Short story reviews: Clarkesworld, Feb 2011
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 
