Nebula nominations are closing in two weeks! There’s still time for the Hugos though… and I also need to decide what to nominate for the Carl Brandon awards. I have a metric TON of short stories I’d love to nominate, but seeing as these awards usually go to longer-form works, that might be a waste of time. Still, I’ve read several good novelettes and novellas that would be a good fit; I just need to make up my mind. Carl Brandon nominations are open to everyone, so head over:

The Carl Brandon Parallax Award is for an outstanding speculative fiction work by a self-identified writer of color. The Carl Brandon Kindred Award is for an oustanding speculative fiction work dealing with race and ethnicity. You may nominate the same work for both awards.

After the short intermission, back to today’s stories:

This Strange Way of Dying by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (a Mexican-Canadian woman)

from GigaNotoSaurus – audio version available on Podcastle

This story was published in GigaNotoSaurus, a magazine specializing in novelettes, but it’s not actually a novelette (the word count is around 5400) – just mentioning this in case you want to nominate it for awards. Despite the length, it is a quick read, as Moreno-Garcia’s other stories: she writes lean prose that simply flies by. Let’s see what this one offers!

A girl makes a pact with Death, over the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. The fascinating setting saves the story from being a boring rehash of the old theme.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia also writes straight-up fantasy, but to be honest I appreciate it more when she sets her stories a bit closer to home – especially since she does not tend to overexoticize anything. I’ve wondered if some magazines pressured “ethnic” writers in that direction, or maybe that’s just the kind of style that tends to resonate with the (white, American) editors. Anyway, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a good counterexample: her stories are not loaded down with extraneous detail, but they are still pronouncedly local. More please!

The Sighted Watchmaker by Vylar Kaftan (an American woman)

from Lightspeed (Dec 2011)

An “alien observer” story, with a twist. I think I dislike this “with a twist” template more and more with each passing day: in a story building on ages-old tropes, where said tropes are changed in one specific way, the reader (ME!) still has to wade through too much of the same old same old in order to get to the heart of the matter.

Still, the change was interesting (it made me feel the author would see some opposition from both sides of the creationism debate) and the writing was touching. I also liked the sweeping perspective. I wouldn’t choose this story as one of the year’s best – like Rich Horton did -, but it was decent enough.

First of all, here’s something relevant to today’s novelette. Someone told me that Angela Ambroz was miscategorized and she was in fact an American writer of Italian-Slovenian descent. I don’t know – one of her author bios (which she wrote herself) says “She is Italian-Slovenian, educated in the US and UK.” I think this implies that she was only educated in the US but she is not actually from the US.

On the other hand, this interview makes it sound like she really is an American of Italian-Slovenian descent: “I was an immigrant’s Army brat – born in one country, raised in another – and I attended universities in three different countries. Even my “true” nationality is a little blurry: my family’s from a border region in Italy, and there’s a lot of internal debate about whether we’re Italian or Slovenian or Austrian or what.”

If you’ve been here for a while now, you probably remember that at one point I seriously considered emailing every author about categories. But as I post about 1-2 stories every day except Shabbat, that’s a lot of authors, so I gave up on the plan fast… Maybe I could take the time to ask about confusing cases though.

Anyway. Novelette.

Droplag by Angela Ambroz (an Italian-Slovenian woman, or an Italian-Slovenian-American woman, or…?)

from GigaNotoSaurus (May 2011)

This is another story set in her fictional universe, comparable to the previously reviewed one. I felt like it was more of a kitchen-sink story; it’s as if she really wanted to cram absolutely everything into the novelette, from Afro-Brits to Japanese and a Muslim guy with a… Muslimfro. Well, sure, if there are Jewfros, then why not Muslimfros, but I’ve never heard the expression before. (Google only produces 1120 hits, many of them are abbreviations of usernames like “MuslimfromAmerica”. I think we can safely call this a neologism.) I gave up on adding every single combination of ethnicities as a separate tag after the Japanese-Sikh man appeared.

My issues with the setting are also more pronounced this time, as the author tends to slide into “oh look, now it’s the white people being oppressed”  at the beginning (though to be fair, one character tells off another for doing it, and after that, the topic does not come up again). And some of the descriptions verge on the caricaturistic:

So the businesspeople said, clucking into their million-dollar hookah pipes and plotting new Drops and colonies. The advertisements that flickered over the floating Super Gate of India, miles above orbit, instead read, “Welcome to His and Her Imperial Majesties’ Home, the Kohinoor Diamond of the Universe, DELHI PRIME. Hindustan zindabad! Hindustan zindabad! Hindustan zindabad!”

Sure, I get it it’s space opera and all, but still, this is overdone IMO, especially since this is not the author’s own culture.

On the other hand, the story goes places SF does not tend to go: religious experience, automatic speech (!), precognition (as an effect of space travel, but still, precognition no less).

I’m not satisfied, but I can be persuaded to read more by Ambroz, there’s a lot of potential there – though some of the issues seem to be systemic, and the more of the author’s works I read, the more apparent this becomes.

The House of Aunts by Zen Cho (a Malaysian woman)

from GigaNotoSaurus (Dec 2011)

This is a vampire story with local flavor, set in present-day rural Malaysia. Or maybe I should say it’s a pontianak story, as the Malaysian pontianak differs from the European vampire in several important respects – but you’ll learn about all that during the course of the novelette.

I really enjoyed it when the characters spoke Manglish. Awesome lah! The story was heartfelt and touching (and just a wee bit gory ), but the characters of the aunts blurred together a bit at times. Maybe there could’ve been more elaboration or something else to help readers keep track of them as individual persons, even if that made the novelette longer.

All in all it was a nice read, not very fast-paced, but not everything needs to be fast-paced. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the free story! It also comes with a free epub version, I think that’s great – I’ll have to read more of the GigaNotoSaurus novelettes.

I also totally need to read more from Zen Cho – she has a bunch of other eligible works this year, unfortunately not all of them are available online free of charge… I liked The Guest, but that one was published in 2010, so it’s not eligible for awards this year.

from Redstone Science Fiction (June 2011)

This story hasn’t gotten enough attention if you ask me. Ambroz writes with flair – she has an eye both for small details and for the epic, which is exactly what you want when it comes to a sweeping space-opera yarn like this one.

I see the author in the characters – Angela Ambroz travelled far and wide and lived in many places, from Fiji to the UK, and she’s also Italian like the protagonist’s love interest. I don’t know if she ever tried to topple any empires in the process I also wonder about her connection to Tibet – this is her second story I came across that had Tibetan characters (the other being Shahrukh and the Tibetans, set in the same universe as far as I can tell).

I loved how the protagonist was masculine (as befits a bodyguard), but female. We could certainly see more of that in SF; even space-marine stuff often tends to shy away from explicitly masculine women.

There’s something that bugs me, though – I don’t like it when people are being lectured on their own history. Plus (spoiler!) I’m somewhat tired of “romance across lines of privilege” stories, and they raise many issues, but this story whizzed by so fast I only noticed this upon reflection.

I also wonder what Indian people think of Hindustan being painted as a future imperialistic superpower! (If this happened with one of my ethnicities, I think I’d both be flattered in a twisted sense and kind of apprehensive, as in, do you really have to…? :O )

Bonus: the World SF Blog just had a link to an article on Italian SF earlier today. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it doesn’t seem to mention a single Italian writer who writes in English… well, Angela Ambroz is one!

In Which Faster-Than-Light Travel Solves All of Our Problems by Chris Stabback (an Australian man)

from Clarkesworld (Dec 2011)

Another of those ‘style is substance’ stories like this one. I think it was Samuel Delany who once wrote that one should only write in first person if the narrator’s voice is important and unique… Stabback certainly delivers on that count, and his ‘I am a spacefaring recluse’ narrator does have a strong voice, but that does not necessarily mean it is enjoyable.

The plot is just a bunch of clichés thrown together, so the story either makes an impact based on style, or does not make an impact at all. It seems to be quite controversial with readers on the Clarkesworld website, some people love it, while others are puzzled at the adulation.

I think it remains to be seen whether the author can write something different and equally distinctive (in which case everyone should pay close attention) or whether this is him speaking instead of his protagonist. His website vaguely suggests the latter, but there’s so little text on it it’s hard to say!

Thirty Seconds from Now by John Chu (a Chinese-American man)

from the Boston Review (Sep/Oct 2011)

This is a surprisingly well-written story about a gay relationship featuring a precognitive protagonist. (I was surprised primarily because this was the author’s first publication and it did not even appear in a genre magazine -  literary authors who casually try genre writing often end up producing really derivative content.) I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on John Chu from now on!

There’s something I really disliked in this story, though. Precognition is not portrayed similarly to the way people report precognitive experiences in real life; it’s more dramatic and SFnal. That alone would not be a problem, but I have issues with the way it’s presented.

My friend Dash has an excellent post on precognition in SF, you should read it; it’s a lot longer than this review, with plenty of food for thought. Precognitive characters in SF never having a stable romantic relationship is explicitly called out.

The author – a gay man? – successfully avoids the bad gay tropes, but still hits many of the bad precognition tropes. (Whether precognition is “real” is completely irrelevant here – what matters is that many people have experiences they interpret as precognitive, and that should be considered.)

At least the story is told from Scott’s, the precognitive person’s point of view, and as his partner Tony (spoiler!) first belittles, then rejects his experiences, Tony comes across as a jerk. This still begs the question why Scott, knowing everything in advance, still opts to enter the relationship. A bad relationship is better than none at all? I don’t buy that.

I strongly dislike the formatting on the magazine’s website, but I shouldn’t blame the author for that If you try to export the text, be sure to remove the out-of-place quotes. The printable version doesn’t have them, but still has, of all things, the comment form. *grumble!*

Choose Your Adventure by Kat Howard (an American woman)

from the April 2011 issue of Fantasy Magazine

I came across this story in a year’s best list, but it was somewhat of a disappointment. At least it’s short – barely over flash length.

It’s structured as a kind of faux Choose Your Adventure book, but it’s meant to be read in a linear fashion. That’s an interesting innovation – if I can call it an innovation rather than a setback!

I felt like the author was trying to “tame” the medium of interactive fiction to make it palatable to the mainstream. I hazard a guess that most people familiar with interactive storytelling will find the story boring and derivative in comparison to what’s available out there, not in pro venues like Fantasy, but out there regardless.

For everyone else, allow me to recommend the Interactive Fiction Database instead. And a bit of shameless self-promotion: I have also written introductions to interactive fiction both in English and in Hungarian.

Also, while we’re at the 2012 Hugos, Yoon Ha Lee’s Conservation of Shadows is a much better story based on similar themes (second-person narrative, linear fiction inspired by nonlinear fiction). It’s one of my candidates for nomination so far.

A Militant Peace by David Klecha (an American man) and Tobias S. Buckell (a Grenadan-American man)

from the November 2011 issue of Clarkesworld

This is straight-up military SF and an interesting take on overwhelming force. Alas, my suspension of disbelief was really strained several times – not a good sign when it comes to supposedly realistic near-future SF!

First, I’ve found the general political scenario unbelievable (this is not really a spoiler, it’s how the story starts): Vietnamese UN troops invade North Korea “peacefully” by creating unassailable “alternative settlement zones” where civilians can flee.

Let’s say that again: the UN invades North Korea. Sure, and pigs fly. (If you kick them hard enough…) And this process is expected to last a decade? With no one else interfering?

Second, armies expecting to be literally invincible because of the huge technological disparity are sometimes in for a surprise. To offer an example that’s geographically close, the Serbians shot down an American F-117 stealth plane in the Kosovo war (1999) using Soviet technology from the 1960s. (The Serbian commander was an ethnic minority Hungarian; his Wikipedia page is quite detailed and describes the incident in detail.)

Also, the story seems to assume that North Korea stagnates; if other armies were to develop such amazing defenses, North Koreans might also be able to acquire them – espionage, proliferation, etc. the options are endless! After all, they apparently have nuclear weapons…

One of the story’s points is (spoiler!) that psychological vulnerability is also a form of vulnerability, so at least it’s not an “our army is perfect” tale, but it edges close – if the characters were American instead of Vietnamese, the novelette would read as straight-up propaganda for the American right wing. (And I like military SF, I’m not one of those people who are bothered by fictional depictions of armed conflict.) At least the story raises the very real issue of the UN troops not having a mandate strong enough to prevent atrocities.

Semi-related link I’ve been meaning to show you for a while now: Planeman’s Bluffer’s Guides. They include a detailed treatment of both Pyongyang’s and Hanoi’s anti-aircraft defenses based on Google Earth data. Unfortunately his blog seems to be down… (gee, I wonder why؟)

Black Fire by Tanith Lee (a British woman)

from the January 2011 issue of Lightspeed

This has to be the first British work I’m reviewing unless I’ve managed to miss something. It is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story – I do love me some Bible fanfic, but Black Fire just isn’t strong enough.

The narrative is composed of police interviews with ordinary citizens. With this type of structure, a lot hinges on the voices being convincing. Here, the citizens sound realistic, but also slightly boring.

Special groanworthy quote: “My last thought is, I confess, is this really then what is meant by Science Fiction?“

iTime by Ferrett Steinmetz (an American man)

from the September 2011 issue of Redstone Science Fiction

A highly readable time travel story with two shortcomings. First, one of the characters is such a stereotyped vacuous bimbo that I found the first half of the story hard to read, I kept on cringing. Sure, the protagonist is a hacker girl, but as the story is based around their interactions,  the difference between these two women only emphasizes that the author tried to build on lazy stereotypes. The complete opposite of a caricature is also a caricature.

The second shortcoming is worldbuilding-related: there is zero social context. Minor characters are completely oblivious to the time-travel technology, even though a resale market has sprung up already: “Daddy paid four hundred thousand on eBay for an unbonded four-hour model,” she said, puffing out her chest. Still, no one understands that Miss Vacuous Bimbo is using a time-travel gizmo!

Also, the device must have a really horrendous user interface if  (spoiler!) Bimbo manages to use it without ever being exposed to any warnings. Even my Nintendo Wii keeps on telling me to please wear the controller strap, and that’s really minor in comparison. As the name strongly hints at the fictional gizmo being produced by Apple, a company whose strong suit is providing a smooth user experience, this is even more puzzling.

It’s a shame – the temptation aspect is very well-executed, and I liked  that different characters experienced similar temptation for different reasons. There is also a “learning social interactions” theme to the story that will probably resonate with many readers.

The Hubbard Continuum by Lavie Tidhar (an Israeli Jewish man)

from Redstone Science Fiction, March 2011

L. Ron Hubbard was right and the future is a Scientologist nightmare with with Clears, Pre-Clears, implant stations and such. The plot is a short, fun romp with time travel and “psychic Thetan death-rays”; maybe a bit too self-referential for my tastes, though it’s by no means as bad as the usual ‘writing about writers who are writing’. I can’t help feeling Scientology ought to be more… paranoia-inducing.

I’m getting tired of repeating “this story was inspired by X, this story was inspired by Y”, but what can I do? Surely there is nothing new under the sun, but to see so many stories which are direct homages or rewrites is disappointing, even when they turn out to be decent work after all. I didn’t expect this! With that being said, this story was apparently inspired by William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum, except here the future is not Gernsbackian, but Hubbardian. Apparently, because the debt is not acknowledged by the author (compare Liu’s novella in my previous post), though the title makes it obvious. Still, I couldn’t find a single review online which noticed the link. This probably explains why the story is better-received than it ought to be: it seems more original than it actually is.

Grace Immaculate by Gregory Benford (an American man)

from Tor.com Originals, Oct 19 2011

A flash story about first contact with aliens and religion, with a twist. I’m bored with SF where the aliens learn something from the humans which Would Never Have Occurred To Them Otherwise – that’s so anthropocentric. But at least here (spoiler!) the aliens get the last laugh.

This one is mostly for completionists – while we’re at it: do send me links to religion-related SF, gotta catch ‘em all! – or those who really just want a mildly amusing story to go with their morning coffee.

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu (a Chinese-American man)

from Panverse Three (free reprint above!)

 This story was inspired by Ted Chiang’s Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is also well worth the read (but it’s unfortunately not available for free, at least AFAIK). The format is similar – a documentary (well duh!) – but the contents are radically different.

The Man Who Ended History is about the activities of the real-life Japanese Unit 731 in the 1935-1945 time period. The Japanese military set up a secret biowarfare research unit in occupied Manchuria and performed experiments on unwilling Chinese prisoners. If you’re unfamiliar with this (I wasn’t), then before reading the story or clicking on the links, do note that you will read about activities that were as atrocious as Nazi German human experiments in Europe. In graphic detail.

 Since the target audience is unfortunately not familiar with this massacre (or at least not as familiar as with the Holocaust), Ken Liu spends a lot of time on exposition, so the documentary format is well-chosen. The SF part involves time travel – not in any conventional sense, though; it’s definitely not one of those “travel back in time to kill Hitler”-type stories, don’t worry.

It’s a very thoughtful and well-sourced (!) story, with detailed endnotes. My only problem was that the more scholarly talking-heads  occasionally spoke in such dry and convoluted sentences I was tempted to skim.  People don’t talk like that in video interviews, not even historians; at least IMO. By contrast, the locals had very believable voices – the author states they were based on forum posts etc., a great touch.

I loved it how lots of characters did everything to simplify the issue, but since they were all presented together, the issue stubbornly refused to become simplified.

Something that should be IMO more emphasized – the movie the protagonists watch, Philosophy of a Knife (yes, it’s a real movie), while based on real events, is marketed as gorefest horror. I think that’s absolutely horrifying – having to come across a real-life historical atrocity connected to your people’s history the first time in your life in an exploitation movie…

Something else I wished to be explored in more detail (spoilers)!: Kirino mentions her children, and presumably Wei is the father, but there was nothing further about their offspring. Children who grow up with the legacy of being the descendants of both the murderers and the victims, that is something I can especially relate to as a Hungarian Jew, I wish there was more along those lines. Maybe in a different story…

I think there might be a technological solution to the SFnal conundrum, though (more spoilers): reconstructing mental imagery from fMRI activity is a problem I’d call almost-solved; since the story is set in the near future, the historical scenes people experience in the fictional scanner could be recorded at the same time – at least the visuals. But of course the claim could be made that fMRI recording interferes with the fictional Kirino Process. But this does not detract from the story itself.

Go read it; while I don’t think it’s perfect, it does things I wish more SF authors tried. I’m quite pleased that both this and the previous novella I reviewed tackle very serious issues related to real-life events, and do so admirably well.

Before we start, a different issue – I’m a bit annoyed to see that some of the stories I was sure would fit into the short story category run in the novelette category on this year’s Hugos. I had originally intended to concentrate on short stories, but many places don’t post word counts in story headers, and in some cases stories are split up over multiple pages, which makes them appear shorter… like this one, which is actually a novella, even longer than a novelette! So I’ll have to reorganize the list and group stories by length.

Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove (an American Jewish man)

from Tor.com Originals, Apr 14 2011

This story looked like a quick read when I scrolled through the page (and I wasn’t really in the mood for anything longer), but when I actually started reading, I was quite surprised to see “Page 1 of 4″ and a link to the following page at the bottom.

I read on, and I was very happy I did. AWESOME happens right after that page break. I want to say as little as possible, but still something that will make you read the story, so I will just say that Turtledove takes the timeworn shtetl-kitsch clichés and subverts them masterfully, while still staying true to the sentiment that pervades them. Amazing, really.

There are some minor inconsistencies, for example when it comes to pronunciation, but (spoiler!) since the characters are historical reconstructionists, it’s perfectly understandable they would get at least a few things wrong.

I only had a small gripe with the story – as an Orthodox Jew, I’m uncomfortable with fully spelled out divine names included in works that come without warnings to treat the names respectfully. As this stands, readers will probably print out the story and toss the printout once they’ve finished, or read it in the bathroom, etc. all of which would be prohibited by halachah (Jewish law).

The author is secular and thus probably not particularly bothered by it, but I am! If you as a reader want to play it safe, the easiest way is to just leave the story in electronic format (which does not qualify as “writing” as per halachah) and read it that way. This also saves trees

Another minor gripe which has nothing to do with the story content:  sometimes there were extra spaces inserted before and after vowels with diacritics, I guess someone’s word processor goofed up there!

*

Here is a beautiful Karliner nigun which demonstrates my point above. In practice, divine names are often hyphenated or substituted when not praying. In the video, you can hear people sing “Kah echsof” while the text reads Y-ah echsof”.

Here is another version (by Aharon Razel & co.) where they sing “Y-ah echsof”: