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Short SF Marathon Day 6: Cortázar, Crosshill, Davis

Published on February 10, 20151 Comment

Julio Cortázar, “Headache.” Tor.com, September 3, 2014 (first English translation).

Now this is interesting. This is a short story originally written in 1951 and never translated before, by an Argentine writer who was one of the major players in the boom in literature in South America in the 1960s and 1970s, published at what may be the site the closest to the heart of genre science fiction. There’s always been whole worlds of science fiction and fantasy cut off from genre, written in different traditions or by writers who don’t think of themselves as genre writers; sometimes the dreaded words “magic realism” might also be uttered, as you may be tempted to in this case. A Spanish language writer telling a story of imaginary animals raised by people who suffer from various just as imaginary diseases and afflictions brought on — perhaps — by those animals? That’s the textbook example of magic realism, isn’t it?

It certainly is an intriguing story, one you know you can’t suck the meaning out off in just one read. It actually made me slightly nauseous reading it, evoking as it does through its language the feeling of migraine onset. I can’t compare the translation (by Michael Cisco) to the original, but on its own it’s got a brilliant hallucinary quality.

Tom Crosshill, “The Magician and Laplace’s Demon.” Clarkesworld, December 2014.

This on the other hand is a much more traditional mixture of fantasy and science fiction, in which the world’s first self aware AI becomes aware of the existence of magic and magicians and sets out to hunt them down to be able to understand and use the last thing in the universe outside his ken. A decent story, well told.

Amanda C. Davis, “Loving Armageddon.” Crossed Genres, July 2, 2014.

Compared to “Headache”, this is a much more self conscious attempt at a magic realist story, or sketch rather, of the man with a hand grenade for a heart and the woman who loves him. It almost seems as if this is meant as a metaphor. Almost.

Short SF Marathon Day 5: Carroll, Ciriello, Cooney

Published on February 9, 20151 Comment

Siobhan Carroll, “The Year of Silent Birds.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 9, 2014.

This is an epic fantasy short story, if that isn’t an oxymoron, a story that hints at a much bigger world than it can show in the space available without being incomplete. A woman comes back from the dead to save the son of her sister from execution, in the process learning that even the undead still aren’t save from politics. Carroll has a good eye for imagery and the opening with the protagonist moving through deep, silent snow while the birds in the forest have frozen on their branches will stay with me a while.

Dario Ciriello, “Free Verse.” Free Verse and Other Stories, Panverse, 2014.

Ever since I first read Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity I’ve been a sucker for parallel worlds/cross time travel craziness and this delivers in spades. It reminded me a lot of the sort of stories Keith Laumer used to write. For me, this is high praise.

C. S. E. Cooney, “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale.” Strange Horizons, July 21, 2014.

I’m not a real fan of modern fairy tales, nor of erotic fantasy perse, but this was worth overcoming my prejudices. Filthy, kinky, written in a way that you can believe the relationship between the witch, her enchanted man-beast and the saint who transforms him back to the man he used to be. Cooney is a writer I didn’t know anything about, but now need to read more of.

Short SF marathon Day 3&4: Bell, Black, de Bodard, Butner, Bowes, Brenchley

Published on February 8, 20152 Comments

Helena Bell, “Lovecraft.” Clarkesworld, October 2014.

My mother visited yesterday, so I had no time to post then. Hence six stories today, the first of which is a domestic horror drama, about a middle aged woman who carries a mouth on her collar bone, through which she spews cthulhu and the young woman who starts to care for her and one special cthulhu. A deftly done kitchen sink drama, so to speak, but I’m not quite sure which period it’s supposed to be set in and if the “Howard” in the story is meant to be the Lovecraft of the title. It left me slightly dissatisfied.

Holly Black, “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind).” Lightspeed, September 2014.

This was a, fun, old fashioned adventure science fiction story, of a young woman who stows away on her uncle ship and learns the hard way how to become a successfull smuggler. There’s nothing really surprising or new about the story, but the way Black tells it makes all the difference. I’d like her to write more about Tera Lloyd and her new, alien partner, as this pretty much feels like an origin story.

Aliette de Bodard, “The Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile.” Subterranean, Spring 2014.

This is another short story set in the same universe as On a Red Station, Drifting, set in the same slow burning civil war featured in that as well. If you like this setting, you’ll this, but it is a bit of a story fragment rather than a complete story, a feeling I have with more of her short work.

It is in fact something I’ve noticed with quite of the short stories I’ve read so far, that they set up and briefly explore a situation, before ending. Few of the stories seem to tell a fully rounded story; sometimes this looks like a deliberate choice, as with “Lovecraft”, just a slice out of somebody’s life intersected with the strange, sometimes it seems as if the writer’s running out of steam. Is this an internet thing?

Richard Butner, “Circa.” Interfictions Online #3, May 2014.

I read this two hours ago and already need to dip back into the story to see what it was about. Not a good sign, but this is a ghost story in which two eighteen year old friends go for a sleep over in an old house in 1984, he makes at her, she rejects them, then he sees her future self when she’s on the toilet. They meet up again in 2014 the night before the house will be demolished, talk about their separate lives since then and then he sees the ghost of her past self.

Trite is the word for it. Midlife crisises are not made more interesting with a mild application of the supernatural.

Richard Bowes, “Sleep Walking Now and Then.” Tor.com, July 9, 2014.

I’ve read stories like this before, in uninspiring volumes of Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best, a slightly meandering, overlong story of future decadence, clumsily written, where the writer feels the need to mention that New York is now the Big Arena three or four times in the course of the story. Anyway, a future theatre production is set in an old hotel, showcasing several acts of violence that happened in its turbulent past, through which the audience can walk and look on to. All it’s missing is a third act…

There’s the hint of a decent story here, but the writing needs to be tightened a lot.

Chaz Brenchley, “The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini.” Subterranean, Spring 2014.

I’m a bit wary of Space:1899 style retrofuture steampunk stories, but if you like that sort of thing, this is a good example of how to do it properly. On a Mars where the British presence is barely tolerated by the natives, who, in a neat twist, aren’t so much the people who dug the canals but the people who live in the canals and the crater lakes, a man hanged for violating the Charter is being buried with all the pomp and circumstance the city of Cassini can give him. As Old Cobb, the gravedigger finds out, something else is going on though.

What made this story for me was that Brenchley is fully aware of the nastiness of the British Empire he depicts, even though this isn’t noticable on the surface of it. It makes me curious to see if this was a oneshot or if he has written more in this universe.

Short SF marathon Day 2: Barber and Bear, oh my

Published on February 6, 20152 Comments

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.

Short SF marathon Day 1: Anders, Arnason, Bailey

Published on February 5, 20152 Comments

One of the impetuses behind this little project was reading Jonathan McCalmont’s series of posts about the state of short story SFF, especially his theory that it has shifted from being idea driven to emotionally driven:

In each of these stories, the genre elements sit somewhere between the metaphorical and the literal; aspects of a fictional world that seem to mirror the contours of real emotional lives whilst leaving the world unchanged and the metaphor unresolved and shrouded with the kind of ambiguity that renders precision anathema[…]

Gradually, and with almost no discussion, the aesthetics of genre short fiction appear to be shifting away from stories that explore ideas and towards stories that seek to use genre elements as a way of encouraging readers to feel a particular way. In this bold new world, genre elements are easily excised or subsumed because the emphasis is always upon the characters’ emotional lives.

From my limited foray in reading the Hugo nominees last year, I can’t deny that he has a bit of a point here — a story like Wakulla Springs has no real genre elements but does evoke the right sort of emotion, was written by the right sort of people to be taken into science fiction. But what I wonder is a) how pervasive this really is and b) if this is anything new. In some ways it’s understandable if science fiction and fantasy writers feel comfortable with writing stories in which the fantastic elements are no longer the point, twohundred years after Shelley and ninety after Gernsback. There isn’t much that you can do with pure idea driven stories in SFF that hasn’t been done before, but there’s plenty of emotional terrain still largely unexplored.

And if science fiction is about metaphors made concrete, something like The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere, which could have easily been written as a memetic, coming out story is still made different by its fantastic elements, even if its consequences aren’t explored much beyond what John Chu needed to tell the story. That’s not particularly new in science fiction after all; take “The Cold Equations” frex, which also built its world up around the morality it attempted to sell rather than really explore the ramifications of its setting.

Charlie Jane Anders, “The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick.” Lightspeed, June 2014 (“Women Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue); reprinted at Tor.com.

Roger, Mary’s boyfriend has broken up with her, her best friend Stacia suggests she should ask for his memories of their love together, from before it turned sour, then steals them and uses them on herself out of jealousy or a misguided attempt to understand their love. Mary cuts off contact with Stacia, finds a new potential boyfriend, then Stacia starts stalking them…

Now here you do have a story that does depend on a sfnal gimmick, the ability to copy and absorb other people’s memories, to drive what’s essentially a memetic plot revolving around relationship issues that could’ve been set at any time since the fifties. This is a smart drug, bio-engineering future but with what look a bit too much like mid-20th century gender relations and dating rituals, but it is undeniably science fiction. I liked it, perhaps because of its mundanity, but also for its humanist core: these are actually nice people.

Eleanor Arnason, “The Scrivener.” Subterranean, Winter 2014.

I never parables or allegories and this story has a bit of that here, inspired by a discussion whether a plot and such is really necessary for a story. So here we have a Scrivener who names his three daughters Imagination, Ornamentation and Plot, which, ugh, is a bit too much on the nose. It also started off arch and with that sense of knowning that it is telling a story which has to do a lot to win me over. In the end however Arnason does do something mildly interesting with this, but it’s a slight story nonetheless.

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.