The Best Short Stories of 1915 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story is the first of the series that eventually became the Best American set of series of books. It’s in the public domain and available on Google Books. I grabbed it because I wanted to see what was considered the best way back then. I did not get or appreciate a few of the stories in the 1969 edition, but they were well-crafted. 1915 is another thing though. Several of the stories appear to be selected not for the quality of the story, but for the political content. I’m quite a fan of stories being explicitly political, but in at least a couple of cases in this collection, the entries had little else going for them. They were mostly ham-handed in their treatment of the politics as well.

Some craft things I noticed. Lots of stories were of the form where one person in the story tells another person a story. Today we’d see this done with a flashback or other method. In addition, three of those were of the form where the person tells a story about themself, but doesn’t reveal that until the end of the story.

The themes fit a couple of political and moral notes: respect for veterans, America is the land of the free, immigrants are good for our country, and most of all, right living will get a person ahead.

Did not enjoy this collection, and I probably won’t read the subsequent editions edited by Edward O’Brien even though a bunch of them are public domain and free.

The Water-Hole by Maxwell Struthers Burt

Back from a stint in Arizona, a man gets into a discussion with his drinking buddies about the nature of bravery. Is it instinctual or is it conditioning? To illustrate, the Arizona man tells a story of love, where a woman’s husband and another who loves her trek out to the desert in search of gold. The husband is a boor, and jeopardizes their lives as well. And yet, the other man saves his life (instinctively!). And in a preview of many other stories, at the end his buddies figure out the Arizona man is telling a story about himself.

The Wake by Donn Byrne

Wealthy farmer marries a girl, because her father had given her to him. Only thing was, she was in love with another named Kennedy, and he with her. After the marriage, she wastes away in the farmer’s house in quick order, and Kennedy vows revenge. The farmer has an interesting reaction. Other than the ugly morals of the time, this was a good story until the end, where it kind of falls apart.

Chautonville by Will Levington Comfort

Russian generals hire a folk singer, Chautonville, to inspire the men on the front lines to fight. Despite his fear of dying, he sings to them.

La Dernière Mobilisation by W. A. Dwiggins

Kind of a cool story about soldiers mobilizing at the end of a battle. Very short.

The Citizen by James Francis Dwyer

At the swearing in ceremony where he takes on U.S. citizenship, a Russian immigrant remembers back to his days in Russia when he found his Dream (capital D) of freedom in America. Very didactic.

Whose Dog—? by Frances Gregg

Young boys torment a homeless guy at the dock, where his life isn’t very valuable. Depressing.

Life by Ben Hecht

A young playwright comes across a living metaphor, and the metaphor is him. And it’s ugly.

T.B. by Fannie Hurst

Young woman works in a basement sale department under arc-lights. At night she goes to dance halls with a beau. Her roommate constantly chastises her. Then she happens on a tuberculosis exhibit and clinic and begins to think she has it because bad air and dancing gives you T.B. Also, men at dance halls are jerks who will drop you at the slightest hint of trouble.

Mr. Eberdeen’s House by Arthur Johnson

Ghost story that I didn’t quite understand. Visitor to the Eberdeen house has visions that put him in place of a ghost he sees.

Vengeance Is Mine by Virgil Jordan

An Allied pilot is assigned to check out the battlefield before the troops engage with the enemy. There’s no sign of the Germans, so the pilot lands, and can’t take off again for ugly reasons.

The Weaver Who Clad the Summer by Harris Merton Lyon

A parable about finding contentment in one’s Work, even if it won’t last but the moment (as the work of a sculptor or painter would). Also, another story where the speaker tells a story to another listener in the story, and at the end the speaker says, and it was about me!

Heart of Youth by Walter J. Muilenburg

A young farming family is faced with moving west to a place with dryer air for the health of the family’s mother. The young son wrestles with whether to stay behind and work the old farm on his own so that the family won’t have to sell it. Prepare yourself for the maudlin touching moment at the end.

The End of the Path by Newbold Noyes

Two young lovers are separated when the woman suddenly becomes enamored of her religion and joins a convent. Feeling particularly put upon, the young man enters the chapel and stabs a statue of the Virgin Mary to express how the church torments him. At that exact same moment in the convent, his former betrothed falls dead! Yet another story within a story where the storyteller exclaims and it’s about me!

The Whale and the Grasshopper by Seumas O’Brien

Decency as explained by a whale and a grasshopper. Parables. I need them explained to me.

In Berlin by Mary Boyle O’Reilly

Short short. Woman on train behaves oddly. Girls on train giggle at her behavior, thinking her worth a laugh. Man on trains explains to chagrined girls why woman behaves oddly. It has to do with the war.

The Waiting Years by Katharine Metcalf Roof

Unrequited, and very very creepy, love. Different standards from day. I get it. But reading about a man of 24 lusting after a girl of 15 is off-putting. Particularly because the man doesn’t think of the girl as a woman, which I would sorta get under the standards of the day even though I have a hard time thinking of a 15 year old as a woman. But he keeps calling her a child, and expressing his desire for her, though he’s willing to wait for her to reach adulthood first. Squick!

Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt

A Russian Jew comes to America for his grandson’s Bar Mitsva to keep his wife happy. He’s cranky and crabby and wants to go back to Russia, and bring the grandson back as well, even though in Russia he could not go to college because he’s Jewish. I’m missing the message in the story.

The Survivors by Elsie Singmaster

A stubborn ex-Confederate soldier spends the rest of his life trying to ruin the Memorial Day parades populated by the Union ex-soliders in his hometown by dressing in his Confederate uniform, despite his pre-war friendship with the men of the town. Another very didactic story.

The Yellow Cat by Wilbur Daniel Steele

This was actually a pretty interesting story, though hard to follow at times. A sailing vessel is discovered unmanned at sea, and the sailor who boards it to bring it home starts thinking there’s a ghost on the ship that turns into a yellow cat when he’s not looking.

The Bounty-Jumper by Mary Synon

One man’s shame at having been a bounty jumper during the Civil War, not because of greed but because of cowardice, and his vow to atone for his wrong.

Title: The Best Short Stories of 1915 and Yearbook of the American Short Story
Editor: Edward J. O’Brien
Series: Best American Short Stories; 1915
Imprint / publisher: Small, Maynard & Company (scanned to Google Books)
Format: ePub electronic book
Length: 274 p. (not including supplementary materials)
Publication date: 2009 (originally 1916)

I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.

Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.

In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.

Blood Tide by Thomas P. Hopp (Duwamish)

The anthology starts out in an area just south of downtown. The Duwamish river has been dredged and shaped into a shipping hub, surrounded by the medium heavy industries that like close proximity to easy international freight. The land once belonged to the Duwamish, a branch of the Salish tribe that inhabited the area when Europeans moved in. Unrecognized, the Duwamish dwindled in number without a reservation or a dedicated tribal government to keep them together. The tribe persevered even so. Hopp’s story interacts more with a few Duwamish members rather than the Duwamish area, which doesn’t have the distinctly Native American feel implied by the text. The crime is that of red tide poisoning, where someone has distilled the poisonous substances from the tide and used it to murder someone. The hero is Peyton McKean, a virologist of some sort. He stars in Hopp’s self-published novel The Jihad Virus. He has a journalist sidekick who comes running to write up McKean’s exploits in mutual symbiosis. While sufficiently noirish, it’s utterly predictable and clunkily written. Good for bringing some exposure to the Duwamish cause, however.

Promised Tulips by Bharti Kirchner (Wallingford)

Wallingford is not a neighborhood I would associate with dreaded crime. The essence of noir (I.M.H.O.), is the ominous knowledge that someone is going to get screwed, and that I both don’t want to watch and can’t help watching. A professional gardener who lives in Wallingford (this certainly fits the area) imagines what could have happened to her best friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a less than upset social climbing husband. The location is not dreadful, but it inspires a quietness that allows a person to think a lot, expanding worry into something huge. It’s all around a very good story.

Golden Gardens by Stephan Magcosta (Ballard)

This is another story that manages to be ominous despite the idyllic location. Magcosta uses Golden Gardens Park to set a tale of emotional revenge. The park’s beach isn’t remote, but it’s secluded from residences by the railroad and a steep bluff. Consequently, if you wanted to kill someone without being bothered by passersby, Golden Gardens wouldn’t be the worst place to do it. A Hispanic woman distraught over her soldier son’s death in Iraq wants to avenge him on the first convenient Middle Eastern looking person she can find, a cabbie. An ugly, inevitable end packs a lot of emotion. Recommended.

The Center of the Universe by Robert Lopresti (Fremont)

Fremont is yet another area that isn’t particularly seedy. It features a weird combination of left-wing free-thinking and good old crass American commercialism. Lopresti really nails the vibe of the neighborhood through the eyes of a somewhat mentally ill homeless person. He can’t always tell the difference between the true and the false already, and Fremont’s dichotomy doesn’t make things any easier. In the middle of this, our guy thinks he sees a girl get murdered, and the guys who did it to boot. Another recommended story.

Blue Sunday by Kathleen Alcalá (Central District)

Alcalá’s story doesn’t really work as noir for me. Someone’s gonna get screwed, but it happens right at the beginning so there’s little in the way of menace afterward. A couple of Iraq soldiers on leave party it up and get drunk when they run into a cop all to eager to suspect the worst of minorities. Alternates between scenes of the soldier recovering from his police encounter in the hospital and scenes of him handling Iraqis roughly. Well worth reading as a portrait of how racial bias fucks us up, and it’s an issue that comes up often in the Central District.

The Taskmasters by Simon Wood (Downtown)

The first of four stories where the person who’s going to get screwed is being set up to take a fall for the unscrupulous. A bar brawler gets taken in by an underground group called the Taskmasters, whose ostensible reason for existing is as a band of vigilantes, righting wrongs ignored by the police. They have one method: they decide someone is guilty and execute them. Sounds like a 70s T.V. movie plot. Predictable. Not a lot of downtown flavor. And I didn’t get a feeling of peril.

What Price Retribution? by Patricia Harrington (Capitol Hill)

A half mile from my place is a steep hillside that separates the Capitol Hill neighborhood from my Eastlake home base. Between Interstate 5 and the incline, there’s only a few streets connecting the areas, at the north and south end of this bluff. However, there’s a couple of stair climbs that lead from us to them, which pass under wooded branches so dense that it’s dark in the daytime during the height of summer. Among those trees is a homeless camp according to Harrington’s story. When a homeless guy gets the crap beat out of him, the Mayor of the camp, an erstwhile cop, sobers up enough to seek revenge on the drug dealer. This one is great, not so much because I wanted to see the dealer live, but because the revenge could get really bad. (Though why a big time dealer would try to sell to penniless homeless folks in the first place is a little fuzzy.)

Till Death Do Us … by Curt Colbert (Belltown)

The second story of set ‘em up to take a fall variety. 1940s Jake Rossiter stars as a P.I. who takes a bad domestic case because he needs the money. Coincidentally within minutes of each other, both sides of a divorce case hire Rossiter to prevent the other spouse from murdering them. A fun story, but not in a dreadful way.

The Best View In Town by Paul S. Piper (Leschi)

Piper’s story is the first of two commit a crime against someone close to you for the money entries in the book. Here a drunk loser brings home a girl, only to find out the girl’s grandfather grew up next door, where he supposedly stashed away valuables that the family never recovered. And she’s damned pissed the new owners seem to have maybe found them. Just a little too predictable. Good portrait of a loser though. I liked that.

The Wrong End Of A Gun by R. Barri Flowers (South Lake Union)

The third of the set ‘em up to take a fall stories, and by far the worst story in the collection. Dude wants to get with a girl just because she’s hot, despite hundreds of warning signs that would make even the most besotted 17 year old run. And he’s a veteran of divorce court, who’s world weary tone should give him a clue. Flowers uses some awfully trite physical descriptions too: Her complexion was like maple syrup over buttered waffles. A) Food descriptions of skin tone are tiresome. B) Maple syrup I can see as a skin tone. Smooth and brown. On top of buttered waffles? Have you ever looked at buttered waffles after pouring syrup on them? They are blotchy, greasy and pockmarked. This is not attractive. Tasty and delicious in a waffle, but not so much for a complexion.

Paper Son by Brian Thornton (Chinatown)

Thornton writes historical noir set in 1889, when Seattle wasn’t exactly welcoming to its Chinese immigrants. One of them washes up dead on Mercer Island, and a rookie Treasury Agent investigates. Triads and prostitution and drug running and multiple missing people! And I definitely didn’t see where the ending was … er … going to end.

The Magnolia Bluff by Skye Moody (Magnolia)

The second of the set up people you know for money stories. Circus clown midgets have a rivalry that spills into really good resentment when one of them makes it to Hollywood. Magnolia as a setting, although described accurately, didn’t lend itself to bad shit happening.

Sherlock’s Opera by Lou Kemp (Waterfront)

Moriarity’s adoring little brother Jacob lures Sherlock Holmes to Seattle to take his revenge on the sleuth. Why? Why?

Food for Thought by G. M. Ford (Pioneer Square)

The final story is the last of the set folks up to take a fall ones, though this one works out a little differently. But again, a broke P.I. takes a domestic muscle case that he’d rather not, because he needs the money. A short, enjoyable story that broke the mold of the previous three.

A few standout stories but overall not as good as I’d hoped.

One other blogged review:

• Bookgasm

Title: Seattle Noir
Editor: Curt Colbert
Cover creator: Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Noir
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Paperback
Length: 268 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-80-4

Between work and family crisis and short stories being slow reading for me, this took me over two weeks to finish. I don’t count that against the anthology however. It’s got one of the more ambitious premises that I’ve seen. Every story is supposedly science based, though Ryman told a reading audience in Seattle a couple weeks ago that it’s not, strictly speaking, an anthology of Mundane SF.

I’m tempted to give the book extra points for making the attempt, just because I love science so much. In some cases, like this and the previously read Interfictions 2, the anthology theme is quite laudable. They are attempting to do something moral with their theme. In the case of Interfictions 2, it’s to highlight a genre that the editors did not feel gets the exposure it should. This one is to promote science, obviously. Both are judgment calls on what is right and correct about the world, although not necessarily of grand import. The theme of a vampire anthology doesn’t promote a moral view (though individual stories surely do). Even though Feeling Very Strange was similar to Interfictions, its focus as a historical retrospective of slipstream lends itself less to promotion of a moral view than a prospective one such as Interfictions. Anyhow, I love my brain candy, but I also appreciate when authors and editors try to do something good with the world. We need more science, scientific thinking, and appreciation for science.

How the anthology worked is that Ryman put a set of authors (mostly British) in contact with a number of scientists (mostly at the University of Manchester). They then conversed and exchanged viewpoints. Each author wrote a story related to the research of the scientist. There appear to be varying levels of collaboration between the stories. Some have the science very integrated with the story. In others, there’s a brief mention of something scientific and little else. After each story appears a note by a scientist, sometimes commenting on the plausibility of the story and sometimes just commenting on the related research.

Carbon: Part One and Carbon: Part Two by Justina Robson

Once again I don’t appreciate something by Justina Robson. She’s probably a very nice person, but man her writing and me appear to be like oil and water. The science behind this story is inventing corrective lenses for an electron microscope. But the real story is department politics. Getting money for research, presenting your best face, fighting with funding sources that really don’t like science. Unlike the two other Robson stories I recall, at least I could follow the story.

Global Collider Generation: An Idyll by Paul Cornell

The Large Hadron Collider inspired all sorts of fears that it would end the world and universe. How bad would that fear get if the collider circled the world? The central story is a thriller about someone trying to stop the next collider. Kinda meh for me, as the plot seemed very paint by the numbers.

Moss Witch by Sara Maitland

This was a really good story. It’s more fantasy than science fiction. A bryologist field researcher heads into a wooded area of Britain to catalog mosses. A moss witch lives nearby, tending to the mosses and lichens which she resembles. Moss witches don’t exist and never could exist, but this story nevertheless has the most detailed science of any story in the book. Plot-wise Moss Witch kind of plodded a bit until the middle, but Maitland made it into something interesting.

Death Knocks by Ken MacLeod

Journalist on the trail of designer drugs that don’t exactly make you high. Instead, they make you very very depressed.

Collision by Gwyneth Jones

Despite this anthology not being strictly Mundane SF, this story really didn’t belong. Given that the back cover blurb says the stories take away fantastical clichés about space travel, a story about discovering fast than light travel just doesn’t fit here. Also, it’s very jumbled, and that put me off. Ryman said in his appearance here that this story fits because it’s a mad scientist story. He appeared to be amused by my question, almost as if he was expecting this kind of reaction to the story.

Without a Shell by Adam Marek

Really good story about the world of haves and have nots. The science is personal body armor that would normally be used in a military or police context. Marek puts it on dystopic future schoolchildren. The first story in the collection that successfully felt people-centered to me.

You by Geoff Ryman

A gem of a story! Ryman has a number of things going on in this story. First, an excellent set of characters with desires and goals and foibles. Second, science regarding the discovery of language. Third, the politics of scientific discovery, particularly with respect to getting credit. Third, he takes personal blogging with ubiquitous computing and extrapolates to how someone might experience consuming it.

In The Event Of by Michael Arditti

Combined near future dystopia with parents attempting to recreate a daughter through cloning, told through the eyes of the clone. Nothing ground-breaking here, but I like the main character a fair amount.

Zoology by Simon Ings

Science behind the sense of smell. Story is a bit more like some of the other ones, more about the scientists and their departmental processes. Decently told.

Temporary by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Really liked this story about superstition and prejudice and their intersection with people’s views of science. Again the science isn’t terribly integrated with the story; you could drop in a number of scientific observations in place of the one about a continually exploding star. But I did like the character in this brief portrayal.

Doing the Butterfly by Kit Reed

MRI as lie detector and criminal attempting to fake it out. Also, a love story, sorta. It worked, but it’s missing something, though I don’t know what. Maybe any kind of credible back story to the characters. Just what is it that makes a woman go for a bad guy she knows is bad? I know there are lots of things, but in this case the story is tight and close up on the criminal’s evasion attempts that no other of his qualities really show. It’s nice that in this case though the criminal really doesn’t have the upper hand, so I wasn’t cringing throughout on behalf of every other character. Pretty good story still.

White Skies by Chaz Brenchley

I’m so glad the science in this anthology wasn’t dominated by global warming stories. It means this story that is tangentially about global warming doesn’t get buried. Post-global warming and sea rises, competing groups of people have been enacting their own counter-measures. Both methods, seeding the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and seeding the skies to induce sunlight reflection, have drawbacks and so the groups dedicated to each are enemies, though by the time of the story they’ve forgotten exactly why. Plot is mostly about conniving insiders versus a culture of distrust.

Enigma by Liz Williams

Another story that just didn’t seem to fit, given the blurb against artificial intelligence on the back cover. It’s a discussion between Wittgenstein and Turing in a future virtual world, looking back on events during World War 2.

The Bellini Madonna by Patricia Duncker

A person viewing artwork has a brief vision of the cosmos that is awe-inspiring. Scientists often are inspired by the cosmos. Viola! Science. Phhpth.

Hair by Adam Roberts

I generally don’t care for evil corporation tries to suppress technology that threatens its profits stories. Too pat. Aside from that angle, I did like the character here who runs away from his employer obligations to give his idea to the world. It’s mostly ego not altruism, but altruism results. Or would if he wasn’t being handled. The science implants photosynthetic cells into hair so that people don’t have to eat. Sorta fanciful, but research is being done on the individual pieces at a level far below that appearing in the story.

As you can tell, I looked askance when the science wasn’t particularly integrated with the story. When the story is all about departmental politics even if they are scientific politics, it makes for something less interesting to me. Science should not be a MacGuffin.

Loved the Sara Maitland and Geoff Ryman contributions. A few more good stories. Overall a solid effort at a worthy cause.

I’m a little distracted by a family crisis, so it’s kind of hard to break down some of the whys and wherefores. C’est la vie.

Title: When It Changed: Science Into Fiction: An Anthology
Editor: Geoff Ryman
Cover creator: Steve Boyler
Imprint / publisher: Comma Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 267 p.
Publication date: 2009
ISBN-10: 1-90558319-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-90558319-5

Because I read Feeling Very Strange, I hesitated to get this similarly themed anthology of interstitial fiction. Short stories are difficult enough for me to read, though I read enough of them. It’s hard to get into a rhythm like it is with a novel. Each story in an anthology introduces new settings, new characters, and new plots. The context switching eats up time. Also, the amount of tasting of each story varies, whereas with a well done novel I am poring over the text with a pretty constant level of attention.

I’ll get back to that in a moment. The description on the back cover of Interfictions 2 says:

It’s all about breaking rules, ignoring boundaries, cross-pollinating the fields of literature. It’s about working between, across, at, and through the edges and borders of literary genres. It falls between the cracks of other movements, terms, and definitions. These are stories to surprise us — stories showing us that literature hold possibilities we’d never imagined …

The whole point of this is to avoid the familiar. The stories challenged my reading skills, on top of the already substantial difficulty I have with short stories. I knew this ahead of time, but solicitations to review it kept popping up in various places: LibraryThing, the LCRW blog, and finally on author David J. Schwartz’ blog (which I read because I loved his book Superpowers). I succumbed.

I figured I would really like some of the stories and a substantial portion just wouldn’t work for me. I suspect for a large number of people this will be the case. Each story tries to be different, and different in different ways. Unless a person has an innate love for everything experimental, they’ll connect with each story in hugely different ways. I’m glad to say that I liked more than I expected.

For me, the best two stories came early: M. Rickert’s Beautiful Feast and Will Ludwigsen’s Remembrance Is Something Like a House. A number of other stories, including those of Carlos Hernandez, Peter M. Ball, Amelia Beamer, Alan DeNiro, and David J. Schwartz, are ones I’d recommend to anyone. I highly doubt my experience will be universal though, even for the two stories I loathed. A fair number of people will enjoy each story because they are differently strange.

The Interstitial Arts Foundation has also published eight additional stories online in what they call The Annex. I dunno if I’ll get around to reading them, because for some reason I never get around to reading online fiction even though I intend to. If I do, I’ll throw up a separate review for those.

Introduction: On the Pleasures of Not Belonging by Henry Jenkins

I am not convinced of anything by this overly academic treatise on falling between genre lines. There’s pleasure in not knowing where a story falls? I liked the editorial text in Kessel and Kelly’s Feeling Very Strange better. That volume was very clear that stories that don’t fit categories won’t work for some people, and some of them won’t work for anyone. Slipstream, or interstitial fiction, whether or not they are synonymous terms, both strive to go outside the comfort zone of traditional categories. By definition, it’s uncomfortable. So yes, some of us readers want invention and originality, and take pleasure in that. But seriously, if that’s all a story has going for it, then it’s a failure. I would have liked to see an intro that explored how invention can interact with other story goals, someone’s personal experience of how they interact with between genre fiction, or something. This really just came off as another argument for breaking from tradition cloaked in academic language. I got it. Stop lecturing.

The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper by Jeffrey Ford

The first story didn’t get this collection off on a good start for me. Ford tells us a dream he had. Yup. It has all the attraction as when someone comes up to you at a party to tell you all about the dream they had last night. I don’t get why people do that. In my experience, dreams are the inbred children of imagination. Definitely memorable, but more so for the person who dreamt them, and for others only because they are strange not because they are interesting. A dream is good for a seed of a story, but it needs to be cultivated by real imagination. Back to the story though. While reading about Ford’s dream about wallpaper (could there be any less interesting subject?), I wished I was at a cocktail party where I could foist the dream-teller off on another unsuspecting party-goer.

The Beautiful Feast by M. Rickert

But after the failure of the first contribution, the collection continues with this marvelous account of a boy who’s father didn’t return from Viet Nam. A luscious description of a boy trying to catch falling leaves starts it off.

His fingers touch the whisper of leaf but close on air. It doesn’t matter. He spins across the yard, dodging gold bullets. He’s hit! He’s hit! He falls to the ground, rolling leaf, grass, sticks and dirt. In the distance, a dog barks. The boy lies still, arms spread, legs at odd angles. Dead.

At first I thought this was a ghost story based on the first few paragraphs. But I’d finished my latté at the coffee shop where I read, so I put the book down and went home. The next day I picked it up again, and re-read from the beginning. And then I wasn’t so sure it was a ghost story. You’ll have to read it to decide for yourself. As with the previous Rickert story I read, this one packs a subtle emotional package. There’s a hole inside this boy that he seeks to fill by finding the father lost in war. I felt that from reading her prose.

Remembrance Is Something Like a House by Will Ludwigsen

I once had a dream of a house that was trying to jump off a cliff. I woke up and wrote that down as a story idea, but never could figure out how to go about it. (This is why I am not a writer of fiction, I can never figure out how to turn any idea into a story.) Now having read Will Ludwigsen’s story told from the point of view of a house, I can stop thinking about ever attempting my story. This is good. If these walls could talk… Which they can’t in the story. The house has a personality, and misses the family that used to live inside. So it goes on a journey to find them. But it can’t talk. Man, it sounds so bad saying it like that, but it’s really good. Also, imagine if you stumbled onto the house you grew up in, a thousand miles and 70 years away. Just sitting there in the mist on your morning walk in some spot that it just shouldn’t be. Would that be freaky or what?

The Long and Short of Long-Term Memory by Cecil Castellucci

This one didn’t pack the punch the previous two stories did for me. But it was still a nice, well-constructed story about the perils of memory. Both of forgetting, as well as remembering. Kind of science fictiony, but not overly so. Includes diagrams.

The Score by Alaya Dawn Johnson

It’s a good story, but I had a hard time really getting into it. It’s a history of a (fictional) prominent activist killed while in custody, told through newspaper stories, web postings, emails, interviews, etc. over the next half a century. At the center is a conspiracy theorist of the internet variety. If you didn’t see such stuff on the internet now, you might buy this character. But since you’re on the internet, you’ve seen wackos like this before.

The Two of Me by Ray Vukcevich

Fun, though inconsequential, story. According to the note from Vukcevich, the inspiration comes from a drawing by a student in one of his classes where he tried to write a story based on the drawing. Of course, the drawing isn’t included, but it’s pretty obvious what the gist of it must be. Davy is a regular boy, except that someone starts growing out of his shoulder. Over the years, he and his sister grow up together. First, just the head. Then the shoulders and arms and torso and legs. Some day, enough of Renata will grow out that she’ll just pop loose and be able to walk off.

The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez

I really liked this story, though it squicked me a fair amount. There’s blood. Ten year old boy grows up into dinosaurs, and magic, and then Santeria, which he wants to use to help his father find a new love to replace the mother who died. Alternative history and ghosts play a part as well. Not sure what it was about the kid, but I loved him. Perhaps that he was so earnest.

Shoes by Lavie Tidhar

Kind of a magical realist story of the south Pacific variety. It didn’t click with me. Something about the characters made them too unreal and too distant for me to really care about them. Basically, it’s an old guy reminiscing about the old days when the white man first came to the islands. Then and now. Not really a before though.

Interviews After the Revolution by Brian Francis Slattery

Story told in interviews, natch, of the town of San Marcos during and after a war, when entrepreneurs razed the empty hilltop city center to build a lavish party locale. Again, a competent story, but one that didn’t inspire me.

Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken by Elizabeth Ziemska

Almost a standard time travel story, with the protagonist being a Polish American who wants to prevent Poland’s dismembering during World War 2. His method is to go back even further and convince a former ruler of Poland, Count Poniatowski, to be a better ruler in order to strengthen the country. Poniatowski is a little weird though.

Black Dog: A Biography by Peter M. Ball

A mysterious black dog only the narrator can see that also breathes fire and eats people, particularly his girlfriends. Is it metaphorical? Who knows? The dog is intimately connected with his shitty love life though. Though I’m starting to see a trend in how to get a story classified as interstitial. Take a regular story. Insert a fantastical element. If the fantasy is treated as real, you’ve got something for the fantasy shelves. If it’s metaphorical, put it on the literary shelves. But… here’s how to get it called interstitial: don’t tell the reader whether it’s real or symbolic. Really liked this story.

Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse by Camilla Bruce

This is the sort of story that writers go ape for. But as a general rule of thumb, stories about the writing process bore the hell out of me. This one did. Perhaps that’s a sign that I’m not a writer at heart. Take the place where a writer’s ideas come from and give it a sort of sentience and personality of its own and then look at how it feels about its associated writer. Too much like my geek friends who feel the need to tell everyone around them all about their latest piece of code.

Morton Goes to the Hospital by Amelia Beamer

An absolutely charming story. An old guy and the ghost of his ex-wife, and their relationship with the guy’s Alzheimer’s afflicted former affair. A few fantastic elements in, including the ghosts, thrown in, but none of them are overwhelming. Awesome characters carry this.

After Verona by William Alexander

Someone murders Verona, perhaps her sketchy boyfriend. Her co-workers experience the not-knowing how it happened as well as possibly the border between the worlds of the living and the dead. This isn’t really meant to be a play on words, but there’s just little life in this story. It feels like experimental forms and scales, rather than a piece of music. I’m not really sure what was missing about the characters; they just didn’t feel three dimensional to me.

Valentines by Shira Lipkin

According to the author’s note, Lipkin used her experience as an epileptic to build this story. The girl in the story has problems with her memory, and it takes her partially out of the real world. She takes notes on everything and files them in an attempt to make sense of reality. Three similar waiters, all with variations on the name Valentine are subjects of her notes. Really good job of imparting a sense of confusion and impermanence. Really identified with her struggles with making sense of the notes in her filing system and a nice connection between the Valentines and when her filing system falls apart.

(*_*?)~~~~(-_-): The Warp and the Woof by Alan DeNiro

A fairly traditional dystopian science fiction story. It jumps between characters without transition, and leaves some of their stories hanging. I’m not quite sure what qualifies this as interstitial, except perhaps that one character is a writer means everything else may be fiction. But I dunno. The ending confused me. The near future described though has a different feel than other science fiction dystopias I’ve read. Again, I can’t quite put my finger on how it’s different. That it’s different is a good thing; it felt fresh and interesting to me. Maybe it’s just because it’s more normal than anything I’ve read recently.

The Marriage by Nin Andrews

Short short. Creepy guy has creepy animalistic wife.

Child-Empress of Mars by Theodora Goss

John Carter of Mars retold from the perspective of the Martians. Or at least that’s what I imagine, as I haven’t yet read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series. But I’m in good company here; Goss admits in the author’s note to having only read the Wikipedia entries on the series. It started off a little obtuse, but the pieces came together in the middle.

L’Ile Close by Lionel Davoust (translated by Edward Gauvin)

I don’t know if this is a retelling of the Arthurian legends, a deconstruction of them, or what. One of the categories of story that I rarely enjoy is that of myth and legend. Meta-myth? Not for me.

Afterbirth by Stephanie Shaw

Another one of those are the dragons real or are they metaphor but we won’t tell you so it’s interstitial stories. Somewhat autobiographical experiences of giving birth. Not for me.

The 121 by David J. Schwartz

An act of terrorism produces a sentient fireball in a dystopian Hollywood, where it makes a living acting in ATF training videos. Because the government likes explosions and they make for great film. The 121 refers to the people killed in the initial blast; they live on inside the fireball. Weird, obviously, but in a way that worked for me.

The editors got each contributor to share a bit about each story and how it fits into interstitiality. This became a bit amusing to me as I progressed through the anthology. Quite a few of them wrote blurbs along the lines of I don’t know how this is interstitial, but …

In addition to a trend or two I noted in my story comments, something else was kind of apparent. The content seemed to be consistently playing with the boundaries between fantasy and realism, and mostly omitted other genres such as romance, historical fiction, mystery or noir. Granted, the crossover between science fiction and noir isn’t virgin ground. One story gets sorta historical, but it barely touches on the feel of historical fiction. For all I know, authors in other genres may not be interested in writing this sort of thing.

Other blogged reviews:

• Charles Tan at SF Signal
• Journal of the Mind, Mark II

Hmmm, woulda thought there’d be more reviews already given the blitz of freebies sent out by the publishers and numerous contributors.

Title: Interfictions 2: an anthology of interstitial writing
Editors: Delia Sherman, Christopher Barzak
Cover designer: Stephen H. Segal
Cover artist: Alex Myers
Series: Interfictions; 2
Imprint / publisher: Interstitial Arts Foundation
Format: Paperback
Length: 302 p.
Publication date: November 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-61-4

The Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press provided me with a review copy. Contributor David J. Schwartz had a hand in directing this one my way. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $10.88 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the Franciscan Hospital for Children.

Last month I went to an author reading at Inner Chapters Bookstore in South Lake Union. It’s actually the closest bookstore to my condo, but I hadn’t been there before. Nice setup. The reading was for Birkensnake. I’m not exactly sure how to classify Birkensnake: a zine/e-zine combo, a chapbook series, or what? You can get the stories online. And they put out handmade bound copies. But it appears they only do one issue a year. Tina Connolly read a story from Birkensnake One, and Matt Briggs, Caren Gussoff and Evelyn Hampton read their stories from Birkensnake Two. I liked them well enough to buy a copy of Birkensnake Two for $4.

Alack! I mostly liked only the stories I heard. The rest were too esoteric for me. Here’s what the editors write on the Birkensnake submission page:

We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.

If that’s your sort of thing, go for it. I don’t think that way, so it didn’t work for me. I knew it would be out of my normal reading when I picked it up, but didn’t realize how much outside.

All the stories are available online for free.

I should mention that the cover is beautiful. I’m not sure what material was used to give it the texture it has, but it’s more than the pretty picture you see in the thumbnail above. Kind of a fuzzy feel with rough hard lines. Also, each cover is unique; they’ve hand-singed them so they are all slightly different. Hand-singed, not hand-signed. As in, with a torch of some sort. I love that sort of thing.

The Children’s Factory by Michael Stewart

Okay flash fiction length piece. Very short and sorta interesting.

from A World Called the Blazing World by Danielle Dutton

Another children themed work following a maid in the Queen’s retinue. Hard to follow mostly.

From now on all I’ll talk about is light by Blake Butler

A third child themed piece. Another one I didn’t grok.

Five Simple Sentence Forms by Rhoads Stevens

Six paragraphs. Five sentences each. I wasn’t inspired.

Knot by Matt Briggs

Liked this one. Metaphor of coming unraveled made somewhat literal.

Strange Animal: Three Stories by Christopher Boucher

Three small stories. First where a girl keeps her brother in a cage, but he’s okay with that. The second has a man leave an argument because he thinks he sees an animal. And the third where a girl aspires to a career in staffing. Each of them where I thought, There’s something a little off with that person. The stories treat them as if they are normal everyday neuroses, like how I have to always put the sugar in my coffee mug before I pour in the coffee.

Correspondence by Caren Gussoff

My favorite in the collection. Two scenes of soldiers fallen from grace working in the bowels of Battlestar Galactica like ships, checking garbage for contaminants that, if passed along to the incinerator, would blow up the ship. Stuff happens. Excellent.

Someday on Planar Surface by Matthew Pendleton

At 30 pages or so, this is the longest piece in the collection. But I had to stop reading after 10 pages or so. I have no idea what the hell was going on.

Dogfight by Miles Klee

Uhm.

Sag: A Saga by Evelyn Hampton

Some beautiful word play, but if there’s a story there it went over my head. As non-sequiters, I loved them. As a story, I was lost.

Tumor Flats by Joyelle McSweeney

Another uhm.

One other blogged review:

• Big Other (definitely more to his taste than mine)

Title: Birkensnake Two
Editors: Joanna Ruocco, Brian Conn
Cover: Chemlawn

Disclosure: Caren Gussoff is an acquaintance of mine. I’m not the kind of person who gushes about stuff just because it’s made by friends. But you can take that I liked her story with a grain of salt if you are so inclined.

Since last summer, I’ve been making an attempt (unrigorous as it might be) to read more fiction by women. I read five works from the top ten of the Feminist S.F. The Blog’s list of works that should have more attention, for instance. Then RaceFail raged all over the S.F. internet and I went to Wiscon in May. When I left for Wisconsin, I brought with me to read on the trip only writers from marginalized groups: women, minorities, foreigners, etc. Since then you may have noticed fewer white males and more of everything else on the blog. Basically, I’m making an even more concerted effort to expand my reading. Generally that won’t be anthologies like Cosmos Latinos and Dark Matter which are designed explicitly around language and race respectively. But they are as good a place as any to start.

My unofficial rule of thumb in the future is to start a book by a woman, foreigner, or minority for every book by a white male that I finish. I may not stick to it 100%, but that’s going to be my general procedure for a bit. I’ve actually been doing this for a month or so. Yes, it’s a quota of sorts. I don’t see it as a bad thing. I thought about joining up with the Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge but I’m not really one for book challenges. They aren’t bad for people who like ‘em, but I hate the feeling of trying to fill a list. Too much pressure. This way I’m reading more diversely but as an ongoing thing rather than a time oriented goal.

Dark Matter is a collection of speculative fiction written by members of the African Diaspora, as the cover calls it. Quite a few of the stories are by non-genre writers. All but one (that I could tell) had some genre element to them. In 2000, you might not have been able to fill an S.F. anthology with stories by black genre writers. Maybe you could have, but it wouldn’t have been as easy as it would be today. But the non-genre writers in this anthology generally come from music and poetry, and some of the genre writers appearing herein have that background too. U.S. black culture has generally been tied more to music than it is to science. Which makes these writings tough for me. Music and especially poetry are not my bag. Like when I read a couple of Windling and Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy anthologies, there was a lot of esoteric stuff that I didn’t grok.

My favorites have to be the Octavia Butler story, the second Nalo Hopkinson story, and Tananarive Due’s story. I’ve now read three Octavia Butler works since I read my first just under a year ago. It’s starting to look like she’s going to be one of my all time favorites, because I’ve really liked all three. (At one point, Orson Scott Card was my favorite author, and so was David Eddings, so getting onto my favorites list isn’t necessarily a mark of distinction or good writing.)

One quick note about the title. In the introduction, Thomas says she liked the metaphor of dark matter. Dark matter being matter in space that we know is there somewhere, but can only see by its effects on other matter. Similarly, she felt that the work of black writers was more often felt in it’s effect on other writers than from being directly observed. I don’t think it was meant to imply dark and somber. My general impression after having read the book though is that it is pretty somber. A fair number of the stories explicitly deal with race relations and race relations in America in particular, and neither subject is historically full of awesome.

Sister Lilith by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

An imagining of the life of Lilith, Adam’s first wife before Eve. A little bitter, as I imagine the first wife might be.

The Comet by W. E. B. Du Bois

Earth passes through the tail of a comet, which releases deadly gases which kill nearly everyone in New York City except a black messenger and a white society girl. How much of racism is tied to societal pressures which disappear when society disappears? Can someone give them up what that happens? The piece directly confronts racism in more than one way. Kind of a bleak outlook.

Chicago 1927 by Jewelle Gomez

A vampire happens on a Chicago music tavern that caters to a black clientele run by a black man. She’s impressed by the owner and has to choose how to use her vampirism around him. There’s nothing really earth-shatteringly original about the story, but I was quite well done. Gilda, our vampire, does not come off one dimensional at all.

Black No More by George S. Schuyler

An excerpt from a novel where a medical process has been invented that removes most traces of Negro-ness from a man. No big lips, no wide nose, and no black skin. Negroes line up for hours to get this treatment. There’s inklings that this might not be the best choice ever, but since I just have an excerpt I’m not sure where the author took it. Excellent satire: the dream of every black man just had to be to live in harmony as a white man!.

separation anxiety by Evie Shockley

Could a reservation be more of a safe place for a culture than a concentration camp for it? The story follows a couple of professional dancers who live in such a reservation. Scrupulously protected from outside influences though, it becomes tedious and a lot like living in a zoo. Another pretty well written story.

Tasting Songs by Leone Ross

Jerry is a photographer, one of the up and coming types. He has an affair with Brianna. His wife Sasha finds out. It sounds kind of pedestrian in description, but the characters come alive in the story.

Can You Wear My Eyes by Kalamu ya Salaam

You’ve seen this one in horror movies. Organ transplant of someone else’s body parts and you get a piece of that person’s thoughts and soul. In this case, it’s the eyes, and Reggie starts to see things his wife saw. The point being that women and men see things very differently sometimes. It’s true that women rightfully see many things as threat that men do not, but I disagree with the implication that men couldn’t handle it if they did. And not that they could handle things better than women. But no worse either. Reggie does get an eyeful of his own behavior though. Stuff that he never thought twice about before he got his wife’s eyes.

Like Daughter by Tananarive Due

A woman gets a somewhat unwanted second chance to help her best friend Denise. As kids, Denise always needed protecting, from others and from herself. Denise now has a child named Neecy cloned from her own DNA in an attempt to re-do her own life. Of course, she can’t fix her own life so re-doing it with a cloned child is not too likely. Paige is the successful friend, and Denise wants to send Neecy to her. Pretty sad story.

Greedy Choke Puppy by Nalo Hopkinson

A Caribbean vampire story. Not really my kind of story.

Rhythm Travel by Amiri Baraka

Teleportation by music. I suspect more interesting to people who really like their music than it is to me. I just don’t have a huge connection to music. If you did this story with books, I’d be thinking totally awesome! Music lovers might have that reaction from this short short.

Buddy Bolden by Kalamu ya Salaam

Really not my kind of story at all. Didn’t finish it.

Aye, and Gomorrah … by Samuel R. Delany

Fetishizing people who work the spaceships. I liked this better than I liked Nova.

Ganger (Ball Lightning) by Nalo Hopkinson

Science fiction horror. Skinsuits that enhance your sensation, particularly during sex. But you just can’t leave the suits alone together. Pretty damn good.

The Becoming by Akua Lezli Hope

I didn’t understand this.

The Goophered Grapevine by Charles W. Chesnutt

A spiritualist slave puts a goopher (a curse of some sort) on a slaveowner’s grapes. Not to spite him, but to help him. Slaves that eat the grapes are cursed. One accidentally does, and the spiritualist takes the curse off him partially. Afterward, the slave and slaveowner conspire against other slaveowners to take advantage of his condition. This was written in the 1800s. One thing interesting to me is that Chesnutt used black stereotypes such as watermelon eating in his story. I can understand not wanting to buck the white system to get ahead. So leaving the blacks as poor, stupid and illiterate I get. Watermelons I don’t. Obviously there’s a reason, whether internalized oppression, belief in the stereotypes himself, or something. Just wondering what it was.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night by Octavia E. Butler

An awesome story about a fictional Duryea-Gode disease. Spawned when parents take a drug that cures cancer, their children have Duryea-Gode and they pass it on genetically Which is an interesting dilemma in itself, cure yourself, but have no kids. But not the focus of the story. Say you have a great way to help Duryea-Gode patients, horribly disfigured, sometimes brain damaged. What’s your responsibility to those patients, when the way you can help requires the commitment of the rest of your life?

Twice, at Once, Separated by Linda Addison

Travel to other stars takes generations. Inside a generation ship, who would know they are traveling to another star. What you know might go through a huge inter-generational game of telephone. The protagonist here is one of the few that finds out what her world really is, after she starts having dreams of Ship.

Gimmile’s Songs by Charles R. Saunders

A female warrior in Africa meets and falls in love with a ghost of sorts. I liked it because for once the super-elite warrior person is a woman.

At the Huts of Ajala by Nisi Shawl ¹

How Loanna got an A quality head by tricking the god Ajala. Fables of gods don’t usually get me excited, but the bold Loanna I got into.

The Woman in the Wall by Steven Barnes

I didn’t notice any overt science fiction or fantasy element in this story. Perhaps I just missed it. A woman, her husband, and their child end up in a refugee/concentration camp after their plane runs into difficulties over a war-torn country. They are artists who popularize the art of non-white countries. Cultural appropriation, some might say. It’s pretty clear the woman doesn’t really feel as if she’s a part of the cultures, more like Here I am, the liberal person to save the day because she views and interacts with the camps residents as the other.

Ark of Bones by Henry Dumas

Sort of a vision quest kind of thing? Maybe? Headeye and Fish-hound are taken onto an ark of bones on the Mississippi. Headeye needs Fish-hound to be witness to his calling. What he was called to do, why, and it’s significance I couldn’t quite tell.

Butta’s Backyard Barbecue by Tony Medina

Did not get this two page work at all.

Future Christmas by Ishmael Reed

This story I could at least follow mostly, but it definitely is not my kind of story. It’s a bit of a mix of a story of the future where one company owns the rights to Santa Claus, and a story of the Nicolaite Society. The society I can’t quite tell what it is: sort of Marcus Garvey-ish group with infighting people who have the titles of Brother and Sister. But what its reason for existence is I missed if it’s in the story.

At Life’s Limits by Kiini Ibura Salaam

Traveler from another planet WaLiLa goes to Earth (specifically Cuba) to collect nectar from Pedro Alonzo. Sort of a machine, I gather, she fuels herself with flower petals and speaks natively through motion. Of course, Earth has poison for her and she’s not the only visitor from her home planet. Pretty decent story, though my reaction to it may have been pushed up a bit because it’s the only story in the last few that I got.

The African Origins of UFOs by Anthony Joseph

Two pages in, I skipped over the rest. Totally confused.

The Astral Visitor Delta Blues by Robert Fleming

Another story I didn’t get. Guy goes into a bar and someone there is an astral visitor? Maybe…?

The Space Traders by Derrick Bell

The premise: aliens come to Earth and promise technology that will save it from certain economic and environmental ruin. In return, the aliens want America’s black people. You have two weeks to decide. Go!

The Pretended by Darryl A. Smith

White people invent robots to play black people so that whites can continue to pretend that black people aren’t really people. Blacks are already non-existent. I don’t understand whites making up robots specifically in that manner when they should have lots of ethnicities or other ways to make people into the other without having to invent them. But as a literary device I’ll go with it. The kicker for the story is that black robots really can’t pretend not to be people; if they are to pretend to be black, they have to be people too. And so whites consign black robots to the scrap heap (in concentration camp like trains) because they couldn’t do something that blacks also couldn’t do, not be people. (I think I got the phrasing right there. Too many negatives…)

Hussy Strutt by Ama Patterson

Another work whose poetic stylings lost me.

The following are non-fiction pieces:

Racism and Science Fiction by Samuel R. Delany

Delany tells of several incidents over the years where he has experienced racism among S.F. fandom and professionals, from outright I can’t publish stuff about Negroes to more subtle things like automatic pairing between he and Octavia Butler at conventions. His action item is that analytical systems need to be established. In other words, taken in isolation his being paired with Octavia Butler wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but as a system (i.e., always pairing the two) it’s problematic. His other necessary requirement is that enough black writers get notice that it becomes commonplace for S.F. writers to be minorities. Sadly, nearly 10 years after publication of Dark Matter that’s till not the case, though there are greater numbers.

Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction by Charles R. Saunders

A follow up to a piece he wrote in the 1970s (that I haven’t read) called Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction. Then it was because S.F. was white on white in white. In this piece he notes that blacks should read science fiction to support the continued and emerging presence of black writers and whites who write better black characters. Otherwise the black experience in S.F. will continue to be told by unsympathetic white writers who may not get it right.

Black to the Future by Walter Mosley

Short piece describing Mosley’s hope that a crop of black S.F. writers is just around the corner. Something that I think turned out to be true.

Yet Do I Wonder by Paul D. Miller

Kind of a poetic essay about Miller’s interaction with culture that touches on S.F.

The Monophobic Response by Octavia E. Butler

Musings about aliens in the stars and among us.

¹ I met Nisi Shawl this spring at Wiscon 33. In addition to S.F., we share a predilection for pie and she’s been to my place for one of my periodic Pie Nights. It’s not a conflict of interest, but my personal interaction with her may color my judgment. If I start hanging out with more authors, I may have to come up with a real policy here.

Title: Dark Matter
Editor: Sheree R. Thomas
Series: Dark Matter; 1
Imprint / publisher: Aspect / Warner Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 427 p. (includes biographical material)
Publication date: 2000
ISBN-10: 0-446-52583-9
Subject: Science fiction, American
Subject: Fantasy fiction, American
Subject: American fiction — Afro-American authors
LC classification: PS648.S3 D37 2000

Reading Cosmos Latinos started off as an attempt by me to expand my reading repertoire and hopefully get exposed to interesting science fiction that I’d never read. By the end though, the reading experience became like eating my vegetables. Clean your plate and they are good for you. For the most part the stories selected for this anthology were ones I did not like much. A few were good. Overall the mood set by the selections was quite depressing. The best of the stories ended on hopeful notes. None except the Utopian screed that opened the volume were out and out positive experiences. One or two were ironically positive types though.

Perhaps it suffered because an academic press published the book and it’s geared toward those who want to study Spanish language literature rather than regular readers. Everything was so serious. And depressingly political. I’m not against politics in my books unless I disagree with the politics, but a lot of the stories here just bashed you over the head with the politics to the exclusion of the story. Or it may have been the literary aspect that put me off. I don’t know for sure.

A lot of the effect was to me cumulative. Nothing wrong with these elements in one story. But repeat them over and over and the reading becomes a slog.

The Distant Future (1862) by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno

This isn’t really a story. It’s a description of a utopia in the future. What’s interesting isn’t so much what he sees as predictions, but instead what he sees as a reflection of his own values. In utopia, women are the weaker sex and are timid. An undefined morality rules the day. Written in 1850, it reflects that time more than it does anything else. What are the things that people then saw as evil?

On the Planet Mars (1890) by Nilo María Fabra

A bit in a similar vein, though with an actual story. A utopian Mars discovers life on Earth and begins communicating with it.

Mechanopolis (1913) by Miguel de Unamuno

Traveler accidentally ends up in a city of robotic souls, and doesn’t exactly like what he finds. Is technology so soul-sucking?

The Death Star (1929) by Ernesto Silva Román

A mysterious star appears in the sky, travels to earth at the rate of one light year per second, and issues a deadly radiation as it gets closer! What will humanity do to survive??!

Baby H.P. (1952) by Juan José Arreola

Convert your children’s vitality into a source of power. That sentence from the first paragraph about says it all.

The Cosmonaut (1964) by Ángel Arango

A first contact story, Cuban style. In some ways it’s the same sort of hilarious miscommunication way that is a staple of first contact stories. But it does have pretty weird aliens that really do stuff not quite like I’ve read before.

The Crystal Goblet (1964) by Jerônimo Monteiro

Scry into the future using a blue glowing crystal goblet and you may not like what humanity does with itself. Drink Coca-Cola!

A Cord Made of Nylon and Gold (1965) by Álvaro Menén Desleal

Distraught by personal problems, an astronaut on a spacewalk cuts his tether (the cord made of nylon and gold). Then it gets weird. This one underwhelmed me.

Acronia (1966) by Pablo Capanna

I really couldn’t follow this story. I think machines are running the world, but people think they are. Or something like that. Maybe this could be called slipstream, just because what the hell is going on is so ambiguous. Or not. I don’t know.

The Last Refuge (1967) by Eduardo Goligorsky

A country has isolated itself from the rest of the world, kind of like North Korea. It’s to keep the country safe from materialism. Interspersed with a narrative about a citizen keeping forbidden photos of what the country was like ages ago, handed down in the family for years, is text from a scene where the man stands next to a spaceship, seeking escape. This is a really good story.

Post-Boomboom (1967) by Alberto Vanasco

Another story I really liked. It’s a post-apocalyptic story. I’m a sucker for those kinds of stories. This one is a little different. Instead of savage people fighting each other Mad Max style, these folks try to help each other. Only… well I’m not going to say. I think they match up well with real-life humanity. If you’ve ever worked retail before, you’ll recognize these characters.

Gu Ta Gutarrak (We and Our Own) (1968) by Magdalena Araceli Mouján Otaño

Basques invent a time machine in order to learn the origin of the Basque people. You can probably guess where this one is going.

Future (1970) by Luis Britto García

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hated that crap in school. Don’t think much of it in a story-like thing either.

When Pilate Said No (1971) by Hugo Correa

Humans visit aliens, who have their own Christ that predicted the arrival of humans. I kind of liked this story, though the character are all ham-handed.

The Falsifier (1972) by José B. Adolph

A take off on a historical tale of a Christ-like figure of the Andes. This kind of story works so much better if the reader has a connection to the original tale that an author uses as the basis for updating. If I wrote a story updating an apocryphal legend about Ballard, I and people from Ballard would have quite a bit better chance of connecting with the story. Those of you living in Charleston, West Virginia, your eyes would glaze over.

The Violet’s Embryos (1973) by Angélica Gorodischer

My not finishing the story does not bode well for my upcoming (someday) reading of Kalpa Imperial. I read only eight pages and had to force myself to get that far. Its literary style consists of lots and lots of disconnected sentences that do not lead from one to the other. I had no idea what was going on at all. I put literary in quotes because I’m a firm believer that literature can be both good and not obscure. If it takes a class to understand the basic text, it’s not for me.

The Brain Transplant (1978) by André Carneiro

Another writer who eschews the science fiction label and wants to be called literary. You can have it! Gah. The Brain Transplant was a little more comprehensible than Gorodischer’s story, but not by much. Brain transplants make it so you get all the sensation from someone else, which apparently unglues reality. The only thing you can trust are your own senses, according to the editor’s introduction. I suppose that’s as good an interpretation as any, because in the made up world where you feel other’s senses of this story, the writing doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

From above, an enormous head came down over the table. The professor picked up a scalpel, and with great skill and speed made an incision in the hair and opened up the bone with a small hammer to get at the brain. He inserted something down in there and pushed a pedal. The scene filled with people. There was a new baby doing number two, a nude man in the lotus position, two girls cutting each other’s public hair, and a monk, a cross painted on his chest, with an old paperback book in his hands.The professor kicked the baby, which rolled aside crying.

I’m not saying this doesn’t make sense with some explanations. Bell and Yolanda-Gavilán selected it because it has meaning to them. But I don’t have a degree in literature, so this sort of thing requires some background I don’t have.

The Annunciation (1983) by Daína Chaviano

This is the story I point to in my commentary on The Falsifier that I didn’t know I was pointing to. It’s a science fictional retelling of the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary where he told her she was to be the mother of God’s child. That’s a story I know! I have a connection to it, and so the retelling is something I grok much better than I did Adolph’s story. It’s pretty fun, by the way. Maybe a little sacrilegious for devout Christians, but I approve.

A Miscalculation (1983) by Federico Schaffler

Young kid dreams of space and looks to the skies. A depressing sensawunder kind of story, if you can really combine both terms.

Stuntmind (1989) by Braulio Tavares

Aliens have technology. We have … contentment? Slower lifestyles? Spare brainspace for sure. It’s a good exchange in this story.

Reaching the Shore (1994) by Guillermo Lavín

A father becomes a guinea pig for his company’s product, but he gets defective implants and no one will help him. But really the story is about his kid’s adoration for dad and the lengths he’ll go to to make his dad okay. Good story.

First Time (1994) by Elia Barceló

Another Lord of the Flies effect. Character study of future kid in a society with no morals. Violent and depressing.

Gray Noise (1996) by Pepe Rojo

This one was pretty inventive. Media companies hire reporters to record first hand the news events of the day, with their eyes. In return for paying for the ocular recording implant operation, the companies get first dibs on six hours of footage every day. Really good.

Glimmerings on Blue Glass (1996) by Mauricio-José Schwarz

Investigators look for people who are only pretending to be dumb in a future anti-union economy, because employers don’t want smart people who will just rabble-rouse and want more. But the investigators have to be smart to do their job.

The Day We Went through the Transition (1998) by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero

Time travel special ops team has to go back in time to fix disruptions to history. That whole thing has been done to death. But the love story between two of the operatives is kind of interesting.

Exerion (2000) by Pablo A. Castro

Eternal life through video games.

Like the Roses Had to Die (2001) by Michel Encinosa

Gave up on this one ten pages in. No clue what was going on in this absurdist riff.

Title: Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
Editors: Andrea L. Bell, Yolanda Molina-Gavilán
Cover creator: Raúl Cruz
Imprint / publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 330 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-8195-6634-9
Subject: Science fiction, Latin American — Translations into English
Subject: Latin American fiction — 20th century — Translations into English
Subject: Science fiction, Spanish — Translations into English
Subject: Spanish fiction — 20th century — Translations into English
LC classification: PQ7087.E5C67 2003

Wiscon hosts an event called The Gathering at the start of their convention. It’s kind of a mish-mash of activities to welcome folks to the convention before the main festivities begin. This year I saw a zine table, a couple of tarot readers, a palm reader, a group performing shapenote singing (not quite sure what defines that, but they sounded great), a clothing swap (mostly women’s clothing so not of much use to me, but I did get a book bag there which was oh so useful), and more. One table presented a plethora of ARCs and proofs for conventioneers as a fundraiser for Wiscon (or maybe the Tiptree Award, I forget which). One buck per ARC. I have no idea who donated the ARCs. Most appeared to be fantasy, with a chunks of science fiction, paranormal fantasy, and young adult titles as well. And there I saw Delhi Noir.

At the beginning of this year, I’d never heard of Akashic Books, publisher of Delhi Noir. But in one of my periodic internet searches for books by authors I like, I saw that Curt Colbert would be the editor for a forthcoming book of noir short stories set in Seattle. I loved Colbert’s Jake Rossiter series put out by the much missed Uglytown imprint, and keep hoping (and searching) for a fourth installment from some other source. Anyhoo, poking around I’ve seen that Seattle Noir (just released) is actually part of a decently large series put out by Akashic Books. When I saw the Delhi Noir A.R.C. I had to grab it.

Why did I need it? Well, partially to find out what sort of quality I might expect before I plunked down real money for the Seattle edition. And secondly I’ve been to Delhi and know a little bit about the city (just enough to be dangerous though). If ever there are cities that are ground for noir-ish crime fiction, India has them, and Delhi is prime in that set. Parts are seedy, dirty, and dark. They exist in close proximity to fresh, upscale malls and developments. Large numbers of people are on the take. Kickbacks, while by no means universal, are so common as to be a way of life. Small rebel groups operate within 100 miles of the city. Bandits and highway robbers with one name and (probably undeserved) Robin Hood reputations operate nearby as well. In many ways it’s like America in the early 1900s. That’s mulch for noir. I figured there was a good chance I’d enjoy this book.

I’m happy to report this my expectations have been met. I’ve only read a small handful of crime fiction anthologies (so take this for what that’s worth), but Delhi Noir is easily the best one I’ve ever cracked open. None of the stories blew me away, but Sawhney’s selections consistently turn out good. I liked every single story in the book. Every single one. Delhi did indeed turn out to be good setting for noir.

I wish I lived near enough to New York City to attend one of the upcoming readings/launch parties for this.

Yesterday Man by Omair Ahmad

Suhasini Das is a private investigator in Delhi, formerly partnered with Jaidev Triloki. Triloki has disappeared, and one of his clients comes to Suhasini to finish the job. Arjun Singh wants to find a man he, scared out of his mind at the time, helped to kill another man. He’s living his life backwards, so to speak, to reach that point in time and redeem himself. It’s more a traditional crime fiction story than an noir story filled with atmosphere, but it does have a noirish ending.

How I Lost My Clothes by Radhika Jha

Fancy schmancy upper class consultant type barely maintains his life as he does lots of drugs on the side. So much an addict that he ends up doing drugs with people under the bridge, he wakes up after a particularly bad week missing deadlines, far from home, having his clothes stolen by his homeless drug buddies. Wasn’t even left his underwear. He has to get himself home, or somewhere safe at least, and get himself something to wear. I enjoyed the story, but it was the only story in the collection that didn’t seem to have the feeling of threat, of double-cross, of the possibility of bad things happening. So it stood out in a book of noir as feeling not noir. Still good.

Last In, First Out by Irwin Allan Sealy

Baba Ganoush drives an auto-rickshaw long hours to get ahead. Sometimes he works late into the night. Sometimes he sees the worst of things. Sometimes he does something about it. A little vigilante justice sometimes hits the spot!

Parking by Ruchir Joshi

It’s common for public servants in India to want a little cash to do their jobs, or do a little bit extra of their jobs. Neighbors fight over a parking spot that is technically public. One set of neighbors has a couple of friendly (to them) parking enforcement officers put the pressure on the girlfriend of the other neighbor. No heavy threat this time, just ordinary justice for hire.

Hissing Cobras by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya

Inspector Raghav Bakshi investigates the supposedly accidental death of Mukta Agarwal’s mother in law. Though living together, Mukta and Kamla didn’t get along, and Bakshi is out to prove Mukta’s responsibility for the crime. Moreover, he’s gonna collect payment from Mukta to make the hissing cobras (pieces of evidence) disappear. He is not a nice guy! I could see where this story was going, but I thoroughly enjoyed it getting there.

The Railway Aunty by Mohan Sikka

A shy young virgin is initiated into the worldly ways of sex by an older friend of his guardian aunt when he stops by to pick up a box of apples. He goes back for more, and more, and then she starts pimping him out to other women, for money. Perhaps not even remotely realistic at all, it’s bow-chicka-bow-bow fun with a dark edge! One of the few stories in the collection where the woman isn’t the one getting taken advantage of in the worst way.

Hostel by Siddharth Chowdhury

Zorawar Singh is the landlord of a hostel filled with miscreants. After they protect him one day from a group of sword-wielding men who come to the hostel to avenge a husband’s honor, a newer miscreant learns the story of how Zorawar came to own and run the hostel. My least favorite in the anthology, but still not bad.

Small Fry by Meera Nair

A street urchin works selling tea at the bus terminal in Selhi, and assists a tout who sells unlicensed bus tickets. He gets involved a bit more than usual when a gorgeous young woman, a Bollywood level beauty, needs tickets fast out of town. The tout and he have to make a run for it. Kind of cold-blooded, but I liked him.

Fit of Rage by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

The protagonist lives in Delhi, hiding out from a crime he committed in a fit of rage in Mumbai. He rents a room upstairs from his landlord Mrs. Bindra, but he hangs out with the servants, who harbor a little resentment of their own. Another very cold-blooded story. Another good one.

Just Another Death by Hartosh Singh Bal

After a servant dies in suspicious circumstances, a new journalist investigates but is persuaded to drop the case. Decades later after he has become a revered newsman he decides to poke into the case that started him off and see if his hunch had been right. Yet another very cold-blooded story. Still another good one.

Gautam Under a Tree by Hirsh Sawhney

Several years prior to the story, Gautam worked with a foreign documentary maker, Lauri Zeller, to film a tribal group that was fighting corruption and capitalism. Though lovers, they had a falling out when Zeller wanted to make the documentary about how art could save the tribal members and several key leaders of the group were murdered including a man Gautam considered a friend. Now he has a chance to write an expose on how an industrialist orchestrated the murder. The story is told from the point of view of Gautam’s girlfriend. I do wonder which foreign documentarian Sawhney is taking a shot at here. Anyway, Gautam is presented with a pretty awful choice.

The Scam by Tabish Khair

A couple of somewhat gullible celebrity types convince a cynical journalist to investigate a caste atrocity in Bihar. The story the low-caste mother and child tell is of being forced off their land by another caste. The journalist doesn’t believe because he caught the child running a turd scam, where a kid throws birdshit on your shoes and then offers to polish them for a fee (something the India guidebooks warn visitors about). Also, if the atrocity were real, in his mind, a politician would already be milking it for publicity. A tale of people changing their minds, but not always for the better.

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash (Prakash’ English language blog, Hindi language blog)

This is the only entry in the book not originally written in English, and it is perhaps my favorite. One of India’s poor, who squats in a ruined castle with his family, works as a janitor cleaning government buildings. Until he finds a cache of millions hidden in a building he cleans. He steals some to finance a lavish lifestyle, even taking on a mistress. Will greed take him too far? Who really owns the money? Loved this.

Cull by Manjula Padmanabhan

And this story actually has a connection to Wiscon! I’d been wondering why the hell a mystery anthology would find its way to a science fiction convention. The last story is a Philip K. Dick kind of near-future S.F. noir. The ruling class decides to do something about an uncontrolled group of the underclass living in a 2,000 acre garbage dump on the northern outskirts of future Delhi, where historical buildings have been moved to underground parks to make way for rigid rectangular city blocks. It’s not particularly original, other than the Delhi setting. Still, it does have a different cultural vibe than these stories usually have.

One word of warning about the collection: violence against women dominates most of the stories. I’m not in a position to know whether that’s representative of Indian culture today or if it’s an editorial bias. It’s not presented in a positive light. Pretty much every story has men taking advantage of men. By my quick count, eight have men taking advantage of women, all violently or sexually. Two have women taking advantage of men, one sexually and one violently. Be that it might reflect reality, some people won’t enjoy the level of violence against women. If you get squicked when that sort of thing predominates, don’t read this.

Title: Delhi Noir
Editor: Hirsh Sawhney
Cover creator: Madhu Kapparath (photographer) / Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Books Noir Series
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Advanced readers copy
Length: 280 p.
Publication date: August 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-78-1

I picked this book up at the dealers room at Wiscon 33 last weekend. I’m not particularly familiar with slipstream, though I’d read one story that appeared in this anthology. But I had such a nice chat with M. Rickert so I decided I would see what this was all about, since one of her stories appears. Verdict: overall probably not my thing. I really liked some of the stories. Some of the ones that didn’t work for me really didn’t work for me. When a story is trying to mess with me, it better succeed well or I’m just gonna be irritable.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel start with an introduction trying to explain slipstream. Not define it, exactly, though. It’s an extended musing on the definition, as as it exists, it’s history, whether it should be defined, and the pitfalls of including particular stories for this undefined thing. Throughout the book they’ve also reprinted a series of comments made on David Moles blog regarding what slipstream’s definition. The end result really isn’t a definition any more than Bruce Sterling’s original essay was. Conclusion: hey, there’s some weird fiction out there that has some common elements that we like.

Al by Carol Emshwiller

The first story in the anthology didn’t work for me at all. According to the introduction, it’s sort of a mashup of Lost Horizon and a satire of the New York City art scene. Al crash lands in a different culture and tries to become part of it. That different culture is, in this case, an artist commune of some sort. Not having any connection to any of the pieces, it seemed strange for strangeness sake to me.

The Little Magic Shop by Bruce Sterling

Very cool little story about a fellow who comes back to a magic shop every decade or two to get a magic elixir that returns him to his youth in exchange for everything he possesses.

The Healer by Aimee Bender

Another really good story. Two school girls, one with a hand of fire, one with a hand of ice. The water from the second girl’s ice can heal. But can it heal the unstable fire girl?

The Specialist’s Hat by Kelly Link

A ghost story. I’ve read this story before, and liked it then. My opinion hasn’t changed on re-reading it. When I went back and read what I wrote way back when though, I said something that I probably should have paid attention to. Overall, I wouldn’t read her again, even though I liked half the stories. Just too much trouble. I just bought Magic for Beginners in the Small Beer Press sale, so I might end up not liking it. For $1 though, you can’t really go wrong.

Light and the Sufferer by Jonathan Lethem

Mysterious aliens follow people who have drug habits. Another great story.

Sea Oak by George Saunders

Another awesome story! Absurdist science fiction fantasy crossover. Aunt Bernie comes back from the dead a little more assertive than she was when she was alive. Great bit is a faux T.V. show called The Worst That Could Happen which takes unlikely but possible tragedies and simulates them. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he’s eaten by wolves. Brilliant!

Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist by Jeff VanderMeer

This is one of the ones that didn’t work for me at all. Shades of H. G. Wells The Time Machine with stratified garbage workers.

Hell Is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang

I wonder if there’s a Ted Chiang story that I don’t like. This one I loved. It’s simple in structure, but thought-provoking. Two big tenets of Christianity don’t have to be taken on faith in this story: god exists and manifests himself all over the place, and hell is the afterlife whose primary feature is being cut off from god. God and angels still are mysterious. They do things for strange reasons. Angels show up randomly, curing some and afflicting others. Neil Fisk’s wife is killed in one of these appearances and ascends to heaven. Neil wants to love god so he can be with his wife in heaven when he dies, but he also hates god for taking her from him. Quite the dilemma!

Lieserl by Karen Joy Fowler

Einstein’s daughter? I think … ? That absence of sound you hear is the vacuum inside my head.

Bright Morning by Jeffrey Ford

Decent but fairly unmoving story about a writer who searches for a lost Franz Kafka story only to have the writer Jeffrey Ford outbid him for it at auction. It kind of pulls a Memento like trick though, in that the gimmick really felt like a gimmick. Clever for cleverness sake.

Biographical Notes to A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes by Benjamin Rosenbaum by Benjamin Rosenbaum

This story tries to pull a similar self-referential trick, but to my mind, the story worked better. Not because of the gimmick though. It’s just a bit more fun is all.

The God of Dark Laughter by Michael Chabon

The second story that I’d previously read. Still like it.

The Rose in Twelve Petals by Theodora Goss

Kind of a re-telling/take-off of Sleeping Beauty with a bit of alternative history. I like it, and I may like it more on a re-reading. It has that kind of feel to it.

The Lions Are Asleep This Night by Howard Waldrop

An alternative history story where a kid in Africa saves his lunch money to buy cheap books and wants to write his own. Alternative history because Europe and America aren’t dominant (and might not ever have been). I liked it, but that’s the book geek in me identifying with the book geek in the kid.

You Have Never Been Here by M. Rickert

This is the reason why I bought the anthology. As the introduction to the book states, it’s very haunting. It’s second person, in a hospital. The doctors are doing something, perhaps conducting an experiment, but perhaps doing something else. They want you to love. It’s confusing. But in spite of the fact that I don’t know what the hell is going on, I liked the story. It works like I wish poetry did for me, mostly by setting a mood and instilling feeling.

Other blogged reviews:

• Everything Is Nice

Title: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
Editors: James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel
Cover creator: Isabelle Rosenbaum (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Tachyon
Format: Paperback
Length: 288 p.
Publication date: 2006
ISBN-10: 1-892391-35-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-892391-35-3

The middle of this anthology wasn’t particularly strong, but you can’t go wrong with something that includes Beggars in Spain. Gene Wars, Eyewall, and Desert Rain round out the top stories in the collection, at least according to me. As I’ve noted before, Dozois’ seeming obsession with naming authors as Big Names and Ones to Watch irritates me. While I think who writes a story is important, Dozois spends more ink in his intros on an author’s pedigree than on the story.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

I think this is the first time I’ve read a short story after reading the novel version. Kress set the standard for the trope I call human evolution: what happens when the next version of humans come along. The idea: genetic engineering allows us to create people who don’t need to sleep. The extra time and some beneficial side effects mean they are smarter and more balanced than normal humans. Who promptly start treating them like crap. Re-reading this is tough precisely because I’ve read so many stories that mimic Kress’.

Living Will by Alexander Jablokov

You are going senile. You know it. You want to off yourself before you get too far gone to be a burden. However, you don’t want to do it while you have some semblance of brain left. The dilemma is that once that semblance has left you, you are no longer capable of making the decision. Could you turn that decision over to someone else? Someone you trusted utterly? Good story.

A Just and Lasting Peace by Lois Tilton

Alternate history in which Reconstruction goes on a lot longer, and southern resistance goes on a lot longer. Rather than the north winning and eventually losing, they never really win. Not bad, but it didn’t impress me either.

Skinner’s Room by William Gibson

I don’t really understand why Dozois’ introduction says this story is about housing the homeless. In a future where cities are falling apart, the poor take over the Golden Gate bridge and build structures for themselves to live in. Nothing earth shattering. Pretty good style though, which sets a mood really well.

Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams

Sometimes it seems like people disaffected by monotheistic Christianity flock toward Eastern religions or philosophies. Although I don’t share Christopher Hitchens vehement language toward those religions, I do tend to agree on principle. If you can’t find evidence for it, it’s not true. Buddhism is one of those religions that falls into that category for me. If you want to believe it on faith, be my guest, but I need evidence. Reincarnation? Asceticism? Bah! Intentionally or unintentionally, this story fits in very much with my view. A future Buddhist-themed galactic empire runs into conflict with an alien race. But right when things come to a head, the empire’s version of the Dalai Lama dies and the new incarnation of Buddha changes things up a bit. To me, highlights how little sense soul reincarnation makes, as well as how despotic religion can be.

Blood Sisters by Greg Egan

When you do a double-blind test of a new drug, isn’t it kind of unfair (if the drug works) that the control group won’t be cured?

The Dark by Karen Joy Fowler

A dark fantasy/horror tale about a boy raised by wolves who ends up as a C.I.A. experiment. It didn’t do a whole lot for me.

Marnie by Ian R. Macleod

If you could go back to high school/college and do it all over again, would you? Here’s how that might happen.

A Tip on a Turtle by Robert Silverberg

What would it be like to actually have premonition? For the guy in this story who predicts who can win turtle races at a resort, it kinda sucks. Well-written, but I’ve seen this done better elsewhere.

Übermensch! by Kim Newman

A sorta alternative history story. It’s not really alternate to real history. Alternate to the Superman history. Instead of the spaceship from Krypton landing in a Kansas field, and Superman working to save the allies, he grows up in Germany and is a tool of the Nazis. Despite not being particularly fond of alternative history, I did like the story. Maybe because superheros from this kind of perspective are done so rarely (that I run across at least).

Dispatches from the Revolution by Pat Cadigan

Not fond of alternative history unless done really well. This one, not so well. What if… the right wing ascended in 1968?! Yeah, it happened in Germany. Perhaps it could have here. But it didn’t. And I’m not sure we really need another scare piece on what the right wing could do in America. I’m pretty sure we don’t need one at all.

Pipes by Robert Reed

An okay story about environmental restoration. Predicated on cheap food from offshore farms making midwest farming unnecessary.

Matter’s End by Gregory Benford

I did not like this story one little bit. A lot of melodrama about India hating scientists so much any scientist/Westerner will get beaten or killed. Westerner comes to secret Indian physics experiment that is measuring proton decay, which will determine the end of the universe. And then things really go to hell. Everything except the actual experiments felt false to me.

A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations by Kim Stanley Robinson

This seems more like a fictionalized travel essay than science fiction or fantasy. A lot more. Maybe I missed something. As travel writing, it seems pretty decent. I want to travel to the Orkney Islands now. As speculative fiction, it seems lacking.

Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley

I really liked this story about genetic engineering. Not that it’s necessarily likely to happen. The story follows more along the lines of take something to it’s extreme to good effect.

The Gallery of His Dreams by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Interesting concept. Interesting writing. Interesting point. But for some reason I just didn’t get into the story. Mathew Brady, a photographer who sought to chronicle the horrors of war during the U.S. Civil War, went penniless from his efforts. The story has a time traveler whisking Brady to wars throughout time to use his skills and equipment to chronicle wars of all kinds. In the end, people view his work as art, not history. Good story, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.

A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis

Good mundane-SF (at least by my estimation) story about rescuing a person from the surface of the moon. The walk in the sun refers to the fact that the castaway’s life support in her space suit is solar powered. She can’t let sundown catch up to her or her ability to breathe will shut off for 15 days (you try holding your breath that long!). So she has to walk ahead fast enough to stay in the moon’s daylight for a month (at least) until a rescue rocket can reach her from earth. Kind of like the premise of Stephen King’s The Long Walk; walk or die.

Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Ian McDonald

A Jew during and before World War II is visited by an angel? I think. I’m not really sure what her visions represent. Another story that didn’t resonate with me, but again probably more me than the story.

Angels in Love by Kathe Koja

A girl overhears her apartment neighbors having loud sex, and she wants some of it. Enough that she starts spying on the woman hoping to get a glimpse of her boyfriend, to see if she can horn in on the action. Nice to see a story about a hard-up undersexed loser being a woman instead of a pasty white geek boy for once. Anyhow, she never sees the man enter or leave the place, despite increasingly stalkerish behavior. What’s going on over there?

Eyewall by Rick Shelley

I loved this story. I have Shelley’s book Fires of Coventry which I really want to read now. Not technically a mundane SF story, but all the key parts of the story are. Basically, a category 5 hurricane leaves 20,000 dead in Florida and a million homeless. A hurricane study group must bow to political pressure. Instead of pure science research, they are supposed to conduct experiments using explosives (including nuclear) to disrupt the eye of a hurricane to get it to dissipate. They don’t like the applied research, and they don’t like using nuclear weapons, and they don’t like that their scientific existence depends on something they don’t like. The non-mundane part is that the experiments occur on a water covered world that has lots of hurricanes and is mostly untouched by human hands. The awesome part is the simmering conflict between the political guys and the original science people. Awesome tension and buildup.

Pogrom by James Patrick Kelly

Another story I liked. Near future story where the young are in conflict with a richer older generation. What I loved is the hypocrisy of the main character, an older woman, commenting on how the younger generation blames the entire older generation for the sins of a few.

The Moat by Greg Egan

Interesting but not compelling (gah! I just used compelling in a review!) idea about people who create their own alternate D.N.A. and why they might want to do so. Hint: it’s an us vs. them thing.

Voices by Jack Dann

Boy talks to the dead. Friend doesn’t believe him. Not inspiring.

FOAM by Brian W. Aldiss

FOAM stands for Free Of All Memory. Unscrupulous people steal other people’s memories to sell, kind of like drugs. Eh.

Jack by Connie Willis

I don’t usually like stories of this type. A type I won’t reveal here so as not to spoil the story, but also partially because the relevant word is never actually used in the pages. But I liked this one. Thought it was a novel take on the idea, and some of the things left unsaid intrigued me. For instance, how down and out would Jack have to be to resort to the kind of subterfuge he does?

La Macchina by Chris Beckett

Yet another version of robots gain awareness. Nothing about this screams best of the year to me, though I wouldn’t call it bad either.

One Perfect Morning, with Jackals by Mike Resnick

I like this story because of what a bastard Koriba Kimante (the elder) is, so beholden to his convictions that he cannot be a father.

Desert Rain by Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy

The miracle of artificial intelligence illustrates this story about one woman’s one person bubblehead validation brigade. A BVB is always a little more empty than you’ll think it will be. I’m not sure if this is my favorite story in the book or not. I guess it depends on how I think people relate to their BVBs. Most days, I don’t think most people get that a BVB is skin-deep. Those days I probably will like this story even more.

I kinda do want to know why this particular year is still in print. I bought this new from Amazon. New. It was published over 15 years ago and every other edition of the series older than a year or two has to be purchased used. So why this one?

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Bob Eggleton (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Science Fiction; 9
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 575 p.
Publication date: 1992
ISBN-10: 0-312-07891-9