March 12, 2024
More Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)
March 8, 2024
Review: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 209
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This issue isn't quite as good as the previous one, but it has a barn-burner of a story called "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole," by Isabel J. Kim. She has written very good stories in the past, some of them within the pages of this very magazine, but I think this is the best one I've seen from her yet.
It's an answer to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," which is less of a story and more of a thought experiment. The thought, in this case, is a variation on Spock's pronouncement from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan--"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
Because Omelas as a city, culture and civilization, you see, depends entirely on the misery of one small child locked away in a room at its base. Everyone in Omelas knows this and either makes an uneasy peace with it or, as the title refers to, "walks away." There have been many replies to/engagements with this story over the years (including an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ), but I don't think I've ever seen one like this. Kim's story pulsates with rage, as she takes Le Guin's original premise and turns it inside out, applying it to today's world and all the things governments, rich people and capitalism enable or overlook to ensure their systems remain running.
The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.
And of course, it was true that the whole city literally ran on the load-bearing suffering child in a very real physical way that was not a metaphor. And everyone really liked having running power and no blackouts and good schools and low crime and community-oriented government and safe sidewalks and public transit that worked.
This story hits you like a gut punch. So far, it's the best story I've read this year.
There are two other excellent stories in this issue. "Kardashev's Palimpsest," by David Goodman, is a tragedy/love story that spans literally billions of years in the narrative of Dee and Vee, who were once human and now are "computational matter, wrapped in the hardest, densest materials any species ever created." We follow these two as humans evolve past their biological bodies and are uploaded into a virtual universe, and graduate to self-contained mindships exploring the galaxy. Earth is destroyed and Dee thinks they lose Vee in its destruction; but eons later, the two find each other again, just in time to see the universe winding down...or perhaps being reborn. It's a timeless love story, and proof that for a narrative to succeed, you need characters, not just high-concept ideas.
Finally, we have "Lonely Ghosts," by Meghan Feldman, which tackles the need for companionship and connection, even between machines. Sini is an exploration android apparently abandoned on an alien planet--its last contact with its human minders was thousands of years before. Now, the only being it can reach is CRABB, a megacity construction droid on one of the planet's moons. But Sini has been seeing the ghosts of its previous handlers for centuries and is basically afraid that it is going insane. So it reaches out to CRABB for reassurance, and the construction droid ends up using its last long-range warp packet to bring Sini to its moon, where it has been building a city all by itself for eons. This is a fairly short story, but it has some lovely characters.
On Bluesky, the editor Neil Clarke has this to say about the state of his magazine:
"Round two of the Amazon magazine subscriptions nightmare is shaping up to be far worse than round one. I'll have more to say when I've finished reviewing my math (and maybe looking at Feb. data), but it's not good. Always a good time to subscribe."
Please, think about subscribing to this excellent magazine. I would hate to lose it.
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March 6, 2024
Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)
Now that we're in a new year and things have settled down a bit in my life (if not the wider world, lolsob), I thought I would start a new series consisting of just what the title says: Stories I have enjoyed that deserve a wider audience. I subscribe and/or am a patron to several genre SFF magazines, and also find links to other stories in my internet travels, so I thought I would lump several of them together every so often and recommend to my readers (*waves*).
With that in mind, let's look at the January/February issue of Uncanny Magazine.
March 5, 2024
Review: Sky's End
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is about a society with stark class divides (the Highs and Middles are the rulers and elite respectively, and the Lows are the serfs) on an environmentally ravaged planet with floating sky cities and islands above a surface hidden by black acid clouds, with survivors Below who construct cyborg monsters and dream of getting their revenge on those Above.
It's a first novel, and as a consequence the opening chapters are a bit rough. The protagonist, Conrad, was born Conrad Urwin and is trying to get revenge on his uncle for casting him and his mother out to the Lows. After he joins the Selection and is picked to join the Hunter Trade--the elite sky-faring monster-hunters--and finishes his training and starts serving on a skyship, the narrative smooths out a bit.
Unfortunately, the worldbuilding is just as rough: it makes superficial sense as you're reading, but you can't think about it too much. (For example: if the people Below can't really grow crops, why haven't they starved to death long before now? And how can they have enough of an industrial society to create the massive metallic/organic Gorgantuan skyserpents and other cyborg critters that bedevil the Skylands? Furthermore, how can a sky serpent hundreds of feet along--and at the climax, one called a Gigataun appears that is a mile long--even move, much less function? And how can floating sky islands have rivers and waterfalls on them? Wouldn't the water just gush over the edge and run dry?)
Ultimately, what saves this story is the characters. Conrad is a sullen sixteen-year-old grieving the loss of his mother, nurturing hate for his uncle, and trying to rescue his younger sister Ella from his uncle's clutches. He is obsessed with "rising," the process of working through one's selected Trade to a higher position in society. He has an absorbing inner conflict--the contrast between his frankly right bastard of a father, who whipped this kid repeatedly in an attempt to show him he has to be selfish and ruthless, and his mother, who tried to teach him caring and compassion. Over the course of the book, he learns to trust in and work with others, and gradually discovers a new family in the crew of his skyship, the Gladian. Another character, Conrad's nemesis Pound, changes from a bully who hates Conrad's family and all they stand for, to a more humble crewmember who knows his limits and is willing to serve on the Gladian alongside his former mortal enemy. The entire crew of the Gladian consists of well-drawn, fleshed-out characters who each have their own journeys, and the characters carry the book through its rough spots.
Along the way, Conrad, Pound and crew discover the existence of those Below, and realize the Skylands are in mortal danger (their capitol, the sky island of Ironside, is destroyed by the aforementioned Gigataun by ripping out its "heart," the apparent anti-grav mechanism that keeps the islands afloat). This portion of the storyline is wrapped up fairly well, but obviously there's a lot more to come.
This book needs better, more thought-out worldbuilding, but it wasn't a deal-breaker, at least for me. I can usually forgive a lot of first novels. Hopefully the next two books in the trilogy will straighten out these issues, as this world has a lot of potential here.
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February 29, 2024
Review: Clarkesworld Magazine January 2024
The January issue of Clarkesworld Magazine is excellent, with five outstanding stories. (It also has a cute, warm and fuzzy cover, with the robot holding the little girl's hand. Suitable for Christmas.)
"Nothing of Value" by Aimee Ogden starts us out, a short and creepy little story about a future version of space travel, Skip2, that copies a person's DNA and memories and sends their information to other planets to be reprinted into a fresh new body. This story confronts the fact that such technology murders the traveler each time they step through it:
A version of me would die, I argued. But then a version would live, too, and nothing of value was actually lost. An exact copy with the same feelings and memories, the same bad habits, and the same favorite coffee cup. Everyone was doing it--they wouldn't be, if it wasn't totally fine. The corporations would have shut it down so they wouldn't get sued. The International Supervisory Board review had said that there was nothing unsafe or unreasonable about Skip2 travel.
Our protagonist is attempting to meet up with their old lover on Mars and rekindle their relationship, ten years after they broke apart. They don't get back together, as the core disagreement between them is over the narrator's usage of the Skip2 technology. But the further you get into this story, the more sinister the subtext becomes. I didn't realize this until the second time I read it through, but this story is really about the horrifying implications of its central concept. When an individual's information is sent ahead to print into a new body, the previous one is destroyed:
Your smile retracts. "You mean because of the lockdown? I saw it on the 'scape."
"They caught the shell pretty fast--only twenty minutes or so before they could get it back into the recycler. 'Lockdown' is a strong word for twenty minutes." I snort. "That's barely enough time for a post-print stretch to make sure all my parts came through right."
So the "shell" is the previous person, murdered to make room for the new one. This technological shift contributes to the dehumanization of people in this future, and creates a cultural schism between the people who use Skip2 and those who don't, as reflected in the conflict between the narrator and their lover.
This story is unsettling as all get-out, and packs a terrifying punch for its short length. You won't soon forget it.
"Down the Waterfall," by Cecile Cristofari, is a time travel story that doesn't fall into the usual time-travel tropes. The protagonist doesn't want to change the past--she just wants to briefly travel down "the road not taken," and visit a person who died all too soon.
Her smile wavers. As much as she enjoys these meetings, she finds herself unnerved, at times, when strands of her mind wander in directions she doesn't mean to explore--another life, another rivulet of time, where this friendship of theirs would have taken a different form. She thinks of her husband and takes another sip of her coffee.
This is a quiet, lovely, bittersweet little story.
"Stars Don't Dream," by Chi Hui, translated by John Chu, was published in a Chinese SF magazine in 2022 and translated into English for this issue. The Chinese authors I've read in the past are often pretty thin on characterization, but thankfully that isn't the case with this story. This tells of a future where space exploration has been abandoned, and everyone on Earth spends their time in a virtual reality "dream tower" while their physical bodies are being cared for and carted around in robots. In this future, even babies are conceived in artificial wombs and cared for by robots. One of the characters is the one human who has contact with these babies:
These infants will eventually grow up. They will be sent to live by the side of every parent who ordered them. By then, they will no longer cry and scream. They will have been weaned, raised to be obedient, clever, and to satisfy others. What some parents order for their baby is the whole growth period service. For their entire lives, these babies never live by their parents’ side. They are weaned at the nursery, then are sent to youth camps all across the United States. There, robot instructors keep them company. The instructors have built-in expert knowledge of one hundred fifty kinds of child-rearing actions. This is sufficient to raise the babies to adulthood.
This future is kind of horrifying as well, even if it turns out hopeful at the end. This story's characters mount an expedition to Venus that ends up introducing life into the planet's poisonous atmosphere, which gives rise to intelligent life thousands of years later. (This story's timeline spans three hundred million years.) The entire theme of the story is while the universe and stars are cold and uncaring and don't dream, the life that arises does; and as that intelligent life states:
"Let's toast to possibilities," he says. "A toast to the universe that does not dream."
They all raise their glasses. Starlight ripples through each glass.
"To possibilities!"
This story, like a lot of Chinese fiction I've read, has an old-fashioned retro feel to it, with a great deal of classic "sensawunda."
"Rail Meat," by Marie Vibbert, is a yacht race with a twist--the yachts are skimming the stratosphere. Our protagonist, Ernestine, a thief, grifter and con artist, signs on to the races as "living ballast." This is another short, action-packed story, where the other main character, Rico, who joins the yacht races to win the heart of a millionaire yacht owner, discovers attaining his heart's desire may not be such a good thing after all.
Finally, we have "You Dream of the Hive," by C.M. Fields, another story that is not long but packs a helluva punch. This story uses the uncommon and tricky second-person narration in its depiction of a person trapped by an interdimensional hive mind, just rescued--and who wants to go back. For Star Trek fans, it's comparable to a drone wishing to return to the Borg:
Entering the Hive was like slipping into a warm bath, like listening to a church organ the size of a moon, like watching a starburst in a trillion colors, all at once. It was the embrace of ten thousand arms enfolding you into a community knit like the neurons in your brain. You did not understand the language of the Hive at first, but it gave you all you needed.
Like the best of the other stories in this issue, this story also has an edge of horror: more subtle than "Nothing of Value," to be sure, but just as unsettling in its final lines.
All in all, an outstanding issue of Clarkesworld. Issues like these are why I've been a subscriber for years now.
February 23, 2024
Review: Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I only read non-fiction sporadically, but I think this is an important read for any American (and anyone in other countries who want a cautionary example about maintaining democracy). The authors drill down into the reasons democracies falter and authoritarian movements take hold, and highlight the peculiar and unique elements of the American system, constitution and people that make the titular "tyranny of the minority" possible.
I want to highlight one paragraph that sums things up:
American democracy can only survive with a Republican Party that is capable of winning national majorities--one that can compete for votes in the cities and among younger and nonwhite citizens. Only when Republicans can legitimately win national elections again will their leaders' fears of multiracial democracy subside. Only then can we expect the party to abandon violent extremism and play by democratic rules, win or lose. For those things to happen, the Republicans must become a truly multiethnic party. Our institutions have weakened the GOP's incentive to change course in this way. And that's a serious problem. As long as the Republican Party can hold on to power without broadening beyond its radicalized core white Christian base, it will remain prone to the kind of extremism that imperils our democracy today.
I remain pessimistic, given the current Trump-hijacked state of the Republican Party, that this will happen any time soon. But this book lays out a solid roadmap for the country's future, if the GOP can bring themselves to pay attention to it.
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February 20, 2024
Review: What Feasts at Night
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the second novella in the Sworn Soldier series, following the adventures of Alex Easton, a retired soldier of the fictional country of Gallacia in the late 19th century. The previous book, What Moves the Dead, was one of the best books I read a couple of years ago, a takeoff of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." This story features the return of Alex Easton, their traveling companion Angus and the fungal expert/Angus's girlfriend Eugenia Potter, and introduces some delightful new characters, including the grumpy Widow Botezatu and her grandson Bors.
This story is a little longer than the previous one, and veers more towards the supernatural instead of the previous story's SF bent. In this case, the monster is the "moroi," a ghost that comes in the night, sits on your chest, and sucks your breath. The moroi killed the caretaker of Alex's Gallacian lodgehouse, Codrin, and threatens Alex and their friends. Alex throws down against the moroi at the climax, in an extended dream sequence that also weaves in the primary theme of the story: Alex's PTSD (here called "soldier's heart") and how they deal with it.
This backstory of Alex's war experiences was mentioned in the first book, but really brought to the fore here. The characters and their relationships also are more of a driver in this book than the plot. Since we're visiting Alex's home country for the first time, the author provides plenty of vivid descriptions throughout:
Autumn was nearly spent, which meant that many of the trees had lost their leaves. You might think that would mean that the woods had opened up, but if you think that, you have likely never been to Gallacia. Serrated ranks of pine lined the road, with the bare branches of oaks thrusting out between them like arthritic fingers. The sky was the color of a lead slug and seemed barely higher than the trees themselves. Combined with the wagon ruts that left a ridge down the center of the road, I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.
Alex Easton's droll, relatable voice definitely carries the reader along in this book, along with a wry, matter-of-fact sense of humor that had me laughing out loud at several points:
it probably helped that Miss Potter did not demand English cooking and ate heartily of all the Widow's dishes, passing praise via Angus or myself. The quality of our food improved markedly. It hadn't been bad before, but it had been fairly monotonous. Now we only had paprika sausage for every third meal. (We stole that from the Hungarians, bask when we tried to fight them and they beat us sensless. This is how Gallacia acquired most of its cuisine. The Widow made excellent paprika sausage, but one's bowels do require a few hours to recover now and again.)
We find out a good deal more about Gallacia and its culture along the way. I don't think this book is quite as good, or as frightening, as What Moves the Dead (that book was enough to give anyone nightmares and look askance at mushrooms for a good long while). But the characters are appealing enough to make up for it.
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February 15, 2024
Review: Exordia
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I gave this book fifty pages before I gave up on it. It's supposed to be a multiverse-crossing, alien invasion story that also discusses philosophical concepts like free will and souls being the products of a physical brain's weaving together stories. This might have been interesting if the two main characters (a Kurdish refugee and an eight-headed snake-woman) weren't such unlikable monsters--I can stomach monsters in my books to an extent, but not these two. When I realized I didn't care in the least if the main characters murdered each other, that was it. I just received a brand-new novella by T. Kingfisher, and that sounds a helluva lot better than this.
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February 13, 2024
Review: The Tainted Cup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Robert Jackson Bennett is pretty much an insta-buy for me, and this book ups his considerable game. This is a fascinating world set against a well-constructed puzzle box of a mystery that reveals some unpleasant cracks in this world's Empire, and a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Empire's equivalent of our 1%, the tremendously wealthy and influential clan Hazas.
Our protagonist is Dinios Kol, an "engraver" who has been genetically engineered to have a perfect memory and total recall, working as an apprentice investigator to Anagosa Dolabra. The first chapter opens with him being called to an estate where a man has been killed, by the novel method of a plant erupting from his body and literally eating him up. This is our introduction to this world, with its extensive genetic engineering:
Which wasn't to say it was not opulent. Miniature mai-trees had been altered to grow down from the ceiling, acting as chandeliers--something I'd never seen before--their fruits full to bursting with the glowing little mai-worms, which cast a flickering blue light about us. I wondered if even the air was expensive in here, then saw it was: a massive kirpis mushroom had been built into the corner of every main room--a tall, black fungus built to suck in air, clean it, and exhale it out at a cooler temperature.
This is made possible through the industry of "reagents" and "suffusions," substances grown and built to be ingested and change DNA in specific ways. This takes up tremendous amounts of land in the inner Rings of this Empire, but this entire process is based on the blood and bodies of the "leviathans," the monstrous kaiju of this world who emerge from the seas every year in the "wet season" and rampage through the Empire--or at least they did, until the massive seawalls were built to keep them out.
This backstory and worldbuilding could have taken up literal chapters, but it is doled out in the precise fractions we need to serve the story. I am in awe of the author's economy in doing this, and at the same time making this complex and fascinating world understandable. As a reader I never felt lost, never had any WTF or head-scratching moments. Our focus is on the unfolding murder mystery and the gradual, inexorable raising of stakes, until the final confrontation when Ana reveals all--which takes place as another leviathan is coming ashore and triggering mass panic. This juxtaposition of the investigator Dolabra revealing who committed the murders and why, and the leviathan drawing ever closer, creates some almost unbearable suspense in the final chapters.
Ana and Din are also well-drawn characters. Obviously they're based on Holmes and Watson, but Ana is a good deal more ruthless and predatory than Sherlock: she has incredible investigative abilities and also comes across as somewhere on the autism spectrum, since she wears blindfolds in public to avoid too much stimulation and is inclined to hide away in her house or room to stay away from people. Din, on the other hand, with his reading and writing difficulties, is meant to be dyslexic, I think. But his determination to pass his exams to become an Iudex apprentice, and his willingness to bend the rules to do so, marks him as the exact sort of assistant Ana needs.
The mystery involves the Hazas clan and its hubris and greed, and the unthinking consequences it doles out to people considered beneath it in its pursuit of what it wants. This includes the province of Oypat, destroyed years ago by an experimental, fast-growing reagent called "dappleglass" that got away from the Engineers of Oypat, threatening to eat the entire province and its inhabitants, until Oypat had to be burned to the ground and locked away. The echoes of this crime and those who enabled it, and the revenge plot formulated by the survivors, is the focus of this story. There was apparently a neutralizing reagent created for dappleglass, but bureaucratic inertia (later discovered to be deliberate) doomed the entire province:
"And....what did the Preservation Boards do regarding Oypat?"
"They moved quickly. Or....they tried to. But the cantons that would have to grow the reagents for the cure...Well, they brought many concerns. They protested how creating these new reagents could lead to environmental issues with all their other reagents and agriculture. They demanded tests and studies, wanting to ensure that there was no commingling or mutagenic possibilities."
"I see," said Ana softly. "Then what happened?"
"The process simply took too long. The dappleglass reached a critical point. It had devoured too much land. Too long a border for it to ever be properly neutralized. Like a tumor infecting the bone, or the tissue of the heart, it was too late. So we evacuated the canton, and then....then we applied a phalm oil burn."
This book touches on current fears of genetic engineering run amuck and what might happen if it gets out of control, and the greed of anyone who thinks themselves better than others just because they are rich. It's a complex, absorbing story with a fascinating, horrifying world I would love to revisit again and again.
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February 5, 2024
Review: The Tusks of Extinction
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This slender novella (112 pages) is full of ideas. Cloning mammoths (also woolly rhinos and other Ice Age animals); trying to re-create an extinct ecosystem in Siberia; mapping and downloading a person's consciousness and memories and uploading the record to an organic brain; widespread use of drones as pack animals/little spy machines; and even a mechanical device that straps to a sender's and receiver's temples that is basically a artificial telepathic/thought projector.
It's a lot. This book, while absorbing, feels overstuffed. I don't say this often, but this story and ideas could have benefitted from expansion to a full length novel, to give the plot and characters some time to breathe. The ideas are certainly fascinating enough to support a book.
The main theme of the story is the author's anger over the exploitation of the natural world, in this case the future extinction of elephants in the wild due to the ivory trade. There's no year given in the story, but it has to be several decades from now, perhaps as much as a century. One of the main characters, the elephant biologist Damira Khismatullina, is killed trying to defend her elephants; a year previously she had left a copy of her memories at the Mind Bank. Fifty years after her death, as cloned mammoths are struggling to survive in their Siberian preserve and wild elephants are extinct, she is resurrected and downloaded into a mammoth's body to serve as their matriarch and teach them to survive.
There are two other main characters: Svyatoslav, a young boy participating in the killing of the mammoths with a group of poachers; and Vladimir, the husband of a "great white hunter" who has paid out an ungodly sum to hunt a male mammoth. This was deemed necessary by the preserve's director to support Moscow's "return on investment" (!) so the preserve and cloning of future inhabitants can continue. But Damira has other ideas about the whole thing, and when the poachers and hunters start shooting her mammoths, she leads them on a bloody revenge spree that ends up killing nearly all of the hunters.
That's what I mean when I say this should have been a book. There's so much here, and by necessity we're focused on the tale of the mammoths in their preserve and those hunting them. There is no room for any wider look at this future world, the technology, politics, progression of climate change, etc. Even the characters, while fleshed out as much as the 112 pages allow, could have benefited from a longer story. The author's debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, was a fascinating look at the discovery of intelligent octopuses and their culture, and this could have been equally interesting, delving into the culture of the mammoths and the ramifications of a former human leading them.
That's not to say this book isn't worth reading, although the climax is a little rushed, and the ending is abrupt. But the future the author lays out here, and the ideas and concepts explored, are more than interesting enough to carry it.
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