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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.

Short SF Marathon Day 29: Harry Turtledove, Genevieve Valentine, Damien Angelica Walters

Published on March 5, 2015Leave a comment

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.

On a more general note, doing an alternate history story this way, in which there’s nothing going on but figuring out how the world differs from our own because something else happened, is only fun if the world is indeed somewhat different. Of course it is possible to focus your story on an ordinary life lead in an altered world — Jo Walton did this well in My Real Children presenting two different timelines and the different lives lead by the protagonist — but what Turtledove does with it is just not interesting apart from it being Anne Frank. Using her name gives it a cachet it hasn’t earned.

Genevieve Valentine, “The Insects of Love.” Tor.com, May 28, 2014.

This is another sort of time travel/alternate history malarky all together and a much better story, one that has earned its emotional weight. Love conquering death has been done before, but rarely it’s been the love between two sisters. Told in fragments, in stream of consciousness by the younger of the sisters, which more often than not doesn’t work, but here does. What also worked was the overall insect imagery, which I’m not sure was about real or imaginary insects and don’t want to find out.

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

The best story of these three and one that’s gone on my Hugo nominations list. 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.

Short SF Marathon Day 28: Anna Tambour, Natalia Theodoridou, E. Catherine Tobler, Jeremiah Tolbert

Published on March 4, 2015Leave a comment

Anna Tambour, “The Walking-Stick Forest.” Tor.com, May 21, 2014.

A weird fiction revenge story in which the person seeking revenge comes to some well deserved grief themselves. Not that much fantastical about it, but it reminded me somewhat of interbellum horror and weird fiction stories without being a pastiche.

Natalia Theodoridou, “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul.” Clarkesworld, February 2014.

This is a brilliantly done take on an old subgenre, that of the stranded astronaut on an alien planet and how they fill up their lives when rescue is …unlikely. Here the stranded astronauts makes large automotons from his wrecked spaceship’s resources, inspired by Theo Jansen’s strandbeesten. The holy numbers of the title are also inspired by these strandbeesten.

E. Catherine Tobler, “Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds.” Clarkesworld, May 2014.

A woman walks through an empty world having escaped from a bunker, looking for company but not finding it anywhere, just more empty bunkers. Throughout the story there are hints that she was the victim of alien abduction, but she herself doesn’t remember anything of what happened before she found herself in this world. A nicely atmospheric story that is careful not to provide any real answers.

Jeremiah Tolbert, “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape.” Lightspeed, January 2014.

This is the quintessential example of a particular strain of hippy science fiction, where peace and love are meant to bring us to the stars. A few years into the future, “space whales” start “beaching” themselves on Earth and certain people feel telepathich messages or hallucinations when they touch the beached carcasses. Thom is one of them, one of the most sensitive and he’s used by Lilian, the leader of the Contactee movement, to get closer to the mystery of the whales. Nicely done, but incredibly sentimental and if you’re allergic to that, don’t read this.