Love and Anarchy and Science Fiction by Angela Ambroz (an Italian-Slovenian woman)

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!

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.

 Here is the promised novella, thematically quite similar to the previous one.

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.

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.

Making My Entrance Again with My Usual Flair by Ken Scholes (an American man)

from Tor.com Originals (Jan 12 2011)

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

Mama, we are Zhenya, Your Son by Tom Crosshill (a Latvian-American man who is also an immigrant)

from the April 2011 issue of Lightspeed

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.

Be sure to read the author interview as well once you’re finished. All magazines should have similar extra features!

To be honest I disagree with him (spoiler cut):

“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

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (a Chinese-American man)

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.

_________

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.

All That Touches the Air by An Owomoyela (an American asexual neutrois person of color)

from the April 2011 issue of Lightspeed

A lengthy alien-contact story with great characterization. Very few stories try to tackle the fundamental claustrophobia inherent in living in an alien environment (Bios by Robert Charles Wilson comes to mind, and… not much else) and this one does a great job. It’s great to see that not everyone reacts the same way, and some people might take precautions a bit too far, just like in real life.

There is also an annoying little know-it-all in there, a character type seldom seen in SF probably because it uncomfortably reminds most authors of their childhood selves.

It’s hard to say whether this story is better than Frozen Voice, the author’s previous work I reviewed… I enjoyed this one more on an intellectual level, but Frozen Voice had more striking imagery that stayed with me over time. (I am a very visual sort of person, you can bribe me with spiffy pictures ) Anyway, both stories are well worth the read!

As before, read the author interview – it gives a really new perspective on the story. (And yes, there’s a bit about childhood selves in there…)

The Rotten Beast by Mary E. Pearson (an American woman)

from Tor.com Originals (Nov 30 2011)

What a simplistic tale. I kept on waiting for a faint glimmer of originality – or perhaps a masterful twist that will subvert all the bad tropes in the story at the same time – but no, nothing.

Of course maybe we’re all just dealing with an unreliable narrator – after all, she is an emotional teenager who comes across as the straw-man who people like to attack when talking about religious fundamentalists. (No, actual religious fundamentalists are not necessarily like that, but this is an unrelated tangent best saved for some other time.) There is no mention of religion in the story though, there are only lengthy anti-technology and anti-science rants that are about as profound as those conspiracy theories about Satan’s barcode printed on your forehead.

The technology is laughable: “I press my hand to my chest and try to feel the biochips clicking away inside”, “Being controlled by all the computer chips stuffed into his Biogel?”. I understand this is a YA story, but young adults are not stupid for the most part; they should not be treated as such.

Unfortunately there is not a shred of evidence in the story itself that the narrator is unreliable. Moreover, the story is a straight-up retelling of Eve and the apple, except… with a peach. I’m serious. A peach.

I’d say this one is a lemon.

(:O Couldn’t resist…)

I’m no longer doing these reviews magazine by magazine and in chronological order. I read a lot of stuff which I haven’t reviewed yet that I’ve found really meh, and I want to spice up the mehness a bit. Some magazines are quite consistently boring. (At least Clarkesworld tends to be interesting even when I dislike the stories in question.) Maybe I’ll post about that later on…

Spoiler cuts are the same as usual.

Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow by Corey Mariani (an American man)

from the Jan 2011 issue of Lightspeed

This is the author’s first publication (congrats!) and despite that he writes with a firm, self-assured voice. Alas, I’ve found the worldbuilding sorely lacking: if it is possible to change people’s sexual orientation in this hypothetical future, why is it not possible to change their social predilections? Why do the adults turn several children into killers instead of simply making the opposite change to their victim? Even the protagonist asks “It seems to me that they could have lit that house on fire just as easily as we did. They didn’t have to show us all of those awful things.” So why did they do that? Are the adults just evil for no particular reason, or am I missing something? I expected more after the fascinating start.

Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor by Grady Hendrix (an American man)

from the June 2011 issue of Lightspeed

A short, humorous story about a crash landing and… wait, there’s no sense in summarizing when all that is included in the story title anyway.

I suppose I would’ve found it funnier if I had hands-on experience with real-life OnStar systems; it’s not very amusing to read about an unfamiliar thing being parodied. Unfortunately this limits the story readership to regions where OnStar is available…

Further still, the story is eerily similar to Mars: A Traveler’s Guide by Ruth Nestvold (also available as an audiobook in podcast form). The Nestvold story has a different angle, though; much more melancholy. Also, AI chatlogs in general have been done to death in SF – I’ve even seen the topic on magazine “do not submit” lists.

The “sensual lovemaking” parts were amusing, but that’s about the only positive thing I can say about this story.

Endnote: Grady Hendrix often writes about Asian topics, but he is not actually Asian, hence this post is not tagged with Asian writers.

Clarkesworld #57 – June 2011

I liked this issue overall. Again, spoilers are in white.

Semiramis by Genevieve Valentine (an American woman)

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 endangered Pavlovsk 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 by Mari Ness (an American woman)

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.

*

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.

The short story reviews are back after the interruption… Again, spoilers are marked with white.

Clarkesworld #56, May 2011

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo (an American woman)

Last week, I had a strange idea. Sometime in the far future, I’d like to edit a thematic anthology which features body horror stories without the horror… or more accurately, without the revulsion. Body horror is usually presented in a bad way. The character changes into something in a quite graphic manner, and this is presented as horrifying and possibly evil. Stories which still have quite graphic elements, but where the reader is expected to feel the events are good and moral for some reason, or just neutral and normal, are few and far between… even though speculative fiction is supposed to be (at least in part) about just how far the human condition extends.

This story could possibly qualify, though it is not really graphic. The main character is a shapeshifter, but the usual tired tropes about shapeshifting do not apply. For example, when someone dies, everyone (including the reader) expects the shapeshifter killed them, but it turns out the shapeshifter was telling the truth that it was an accident. All throughout the reader is left rooting for the shapeshifter, and in my opinion that’s a Very Good Thing and something so often lacking in modern Western SF. (A Russian parallel I really liked was the Stars duology by Sergei Lukyanenko, unfortunately not available in English yet.) The fictional Other is usually evil, demonized, disgusting – the restraint writers try to exercise when writing about real Others is usually gone and their xenophobia shows through clearly. Not here, and thank Cat Rambo for that.

We still have the evil mad scientist trope – by now you probably know this is one of my pet peeves -, but in this story the scientist is more of a greedy jerk than the classic mad scientist.

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman (an American man)

I simply could not get into this story. It starts off very slowly and does not really pick up steam until the second half. A friend of mine showed me The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test the other day and I couldn’t get it out of my head while reading The Architect of Heaven. Trent is extremely rich, extremely popular, and people readily sacrifice their lives for him. This would not be necessarily bad in itself, but I saw nothing in the story that would’ve made me feel that yes, Trent really was that kind of guy. The characterization just wasn’t strong enough for the rest to be believable.

I wasn’t sure if there was a gay subplot, because it is never discussed explicitly, but if there is, then that’s probably worse, because of course the gay man ends up sacrificing himself for the straight guy. LJ user prusik posted a lengthy analysis, so I’m not going to go into more detail; this is definitely not one of the cases where I notice something about a story that no one else has pointed out yet.

I’m writing an article on the characterization of Eastern Europeans, so I’m not going to comment on the stereotyped Russian… and the stereotyped Chinese, either. But I think this story is going to make an apparance in the article…