I wanted to review the Palencar project stories at Tor.com, because they were inspired by a painting featuring a modestly dressed young woman and I have that exact skirt and all. But all stories in the project were written by straight white American men and so they did not really fit my usual theme, underrepresented groups in SF. Silvia had a great idea that I should focus on male authors writing female protagonists and I decided to go with that.

The Palencar project featured five stories commissioned by Tor.com to fit a painting by John Jude Palencar. I have to say it’s a bit disappointing to see that the commissioned stories feature authors only from the single most overrepresented group in Anglophone SF, and some people have already expressed their displeasure in the comments.

There is also another controversial issue, namely that the painting was originally intended for a novel by Ian Tregillis and there is no mention of this on Tor.com. I have to say I haven’t read the novel, but I’ve just ordered a copy from the Book Depository (who, surprisingly, ship to Hungary free of charge) to remedy this as fast as possible.

Anyway, back to the stories… Today we’ll only have one story because of the long wall of intro text above. Oops!

New World Blues by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (an American man)

from Tor.com Originals, Feb 2012

Not the best start: “She walks into the control center, feeling foolish in the ankle-length purple-gray skirt and the long-sleeved high-collared white blouse.” Modest clothing makes one feel foolish? That’s not the way you win me over.

 The story is written in tight third person with a woman as the POV character. (I wonder if all these stories inspired by a painting of a woman will have a female protagonist, but we’ll see.) I think she’s middle-aged because there is ample reference to her age as being too old… we would not see this with a male protagonist.

A tentacle monster from hell, which is supposedly in the skies (?), is attracted to women. Uh. It is even described as “acting like a typical domineering male”. Apparently if you write about a woman, it can only be about a gender power struggle (whereas if you write about a man, it can be about anything). The protagonist has a mansplaining contest with the monster – I kid you not – and… that’s about it. The ending is completely incoherent – it’s like the author forgot about the scene at the beginning of the story and decided to just write a story about (spoiler!) virtual reality acting. The only thing that is established is that the protagonist is a so-called Strong Woman. I recommend Rose Lemberg’s recent essay on the topic.

Feel free to skip this story… tomorrow we’ll see if the rest is any better! (I sure hope so, I was really looking forward to this project; I love themed collections.)

First, the table of contents for the  second volume of Mirror Shards has been announced and I’m on it. Whee!

Second, Here, We Cross – an collection of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling 1-7 has been released; my neutrois-themed poem The Handcrafted Motions of Flight is reprinted in it and you totally want to buy a copy. Yes, I know my poem is available online, but you need to support this worthwhile endeavor

Here’s the cover – it uses a painting by the awesome M. K. Čiurlionis. (Wikimedia Commons has a large selection of Čiurlionis paintings in case you’re interested.) If you click on it, you are shunted to Amazon, where you can pick up your copy of the chapbook. It’s hot off the press! You will also be able to  buy it on Wiscon  and attend the release party if you happen to be there. It sort of feels like the entire world except me will attend Wiscon, I wonder if I should try to get my friends to meet each other, but the friendship relation is not transitive, so that might not go well…

The next week’s theme is Men Writing Women – I owe the idea to Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It might take more than a week to make six entries, but I’ve already written a few posts in anticipation of the new theme.

So, some magic and some psi for the last entry…

To Go Home to Leal by Susan Forest (a Canadian woman)

from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2012

I loved yesterday’s story from BCS, but I was much less satisfied with this one – I originally had something else in mind for today’s entry, but this story illustrates the perils of magical worldbuilding so well, I had to review it still in time for the theme.

This is a character-centric piece, about a boy and his father who is a petty criminal and an alcoholic. I had no problems with the characters or the general quality of the writing itself, but there was one point toward the end where the plot completely broke down for me.

Spoilers follow: The father yearns to return to his hometown, but he cannot, because he’s been branded a thief – quite literally, they cut his hands off, first one, than the other. So the boy tries to smuggle his father back by hiring a magician to put him into a state where he looks dead. Then the boy gets through the city guard by showing them the corpse in a casket. Where this breaks down is that magic, while expensive, does not seem to be particularly unknown or hidden in the story universe. Yet the guards never for a second suspect that maybe the corpse is not really dead. I think this is a variant on what TVTropes calls Plot Induced Stupidity.

Magic exists for the sake of the plot gimmick, but does not fit into the story universe in general. This is the exact thing that works in a story, but does not work in a roleplaying adventure. Magic is a big plot-breaker if the writer does not take some time to reflect on the implications.

Next up is something I’ve been putting off reviewing, because lots of people – including regular commenters – liked it, and I disliked it a lot.

Alarms by S. L. Gilbow (an American man)

from Lightspeed, March 2012

(S. L. Gilbow doesn’t seem to have a website either. I run into more and more writers like that these days, even in pro online venues…)

Cara is a young and slightly oddball woman who one day acquires the ability to set off alarms in her vicinity. All of them, and she cannot help this. She is a lot like me, incidentally – can’t you tell? About the lists, I mean – so it’s hard for me to read this story without taking it all too personally.

After Rachel Swirsky’s novelette Fields of Gold made both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists, I’ve seen a huge proliferation of quirky lists as story elements (especially in slush, but to a lesser extent even in published fiction). I’m willing to give Gilbow the benefit of doubt that he came up with the idea on his own, but there’s always that but.

The story makes it very clear that this uncommon ability is a curse, in fact a “supercurse”. There’s a lot in there that I can identify with – down to details like the protagonist playing cockroach à la Kafka – and I can see why she would feel that way. But I think the entire chronology is off. Of course there’s not much I can base that on, but a good real-life analogy would be poltergeist cases, which do seem to have a common narrative thread to them.

Some spoilers follow, from now on to the end of the review; I’m not cutting them because this is the end of the post anyway.

Seeing as her ability works unfailingly 100% of the time, I can’t believe she would not try to, um, monetize it in some way even before she is able to control it. I would not recommend the Randi prize or the military – what occurs to people in real life – but surely she would’ve at least had a stray thought in that direction. Not necessarily about monetization per se, but she could at least try to see some positive aspect to her ability even before she gains control of it, or make an attempt to locate people who know more about this. (Believe it or not, some people actually turn to universities, which is not necessarily a bad notion. If you need a referral, let me know.) Even if the point is that she is clinically depressed, her boyfriend could think of something.

Then the problem is solved much, much too easily. Of course, I get it, it was a metaphor all along. Except even if it’s a metaphor for OCD or Asperger’s or whatever, those issues do not solve themselves overnight either, and even the assumption that they do is quite offensive. (See “magical cure”.)

She gets to the “monetizing” part only after she gains control. Then we have yet another ironic take on superheroes and supervillains. The problem is, even subversions of superheroes tropes have been done to death already. I’ve reviewed another similar story during this themed week, and I’ve read a lot more.

Also, the story made me realize that alarms were a lot more common in the US than in Hungary. Yeah, that’s a kind of well duh notion, but it really never occurred to me before. I’d probably go bonkers if I had alarms in my apartment. It’s bad enough that I have to worry about a stray EMP taking out the smart meter… *grimaces*

Similar stories I’ve reviewed: Dragonfly Girl by Chuck Wilkerson, see above.

Scry by Anne Ivy (two American women)

from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2012

Anne Ivy is a pseudonym for two sisters. I think this is their first published work – under this pseudonym at least. I could not even dreg up contact information for them, I suppose I could pester the magazine, but I assume the authors are secretive for a reason. One of them is a lawyer and the other is a MD, and I guess they are worried that their professional careers are going to be impacted adversely if it ever comes to light that they *gasp* write speculative fiction.

(I’m frankly quite puzzled by that, in Hungary I’ve never experienced anything even remotely like trouble, on the contrary. Or maybe scientists are different from lawyers and doctors, in this respect at least… anyway, this is a mostly irrelevant tangent.)

This is a good solid fantasy novelette… or maybe I could even call it science fantasy, given that one of the characters is an alien straight out of a space opera tale. It ran in BCS, which normally publishes fantasy, but during a special science-fantasy event, so I guess it’s in one of those inbetween places where classic categories break down.

The protagonist is a female aristocrat who both experiences and instigates some high-class intrigue. I’m normally not a fan of stories focusing on aristocrats, but this story was so well-written, it could’ve focused on the English royal family for all I cared.

The goings-on mostly have to do with some people’s ability to scry and thereby see the future. The ages-old question rears its head: “Does scrying merely reveal things, or does it make them happen?” It’s all very well-executed and surprisingly realistic for such an… operatic setting and mood. The ending is spot on; I absolutely loved the final sentence.

The alien (demon?) as an agent of social change is also an interesting theme, I wish I could read more stories set in this world. I find it hard to think of things I disliked – I think the sex was a bit too sudden and… cinematic, but that fit the setting, so I suppose this is a matter of personal taste. In any case it did not detract from my enjoyment of the story.

Similar stories I’ve reviewed: To Follow the Waves by Amal El-Mohtar – more magical fantasy with a central idea that sounds like a disaster, but works surprisingly well regardless.

Shadows Under Hexmouth Street by Justin Howe (an American man who lives in South Korea)

from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #89, Feb 2012

A fantasy crime story… of sorts, where the polisomancer’s apprentice has to locate his missing master. There’s a lot of charming detail:

“Deli-berry.” The office homunculus dropped a parcel on the desk, then swallowed the ashbin’s contents. The creature coughed-spat the bent paperclips onto its palm and hooked them through its tattered lapels.

The focus is on the sense of place; the city itself generates magical creatures, and if one can tune into the genius loci, wondrous things might happen. At first I was worried that the plot would flounder, but the ending was great and surprisingly upbeat. It took two reads for this story to grow on me, but I ended up liking it a lot.

Also, absolutely great line (I’m unsure whether it counts as a spoiler): “It wasn’t hard. It only took his surrender.” That’s true of magic and related activities in general, I’d argue, and not just in fantasy; it’s a quite lengthy tangent, but allow me to offer a Talmudic story about intercessory prayer:

On another occasion it happened that R. Hanina b. Dosa went to study Torah with R. Johanan ben Zakkai. The son of R. Johanan ben Zakkai fell ill. He said to him: Hanina my son, pray for him that he may live. He put his head between his knees and prayed for him and he lived. Said R. Johanan ben Zakkai: If Ben Zakkai had stuck his head between his knees for the whole day, no notice would have been taken of him. Said his wife to him: Is Hanina greater than you are? He replied to her: No; but he is like a servant before the king, and I am like a nobleman before a king. (Berachot 34b, trans. Maurice Simon)

 Let’s read another story from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, who publish a lot of magic-oriented fantasy…

A Place to Stand by Grace Seybold (a Canadian woman)

from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #89 (Feb 2012)

It’s established right away that magic is inherently untrustworthy:

Benign magic, like the Lady Adelie’s, but magic still, and not to be entirely trusted.

I’m not fond of this offered in such an unreflected manner. Let’s go on to see if it gets better… it doesn’t get better, but my explanation gets quite spoilery, so you might not want to read the rest of this entry before reading the story itself.

Lady Adelie, the sorceress, uses magic to optimize the lives of villagefolk and create happy and fulfilling fates for them. This takes the form of an initiation ceremony: villagers visit her house, enter a trance state and dream their futures. She then nudges them away from misfortune. She does not tell the villagers exactly what she is doing, for fear that if they were to find out, they would become paranoid.

Predictably, a girl finds out, and the sorceress does not want to let her go. An outlaw breaks into the house, the girl sides with him, they wound the sorceress (it is unclear if she is killed; she tries a healing spell on herself, so let’s hope she stays alive), and the girl and the outlaw go off on an adventure.

Take-home message: if you do a magical working that benefits people, you get a knife in your belly? The sorceress specifically states she did not try to control people, just to preserve them from untimely death or misery. Of course, she could’ve been lying, but her actions seem consistent with her words. The only thing she could be faulted for is not letting the girl go when she is unable to find a happy fortune for her. Attempting to murder the sorceress in turn seems like overkill…

So a bandit who goes around hurting people or whatever it is that bandits do (he threatens to murder the girl too) is a better option than a well-meaning and rather timid sorceress? I’m not buying that.

As before, it’d be quite unfair for me to review the issue, since I had a hand in it (though I’m not the editor); but I especially liked Nikki Alfar’s and Bonnie Stufflebeam’s stories. I’m going to tag this entry with author and theme tags so that if someone wants to find, say, a story with gay characters, they’ll be able to… etc. you know the drill.

*

Second, Rose Lemberg’s absolutely awesome flash story Seven Losses of Na Re is up at Daily Science Fiction. Rose has offered to sponsor my Hugo membership next year, so I’m not going to nominate her work to any awards, but this is literally the best flash story I’ve read all year. Read it now!

*

Third, I’ve had some time to write fiction and poetry (time that should’ve been spent asleep, or responding to that huge stack of personal emails – I apologize!!). Responses seem to take forever, but I’ve already sold the story This Secular Technology to Mirror Shards Vol. 2., so a few words are due…

The story was inspired by sfirat haomer, though that in itself does not make an appearance. The protagonists are Orthodox Jewish girls – I was fed up with the overwhelming male dominance in Jewish-themed SF stories, so I’ve gone ahead and written a few stories about Jewish women. I have to say I once received a quite racist personal rejection that turned me off writing fiction altogether for a while… This is my revenge in a sense.

The plot involves running around a space station and killing demons with symbiotic bioweapons. There is psi. A lot of it. (It fits this week’s theme!) You get to learn about the Kabbalistic benefits of augmented reality. There are small lulz. There is a theological question that goes unanswered because, um, DEMONS AT THE GATE (and because I wanted the reader to think about it before googling for a mainstream answer). Plus the whole thing can be read as a retelling of the Akeidah. Enough of a teaser?

I wanted the story to have cinematic action, plus include a scene reminiscent of classic shamanic initiations, but in physical reality. In the process, I’m afraid I’ve contributed to some of the same psychokinesis = warfare tropes I’ve just decried yesterday, but to be honest I wouldn’t even have realized there was such a strong connection between these two concepts in my mind if not for these recent stories I’ve written… though only this one has an actual battle. I hope the others will also see the light of day soon! (My recent poem in Stone Telling also fits here, sort of.)

*

+1: this just came in, after I wrote the above post… Aliette de Bodard has an interesting essay about  SFF as metaphor: aliens, vampires, foreigners and immigrants. I’ve just commented on the discussion thread myself.

Bright Lights by Robert Reed (an American man)

from Strange Horizons, May 2012

An extraterrestrial who appears to be both telepathic and psychokinetic hijacks a high school class and abducts the children. The nonhuman first-person viewpoint has been done time and time again; here I did not feel like it was really believable. The alien apparently does not understand the meaning of a smile – as evidenced by the repetition of “showing her teeth” -, but knows expressions like father-son bow? Heck I‘ve never heard of father-son bows before. (Also, how can a telepathic being not understand the meaning of a smile while paying attention to the speaker? That’s odd…)

There is also some gender fail. First we read this description of the class: “Eleven partly grown people are sitting in the classroom. Seven are male, three female. One is somewhere between.” Later on, the child who is “somewhere between” is identified in the following ways: “the person that is not quite a girl”, “the boyish girl”, “the girl/boy” and “she”. So are boyish girls not quite girls? Excuse me? I did not expect to read this in Strange Horizons of all places! (An alternate reading is that a genderfluid trans person is miscategorized as female, but to be honest I don’t think that was the author’s intention here.)

The ending paragraph is very amusing though, I suppose outdoorsy people of all planets think alike?

Similar stories I’ve reviewed: Defenders by Will McIntosh – this story is so similar in both style and subject matter that I thought at first that it was written by the same author!

At the Foot of the Lighthouse (Todai Moto Kurashi) by Erin Hoffman (a multiethnic American woman)

from Tor.com Originals, May 2012

This is a story of the Japanese internment camps in the US in WWII and it is inspired by the author’s family heritage. She identifies as multiethnic and at least one of those ethnicities is Japanese-American.

I come from a similarly assimilationist background and I’ve had my moments of betrayal by the majority, though at least my beloved Hungarians haven’t decided to ship me off to a camp yet. (I’m sorry if that sounds too wry, but that’s how I feel.) So the story hit close to home and I think the ethnic aspect is spot on – at least as far as I can tell, being from a completely different set of cultures, but familiar with a somewhat analogous situation (ie. Jews in Hungary).

The prose is beautiful and yet easy to read, though maybe there are too many quotes… the Nietzsche line at the end felt a bit clichéd. It’s a great quote, but I’m afraid I’ve read it one time too many.

 What I have a huge issue with is the presentation of psychokinesis. I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but you’re probably better off reading the story first before moving on to the next paragraph.

There is the mostly American concept that psychokinesis can only be used for military purposes, and this story feeds right into that. Healing, building things, etc. every other use is overlooked in favor of the military. It does not seem like a major issue, but I lapped up such stories in grade school and in retrospect it has been very damaging. If one is in the slightest bit spiritually inclined, this is not a beneficial cultural lesson to learn, and I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with it myself.

I understand that here in this story this association of psychokinesis with warfare is used to represent a much more nuanced concept than, say, in superhero fiction, but it still reinforces the negative tropes. I’m not sure the  readers will realize that this association is wrong (even though it’s presented as such in the story – the military guys are not the “good guys” here) rather than “why, that’s only natural, that’s only logical, etc.”. I’ve heard that argument over and over, for example about the oppression of telepaths in Babylon 5. “This is only realistic.” Again, many – if not all! – traditional cultures have similar concepts of affecting physical reality with the mind, and it is not exclusively connected to warfare.

Since the protagonist’s family has this as a family tradition – as far as it’s possible to tell; for example, the grandmother clearly recognizes what is going on – then all these problems would’ve been alleviated just by a scene or two exploring that. To make sure the reader understands that there is more to uncommon abilities than mass murder. Then the contrast would have been even sharper.

Similar stories I’ve reviewed: The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu.

A Case of Curiosities by Guy Anthony De Marco (an American man)

A magic box story with a highly predictable twist. I’m sure I’ve read something very similar before. (There is also the Apocalypse Box in Crusade – I’ve just watched the episode where it’s introduced last month -, but that’s not what I’m thinking of.)

Guaranteed to Work by Lee Hallison (an American woman)

We’ve just had a fairy godmother tale, and now here’s a fairy godfather tale. It’s interesting that the protagonists are both retired – not the usual age range of fantasy, definitely – and the plot is interesting, but the writing did not really grab me.

The Pencil of Truth by Shamus Maxwell (a British man)

Strange shopkeeper sells magical items. That should have a TVTropes page… oh wait, it does have one. The story starts off lampooning the trope right away *yawn*, but the magical item in question is somewhat interesting at least.

Magic Enough by Chuck Von Nordheim (an American man)

I’d just railed against Bradbury-esque “Beautiful Small-Town American Childhood” stories in another upcoming blog post, and in this one’s contributor notes the author himself flat out says that’s what he wanted to achieve (uh oh). It’s different though. One of the kids is terminally ill and the other tries to cheer him up. I can live with this more realistic variant on the Bradbury theme…

Prophet by Laura Lee McArdle (a Canadian woman)

The odd one out; I ran out of stories tagged with magic which were eligible, so this one is a religiously-themed fantasy short story, but since the protagonist communicates telepathically with G-d, it still counts. Apparently G-d is a prankster! It’s all… oddly cute, though I think the little girl’s voice isn’t always spot on.

*

All in all I wasn’t very impressed with this set of flash stories, but maybe that’s because something 100% pure awesome is going to be up at Daily SF very soon; it was written by a friend, so I’m kind of biased, but it also prompted Ken Liu to say he wished he could write something that good (!), so at least I’m not alone in thinking the story is great.

I’ve come across an interesting fundraiser in the meanwhile. Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire is raising money for a postcolonialism-themed SF anthology he’s going to co-edit with Fabio Fernandes.

They are at 75% funding right now, so now would be a good time to chip in. I have to say I used to be very skeptical of such fundraisers because ultimately nothing came out of the huge amount of money raised for Verb Noire… but Djibril al-Ayad has a proven track record and Future Fire has been around for a long time. (BTW the latest issue is also available in epub format and has work from several writers I like, I should put this in my reviews queue…) So this seems like a worthy cause.

Reviews will be longer than usual this week – I have plenty to rant about, sigh -, so I’m only doing one story a day. I have more than enough material, so if you want to read even more about psi and/or magic in SF, I’m up for it…

Dragonfly Girl by Chuck Wilkerson (an American man)

from Redstone Science Fiction, Feb 2012

A story set in the present day with no trimmings; a young girl realizes she can communicate telepathically with insects. Similar abilities run in the family and she receives some instruction on the dos and don’ts from her mother. The moral is straight from Spiderman – literally:

“We watched Spider-Man.  The movie, you know?”

“Yes, Lily.  I have been to the movies once or twice.  And what did you learn?”

“Don’t get bitten by mutant spiders?”

“And?”

“Don’t make me say it, Mom.”

That’s basically all of the story, it’s all quite low-key and simple. The message is nice – you need to make sure you do not throw the environment off balance – but… can you get any more derivative than that, just barely shying away from “With great power comes great responsibility”?

I’m not sure that’s a good moral anyway: everyone has great responsibility, irrespective of “power”. You can drive someone to suicide with verbal harassment or save someone with a few kind words – and to offer a classic quote from the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5), one who saves a life saves an entire world. How does our responsibility get greater than that?

I think a better way of putting it would be somewhere along the lines of possible actions. Someone who has an uncommon ability has more possible actions to consider. That’s about it… much less flashy and superhero-power-fantasy-esque than Spiderman, but much more applicable to real life.

Since the author was – IMO – shooting for a reasonably realistic depiction of uncommon abilities, it’s slightly disappointing that he had to drag spandex-wearing superheroes into the mix, even in an ironic manner. (“So I’m not destined to wear tights and lead my bug legions to world conquest?”) My friend Dash often talks about cultural context re psi – this story basically reinforces the sad truth that mainstream American culture only offers superheroes and such as cultural context, and that’s… not very useful in everyday life.

Similar stories I’ve reviewed: Six Months, Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders – with precognition instead of animal telepathy, and not as positive as  Dragonfly Girl (to say the least), but also set in the present day.