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.