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Reaper Man — Terry Pratchett

Published on March 19, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Reaper Man

Reaper Man
Terry Pratchett
287 pages
published in 1991

Even before rereading the day after pTerry’s death, Reaper Man was mired in grieving for me. Because I reread it in 2012, the year after Sandra’s death, when I had fallen back on Pratchett’s Discworld series as comfort reading, something to lose yourself in and forget for a while. And then I hit Reaper Man, in which DEATH has been retired by the Auditors for having become too human, has to find a new living as BILL DOOR and a fragile, predoomed romance starts between him and Miss Flitworth, the never married widow he ends up working as a farmhand for. It’s a novel about death and life and humanity and the essence of it is captured by what DEATH argues at the climax of it:

LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

That’s a sentiment, for all its vaguely Christian overtones, I can get behind. DEATH himself has started off in the first two Discworld novels as a somewhat evil incarnation of the Grim Reaper, through his obsession with reaping Rincewind, but after this had been established as conscientious and extremely careful in doing his job and that quote sums it up to a tee. The harvest needs to be done, but it has to be done with care and attention — there’s a great scene in which BILL DOOR turns out to scythe the wheat one blade at a time and is still faster than everybody else. And it’s this what the Auditors object to.

The Auditors are one of the first of Pratchett’s standins for faceless capitalism, or so I like to read them. No identity of their own, no interest in anything that makes humanity, well, human, no interest in seeing the job done properly, only in that it’s done efficiently without any care for the individual case. Their Death is impersonal yet vindictive, an attitude familiar to anybody caught in the crosshairs of any large company’s “customer service”.

DEATH’s retirement as BILL DOOR meanwhile brings to the fore his own humanity, as he learns to live as human, deal with the passage of time and inevitability of well, himself. Seeing DEATH figuring all this out and how to act in daily life, how to become just Bill Door is both funny and sad, especially since you know how it has to end.

Fortunately there’s more than enough to laugh about in the book’s second plotline, revolving around the wizards having to deal with the fallout of DEATH’s retirement as the lack of things dying leads to a buildup of life forces, enlivening things considerably in Ankh-Morpork. Windle Spoons being one of them, who as a wizard is privileged enough to know the hour of his death, but with DEATH missing, this appointment isn’t kept so he returns as a zombie. Sort of. His colleagues are considerate enough to try out the traditional methods of dealing with the undead on him, to no avail.

Meanwhile even inanimate objects are starting to feel the effects of the absence of DEATH and amongst an infestion of snowglobes and shopping car trolleys is hiding, leading up to something sinister, something parasitic on cities, the shopping mall…

Even though I’ve reread this at least half a dozen times, this still makes me laugh out loud in places, as it makes me choke up in others. Pratchett really hit his stride around this time and Reaper Man would be an excellent place to start reading the Discworld series with. It doesn’t need much prior knowledge, it shows off both his humouristic and philosophical side and it’s representative both of where Pratchett was coming from and where he was going to.

Short SF Marathon: Recap

Published on March 10, 20151 Comment

So what have we learned from reading the almost 100 stories on this list? That there were actually quite a few excellent fantasy and science fiction stories published last year, that even when coming already curated there’s so much stuff out there you can easily drown in it and that there a fair few writers doing interesting things at the short story level I hadn’t heard of before I started this, who I like to see more off.

Of the stories on the list, the following got nominated for one of the short fiction Hugo Awards by me:

Rachel Swirsky, “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap).” Subterranean, Summer 2014.

A brilliant story about a daughter and a father and how they cope with her impending death. I’d call it a 21st century Helen O’Loy if that wasn’t a creepy sexist bit of sentimental shite and this isn’t.

Veronica Schanoes, “Among the Thorns.” Tor.com, May 7, 2014.

Re-imagining a horribly anti-semitic Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch.” Granta, October 28, 2014.

A very meta, very allegorical, feminist sort of fantasy story.

Yoon Ha Lee, “Wine.” Clarkesworld, January 2014.

A great space opera sort of science fiction story, with a trans protagonist.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, “A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon A Star.” Tor.com, July 20, 2014.

You could argue that this isn’t science fiction, but this is a story that concerns itself with everything science fiction should concern itself with in the 21st century.

Ruthanna Emrys, “The Litany of Earth.” Tor.com, May 14, 2014.

A Lovecraftian story that refutes Lovecraft’s racism.

Alyssa Wong, “The Fisher Queen.” F&SF, May/June 2014.

“The Fisher Queen” is perfect, already a Nebula nominee and deservedly so. It’s a story about a fisher girl from the Mekong delta who one day learns the truth behind her father’s joking that her mother was a mermaid. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a feminist fairy tale.

Damien Angelica Walters, “The Floating Girls: A Documentary.” Jamais Vu 3, September 2014.

A very simple story about an unexplained wave of girls, well, just floating up into the air and the indifference with which it is greeted. It feels very much of the moment, a response to things like GamerGate and such.

Kelly Sandoval, “The One They Took Before.” Shimmer #22, November 2014.

An urban fantasy story that looks at what happens after you get back from fairy land. It reminded me a bit of Jo Walton’s Relentlessly Mundane, about the same general emotions of loss and bitterness, but in a different key so to speak.

Rachael K. Jones, “Makeisha in Time.” Crossed Genres #20, August 2014.

Almost impossible, but Rachael K. Jones has managed to write a novel time travel story, of a woman who keeps getting pulled back into the past to lead entire lifes there, only to return to the exact method she left, her family and friends none the wiser, and how she adapts to this. A great story.

Xia Jia, “Tongtong’s Summer.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, December 2014 (originally in Neil Clarke (ed.), Upgraded, Wyrm Publishing, 2014).

Xia Jia writes about the impact of high technology on everyday life and here tackles a very contemporary subject, the use of robots to help an aging population cope with day to day life. In this case Tongtong’s grandfather, in his eighties but still working at the clinic every day until a bad fall, has to come live with them, so Tongtong’s mother could take care of him. Because she and her husband both work, Tongtong’s father brings home a robot, an Ah Fu, to help them. Which isn’t actually a robot, but a tele-operated machine run by an intern for the company Tongtong’s father works for: real robots don’t work and full time carers are too expensive.

Apart from that I also recommended Carmen Maria Machado, Bogi Takács & Usman Malik for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer based on their stories; all were in their second year of eligibility.

On a more negative note, a couple of these stories were just not very good:

Harry Turtledove, “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging.” Tor.com, January 8, 2014.

Am I the only one who found this story about an Anne Frank who survived WWII on the creepy side, and not in a good way, especially coming from somebody who made his name essentially writing Slaver Rebellion fanfiction? It doesn’t help that it’s so damn pious about it all, with huge chunks of as you know Bobbery about the Holocaust and what happened to the Dutch Jews in World War II. It’s a very American way of looking at the Holocaust and an approach I find suspicious at the best of the times. I much prefer Lavie Tidhar’s way of handling it, much more willing to take risks with such a heavy subject.

Mary Rickert, “The Mothers of Voorhisville.” Tor.com, April 30, 2014.

This is a stupid story about stupid people doing the most stupid thing possible because they have to adhere to the conventions of genre fiction, so nobody ever talks to anybody else until it’s too late. It’s mired in gender essentialism and goes on for way too long.

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.

Short SF Marathon Day 32: Jy Yang, Isabel Yap, Caroline Yoachim

Published on March 8, 2015Leave a comment

Jy Yang, “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points.” Clarkesworld, September 2014.

These are the final three stories in my 32 (!) day short SF marathon and we’re ending it with a bang. Jy Yang’s entry is a near future thriller starring an emergent AI out for vengeance after the death of one of his mothers. Officially it was an accident, a stadium collapse during a political rally but what isn’t clear to human intelligences is clear to the AI: sabotage. This reminded me of stories by Sterling or Gibson; high praise.

Isabel Yap, “A Cup of Salt Tears.” Tor.com, August 27, 2014.

Fittingly, in this last batch of stories we also have another reworked myth, that of the Japanese kappa. A woman is grieving for her husband dying of cancer, taking a bath in an onsen late one night, when a kappa enters the bath house, who introduces himself as the one that saved her from drowning as a child. He says he loves her, she is wary because she knows Kappas are not to be trusted. I hadn’t heard of kappas before, but I liked the way Yap introduced this one and quickly established its properties, according to myth, only for the kappa to act against them.

The heart of the story lies in the unlikely love triangle between the kappa, the woman and her husband. The description Yap gives of her waiting by her husband’s bed in the hospital, arranging her life around it and the feelings of helplessness, grief and sometimes irration and frustration, are horribly familiar. Her finding love or forgetfullness in the arms of the kappa is understandable. A nicely humane story.

Caroline Yoachim, “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion.” Clarkesworld, August 2014.

This is an interesting and frustrating story, not because it’s told badly, but because of the subject. Taking the Kübler-Ross model of grief processing as its guideline, this tells the story of one family coming to terms with the changes in the world after a half succeeded, semi-accidental alien invasion. It’s one of those stories where you sometimes wish the writer would put her focus slightly wider, one that doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion because that’s not how the world works.

Short SF Marathon Day 31: Kai Ashante Wilson, Alyssa Wong

Published on March 7, 2015Leave a comment

Kai Ashante Wilson, “The Devil in America.” Tor.com, April 2, 2014.

I’ve talked before about American fantasy, the kind of fantasy that took the myths, legends and fairytales European migrants brought with them from their home countries and adapted them to the American landscape, the kind of which Lovecraft and Bradbury are offshoots and that got rationalised in Unknown and darkened in Weird Tales. It is of course mostly white American fantasy, drawing on English and German sources, ignoring most if not all other sources of fantasy and magic that come together in America.

But there are other traditions of fantasy and if they’re often invisible to those of us comfortable in our genre ghettos, this is changing again. One indicator of which is the Nebula nomination for this story, a story that revolves around the African magic brought to America by the people kidnapped during Slavery. Set in 1871, only a few years after the Civil War and the end to slavery, it’s about a family that still has “that old Africa magic” running through their blood, but who through slavery have forgotten most of what they need to make it work properly.

This is an angry story, a justifiably angry story, one that could be depressing as well but despite the horrifying conclusion, one that you’re dreading and see coming throughout the story, it does offer a glimmer of hope even while Kai Ashante Wilson is merciless in reaching the inevitable conclusion. He’s also careful in providing a context to the story, by mixing in snippets of history in between the chapters. If it wasn’t clear yet that this story was a response to recent events, an interview with Wilson makes it crystal clear:

Ten thousands things have to spark all at the same time, and cohere into a good hot flame, before a story results for me. I can still count the stories I’ve begun and finished on one hand. But I suppose I might date the precipitating spark of “The Devil in America” to an interview I caught with Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother. The love of parent for child has been an immense preoccupation of mine for a long time, and in the most receptive state of mind imaginable, I sat listening to that television interview: My son was walking back from the convenience store…

It’s no surprise this was nominated for the Nebula and I’m seriously considering changing one of my novelette nominations to this.

Alyssa Wong, “Santos de Sampaguitas” (also, part two). Strange Horizons, October 13, 2014.

The first of two stories by Alyssa Wong, this is a fantasy story set in the Philipines about a young maid who inherits the family god and the choice she has to make whether to accept him or not. This is a well written gem of a story and it’s the weaker of the two.

Alyssa Wong, “The Fisher Queen.” F&SF, May/June 2014.

Because “The Fisher Queen” is perfect, a Nebula nominee and a story I put on my short story nominations list. It’s a story about a fisher girl from the Mekong delta who one day learns the truth behind her father’s joking that her mother was a mermaid. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a feminist fairy tale.

Short SF Marathon Day 30: Damien Angelica Walters, LaShawn M. Wanak, Peter Watts

Published on March 6, 2015Leave a comment

Damien Angelica Walters, “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter.” Strange Horizons, January 6, 2014.

The second Damien Angelica Walters story is even more explicitly feminist than her first. An astronaut is ambushed during a press conference with the news that a notorious serial killer is in fact her father. Now she has to deal with the fallout. If this story has a mission statement it’s in the following quote:

Right. I’ve got grime under my nails that will never come out and I like it that way. Know why? Because it says I’m real, I have a fucking purpose. I’m not somebody’s tits and ass on display like a window mannequin. They did that shit to the baddest fictional woman in the universe. Hell, they even did it to the female marines in the second movie, but that’s sort of forgivable because the guys were in their skivvies, too.

Science fiction at its best always is about today’s concerns as well as the future and this is a great example, a look at a future where we may be going to Mars and have regular commercial space stations in orbit, but women in tech still suffer from the same sort of problem as today, still have to deal with GamerGatesque problems.

LaShawn M. Wanak, “21 Steps to Enlightenment (Minus One).” Strange Horizons, February 3, 2014.

Sometimes a spiral staircase appears on your path, from out of nowhere. If you decide to climb it, you can find enlightenment, but you have to climb all the way to the top. The problem is what happens after enlightenment. All of which of course screams metaphor, which is acknowledged in the story. One of these stories where the fantastical element is there to illuminate the quite mundane but therefore no less important concerns of the characters.

Peter Watts, “The Colonel.” Tor.com, July 29, 2014.

Peter Watts has made a name with dense, brutal science fiction and this is no exception. Set in the same universe as Blindsight, this is a story about a still human Colonel safeguarding the world against the dangers of Hive minds, until he has given an offer he can’t refuse. This is strictly in the Sterling-Stephenson-Strossian mode of jargon heavy, figure it out for yourself if you can mode of science fiction, which if done right, I like a lot. This I like a lot.