elizabeth Bear’s novels in 2013 and since then she’s become one of my favourite novelist, not having read any of her shorter work so far though. These two stories seem to be set in roughly the same future, sometime in the middle or late 21st centyury, after Peak Oil has finally forced the abandonment of private cars and everything that entails. It’s a slightly dated future, what with shale oil making it possible to burn up the planet long before we run out of gas…
“Covenant” is about a serial killer who’s undergone a rightminding and a gender change as part of their rehabilitation process, becoming the victim of another serial killer. It’s a decent story, with lots of internal monologuing explaining the rightminding process and all, so far the most old fashioned science fiction story I’ve read. I can’t stand serial killer stories normally, but Bear won me over with the rightminding, again the strongest actual sfnal element I’ve seen so far. The ramifications of such a technique, the impact on one individual are explored in a way that Barber doesn’t do in her story with the Coma game.
“This Chance Planet”, after a Maurice Maeterlinck quote, doesn’t really have a reason to be set in the future. It could just as well been written as an contemporary fairy story, about a stray dog in the Moscow metro forcing a woman to realise what a deadbeat her boyfriend is. One of those stories where you can’t quite believe the relationship, the protagonist being that blind to her boyfriend’s faults.
MC
February 6, 2015 at 11:00 pmThese are all good points. For my part, I appreciated the anticlimactic resolution in the first of these stories, and I liked some of the interactions with the dog in the last, but I didn’t have a strong reaction to either. I’m more conflicted about the serial killer story. I’m on board with the strong portrayal of consciousness/will/choice/empathy/etc. as essentially manipulable physiological processes (“Escape from Spiderhead” is a favorite). But in addition to not grooving on the serial killer motif, I was thrown out of the story by the gender stuff for a number of reasons: the explanation for it seemed weak by itself; the more plausible explanation was completely meta (role reversal is the whole structure of the story); and given that the process seemed to be a real commitment, I thought there was maybe a dubious allegory there about gender being a simple choice. On the last point, I’m happy to give Bear the benefit of the doubt, but once I saw that it was a role reversal story, my overall feeling about it was pretty much decided.
Cat
February 14, 2015 at 8:35 pmI really liked “This Chance Planet” and didn’t find the narrator’s relationship hard to believe, especially given what I perceived as the character’s youth.