Today we have two stories by women authors. I’m trying to come up with a schedule… I’ve just read something I loved, recommended by a reader (review coming soon IY”H), so keep those recommendations coming! Also, feel free to recommend bad stories, especially if they have to do with underrepresented groups. I’ll review them and hopefully that’ll help others avoid Teh Suffarz

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.

I’ve gotten an amount of responses (mostly private) when I asked for recommendations, error corrections, etc. and I’ll do my best to work through them Thank you folks, this is most appreciated!

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.

Today’s stories are both about… apples! In a roundabout way, at least… You know you are tempted to read on!

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.

Today we have two stories about religion! Errrr… Scientology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster qualify, right?

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.