After a successful subscription drive, Clarkesworld is switching to three stories per month starting with this issue. So let’s see what we have…

I’m going to say right away that I’m not a fan of stories published in parts spaced out with a month between them. Sure, this way there is more material per issue, there is also more longer-form fiction available for free, but I strongly dislike having to wait for the next instalment – it makes me think I’m back in the days of old Galaktika issues printed on yellowing and brittle paper, as opposed to the bright and glamorous twenty-first century. Then again, I’m the sort of person who watches entire seasons of a TV series in a week, and then goes for months not watching any television at all. Coming to think of it, I should be doing that again, it’s been a while… anyway, let’s get back to the issue.

Clarkesworld, Issue 61 – October 2011

Staying Behind by Ken Liu (a Chinese-American man)

A post-Raptu– errr, I mean post-Singularity story, very realistic, very down-to-earth. I liked it, but I liked Ken Liu’s previous story in Clarkesworld this year much better. There’s not much to say about it, there are some fascinating ambiguities in there, but I’d rather not venture into spoiler territory, especially when the story itself is quite short (as in this case).

For Dash – there is a very minor mention of technological telepathy.

Pony by Erik Amundsen (an American man)

Ponies are back in fashion – I blame My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This time we have gritty postcyberpunk space pony wranglers. Not bad, eh? The story is charming and aggressive at the same time. Well, maybe not exactly charming, but quite good nonetheless.

There is a strong narrative voice, the kind that would be annoying were the story much longer, but at this length it works quite well. I could almost hear the gruffy macho protagonist grumbling in my ears while reading.

Also, a highly quotable line: “in space, you can’t not telegraph the evil you’re about to commit.” There are other similar nuggets interspersed throughout the story, but you’ll have to read it to find them.

Silently and Very Fast (Part 1 of 3) by Catherynne M. Valente (an American woman)

Another mention of Sumerian mythology in Clarkesworld (see the previous one). I don’t want to go all prescriptivist, and there’s no One True Way of spelling Sumerian, but the spelling of Ereshkigal as Erishkegal really annoyed me – it’s one of those little persistent nags I can’t get rid of while reading. Fortunately, the story soon veered off and took a different path altogether.

I know Valente has a very vocal fanbase (which includes some of my friends), but her style never clicked with me. “She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones.” Is that supposed to be poetic, or is she literally covered in black eyes?

Still, here the purple has been dialed down a few notches and the story is actually readable, though not particularly engaging. I found myself growing sleepy and I was increasingly inclined to skim. Japan also makes an appearance as an Ooh So Exotic Backdrop (and Look, They Are Eating Exotic Food!). I’m thoroughly uninterested in the sequels, and if not for this series of reviews, I would probably skip them altogether.

On the upside, there is a good point made about the Turing test and privilege. It’s just lost in the flowery prose.

Clarkesworld, issue 60 – September 2011

This issue didn’t really move me – I felt like there just wasn’t much novelty involved. I have a small confession to make: when I started writing the Hugo reviews in September, I considered starting with the current issue and working my way back, but I was so turned off by Pack that I decided to begin with the January issue.

Pack by Robert Reed (an American man)

A postapocalyptic (?) story about someone living in a castle and being taken advantage of by dogs. A lot is left in shadow and there is a twist ending. The story could’ve been written any time in the past fifty years, and in some respects it even felt dated – misery being demonstrated by a female dog masturbating left me wondering why it had to be a female dog, not to mention how she was “very young” and despite that, already a mother (begging the protagonist for an abortion).

I think the only women in the story were subjugated and sexualized (though the former is debatable because the ending is deliberately left ambiguous), while the males were building empires and fighting battles. I couldn’t care much for the protagonist who seemed like a jerk. There is a possible reading that the dogs are human and the protagonist is not, that would make the story slightly more interesting, but only slightly.

Signals in the Deep by Greg Mellor (an Australian man)

This one had an interesting concept, and I liked it how all the hard-SF elements were just there to provide background to a very personal story and were not shoved in our faces; that happens all too often (and I like hard SF!). But the writing seemed somehow off – at first I wondered if the protagonist was an AI, but she wasn’t, it’s only that the writing wasn’t convincing enough.

There were all kinds of little details I loved: the chapter headings showing distance from Earth, (technological?) telepathy presented just as an aside as a normal, even positive thing, and so on.

This is also possibly the most human (and humane) treatment of the issue of embodiment in interspecies communication I’ve come across. But it left me thinking all this could have been better told.

Clarkesworld, Issue 59, August 2011

A really interesting issue which even includes a translated story…

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee (a Korean-American woman)

After Gord Sellar’s musical tale in the previous issue, we have another stylistic experiment in the pipeline, but this one actually works, and works very well. Yoon Ha Lee’s previous story in Clarkesworld sort of grew on me after a while, but this one I loved from the outset.

The plot is inspired by Sumerian mythology – the main character is identified as Inanna right at the outset, so this is hard to miss. Inanna’s descent to the underworld becomes a video game, with an inventory of items and a second-person narrative. I always think of text adventures when I see second-person viewpoints in prose (and I suspect many of my generation do), but very few works of non-interactive fiction exploit this association. I’m very pleased to see this one does.

Conservation of Shadows is a clear candidate for my Hugo nomination… I’ll try to put up my Battle of the Stories page soon IY”H (it still needs a button graphic), and then you’ll see the rankings so far.

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan (a Chinese man), translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

A translation! An actual translation! Rejoice! (Note the lack of an irony marker. We could certainly use more translations of world SF into English.)

This is a pushy, aggressive story. With Pantone colors. (Not kidding this time either.) It has the driving force of cyberpunk, with a brash, angry male protagonist. The plot uses experiential time to address issues of capitalism, the labor market, etc. It’s a very interesting read, though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the pacing, or how the main character needed everything to be spelled out for him. There was also a throwaway “I’m not a telepath” line that I resented. (I thought that was an American thing, having to reassure each other that they were not telepaths… pfff.)

One of the characters describes “robots playing Naxi folk music” as “a donkey braying with its balls cut off” and says that humans were much better. So here is some Naxi folk music, played by humans… All the online videos seem to be from the same tourist show. I picked a segment with an instrumental solo on a Jew’s harp-like instrument. (Incidentally, I can play the Jew’s harp, even though it has nothing to do with Jews.)

The reviews are back – sorry for the long delay!

In this issue, both stories were trying to say something new about time-worn SF tropes, but I think only one of them managed to pull it off. Let’s see…

Clarkesworld, Issue 58 – July 2011

Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika by Gord Sellar (a Canadian man who lives in South Korea)

The ultimate triumph of style over substance! This story depicts evil robots taking over the world – that’s the entire plot and I’m not kidding. It is told in a flourishing style. Example: Gorgeous steel, stainless save the spattered blood of this metropolis aflame, and the reflections of frail bodies strung all about the towers above, ornaments to celebrate the tidings of the new year, the new world, the ends and beginnings of various histories. If this is not your thing, you won’t like the story, if it is, you probably will – it’s that simple.

There is sheet music included… maybe this is not so surprising, since the story is titled after Erik Satie’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire. The score reminded me of Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz, one of the classics of sheet music humor. In the audio version of the story there is actual music. It sounds better than it looks! It also sounds better than Faerie’s Aire (Youtube link!).

This is the second time this year that I’ve seen Clarkesworld run an “inspired by music” story. Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika really fell flat for me even though I’m a Satie fan… and I still prefer works of art that can stand on their own.

Here is a Satie mix by a friend of mine:

Frozen Voice by An Owomoyela (who is an American asexual neutrois person of color)

This one is about an alien invasion and book burnings. Fortunately, the aliens burn books for a rather unexpected reason – I won’t spoil it, read the story, it’s interesting.

I can see more potential here than a simple short story. I liked the way the aliens communicated with a “hum” in addition to spoken and signed (!) languages, even though this wasn’t really elaborated upon. Also, this is another story that will fit nicely into my “Languages in SF” series. Is the theme coming back in fashion?

There is a small typo in the text, the word for book in Arabic is kitab, not kitap. Just thought I’d mention it because in Arabic, only loanwords have p. But I readily admit this is not very relevant to the topic at hand…

I’ve won a book on Haikasoru’s latest contest. I hope it gets here in one piece! My Book Depository orders get here without problems, but I’ve had books won in contests end up completely lost in transit.

They had an interesting topic: the future of gender, so I’m going to reproduce my answer.

The questions were: “What is the future of gender? Is gender static, or does it shift naturally? Can it, and should it, be manipulated purposefully for scientific or social ends?”

I think gender and sexuality are going to become increasingly flexible with the progress of medical science, but that doesn’t mean they are going to become less important, or irrelevant. To the contrary, people tend to be especially attached to the identities they themselves choose – for example, people who convert to another religion tend to be more vocal about religion than people who stay with their parents’ religion.

Yay Genderform already lists 947 different possibilities, and the list goes on… I think writers often manage to reinvent the wheel, and come up with groups intended to be fictional which already exist. (Not really gender-related, but the other day I even managed to find a story in this year’s Hugo crop which seemed to reinvent Asperger syndrome.) Worse still, the fictionalized group often ends up treated as inhuman in the story universe. I’m hesitant to link to TVTropes because it can eat up time like nothing else, but the Hermaphrodite page is a good example, featuring only a few realistic portrayals of intersexual characters and a lot of, um, alien porn or straight-up fetishism.

A discussion on fictional gender might seem like a diversion from the future of gender, but what I’m trying to say is, the future is already here, it just goes unnoticed by the people who are not “early adopters”. As for whether gender should be manipulated purposefully, my answer is more or less the same – if it can be done, it will eventually be done, and in many cases, it has already been done!

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Tim Lieder is taking submissions for his second anthology of Bible-themed horror stories. I thought the first one was awesome (I didn’t like the Catherynne Valente story, though) and I’m all for Bible fiction, so this is great news. Submit stuff, I want to read the anthology as soon as it comes out

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You can’t be pro-GLBT and still work to exclude transgender and transsexual people, that’s a contradiction in terms. Harvard University still tries to pull it off – post by DesiArcy.

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I realized Amazon also sold clothing items, so I decided to search for clothing items I like to wear – for example, wrap skirts. It’s not that I’m going to order anything from Amazon – the shipping would probably cost much than the actual product – but it’s a fun diversion, you know?

Except it was The Lulzy Fail. Apparently everything that even vaguely resembles clothing I wear is somehow “exotic”, “tribal” or “Gypsy”. (These items have nothing to do with actual Gypsy clothing, but nevermind.)

If you don’t know me in person – I wear two kinds of clothing. Either the “all black with metallic implements of torture” type of oldschool rivethead clothing (with a dash of goth or punk) or loose clothing with color prints.  This time I was looking for the latter, since the former is usually just a black skirt, a black shirt and my mostly self-made accessories, I don’t need an online store for that.

I like bright colors and busy prints, ideally both at the same time, but I often have to compromise on bright colors (sigh!) since it’s hard to buy this type of clothing locally. As a religious Jew I’m also a modest dresser, which really constrains the type of clothing I can buy in mainstream shops, even when I’m taking layering into account.

So I am apparently Super Exotic because I wear long skirts. Go me?

Clarkesworld #57 – June 2011

I liked this issue overall. Again, spoilers are in white.

Semiramis by Genevieve Valentine (an American woman)

The first-person protagonist really comes across as female, which made me wonder if the story was centered around a lesbian relationship, but in one place the protagonist calls him(?)self a “gentleman”, so I guess not.

Otherwise, this is a calm and quiet story about huge and upsetting events… global warming, political turmoil, countries destroyed or occupied, while the protagonists are working in or around the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I enjoyed it, but I kept feeling there could have been more. For instance, we never learn about the mysterious organization that employs the protagonist.

There is something I feel like mentioning, not directly relevant to Semiramis or my mini-review, but I can see some parallels… Another gene bank with a story behind it is the currently endangered Pavlovsk Experimental Station in Russia. During the siege of Leningrad, the botanists starved to death, but still would not eat from the collection. There is a moving song about the station by an American band, The Decemberists, which also starts with an allusion to Babylon, like Semiramis… so we’ve come full circle.

This is just someone else’s random Youtube upload of the song with no video, so I’m keeping the embed size small:

There is a (non-SF) novel on this topic, Hunger by Elise Blackwell, but unfortunately I haven’t read it yet.

Trickster by Mari Ness (an American woman)

Trickster looks like fantasy, but it has many science fiction elements – I think I can list it as both.

The protagonist is a physically disabled woman, which, combined with the presence of several deities in the story, made me really worried about the magical cure trope. Fortunately there is no magical cure in Trickster. Instead there is a very resilient protagonist, assumed to be weak by everyone around her – including her deities –, when she is anything but. Lots of destruction ensues. (You don’t need to be a buff superhero to cause lots of destruction. OH YES.)

It’s a quite lengthy story – I’m not even sure if it is, technically, a short story – but it’s well worth the read. This one will rate high on my scale, even though I don’t normally like fantasy stories with overly anthropomorphic deities.

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While we’re at scales and such: I’m going to make a “Battle of the Stories” page to help people with Hugo nominations and voting. I’ve already assembled it and added the stories I’ve reviewed thus far, but before I make it public, I want to make a nice button to put on the front page… and I’ve hit a roadblock. What should I put on the button? The obvious answer is the Hugo logo, except…

The Hugo logo is really bland. When I looked at it, my first reactions were: 1. It’s really boring! 2. It looks like a penis! Now, I’m not a very sexual person, but I still think it’s a feat to design a logo that manages to be boring and penile at the same time. I read the comments on the logo announcement and people seemed to be having the same reactions, so it’s not just me.

I know the Hugo award itself looks like a rocket. That’s not an excuse!

They did not publish a list of runners-up, but I liked this logo set a contestant posted in the comments. Alas, it doesn’t lend itself to a horizontal button similar to the ones already in my sidebar.

The short story reviews are back after the interruption… Again, spoilers are marked with white.

Clarkesworld #56, May 2011

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo (an American woman)

Last week, I had a strange idea. Sometime in the far future, I’d like to edit a thematic anthology which features body horror stories without the horror… or more accurately, without the revulsion. Body horror is usually presented in a bad way. The character changes into something in a quite graphic manner, and this is presented as horrifying and possibly evil. Stories which still have quite graphic elements, but where the reader is expected to feel the events are good and moral for some reason, or just neutral and normal, are few and far between… even though speculative fiction is supposed to be (at least in part) about just how far the human condition extends.

This story could possibly qualify, though it is not really graphic. The main character is a shapeshifter, but the usual tired tropes about shapeshifting do not apply. For example, when someone dies, everyone (including the reader) expects the shapeshifter killed them, but it turns out the shapeshifter was telling the truth that it was an accident. All throughout the reader is left rooting for the shapeshifter, and in my opinion that’s a Very Good Thing and something so often lacking in modern Western SF. (A Russian parallel I really liked was the Stars duology by Sergei Lukyanenko, unfortunately not available in English yet.) The fictional Other is usually evil, demonized, disgusting – the restraint writers try to exercise when writing about real Others is usually gone and their xenophobia shows through clearly. Not here, and thank Cat Rambo for that.

We still have the evil mad scientist trope – by now you probably know this is one of my pet peeves -, but in this story the scientist is more of a greedy jerk than the classic mad scientist.

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman (an American man)

I simply could not get into this story. It starts off very slowly and does not really pick up steam until the second half. A friend of mine showed me The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test the other day and I couldn’t get it out of my head while reading The Architect of Heaven. Trent is extremely rich, extremely popular, and people readily sacrifice their lives for him. This would not be necessarily bad in itself, but I saw nothing in the story that would’ve made me feel that yes, Trent really was that kind of guy. The characterization just wasn’t strong enough for the rest to be believable.

I wasn’t sure if there was a gay subplot, because it is never discussed explicitly, but if there is, then that’s probably worse, because of course the gay man ends up sacrificing himself for the straight guy. LJ user prusik posted a lengthy analysis, so I’m not going to go into more detail; this is definitely not one of the cases where I notice something about a story that no one else has pointed out yet.

I’m writing an article on the characterization of Eastern Europeans, so I’m not going to comment on the stereotyped Russian… and the stereotyped Chinese, either. But I think this story is going to make an apparance in the article…

A bit more on yesterday’s topic – I’ve been linked to Deepa D’s most recent post about the queer YA controversy and I’ve also had a private discussion with someone else, and I think there’s something that needs to be said.

Any thematic list that tries to be comprehensive ends up featuring a lot of junk. (Maybe I should call this prezzey’s corollary of Sturgeon’s law!) I did not say this in my previous post because I thought it was self-evident, but it has been brought to my attention that for many people participating in the controversy, it wasn’t! People were and are saying “vote with your wallets” and then linking to the comprehensive list of queer characters in YA.

I’m surprised because this probably means that these people have never tried to assemble any thematic list (OK, I know I have an obsession with lists…) or they have genuinely never read any book about minorities with a critical eye. For example, I collect fiction related to autism. A lot of it is bad – and I’m meaning “I’m going to MASH my keyboard with my FOREHEAD” kind of bad! A lot of the rest, even when well-meaning, still utilizes problematic assumptions. And so on…

This is one of the reasons I’m reviewing stuff – I’ve just started going across this year’s Hugo crop and I’ve already bumped into multiple stories with issues that were not called out by anyone else. (I’m making an effort to read other reviews, comments on stories, etc. too.) In some cases I’m not really the best person to do the calling out, for example if there is a story with a Chinese setting, I am not the best arbiter of accurate representation – though I can spot a confused ethnic hodgepodge. But if there is, say, a Jewish story with problematic elements, I think I can say that it is problematic (though I obviously do not speak for all Jews everywhere).

I’ve found the best stories are ones which draw on the author’s own background, but even this is no guarantee of success – for example a secular Jew can write shtetl kitsch about Orthodox Jews. People can also struggle with internalized oppression… I know I have myself. And some works, even when they represent a particular group well, are just not really good as fiction. So a thematic list is a very different kind of animal from a recommendations list.

Clarkesworld #55 – April 2011

As I’ve said in the previous entry, I’m trying to add every author’s ethnicity and gender, for later statistical purposes… but I’ve had difficulties with this issue. I think E. Lily Yu is Chinese-American and Erin Hartshorn is Jewish-American (or American Jewish? that always confuses me), but I’m not sure, so I’ll probably just have to ask the authors directly.

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu (a Chinese?-American woman)

I’m not particularly fond of parables, but this fantasy story is neatly told – I think this is the type of content that’s best-suited to podcasts, flowing along smoothly. (I read the text myself, but you might want to try the audio version.) Maybe it was a bit too didactic at times, but the political content did not ruin the story outright.

I’m not really sure about the take-home message, though – you can try to be different, but you will probably fail and die a miserable death? Well, life is like that sometimes, true enough…

Matchmaker by Erin M. Hartshorn (a Jewish?-American woman)

Yay, a Jewish story! The family of the protagonist really reminded me of the stories I hear from American secular Jewish friends – I think the American Jewish “guilt trip” experience is expressed quite eloquently, or maybe it is an American secular Jewish experience? Many of the American Jews I know are religious, and their families are nothing like that. Anyway, the author is clearly on to something here! There is also the interesting intersectionality of culture and class – one seldom sees really rich characters in SF, and even then they do not tend to belong to minorities. The author avoids the traditional ‘Jewish millionaires own the world’ trope, but the family comes across as slightly obnoxious… just as it probably would in real life! So far, so good.

I’ve never heard of a shidduch this fast, though – even the most fervently Chareidi people I know had at least 3-4 dates before marriage. (And most shidduchim end up going nowhere. Just ask me!) I understand that things need to come to a satisfying close in the span of a short story, but to me this part came across as more stereotype than reality… and not a stereotype I’d personally like to reinforce.

Clarkesworld #54 – March 2011

I enjoyed this issue, but I still had gripes with both stories. By the way, I forgot to mention that the previous issue had a great “making of” feature about the cover image, by Julie Dillon. I wish all issues had a similar column, this would also help me decide who to pick in the artist categories of the Hugo! Artists talking about their technique make a more memorable impression on me than picture dumps.

The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from the Great Book) by Nnedi Okorafor (a Nigerian-American woman)

Lush greenery is a recurring theme in Nnedi Okorafor’s work and this particular story is no exception. Yay for lush greenery! As for the rest, it’s certainly an interesting, fast-paced tale, but it leaves way too many questions unresolved. All kinds of intriguing plot elements are introduced, but none of them are discussed in detail. The title refers to a larger text – I could see this story work as a chapter of a novel, but not as much as a standalone short story, even though I’d enjoyed it while reading. (Nnedi Okorafor’s website says that the story is set in the universe of Who Fears Death, which is on my TBR pile – I liked her other novels a lot, so I have high hopes for this one as well.)

Being a scientist, I tend to dislike stories which heavily build on the evil scientist trope, especially when there is no particular justification for this. The rationale behind including a Holocaust scene also eluded me, was it included just to demonstrate how evil the scientists were? It certainly did not seem to serve any other purpose.

Also, minor annoyance (but one I see quite often in stories, and this one was no exception): the Bible includes the Torah, these are not separate sacred texts. If someone is trying to say that a character read both the Christian and the Jewish versions of the Bible, the proper word for the latter is “the Tanach”. Spellings may vary, “Tanakh” is also used.

Perfect Lies by Gwendolyn Clare (an American woman)

I love interspecies diplomatic relations stories, and this one is also fascinating, but I am confused: did the author just rediscover high functioning autism / Asperger syndrome? The protagonist’s behavior shows many characteristics of autism, which enable her to negotiate with the aliens, but she is  repeatedly described as “the only human”  capable of doing so. I don’t really know what to think: is this an instance of deliberate erasure, or “only” ignorance? I read the comments on the story, and I’m not the first person the Asperger analogy occurred to – so it’s probably not a case of “one who has a hammer sees nails everywhere”

I think the moral is, if you make up a cognitive minority, try hard to make sure the group does not already exist, and if it does, take that into account?