science fiction

Short SF Marathon Day 25: Kelly Sandoval, John Scalzi, Veronica Schanoes

Published on March 1, 2015Leave a comment

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

I think this is going on my Hugo short story shortlist, 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.

John Scalzi, “Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome.” Tor.com, May 13, 2014.

Scalzi takes the oral history format that’s become popular in the last couple of years to remember anything from the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in America in the early eighties and uses it to chronicle the spread of his fictional disease from his novel Locked In. A bit of a tear jerker in places.

Some of the developments seem to have gone a bit too quick or easy to be totally believable, but that’s more of a question of how much room there is in a novella. It’s funny to think that Scalzi has basically taken the exposition from his novel and reworked it into this.

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

I’ve mentioned before I don’t like fairy tale inspired fantasy, but once again I have to make an exception. Apparantly there was a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in which a lowly peddler tricks an evil Jew and robs him of his money, then kills him by dancing him to death in a thorn bush. Veronica Schanoes uses this as the base of her story and puts it in the context of the actual antisemitism and brutality against Jews as happened in the period the fairy tale was roughly set in. Then she takes the daughter of the murdered Jew and let her take her revenge on the people who killed her father.

There are some horrible scenes in the first paragraphs of the story, but the violence isn’t gratitious. What I liked was this was both brutal and humane; the people who killed the protagonist’s father aren’t nazi caricatures but ordinary human beings and way Schanoes described the crowd who watched his death reminded me also of lynching mobs from American history. Ordinary, decent people can take great delight in watching the other being tortured and murdered in the right circumstances and Schanoes isn’t shy to point this out. But it’s not a story totally devoid of hope and decency. Revenge is taken but not total, Itte is too human to be as horrible as the tormentors of her father were.

Well done. On the Hugo ballot it goes.

Short SF Marathon Day 24: Alastair Reynolds, Mary Rickert, Sofia Samatar

Published on February 28, 2015Leave a comment

Alastair Reynolds, “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa.” Subterranean, Summer 2014.

This is set in the same universe as Reynolds’ first novel, Revelation Space and sequels, another one of those stories where a dysfunctional crew stumbles over an alien secret unimaginably old. Well written as anything Reynolds has done, but it reminded me a bit too much of an average Star Trek episode.

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.

In Voorhisville a mysterious man driving a hearse seduces and impregnates most of the town’s women and when their children are born they have wings. Everybody is convinced nothing good can come from revealing their children, who do seem to have some mysterious powers and while those are troubling, mother love trumps everything. Therefore they all responds the same by keeping it a secret and from there things meander to their foregone, blood soaked conclusion in a Waco style standoff. All of which told through a sort of diary supposedly put together at the end of the siege, with the mothers acting as the narrator in turns.

The problem I have with this is that this is a short story spun out into a novella, with lots of padding and local colour that doesn’t really add anything to the story. In a short story, it doesn’t matter so much that each of the mothers respond exactly the same to their baby boy developing wings, but here there’s room to notice. This could’ve actually worked better as a novel, where there’s more room to develop the characters beyond “town floozy” or “rebellious teenager” and the threat of the babies could’ve been build up better.

A bigger problem is that whole idea of mother love trumping everything else and women being made crazy through pregnancy. It feels old fashioned and slightly insulting. You could argue that it was because of the nature of the pregnancies, but that wasn’t established well enough for my liking.

Sofia Samatar, “How to Get Back to the Forest.” Lightspeed, March 2014.

Now this is a much better example of body horror fiction, one that can achieve in a tenth of the words the sort of revulsion Rickert was going for. It starts with a group of girls on campin the middle of the night herded to the bathroom to puke because one girl believes that way you can puke up a bug that regulates your emotions and it builds up from there. It’s a smart enough story to only hint at what’s going on, not have easy answers and that’s what makes it uncomfortable. There’s also an undercurrent of queerness running through it, a sort of counter current to the surface emotions in the story.

Short SF Marathon Day 23: Richard Parks, Robert Reed

Published on February 27, 2015Leave a comment

Richard Parks, “The Sorrow of Rain.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, October 2, 2014.

This is the second Richard Parks story, again from Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the last story on the list to come from that magazine. If you like traditional fantasy, this may be the magazine for you because all of these stories have been interesting at the very least. “The Sorrow of Rain” is no exception, a story of Lord Yamada and his friend the priest Kenji coming to hunt down some demon or ghost keeping the summer rains going over the village of Aoiyama but finding something else entirely.

I’m certain whether this is meant to be set in historical Japan or a fantasy analogue, or whether it matters. A somewhat bittersweet love story and Parks is somebody I’d like to read more off.

Shannon Peavey, “Dogs From Other Places” (audio only). Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 38, March 2014.

I didn’t read this because this was only available as an audio book and I can’t stand those.

Robert Reed, “Pernicious Romance.” Clarkesworld, November 2014.

A typically complex and thought provoking Robert Reed story about what seems to be a terrorist attack during a football game which sent the entire stadium in what looked to be a coma and killed a couple of dozen people. Things get strange however when the victims start to wake up and tell stories of living weeks to entire lives in other worlds.

It’s told as some sort of government report or scientific study, which I’m a sucker for. No real explenation for the event is given, though strong hints are dropped.

Short SF Marathon Day 21: An Owomoyela, Susan Palwick, K. J. Parker

Published on February 25, 2015Leave a comment

An Owomoyela, “And Wash Out by Tides of War.” Clarkesworld, February 2014.

This is a story about a woman growing up without her mother because her mother has gone off to war and what happens when she comes back. One of the qualities a good science fiction writer should have is the ability to imply a much larger world than is shown in their story and make it look natural. Owomoyela has that ability in spades.

Susan Palwick, “Weather.” Clarkesworld, September 2014.

Every now and then I still have a dream in which Sandra’s alive and in that dream I both know she’s alive and know she isn’t. I always wake up stressed and depressed The idea of giving the dead a virtual afterlife, of having them interact with their friends and family left behind fills me with dread. That seems like the worst of both worlds, having them there but out of reach, never quite getting closure.

Not a new idea in science fiction, but Susan Palwick gives it a new twist and makes this a deeply humane story about love and regret and wanting to make up for mistakes made when it’s probably already too late.

K. J. Parker, “Heaven Thunders the Truth.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, October 2, 2014.

I said Yoon Ha Lee had the most stories in this list, but K. J. Parker equals him. Parker is a veteran SFF writer I’ve never read anything by, one of those writers who’s there but never discussed much. As an introduction to their writing, “Heaven Thunders the Truth” would be difficult to improve. Set in a vaguely African country, it’s a story about a wizard and a king and the virtue of telling the truth at all times.

Annihilation — Jeff VanderMeer

Published on February 24, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Annihilation

Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer
208 pages
published in 2014

Last year Jeff VanderMeer (or rather his publisher) did something rarely done, releasing an entire trilogy in one year. Annihilation is the first of this Southern Reach trilogy and has gotten steady buzz as one of the shoe-ins for Hugo and Nebula nominations; it already managed the latter, in fact. VanderMeer is arguably the father of the American New Weird, that mid-noughties movement that came bubbling up from England and got codified across the pond, mainly through his and Ann VanderMeer’s contributions. I’ve only read one story of his before this, the deliberately confusing The Situation.

Annihilation is a much more straightforward story, of a four woman expedition into Area X, as told by the biologist through her field journal; the other three members are the anthropologist, the surveyor and the psychologist. Their names are never told: “names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X”. They’re the twelfth such expedition into the Area; the previous eleven all came to grief one way or another. What they’re setting out to discover is left vague; they themselves only know in general terms what they’re doing or what they can expect, though the psychologist seems to know more than she lets show.

Because I’ve read it only recently, the comparison with Arkady & Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic was in the back of my head almost from the start of the story, as well as with the genre of horror survival games it inspired. Area X is devoid of human life, supposedly depopulated through an unspecified eco disaster though that’s only a cover story, but at first glance only looks like a well established wilderness park, signs of most human life almost disappeared, save for the lighthouse on the coast.

It’s only on the second day that the expedition finds the first truly alien entity in the Area, a tunnel, spiral staircase into the ground which the biologist can’t help but see as a tower. At first she sees this as a built, artificial tunnel, but an accidently inhalation of spores growning on the tunnel/tower’s walls shifts her perception and she starts to realise the psychologist has hypnotised them to shield them from the truth. But what she can’t shield the expedition from is the writing on the tunnel walls:

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim lit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been.

Who or what is writing this and why is the central mystery driving Annihilation as the expedition falls apart until only the biologist remains. She has an ulterior motive for taking part, as her husband was part of the eleventh expedition. He came back altered and she hopes to find out something about what happened to him.

Meanwhile, as the expedition unravels, she also finds herself reflecting on her own life and past, which is just as gripping as the slow unravelling of the mystery of Area X and like it, there are no easy answers to how she became the woman she is, just a steady building awareness of something gone wrong, until she finds herself in the Area. It adds a melancholic element to Annihilation, a sense of options closed off and roads not taken.

There isn’t any real horror, an evil lurking behind Area X, there is at first glimpse not even anything stranger than a wilderness area that’s both more wild and more clean than it should or could be. Nevertheless there’s the sense of dread that builds up throughout the story, an awareness that something has gone wrong and that more has happened than is acknowledged. And as with Roadside Picnic, it’s unclear if there is a central intelligence behind the change, or whether it’s something natural.

And I didn’t find it scary while reading it, but this was still the sort of story that cost sleep after I’d finished it on Sunday night, as I kept thinking about it half asleep. Not many books can do that. It will be interesting to see what VanderMeer does in the other two books in the trilogy.