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Short SF Marathon Day 15: Yoon Ha Lee, Rose Lemberg

Published on February 19, 20152 Comments

Yoon Ha Lee, “The Contemporary Foxwife.” Clarkesworld, July 2014.

With three stories in this list, Yoon Ha Lee is the most successfull author on it. It’s well earned for me, as I enjoyed each of the three stories. All three are of a similar kind, science fictional reimaginations of folklore and mythology. In this case the foxwife, from the Japanese (and earlier Chinese) traditions of foxes taking human shape to trick or help; the distinction isn’t always clear. Here, sometime in the far future, a male foxwife appears in the space station flat of a hapless grad student asking her to allow him to do her chores.

This is a rather quiet, domestic story where the sfnal and fantastic elements are there mainly as props to help the protagonist resolve her mundane dillemas. What makes it interesting is that it undercuts the traditional fairytale by having a happy ending by not having the human fuck up their relationship with the foxwife. What’s also interesting and which has echoes in the next story, is the matter of fact use of trans/genderqueer characters here, both arguably the foxwife as well as the roommate.

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

In “Wine” it’s the protagonist who’s trans. As the story put it, Loi Ruharn was a gifted but low ranked officer who “came to the Falcon Councilor’s attention as a minor novelty, as a womanform soldier who lived as a man” and was taken as her lover. When their planet is invaded the Council of Five take drastic measures to ensure they will be able to fight off their attackers; Loi disagrees with the methods their mercenaries employ and takes steps to amend them.

This story didn’t need Loi Ruharn to be a trans man; another reason could’ve been found to let him catch the eye of the Falcon Councilor, nor does the story dwell on it other beyond what’s quoted above. With trans characters, as with most other characters not fitting the straigh cis white male template, there’s always the perceived need to have a reason for them to be in a story, rather than just existing. In this case Yoon Ha Lee has it matter in a way that feels natural but then doesn’t make Loi Ruharn into a token. He just is who he is.

Rose Lemberg, “A City on Its Tentacles.” Lackington’s, Winter 2014.

Another sort of fairytale, by somebody I’ve know by name for a year or so now, as somebody both involved in fandom and being spoken off highly by people I trust as a poet and writer. Certainly there is a poetic gleam to this story, of a mother who sells her most precious belongings to help her daughter become better for a few months, at the cost of her own health. It’s clear she has done this before and will need to do this again; as Lemberg makes clear through an encounter in the middle of the story, she also can’t afford to take chances on finding a more permanent solution.

This is a story about the importance of stories and imagination grounded in a reality of life for people without the resources or privilege to make use of it in the way we’re conditioned to see as right by those very same stories. It chimes in well with a blogpost Lemberg just posted on the privilege and necessity of writing and it speaks to a larger debate going through science fiction and fantasy about marginalised voices and the circumstances that make it difficult for so many to get themselves heard.

Short SF Marathon Day 14: Jay Lake, Rich Larson, Yoon Ha Lee

Published on February 18, 2015Leave a comment

Jay Lake, “West to East.” Subterranean, Summer 2014.

This an old fashioned science fiction adventure story, about a ship trapped on a world where the winds are so strong the entire ecology is build around resisting it. Sadly Jay Lake passed away last year.

Rich Larson, “The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy.” Strange Horizons, August 11, 2014.

Cedric works on an oil rig in the Baltic, having fled his father In New Zealand and leaving his girlfriend in Perth. He’s lonely and miserable, until one night he fishes a strange woman out of the sea. Selkie stories may be for losers, but this is a great example of one, with a happy ending even.

Yoon Ha Lee, “Combustion Hour.” Tor.com, June 18, 2014.

A fable of entropy as performed by shadow puppets. Great idea, done well.

Short SF Marathon Day 12: Xia Jia, Rachael K. Jones, Stephen Graham Jones

Published on February 16, 20151 Comment

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

The second Xia Jia on the list is even better than the first and continues his theme of the impact of high technology on everyday life. Here he writes about 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.

So far this looks like a typical gadget story, but Xia Jia takes it a step further to imagine the use people may actually put this technology to. Because in real life as in fiction, we tend to think about the elderly as passive recipients of such high tech solutions to their social and physical problems, but what if somebody like Tongtong’s grandfather could himself use an Ah Fu to frex, play chess with a friend in another part of the country?

The way Xia Jia works this out, again ably translated by Ken Liu, is great. Asimov once talked about social science fiction: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem”. Or, as one wag put it, even harder to predict the invention of the American teenager and their courting rituals based on mass car ownership. Xia Jia comes close, close enough for a Hugo nomination.

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.

Stephen Graham Jones, “Chapter Six.” Tor.com, June 11, 2014.

This on the other hand felt old fashioned, the sort of bullshitty philosophy story an Asimov or Clarke could’ve written fifty-sixty years ago. Not a bad story, but somewhat dated. After the zombie apocalypse, the last grad student and his thesis advisor argue about the origins of human intelligence in light of the new data the apocalpyse offers.

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

Published on February 15, 20152 Comments

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.

Short SF Marathon Day 9: Kathleen Ann Goonan, Theodora Goss, Nicola Griffith

Published on February 13, 20153 Comments

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

To be clear about it and as the introduction points out, this isn’t a science fiction story. But it is commentary on science fiction. It completely skewers the attitudes in socalled Golden Age science fiction that saw man conquer space and woman left to keep house on Mars. So on the one hand you have the timeline with milestones in space development, on the other you have the biography of Carol,coming of age during the space race. Goonan practically rubs your nose in the everyday sexism Carol has to deal with, which all seems so quaint, old fashioned and dumb now, but I can’t help remember that for all its progressiveness and forward looking, science fiction was never all that good at treating women like actual human beings until long after the second wave of feminism hit, and then only reluctantly.

It’s brilliantly done, biting without being axe grindy and it may well end up on my Hugos shortlist.

Theodora Goss, “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Lightspeed, July 2014.

This is an interesting idea which didn’t quite work out for me. What if you could imagine a country and make it real, Borges style? What if you then went on a field trip to your imagined country? And married the daughter of the khan, who has a twin sister, but you made it so the Cimmerians don’t believe in twins?

The problem with the setting is that the imagined country isn’t imaginative enough, too much like a hodgepodge of Central Asian and Balkan cliches. Also, of course, Cimmeria actually existed, or at least there was a people we call that trundling around the Near East during the Bronze Age.

But the story itself is interesting enough to overcome this handicap; I need to find more of Theodora Goss’ writing.

Nicola Griffith, “Cold Wind.” Tor.com, April 16, 2014.

A woman tracks a legend to a lesbian bar, but is not quite what she seems to be either. A brilliant, economically told story. Not surprising coming from Nicola Griffith, who has a knack for the perfect small, telling detail.