Martin's Booklog

A short story a day keeps the critic at bay

Published on February 4, 2015Leave a comment

I want to read more short science fiction and fantasy, even have subscribed to Clarkesworld and Apex Magazine but the digital issues keep piling up on my virtual coffee table. I need to set myself a challenge, to actually start reading short fiction again.

Enter Monsieur Caution’s nicely curated list of noticable fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories published in 2014. That seems like a nice challenge to plough through. Read one or two a day, jot down some notes about them here, see if I can get through it before the Hugo nominations close.

The list:

Charlie Jane Anders, “The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick.” Lightspeed, June 2014 (“Women Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue); reprinted at Tor.com. [LM]
Eleanor Arnason, “The Scrivener.” Subterranean, Winter 2014. [JS; LM]
Dale Bailey, “The End of the End of Everything.” Tor.com, April 23, 2014. [LM; UM]
Jessica Barber, “Coma Kings.” Lightspeed, February 2014. [GD]
Elizabeth Bear, “Covenant.” Slate, September 11, 2014. [GD; JS; LM]
Elizabeth Bear, “This Chance Planet.” Tor.com, October 22, 2014. [FW; LM]
Helena Bell, “Lovecraft.” Clarkesworld, October 2014. [UM]
Holly Black, “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind).” Lightspeed, September 2014. [JS; LM]
Aliette de Bodard, “The Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile.” Subterranean, Spring 2014. [GD; LM]
Richard Butner, “Circa.” Interfictions Online #3, May 2014. [UM]
Richard Bowes, “Sleep Walking Now and Then.” Tor.com, July 9, 2014. [FW; LM; UM]
Chaz Brenchley, “The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini.” Subterranean, Spring 2014. [GD]
Siobhan Carroll, “The Year of Silent Birds.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 9, 2014. [FW]
Dario Ciriello, “Free Verse.” Free Verse and Other Stories, Panverse, 2014. [KL]
C. S. E. Cooney, “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale.” Strange Horizons, July 21, 2014. [LM]
Julio Cortázar, “Headache.” Tor.com, September 3, 2014 (first English translation). [K&K]
Tom Crosshill, “The Magician and Laplace’s Demon.” Clarkesworld, December 2014. [KL; LM; UM]
Amanda C. Davis, “Loving Armageddon.” Crossed Genres, July 2, 2014. [K&K]
Amal El-Mohtar, “The Truth About Owls.” Strange Horizons, January 26, 2015 (originally published in Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios (eds.), Kaleidoscope, Twelfth Planet Press, 2014). [JS; LM]
Ruthanna Emrys, “The Litany of Earth.” Tor.com, May 14, 2014. [LM]
K. M. Ferebee, “The Earth and Everything Under.” Shimmer #19, 2014. [FW; K&K]
Jeffrey Ford, “The Prelate’s Commission.” Subterranean, Winter 2014. [LM]
Karen Joy Fowler, “Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story.” Subterranean, Winter 2014. [K&K; LM]
Max Gladstone, “A Kiss with Teeth.” Tor.com, October 29, 2014. [TC; previously on MeFi]
Kathleen Ann Goonan, “A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon A Star.” Tor.com, July 20, 2014. [LM]
Theodora Goss, “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Lightspeed, July 2014. [JS; LM]
Nicola Griffith, “Cold Wind.” Tor.com, April 16, 2014. [JS]
Shane Halbach, “Copy Machine.” Flash Fiction Online, June 2014. [KL]
Maria Dahvana Headley, “The Tallest Doll in New York City.” Tor.com, February 14, 2014. [FW; LM]
Kat Howard, “The Saint of the Sidewalks.” Clarkesworld, August 2014. [LM]
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, “Where the Trains Turn.” Tor.com, November 19, 2014. [LM]
N. K. Jemisin, “Stone Hunger.” Clarkesworld, July 2014. [FW]
Xia Jia, “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, September 2014. [KL; UM]
Xia Jia, “Tongtong’s Summer.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, December 2014 (originally in Neil Clarke (ed.), Upgraded, Wyrm Publishing, 2014). [KL]
Rachael K. Jones, “Makeisha in Time.” Crossed Genres #20, August 2014. [BC]
Stephen Graham Jones, “Chapter Six.” Tor.com, June 11, 2014. [LM]
Vylar Kaftan, “Ink of My Bones, Blood of My Hands.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, June 12, 2014. [FW]
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Bus Fare.” Subterranean, Spring 2014. [K&K]
Ellen Klages, “Caligo Lane.” Subterranean, Winter 2014. [LM]
Jay Lake, “West to East.” Subterranean, Summer 2014. [GD; LM]
Rich Larson, “The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy.” Strange Horizons, August 11, 2014. [K&K]
Yoon Ha Lee, “Combustion Hour.” Tor.com, June 18, 2014. [FW; LM; UM; previously on MeFi]
Yoon Ha Lee, “The Contemporary Foxwife.” Clarkesworld, July 2014. [LM; previously on MeFi]
Yoon Ha Lee, “Wine.” Clarkesworld, January 2014. [LM; previously on MeFi]
Rose Lemberg, “A City on Its Tentacles.” Lackington’s, Winter 2014. [SS]
Kelly Link, “I Can See Right Through You.” McSweeney’s Quarterly 48, 2014. [LM]
Ken Liu, “Reborn.” Tor.com, January 29, 2014. [UM]
Ken Liu, “The Long Haul, From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009.” Clarkesworld, November 2014. [GD; JS; LM]
Carmen Maria Machado, “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” Lightspeed, April 2014. [K&K; SS]
Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch.” Granta, October 28, 2014. [K&K; UM; SS]
Usman T. Malik, “Resurrection Points.” Strange Horizons, August 4, 2014. [FW; K&K; KL]
Usman T. Malik, “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family.” Medium, October 22, 2014 (originally in Michael Bailey (ed.), Qualia Nous, Written Backwards, 2014). [JS; KL; LM]
Tim Maughan, “Four Days of Christmas.” Vice, December 24, 2014. [JS; LM]
Sandra McDonald, “Selfie.” Lightspeed, May 2014. [LM]
Sam J. Miller, “Kenneth: A User’s Manual.” Strange Horizons, December 1, 2014. [CMM]
Mary Anne Mohanraj, “Communion.” Clarkesworld, June 2014. [GD]
Sunny Moraine, “So Sharp That Blood Must Flow.” Lightspeed, February 2014. [K&K]
Sunny Moraine, “What Glistens Back.” Lightspeed, November 2014. [UM]
John P. Murphy, “Still Life, With Oranges.” Lakeside Circus, January 6, 2014. [KL]
Anna Noyes, “Becoming.” Guernica, November 3, 2014. [CMM]
An Owomoyela, “And Wash Out by Tides of War.” Clarkesworld, February 2014. [LM]
Susan Palwick, “Weather.” Clarkesworld, September 2014. [GD]
K. J. Parker, “Heaven Thunders the Truth.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, October 2, 2014. [LM]
K. J. Parker, “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There.” Subterranean, Winter 2014. [JS; LM]
K. J. Parker, “The Things We Do For Love.” Subterranean, Summer 2014. [LM]
Richard Parks, “The Manor of Lost Time.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, June 26, 2014. [LM]
Richard Parks, “The Sorrow of Rain.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, October 2, 2014. [LM]
Shannon Peavey, “Dogs From Other Places” (audio only). Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 38, March 2014. [UM]
Robert Reed, “Pernicious Romance.” Clarkesworld, November 2014. [LM]
Alastair Reynolds, “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa.” Subterranean, Summer 2014. [LM]
Mary Rickert, “The Mothers of Voorhisville.” Tor.com, April 30, 2014. [FW; LM; UM]
Sofia Samatar, “How to Get Back to the Forest.” Lightspeed, March 2014. [CMM; LM]
Kelly Sandoval, “The One They Took Before.” Shimmer #22, November 2014. [UM]
John Scalzi, “Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome.” Tor.com, May 13, 2014. [MU]
Veronica Schanoes, “Among the Thorns.” Tor.com, May 7, 2014. [LM]
Karl Schroeder, “Jubilee.” Tor.com, February 26, 2014. [GD]
Lewis Shiner, “The Black Sun.” Subterranean, Summer 2014. [LM]
Alex Shvartsman, “Icarus Falls.” Daily Science Fiction, September 23, 2014. [KL]
Vandana Singh, “Wake-Rider.” Lightspeed, December 2014. [LM]
Michael Swanwick, “Passage of Earth.” Clarkesworld, April 2014. [BN (winner); GD; LM]
Rachel Swirsky, “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap).” Subterranean, Summer 2014. [GD; JS; KL; LM]
Bogi Takács, “This Shall Serve as a Demarcation.” Scigentasy: Gender Stories in Science Fiction and Fantasy #6, July 5, 2014. [SS]
Anna Tambour, “The Walking-Stick Forest.” Tor.com, May 21, 2014. [LM]
Natalia Theodoridou, “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul.” Clarkesworld, February 2014. [KL]
E. Catherine Tobler, “Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds.” Clarkesworld, May 2014. [FW]
Jeremiah Tolbert, “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape.” Lightspeed, January 2014. [BN]
Harry Turtledove, “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging.” Tor.com, January 8, 2014. [BC]
Genevieve Valentine, “The Insects of Love.” Tor.com, May 28, 2014. [FW; JS; LM]
Damien Angelica Walters, “The Floating Girls: A Documentary.” Jamais Vu 3, September 2014. [KL; UM]
Damien Angelica Walters, “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter.” Strange Horizons, January 6, 2014. [BC]
LaShawn M. Wanak, “21 Steps to Enlightenment (Minus One).” Strange Horizons, February 3, 2014. [FW; TC]
Peter Watts, “The Colonel.” Tor.com, July 29, 2014. [GD; LM]
Kai Ashante Wilson, “The Devil in America.” Tor.com, April 2, 2014. [JS; LM; UM]
Alyssa Wong, “Santos de Sampaguitas” (also, part two). Strange Horizons, October 13, 2014. [UM]
Alyssa Wong, “The Fisher Queen.” F&SF, May/June 2014. [KL; UM]
Jy Yang, “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points.” Clarkesworld, September 2014. [UM]
Isabel Yap, “A Cup of Salt Tears.” Tor.com, August 27, 2014. [K&K; UM]
Caroline Yoachim, “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion.” Clarkesworld, August 2014. [BN; KL; TC]

The initials at the end of each entry correspond to the critics, writers or anthologists who found these noticable:

Tracking with closeups (January 16th through February 2nd)

Published on February 2, 2015Leave a comment

Borderlands Books : Used&New Science Fiction, Fantasy&Horror – In November, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a measure that will increase the minimum wage within the city to $15 per hour by 2018. Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it's possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco — Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage. Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.
Locus Online – posts from Locus Magazine » 2014 Locus Recommended Reading List – This Recommended Reading List, published in Locus Magazine’s February 2015 issue, is a consensus by Locus editors and reviewers — Liza Groen Trombi, Gary K. Wolfe, Jonathan Strahan, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, Graham Sleight, Adrienne Martini, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Karen Burnham, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Paul Kincaid, and others — with inputs from outside reviewers, other professional critics, other lists, etc. Short fiction selections are based on material from Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Lois Tilton, Ellen Datlow, Alisa Krasnostein, and Paula Guran with some assistance from Karen Burnham, Nisi Shawl, and Mark Kelly.
Seanan’s Tumblr | Do you get royalties on used books, or are they… – Let’s return to the used book ecosystem for a moment. When you buy a used book from my local Half-Price Books, no, I don’t get royalties. But the store pays its rent. People are employed. The lights stay on. People who need money can sell their books to the store to be sold to other people looking for a little joy. A used book is joy magnified. It is something paid forward into the world. A pirated book is a dead end.
Morning Star :: Fantastically profound – Joyce was intensely proud of his roots and once said: “I’ve taken a conscious decision to explore the lives of people who are still ignored by a majority of writers.” He enjoyed his success but expressed sadness at feeling “educated out” of the environment and culture into which he was born.
This is a jar full of major characters … | Time-Machine? Yeah! – Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.

Books reviewed January

Published on February 2, 2015Leave a comment

I’ve been recording my monthly reading totals over at Wis[s]e Words since 2008, but only now thought of doing the same for the books I’ve reviewed here. Better late than never, eh?

This has been a pretty productive month, with ten books reviewed, including some that have been waiting a long time. But eight out of these ten are fantasy or science fiction, with one crime novel written by a science fiction author as well as a non-fiction book about steampunk. It’s a bit unbalanced, but then I do get the most feedback and views on these books, so there. With regards to gender, it’s perfectly balanced, with five books written by women and five by men, though this is completely coincidental.

Monument — Lloyd Biggle
Classic anti-colonialist science fiction.

The Blue Place — Nicola Griffith
An incredibly well written, gut wrenching hardboiled detective.

Half Life — SL Huang
A math savant sociopath learns to how to fake friendship until it becomes real, while trying to rescue a robot child from the company that owns it.

The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
Chillingly plausible Christian dystopia still relevant today.

The Nemesis from Terra — Leigh Brackett
Good old fashioned planetary romance of the kind that Brackett does best.

Who Fears Death — Nnedi Okorafor
A gritty fantasy revenge story set in far future Africa.

The Instrumentality of Mankind — Cordwainer Smith
A decent late seventies short story collection containing all of Smith’s stories not collected in earlier, better volumes.

Schismatrix Plus — Bruce Sterling
Next to Neuromancer the most influential cyberpunk book ever written.

Pandora’s Planet — Christopher Anvil
Light hearted libertarianesque fun about clever earthmen outwitting ponderous aliens — from the point of view of the aliens.

Steampunk — Paul Roland
Disappointing overview of the steampunk subculture.

Steampunk — Paul Roland

Published on January 31, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Steampunk

Steampunk
Paul Roland
191 pages including index
published in 2014

If I felt more nasty Reginald Pikedevant’s excellent cri de coeur against steampunk fakery would be my whole review. I spotted Steampunk: Back to the Future with the New Victorians in the library among the new books and thought “great, just the sort of field guide I need to come to grips with this newfangled steampunk nonsense”. Sadly though this turned out to be just a shallow cash in which told me little I didn’t know written in an irritating manner that had my hackles up halfway through the first chapter.

The danger in writing about steampunk is that one starts to write as if one was indeed a Victorian gentleman, with all the loquaciousness and florid prose that image conjurs up. I can’t do that convincingly and neither can Roland, but he gives in to the temptation occasionally, where his normal writing style is much more casual. These style clashes are jarring and annoying, but would’ve only been a minor annoyance had the rest of the book been better.

Modern steampunk is more than just a literary subgenre, but something of a lifestyle, with artists, writers, musicians and not in the least costume makers inspired by the idea of an alternate, up to date Victorian aesthetic. To give a comprehensive picture of this subculture in less than twohundred pages is a challenge. You need a firm grip on the essentials, a vision of what steampunk means throughout all its various incarnations in art, music, literature and costuming. If you can’t or won’t do it, you run the danger of drowning in details and names.

I think Roland makes two mistakes in Steampunk: he doesn’t provide real definition or vision of what steampunk means to him and compounds his error by dividing his chapters by artform, looking at each in isolation. With the limited space he has for each (literature, music, art, costuming/clothing, movies, conventions and the internet) it’s no wonder each chapter is mostly name checking and listing the requisite names. One feature of the book that could’ve helped in this regard, the short interviews with key figures Roland provides, actually end up hindering because they lack any real depth.

I didn’t catch Roland out in any gross mistakes in the part of steampunk culture I know most about, the part that started as a science fiction subgenre, but neither did I get to read much new. Roland touches briefly on the actual nineteenth century scientific romance writers like Wells and Verne but is right not to consider them part of steampunk — lacking that sense of nostalgia and retrofuturism that’s essential to the genre. He then moves on to proto-steampunk like Moorcock’s The Land Leviathan before talking about K. W. Jeter’s “invention” of the genre by analogue to cyberpunk in the late eighties, to refer to the books he and his friends James Blaylock and Tim Powers were writing. Roland is a bit snippy about those early steampunk books, finding them too wild to be real steampunk, not fitting neatly into what the genre would later become.

These were in my view the most coherent chapters in the book, Roland’s short overview of the history of steampunk as a genre and his survey of contemporary steampunk writers. The chapters after that, diving into music and such, are less interesting. When most of the artists interviewed say that they didn’t consider themselves steampunk, you have a problem. It might have helped if he had put the subculture and steampunk fandom front and center rather than trying to cram everything remotely steampunk related into the book.

This isn’t a completely hopeless book, but it’s shapeless and doesn’t rise much above enumeration of steampunk artifacts in its analysis. It needed a better vision to provide a proper narrative. You’re better off just reading the Wikipedia or TVtropes pages on steampunk and following the links…

Pandora’s Planet — Christopher Anvil

Published on January 30, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Pandora's Planet

Pandora’s Planet
Christopher Anvil
192 pages
published in 1972 (original in 1956)

Libertarianism has a well deserved bad reputation in science fiction, largely because so many writers who profess to be adherents also are godawful people who write jack off fantasies about how freedom requires their jackbooted thugs putting their boot in somebody else’s face, whether it’s Heinlein’s repeated wish to kill off all the lawyers or Kratman resurrecting the Waffen SS to deal with an alien invasion. But once upon a time there was a gentler, more humane sort of libertarianism, one that still catered to the prejudices of Analog notorious editor John Campbell Jr, but that hadn’t quite lost its humanity. H. Beam Piper was its best known representative, but there were others, like Christopher Anvil.

Anvil is one of those writers I only ever had heard about, but had never read simply because I’d never seen any of his work for sale, new or secondhand. He was never translated in Dutch as far as I know, one of those minor Analog writers who’d been reasonably popular in the sixties and seventies but was passed by when the genre moved on. From what I gather he specialised in stories in which clever humans put one over militaristic aliens and Pandora’s Planet is in that mold, gently cocking a snoot at authority in general in the process. It’s gentle and not very humourous satire, but much better than the modern libertarian habit of genociding every alien race that looks at Earth funny.

Anvil uses an idea that other writers, like Niven & Pournelle or Harry Turtledove, would later use in more “serious” novels, that of Earth being invaded by aliens who have found the one simple trick of interstellar travel but are actually somewhat dimmer than us earthlings. The Centrans have been conquering star systems for thousands of years, but never had as much trouble as they had with Earth. But while Earth, divided between nations nowhere else seen by them, is able to keep the invaders busy, they can’t win due to the overwhelming numerical supremacy of the Centrans.

For the moment at stalemate, with Earth nominally conquered but the Centrans harassed and harried at every corner, they try a different tactic: don’t conquer, but let the Earthlings be assimilated in the Integral Union. The Centran High Council has thought up this plan because it has been impressed by Earthmen’s intelligence and drive. They however are smart enough to not give the Terrans access to the entire Union, only a part to see if Terran intelligence and drive could help improve the Union, but in such a way that any possible damage would be limited.

So the Earthmen were let loose in the galaxy and chaos reigns on the various Centran colonies they visit and settle on. All which is shown through the eyes of Klide Horsip, the Planetary Integrator who was supposed to have Earth integrated in the Integral Union. Now assigned to keep track of their progress to that part of the Galaxy known to them, Horsip and his righthand man Brak Moffis are firsthand witnesses to what happens if you let communists, fascist dictators and snake oil salesmen loose on an unsuspecting, innocent alien empire…

All of which is fairly dated, mainly satiric riffing on modern life, mid-fifties vintage, but Anvil is an engaging enough writer that you plow through this. What’s more interesting is the sympathetic treatment of the Centrans, which really isn’t an evil empire but seems to follow the same impulses as say the Federation in Star Trek. And while they may not have the same intelligence and drive as Earthmen, they have their own strengths, rather than just being fanatical warriors. Anvil is also smart enough to realise that in group differences in intelligence may very well overshadow differences between groups. In a society as large as the Integral union there will therefore be many Centrans as smart or smarter than humans and best of those are on the High Council because the Centrans don’t waste talent the way Earthmen do.

That’s what sets Pandora’s Planet apart from the flood of other Campbellian adventures where tricksy humans outsmart hidebound aliens. Anvil’s sympathies lie with the Centrans more than with the Earthmen and while the Earthmen do wreak havoc in the Union, it doesn’t get nasty. An entertaining if ultimately shallow read.