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?

Clarkesworld #53 – February 2011

I didn’t like this issue. It was also shorter than the usual Clarkesworld fare, which makes me think if there just wasn’t enough good fiction submitted…

I am including everyone’s ethnicity and country of origin because I’ll make some statistics eventually (IY”H). There will also be a separate tag cloud and listing for the Hugo eligible stories, I just need some time to set it up. Feel free to recommend additional tags!

I’m also starting to be concerned everyone is going to hate me for expressing my opinions. It’s a bit late now!

Diving After the Moon by Rachel Swirsky (an American Jewish woman)

The setting is a confused hodgepodge of world politics – apparently Egypt and Australia are the major powers, with little explanation beyond “the American Empire and the old Republic of China fought themselves to pieces”. They are also at war with each other. The Chinese province of Qinghai is an independent state populated by Tibetans. Qinghai is a developing country that’s struggling to put a taikonaut on the Moon. All this is occasionally interspersed with sentences that come across as imperial guilt (to me at least): “Cheap North American fabric was little good against the chill” etc.

I understand there is this post-Racefail pressure on American authors to diversify, but surely throwing country names and ethnicities into the blender is not the way to do it. For one, what happened to the current Han Chinese majority in Qinghai? Why are the Tibetans called “taikonauts”, an English word used to refer to Chinese astronauts? I’m admittedly only an outsider to this present-day conflict, but to me it seemed as if the story was trying to step on everyone’s toes.

Some spoilers follow in the next paragraph (I marked them with white so that they are not visible unless you are reading this with a different color theme, but I also want to accommodate people using screenreaders, hence the statement… BTW there must be a better way to do this! Popups? I dislike popups.).

The science and technology seemed nonsensical – I understand part of the story is a hallucination, but this refers to the parts that weren’t, at least in my reading. Exactly why cannot they communicate with Earth? Surely radio isn’t the only way to communicate. “The engines won’t reinitialize unless the ship has confirmation of radio contact” makes no sense from an engineering standpoint – why would anyone build a spaceship like this if they were not worried that, say, aliens would attempt to take it over? Even then, one would probably want the ship to be destroyed and not just ground to a halt.

I understand this is empathically not a hard-SF story, but IMO even soft SF should not have these sorts of blunders. My suspension of disbelief was completely ruined by both the technical details and the social backdrop, and I could not enjoy the rest of the content.

Three Oranges by D. Elizabeth Wasden (an American woman)

This one is a historical fantasy story featuring Prokofiev, heavily inspired by his The Love for Three Oranges. I think some of the plot points seem arbitrary if one is not familiar with the source of inspiration, but that’s fixed by familiarizing oneself with it

I’m not really convinced the story would stand on its own even without the reflection to Prokofiev’s work of art, but maybe that wasn’t the intention either. I am happy about stories that get the reader curious about something else. Also, does this qualify as RPF?

While we are at RPF, I liked Wasden’s Leningrad better, mmm Shostakovich

I’m going to start posting my mini-reviews of content eligible for next year’s Hugos.

I’ve decided to start with Clarkesworld for multiple reasons: they only post two stories a month, but these can be assumed to be of very high quality, since the magazine probably receives a huge amount of submissions due to the fast turnaround. Furthermore, Clarkesworld often has stories by authors who belong to minorities and/or underrepresented groups – I’ve never seen this explicitly declared as a policy, but the trend is definitely noticeable to me. (Especially when we consider some other venues… I’m trying not to point fingers here, because many venues are changing in this respect, but surely everyone can think of a few which are a lot less diverse than Clarkesworld.) Maybe they just “take good stories”, but the magazines I’ve seen which made that sort of comment regarding their editing policies usually took stories mostly from white American men. Clarkesworld is definitely not like that.

I’ll go issue by issue and work my way up to the present. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum. I’ll probably add more quantitative ratings eventually, but only after I’ve read more of the eligible content.

Clarkesworld #52 – January 2011

Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee (who is a Korean-American woman)

I think this story starts off more purple than poetic, but eventually the prose settles into a calm, restrained rhythm. I liked the imaginative setting, but during the first half I found myself going back to reread earlier sections, because I kept on losing track of exactly what was happening, who was whose enemy, and so on.

I was discomforted by the way massacres were portrayed, but maybe that’s exactly the point of the story – namely that high-tech warfare can have an alienating effect on the warriors themselves.

The final twist left me cold, probably because I’ve been playing The History of Hammerfight lately, and it has a similar storyline, with evil empire and unusual flying machines and all. These are probably coincidences – while Hammerfight was originally published in 2009, it became well-known only after it was featured in the third Humble Bundle indie game promotion this July.

(Hammerfight will probably get its own review once I manage to finish it, I am at about 75% of the main story. I have problems with the narrative and the setting, but those are better reserved for a separate article.)

Tying Knots by Ken Liu (who is a Chinese-American man and the first person I’ve seen with a .name TLD)

Definitely a smoother read than the previous one. I don’t like the theme of ‘Wow Look, Uncontacted Group’, and in places it read more like a colonialist story than a postcolonialist one, but that’s clearly intentional: out of the two narrators, the American one is designed to be a jerk. The story is trying to expose the dubious concepts of intellectual property ownership – only important as long as it protects the property of the privileged -, genetic use restriction technology, etc.

(Minor side note: actually, the infamous terminator gene seeds have not been commercialized anywhere because everyone called the practice immoral, so now there are legal agreements farmers need to enter into which basically do the same thing. This alone would be worth a story in itself!)

It is hard to write a racist, privileged jerk while not ending up one oneself, and the unreliable narrator technique adds further difficulty, but Ken Liu manages to accomplish the task quite well without going overboard. One could make an argument for Tom being slightly one-dimensional, but this doesn’t cause much concern in a story of this length. And it’s a hard-SF story, what else can I ask for? I have to say I am biased in favor of hard SF.

One more gripe: I didn’t really see a particular reason for setting the story in Burma/Myanmar of all places. Why Burma? Just because?

Endnote: I will probably discuss this story in my ongoing Hungarian series about languages and linguistics in SF; it will go well with Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold, which also features an unusual writing system.

This list was compiled by Ada Hoffmann and posted in the comments, but it’s worth making a separate entry for it. Thank you Ada! This is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for.

I’ve added some formatting, and I should probably take the time to add links to the magazine names as well…

So far the list only includes English-language markets that also publish speculative fiction. (Are there any markets that do not buy spec fic but buy spec fic reviews? I don’t know of any offhand, and they are not in Duotrope.)

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Aoife’s Kiss: 0-2000 words. No horror. Pays $7.
Basement Stories: 0-3000 words. Pays 3 cents/word.
Beyond Centauri: Ages 10 and up. 0-1500 words. Pays $7.
Big Pulp: 0-2500 words. Pays 1 cent/word. Takes “non-fiction”; unclear if this includes reviews.
Breath & Shadow: 0-3000 words (pieces up to 5000 may be considered). Must be written by a person with a disability and be related to people with disabilities.
Dark Discoveries: 500-6500 words. Horror/dark only. Pays 5 cents/word. *Appears* to take reviews (it takes “non-fiction”, and many reviews are posted from a variety of reviewers) but doesn’t specifically say so.
Eternal Haunted Summer: No clear word limit. Pays $5. Material reviewed must have a pagan focus or otherwise be of interest to a pagan readership.
Expanded Horizons: Reviews and essays related to underrepresented groups in spec fic. Pays $30.
The Future Fire: 500-1500 words. Pay unclear and may not exist; they do pay $20 for stories and don’t mention anything about review pay.
the.gloaming: 0-2500 words. Pays 1 cent/word. Takes “non-fiction”; unclear if this includes reviews.
Hungur: 0-2000 words. Pays $7. Vampire stories only.
Kaleidotrope: No clear word limit. Pays 1 cent/word.
NewMyths: 0-10,000 words. Pays $40.
The Pedestal: 850-1000 words. Pays 2 cents/word.
Phantasmacore: No clear word limit. Pays $1.
Plutonian Times: No clear word limit. Pays $1.
Port Iris: Length and payment negotiable on query.
The Rejected Quarterly: 0-8000 words. Pays $20.
Shroud Magazine: 0-3000 words. Horror/dark only. Pays $25. Accepts reviews on a case by case basis.
Something Wicked: 800-1500 words. Pays $50.
Sounds of the Night: 0-2000 words. Pays $7.
Strange Horizons: 1000+ words. Prefers 1500-2000 words. Pays $20.
Sybil’s Garage: Length and payment negotiable on query.
Witches & Pagans: Review guidelines available on request. Focused on pagan issues, obviously.

You can read my poem “A Hail of Pebbles and Dust” in the 2011 Winter issue of Astropoetica!

It was inspired by conditions hypothesized to exist on the surface of exoplanet COROT-7b (and a few other things you’ll be able to guess).

Also, something about my choice of words… In English – or in Hungarian for that matter! – “tribal” carries very strong negative connotations, it is often used as a synonym for “primitive”. As someone from a tribal culture, I really resent this and do everything to dispel the association. Someone from a tribe, in space? Bring it on!!

“Primitive” is also a really relative concept, for that matter – who is primitive? I have been called primitive quite a few times, mostly on account of my religious beliefs, and I think I’m quite modern.  Look, I even have my own website!

I updated my two lists of articles: English / Hungarian

Yet another gigantic heap of articles in Hungarian… lately I’ve also been writing hardware reviews, it’s great fun as long as the device doesn’t want to explode in my hands Right now I even have a cool infobox listing my ebook reader reviews on the main page of nyest.hu, just below the Facebook app.

I should write more in English, I know, I know! I haven’t written anything in months and now it’s just the backlog. It’s time to send out a bunch of article queries! And there is also research to be done… *cue Portal theme song*

I updated my list of Hungarian popular-science articles; I hope this isn’t getting repetitive for non-Hungarian-speakers! FYI – I don’t recommend Google Translate for Hungarian in its present state: when I sent a friend of mine an anti-racist essay, said friend managed to conclude with the aid of automatic translation that it was a racist essay! Uh oh.

I need to thank Dash (of Expanded Horizons fame) for recommending “Biblical Hebrew mistranslations” as a topic, the article is already available and it’s proving to be quite popular. Thanks again!

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If you are in Hungary, I have a conference presentation at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics next Thursday morning. I’m going to talk about the necessity of applying formal linguistic methods to semiotic data in light of the recent Indus Valley controversy. It’s going to be a short presentation that’s intended to be thought-provoking, it will have amusing pictures and oddball references.

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A bit of squee about projects I’m involved in: nyest.hu just reached 1000 Facebook likes yesterday (like it and win random stuff!), and World SF News had this to say about Expanded Horizons: “Expanded Horizons has become the premier webzine publishing international writers these days, and their latest issue is a strong one, including two Apex Book of World SF II contributors! Check out stories from Hungary, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Hong Kong and the Philippines at this great publication“.

Donate for Expanded Horizons, we’re all volunteers at the magazine and all donations go toward paying our contributors! Teaser: the next issue is going to feature, among other things, interviews by Muslim and Arab authors we have previously published. In the meanwhile, the Muslim/Arab special issue of Apex Magazine is also out!

I also got She Nailed a Stake to His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (edited by Tim Lieder) in the mail and read it last weekend; I wonder if I can find a market for a review… This sort of stuff should be reviewed as often as possible – the more biblically-themed fiction, the merrier! Now I just need to find some time to finish writing that Bible space marine story…