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.
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 questionwhy 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!*
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.
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.
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?“
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.
Today we have two stories about human-alien interaction! To be honest I prefer the term “extraterrestrial”, it’s less value-laden… but that’s probably only me.
Join by Liz Coleman (an American woman) – I don’t have a link for her personal website
from the September 2011 issue of Lightspeed
A story about a human man who becomes a surrogate father to an alien joined to his body – for the time being, at least. A topic I personally find fascinating, and the characterization of the protagonist is decent.
I’m surprised SFnal body modification usually does not relate to the real-life body modification subculture in any shape or form, it’s like the authors do not even know (or have trouble contemplating?) that such a thing exists. This story is an exception! Unfortunately that alone does not really carry it through to the conclusion.
The protagonist visits his family on Earth and a strained coming-out scene ensues. It made me groan – the whole story looks like an extended metaphor for gay adoption even if that was not the author’s intent. It really comes across as “look, I’m writing a story about a current issue, JUST IN SPAAACE“. Aliens are used as stand-ins for minority groups all too often and this is a trend I strongly dislike. If people want to write about minority groups, they should write about minority groups. If people want to write about aliens, they should write about aliens. Mixing the two has very unfortunate implications even if, I repeat, that was not the author’s original intent.
Also, I think the mother’s reaction was completely unrealistic (spoiler cut): the mother goes from “I’d never seen her like this. She looked like a wilted flower, her hand draped limply over her knee, her big onyx ring dangling from her grasp. She looked at me with empty eyes.” to “But she slowly smiled as she looked at the photo, and then at Ngoraich’s battered casing, and asked: “What’s her name?”” People don’t change that much in the course of a single conversation. I guess the author wanted a happy ending, but this is a huge oversimplification of coming out (related to any topic), and thus potentially harmful to people who’ve had to go through a coming-out talk themselves.
One more spoilery note: I’m not saying coming-out stories should always have bad endings, G-d forbid! But if the author wanted to end the story on a positive note, she shouldn’t have set up the story this way, with people starting off from an extremely negative position.
This is a lighthearted story about a clown and a monkey… There are a few moments of brilliance here and there, but by and large the story is not very deep. Terry Bisson has proven that one can write humorous stories which are also very profound, and that really influences my expectations. If something is not very deep, it should at least be unique and memorable, and this story is neither.
It’s an okay read, but definitely not award-winning material. I find it hard enough to say much about it, but fortunately I ranted all too long about the first story, so there’s enough for you to read
Definitely one of the more memorable stories from this year’s Lightspeed. I’m also very happy to see fellow Eastern Europeans gain more exposure
At first I thought this would be a story set inside a computer running Linux: “The gnomes live in the cellar. They’re short and green and wear big fluffy hats with their names on them, like GUI 1, GUI 2, GUI 3″. Which isn’t really a novel idea, save for maybe the Linux part. But the story is about something completely different and ends up being much more ingenuous than just another virtual-reality tale, so keep on reading! Without giving away much, neuroplasticity is a keyword.
“What if you took a very young human brain and placed it in a complex simulated quantum-like environment? Might it learn to adapt to this environment and predict its behavior in real time as accurately as we predict the behavior of the real world (for a quantum-mechanical, probabilistic meaning of “predict”)? If it did, that would be a very strong indication that the human brain does indeed rely on quantum phenomena to make sense of the world”
I think the human mind can model environments whose behavior has no real-world analog; there are some really far-out ideas in experimental gameplay etc. that IMO seem to show this… but I don’t know if this issue has ever been rigorously investigated. Anyway, the story is great
from the Mar/Apr 2011 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction (available as a free story from Del Rey’s website and as an audiobook from Podcastle)
This is a realy, really sad and beautiful story. Definitely one of the best in 2011 – if this keeps up, the hard problem will be deciding which Ken Liu story to nominate for the Hugos!
Also, finally a story that deals with immigration. Even people who belong to a non-WASP ethnic group tend to write about “the sourceland” as Deepa D put it, and not the immigrant or the ethnic-minority experience… at least in spec fic. (The trend is probably reversed when it comes to contemporary non-genre literature!)
Some of it reminded me of the scene in Michael Ende’s Momo where the kids play with the new toys. Also very melancholy.
You can say The Paper Menagerie is fantasy, or you can say it’s magical realism, it’s going to find its home anywhere. Go read it now.
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Note: a big thank you to España Sheriff who linked the audiobook version on hugo_recommend – I would’ve missed the podcast release altogether if not for this notice.
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 endangeredPavlovsk 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 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.
I have a new story online! I wrote it back in December (I think…) when my friend Dash mentioned Innsmouth Free Press (a Mythos webzine) was looking for submissions to an upcoming multiethnic issue. It straddles the boundary between light horror and urban fantasy… it’s an oddball combination of Hungarian urban myths, Cthulhu Mythos, and my childhood. You can read the issue online or download a nice PDF.
I have to admit I have not written a single story since The Turul Spreads Its Wings (forthcoming in the Roar of the Crowd anthology!). If you’re interested in the chronology, Bottomless Lake Bus Stop came earlier.
I will have to spend a sizable portion of the summer writing – besides fiction, I also have several scientific articles to finish and submit! (See my previous entry.)
This is just a quick announcement to say that my historical fantasy story The Turul Spreads its Wings will be featured in the Roar of the Crowd anthology published by Rogue Blades Entertainment. The anthology will be released in September IY”H.
The story has an Ancient Hungarian setting, so if you’re interested in that sort of fantasy, be sure to get the anthology when it comes out. I’m all new to historical fantasy, but I enjoyed writing this piece and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it, too!
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Unfortunately I’ve written all of two stories in 2010 so far… this was one of them. But I finished a thesis and a lengthy funding proposal, so I’ve written a lot overall, but it was all nonfiction. I’ll try to write more fiction from now on, especially seeing as this was a semi-pro sale. I need to convince myself to submit to pro markets! (In Hungarian it’s not a problem. But in English, I admit I have a self-confidence issue due to not being a native speaker.) It’s also hard to write fiction when my job involves writing nonfiction, and I don’t want to do ‘more of the same’ (= writing in general) in my free time!
With all that being said, I’m now writing a nonfiction piece on a science fiction topic, but who said I had to make sense?
), 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.
