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.

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

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 have laying around a few older fiction magazines that I’ve never read. So I figured I would knock some of them off over the next month or two. I can’t even remember why I bought this one eight years ago.

As normal, I’m only reviewing the fiction.

Lifeline by Eleanor Arnason

I think Mark Watson states my thoughts best in his review:

The story ends with a lengthy dialog between Duluth and an AI concerning destiny and other matters – which comes across as being what Arnason is really wanting to talk about, with the preceding story the means to get her there.

Duluth is our main character, a former revolutionary who is being studied by the ruling AIs by having an AI implanted in her head. The plot has her getting kidnapped by alien revolutionaries.

The Gods Abandon Alcibiades by Joel Richards

Aliens experience human life by inhabiting ancient Greek personages? And then some of them get too close to the experience and don’t want to go back? And have to be forced? Something like that. Except it’s all talky-talk.

Day’s Heat by James Sallis

Siblings abused by dad somehow. Something or the other about letting dad or another sibling live vicariously, literally, through what they do. And now he’s dying and sister has come home after resenting him for years. I think.

Romance with Phobic Variations by Tom Purdom

Future Casanova Joe Baske discovers that he’s actually a mark for con-women who have genetically modified one of themselves to fit his well-known tendencies. I’m not really sure if I should view it as saying something about the nature of love or if I should just view it as a science fiction caper. It could be viewed both ways. The latter a bit better, but even then it still falls a a bit short.

Exclusion by Daniel Abraham

Have you ever just dropped someone from your list of friends? Completely cut them off as if they didn’t exist any more? Sometimes that can be an easy way of avoiding dealing with problems. Abraham imagines a world where you can do that totally, with technology. Tell your computer to completely edit a person out of your life. Can’t see ‘em. They can’t see you. Take the social phenomenon to it’s extreme.

User-Centric by Bruce Sterling

The story starts off as a series of messages between members of a product development team. Having participated in a bunch of these sorts of things, it felt very familiar. Then the narrative transitions into a story about the subjects of the story developed by the product development team. Cute, but I’m not sure what the point is. We are manipulated by marketers? We aren’t the sum of the stories told about us? Eh.

Ice and Mirrors by Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven

Very Niven-esque story. No big dumb object though, and a little contrived. A race wants to colonize a planet. Galactic law requires that a neutral race okay planet colonization to make sure no indigenous races are displaced. This is the story of two human verifiers who play the role for a proposed Thray colonization of an ice planet. It’s the first time the pair have done this, and indeed the first time humans have. The contrived part is that only the team lead can okay it. The team can only be two people. They can only send one message (no consultation). And no one else but the Thray are there with them. Given the unlikely setup, it’s a good story. But that setup just doesn’t make sense other than to inject some danger into the story.

Title: Asimov’s Science Fiction
Issue: February 2001 (301)
Cover creator: Michael Carroll
Length: 144 p.
Publication date: December 2000

Back in January, I wrote about my views on the graphic novel: a worthwhile art form, but not literature as I define it because the primary mode of storytelling in it is visual. I might occasionally put up a review of a graphic novel on this blog because the blog covers books in all their forms. Cookbooks and atlases are rarely literary, and yet I include them. I’m a pragmatist.

In contrast, I consider audiobooks to be literature. While the medium for storytelling is verbal, the transaction between the book and reader is conveyed by the words. The narrator’s skill can add or take away in presentation, but to me the words are equivalent to the written form. The words are what are important to me.

But I’ve never listened to an audiobook before. That’s partially because audiobooks are freakin’ expensive. But it’s also because I have a much harder time focusing on the story. Audiobooks are often played in the background while a busy person does something else. When I read, my full attention is on the pages in front of me. To listen to an audiobook that way, my tasks would need to be so mindless that I my full attention could be devoted to the book.

In listening to METAtropolis, I also determined that not being able to look back a few words, sentences, or paragraph’s detracted from my comprehension. On a page, if I don’t quite get something I could scan back briefly and get that understanding. And my comprehension looking at a word was much better in the first place. I seem to mis-hear things when spoken more frequently than I mis-read as well.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. When my mom lost the use of her hands this summer, I signed her up for Audible.com so we could get some audiobooks for her to listen to. She could operate a laptop with her feet, so Audible was a much better choice than buying CDs. Cheaper too. She left a few unused credits when she died in October, so I selected a few books to use them up. Figured it was a good opportunity to try audiobooks.

First up is METAtropolis. Right now it’s only available through Audible, so this was a perfect opportunity. It’s a shared universe anthology. Two of the five authors (Schroeder and Buckell) are among my recent discoveries. The other three have been on my list to check out for a few months.

In the Forests of the Night by Jay Lake (read by Michael Hogan)

I didn’t really like Michael Hogan’s breathy reading. It seemed overly dramatic to me. Tyger is a mercenary newcomer to Cascadeopolis, an anarchist green commune in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade mountains. Capitalists have targeted the semi-secret community for their intellectual property, which they normally give away freely using open source licenses. Tyger and another operative are under contract to the capitalist, but Tyger has gone rogue. I did not understand the ending to this at all.

Stochasti-city by Tobias Buckell (read by Scott Brick)

In Detroit, a green movement needs help fighting against the Edgewater Company’s private security forces (the police are more or less non-existent) who are trying to prevent them from forcibly make Detroit car-free. Often jobs are done through turking which I believe is a take-off of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, though where they got it I do not know. In this method, anonymous employers split up jobs to anonymous employees who only get to see a little bit of the big picture. Think of hiring 50 movers each to carry one box for you. That sort of thing. The green movement hires Reginald, a former military colonel now working as a bouncer to do part of the work. BUt then he gets sucked in to the plot just a but more. Good story. The legal setup for parts is a bit unbelievable, but I do like the economic landscape described.

The Red in the Sky is Our Blood by Elizabeth Bear (read by Kandyse McClure)

Okay, now I see a formula behind this anthology. Third story in a row of a band of outsiders/reformers trying to live in the margins of a decaying or decayed United States. Outsiders are environmentally conscience kibbutzim type places. Not necessarily a bad premise, but all three stories seem to follow the same general lines. As in, introduce a non-member to the place and use that person as a foil to explain how the kibbutz works. Throw in the newcomer mistrust, and a little conflict where the newcomer can play a key role, and there you have your story. So far, I prefer the Buckell version of the formula.

Utere Nihil… by John Scalzi (read by Alessandro Juliani)

Slacker kid needs to take a placement exam to go out and get a job. Starts off with slacker kid Benji playing the friend role to a girl he really likes, and telling her that her current boyfriend doesn’t really respect her. Job he gets is dealing with pig shit, cause that’s about all there is for someone who screwed around as much as he did. In this story, the insular enclave is not the insurgent group, but instead established St. Louis. And the city is set upon by the have-nots outside the city boundaries. A little different from the other stories but still has a lot of the same feel as them, particularly with Jay Lake’s contribution.

To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder (read by Stefan Rudnicki)

Meh. Schroeder’s contribution is, surprise, a reworking of a lot of the ideas that appeared in Lady of Mazes. Virtual reality. The theme behind METAtropolis overall is that disparate locations, generally cities, are linked together in a much stronger bond than nation-states. Cascadia is a combination of Portland, Seattle, and Portland, across a still extant U.S. and Canada. Citizenship in St. Louis provides privileges to visit cities in Asia and Europe. Schroeder takes it one step further. Every place falls not only within several jurisdictions in real life but also within virtual worlds. Put on glasses and enter overlayed worlds of virtual reality, such as Oversatch. Frankly, there’s a lot of magic happens here to make it work. The basic story is that plutonium has been stolen in the real world by someone who lived in one of these virtual worlds. Gennady is an I.A.E.A. inspector who is hired to help find it, and he must travel through these virtual worlds. I thought the story was pretty underwhelming. Even more so than the other stories, I wasn’t fond of the immense amount of explanation the technology in the story required. It took away from the actual story.

I think the concept behind the anthology is strong, but in execution it lacks a lot. The stories feel very much alike, particularly the first three. All of them rely too much on explication rather than story. In other words, I want my stories to tell the concepts needed, rather than breaks in the story where the narrator steps in to explain the concepts.

In addition, I wasn’t too fond of the actors hired for narration. The hook was that three of them appear on the new Battlestar Galactica series. Way to hook in the geek crowd, but they aren’t great readers. Michael Hogan read extremely breathily, for instance. Stefan Rudnicki (not a B.S.G. actor) was quite excellent though.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Indentured Mind
• Dichroic
• AzureScape

Title: METAtropolis
Editor: John Scalzi
Imprint / publisher: Audible Frontiers
Format: Audiobook
Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
Publication date: 21 October 2008

I don’t know if it’s the steampunk sub-genre or the fact that the publisher is U.K. based, but a lot of the stories in this original anthology have a distinctly British flavor to them. Certainly a Dickens style world lends itself well to steampunk’s low-technology ethos, dark brooding and full of all sorts of intrigues that can serve as a basis for a plot. On the other hand, it starts to feel a bit monotonous after a bit. The last four stories thankfully aren’t Brit themed, but you gotta read a while to get to them (or intersperse them out of order now that you know).

I definitely appreciate getting the chance to read a few authors I haven’t been exposed to prior to this, at least beyond seeing their names mentioned in a few reviews here and there. I think this is my first reading of eight of the twelve authors appearing.

My favorites of the anthology are from Roberts, VanderMeer and Lake. Lovegrove’s Steampunch is a good opener as well. There’s nothing I hated or couldn’t get through, even with Youmans’ confusing Static. I normally hate the stories that confuse me, but this offered other delights. Good to see a fairly new imprint in SF making a name for itself. As they say on EBay, AAA+++.

Steampunch, James Lovegrove

An old hand at a penal colony tells a newcomer his story. He used to train Steampunch, the mechano-boxing legend, before robot fighting was declared illegal. Battlebots with an edge. Decent story.

Static, Marly Youmans

I couldn’t really figure out most of what’s going on here. There’s a lot of electricity in the air. Not tension. Electricity. And a woman abuses and/or treats poorly her ward, her grand-niece. On the good side though, Youmans uses some great metaphors in the story. Nothing was thrown away at The Towers, so time accumulated its sediments inside hatboxes and wardrobes. Great stuff. If only I understood what was going on.

Speed, Speed the Cable, Kage Baker

Saboteurs scheme to destroy the Trans-Atlantic cable before it’s even been laid. Counter-schemers plot to prevent this from happening so their secret world domination plans aren’t disrupted. Kind of eh, but not bad.

Elementals, Ian R. MacLeod

I’ve never much been fond of Law of Attraction kinds of things. I’m a born skeptic. If science ever shows that it’s true, I’ll gladly go along. But until then, it’s a lot of hooey (like most of the anti-Obama bull-crap that right-wing ignoramuses spout on blogs and chain email). Elementals is a law of attraction kind of story. Not that MacLeod believes it (I’ve no evidence either way), but it’s mere presence as the unifying theme of the story biases me against it (like it did against a similarly premised Ursula K. Le Guin story from an anthology). The premise here is that elementals are energy spirits that can inhabit people or things and provide them a life of their own. The key this time is that people have to believe in them for them to be effective (or at least believe in their effect, kind of like a self-additive bubble). The scientist who has discovered them and determined a process to use/enhance them can’t convince people his theory is sound, and so he falls by the wayside because no one believes in his elemental self. To sum up, eh.

Machine Maid, Margo Lanagan

I could see where this story was headed fairly soon in, so there’s a strike against it. On the other hand, Lanagan wrote something that affected me in a way that doesn’t happen all that often. She wrote a character that I really dislike, but also one for whom I felt a lot of sympathy. Mr. Goverman owns a remote Australian tract of land, and moves there with his wife (the story is about her) to better track his investments in nearby gold mining. Mrs. Goverman hates sex, and detests contact with her husband. Then she discovers that the electric maid, Clarissa, has functionality to service male owners. I dislike the character for being both insufferable and a prude. And I sympathize with her for accepting/allowing that which she so clearly hates as well as her distaste for her position in general that she feels forced into by society. The plot isn’t anything to write home about, but the character and some of the moral implications are quite interesting.

Lady Witherspoon’s Solution, James Morrow

I don’t doubt that Morrow’s tale is a take off on Hitler’s Final Solution what with references to Nietzsche spread throughout the text. In the satire, Morrow not only spoofs 19th century feminism but also the Nietzschean übermensch. A couple of spots in the story made me laugh here sitting in my favorite coffee shop. And that ain’t easy to do.

Hannah, Keith Brooke

The intro by Nick Gevers says Hannah is about medical ethics gone bad. Seemed more like a garden variety cloning story to me.

Petrolpunk, Adam Roberts

An alternate reality version of steampunk. Featuring a writer Adam Roberts and an editor Nick Gevers in a world where steam technology continued to be dominant because of a Compound that is added to water to lower the boiling point to 40° C. Of course, Compound is also toxic. But from an alternate reality comes other people who want to steal the petroleum and ship it through dimensional gates to their petroleum based worlds. Quite good, even if I really am tired of British themed stories at this point.

American Cheetah, Robert Reed

Finally a non-British theme! Robot Abraham Lincoln faces off with robot Jesse James gang. Reminded me a little too much of Asimov’s robot stories for me to go hey neat. That and there’s already been a couple of robot stories in the anthology. I prefer the less intelligent versions of Steampunch or Machine Maid if we’re going to have a steampunk story. Again, it’s not bad. But it didn’t stand out either.

Fixing Hanover, Jeff VanderMeer

Another robot story, but this one stood out for me. Not quite sure why. I liked the interplay between Daniker, Lady Salt, and jealous Blake. The steampunk aspect isn’t the important part of the story, though it adds spice. Though it could use a better title.

The Lollygang Save the World on Accident, Jay Lake

I’ve generally been a sucker for created worlds. I don’t mean world-building, though that is nice and has a part in created worlds. I mean artificial worlds, like ringworld, or Dyson spheres, or the smoke ring, or Virga. But they don’t have to be space-based. I loved the Linear City. This story features a created world consisting of a very large Pipe of indeterminate size. Where is it? Doesn’t matter. Could be in space. Could be on a planet somewhere. People live in decks inside. It’s been created by beings as an experiment, and most likely left to rot. Many parts of it lay disused and in disrepair. Unused communications devices. Pipes and tanks with unknown fluids. Totally awesome! The Lollygang (which is as you might think from the name, a youth gang), come across Gloves which let them perform feats unimaginable in their world. “Magically” opening locks and whatnot. Not really sure what they can do, and for once I didn’t care that I didn’t know. But the gloves have a way of taking over. Sounds contrived when I write it out, but it really works in the story.

The Dream of Reason, Jeffrey Ford

I believe Jeffrey Ford is the author that told me to kill myself this summer. And you all thought I was cranky one on the internet! The Dream of Reason is a good story about one man’s scientific experiments to determine the composition of stars. His theory, if he slows light enough eventually diamond dust will fall off it. Dust picked up by bouncing off far away stars. But how to slow it down enough? And how to build a big enough device to conduct the experiment (it’s like a steampunk version of the Large Hadron Collider!).

Solaris Books provided this mass-market edition of Extraordinary Engines free of charge through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In return for a free copy, I am obligated to post a 25 word (or longer) review on LibraryThing. This entailed no other obligations.

Title: Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology
Editor: Nick Gevers
Cover creator: Adrian Wood (photo) / Alex CF (artwork)
Imprint / publisher: Solaris
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 441 p.
Publication date: September 2008
ISBN-10: 1-84416-634-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-84416-634-3

I generally like stories that let me become one of the characters. I like to, if not identify with, at least feel like I understand his or her motivations at a personal level. But space opera is often written on a grand scale, with clashes of nations, cultures, and even galaxies. It’s got to be a challenge to combine the two, and I often don’t like the results. Nevertheless, one of my other favorite components of science fiction is the sensawunda, and space opera often has that in spades. If an author can get personal and include that innate coolness, then it’s a pretty damn good story.

Space opera is a subgenre of speculative fiction or science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing powerful (and sometimes quite fanciful) technologies and abilities. Perhaps the most significant trait of space opera is that settings, characters, battles, powers, and themes tend to be very large-scale.

Definition of space opera comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The new space opera as used in this anthology refers to the revival of space opera in the 1980s and 1990s. Frankly, I never realized it had died out, but apparently it did during the 1970s. Supposedly better than the pulpy space opera of yesteryear, a lot of it is overlong and obtuse, or just incomprehensible to me. Much like some fantasy is. However, this is a collection of short stories, so none of them should be overlong at least.

I should count the number of authors in Gardner Dozois anthologies which he terms as Big Names. He seems to declare quite a few new Big Names every year.

Saving Tiamaat, Gwyneth Jones

In the wake of a devastating war that kills nearly all of both species, the Ki and the An refugees are housed in a park-like station. There they negotiate over the end of their war, with members of a galactic federation watching over. Jean-Luc Picard struggles with the prime directive when he learns that the And eat the Ki. Okay, it isn’t Picard. And I probably have who eats who confused. That’s the main thrust of the story and I thought it was kind of boring. The technological aspects just confused me.

Verthandi’s Ring, Ian McDonald

McDonald is one of the S.F. writers who likes to write about the singularity, the point where technology becomes so advanced that everything afterward is pretty much magic. At least that’s the way I understand it. This story, on the other hand, contained nothing I understood. I think it’s a post-Singularity universe, and that’s why everything was so weird. I had to skip all but the first few pages cause I hate being lost.

Hatch, Robert Reed

Reed has a series of stories set on a giant Jupiter sized space ship. In this one there’s a giant alien that fought the ship and lost and now is attached to the surface. A city of humans and aliens also resides on the surface, stuck there after the war with all the ways inside blocked up defensively with hyperfiber. Periodically, creatures hatch from the surface of the dead giant alien, and people harvest them for raw materials. One such hatch turns out not to be creatures but instead a giant ship that escapes. What portent does this have for the Jupiter-ship? I didn’t care though. I didn’t care for the characters. Never got to know them. And I had nothing invested in the world either. No history with it.

Winning Peace, Paul J. McAuley

This one I liked a lot. Sold into slavery after his Alliance lost a war to the Collective, Carver White’s owner Mr. Kanza wants to use him to retrieve a ancient artifact from a dangerous location near a sun. To get White to cooperate, Kanza reveals he owns White’s brother as well. Only unbeknownst to Kanza, White knows his brother was killed in action. Can he use that small leg up to get his freedom?

Glory, Greg Egan

I also enjoyed this story of archaeologists making first contact with an alien world. It starts off with a great hard S.F. sequence which explains how the scientists encode themselves into data and shoot a very very small amount of matter light-years across the universe to reach the planet in the first place. Then it’s how they make contact with two of the dominant nations on the planet, both of whom are mistrustful of the other. Doing all this for a bit of mathematics seems extreme, as my first thought is why couldn’t these people figure out all the needed math themselves. But you need some sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to make it all work, and this is really as good as any.

Maelstrom, Kage Baker

I really wouldn’t term this story space opera. I think of opera as something grandiose, and this story is not. It’s smaller and more personal. I liked it though. Basically a human on Mars decides to put his wealth to use starting up a theater so miners and other assorted salt of the earth folk can enjoy the arts. The first production is a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s A Descent into the Maelström.

Blessed by an Angel, Peter F. Hamilton

I’ve read a few of Peter Hamilton’s novels, and while I think they are good, they are a bit too grandiose. I don’t mind the grandiosity too much except that it makes the novels so very long. Short story length works pretty well for him too though. It’s a story of rooting out a spy told both from the perspective of the agency that intercepts him, as well as the unknowing targets of the spy.

Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?, Ken MacLeod

After getting caught with his pants off, our protagonist must head to a former colony world that has dropped contact in order to pay off his fines. Very bleah to me. Just couldn’t care about this guy, nor about the world he checks out.

The Valley of the Gardens, Tony Daniel

I’ve liked a couple of Tony Daniel’s stories, but this one was a little bit on the weird side and I just didn’t get into it. Inter-galactic war with what turns out to be an extra-universe enemy. An end to the war that confused me as to why it worked. An aftermath that includes teleporting rocks and a telescope that saves the hero of the war. Why a telescope? I don’t get it.

Dividing the Sustain, James Patrick Kelly

This story presents a colony ship of consensualists in which Been is undercover. Consensualists believe in only doing things on which a group consensus has been reached. Been is maneuvering his way out of his small group and in with the captain’s ex-wife (the crew are not colonists). Only Been really has any depth, and you get a sense of his personality, though some of the things he does don’t make sense. But the whole milieu is just cool. Kelly includes quite a few components in a short space: life-extensions, genetic modifications, interesting social movements, and more.

Minla’s Flowers, Alastair Reynolds

The only Alastair Reynolds I’ve read before was Galactic North, which I just couldn’t get into. This, however, I really liked. Starfarer Merlin runs into some difficulties and becomes semi-stranded on a long-lost colony planet to make repairs. The inhabitants have reverted to just past industrial revolution type of technology. Merlin also discovers that their sun is about to be destroyed, so he warns them they have about 70 years left. They need to unite the planet and get off it before it’s too late. Merlin stays to help, periodically going into suspended animation in his ship. Hard to really identify with any of the characters, but they do have a lot of depth. A good warning that if you are going to pick sides, it’s best to check out both of them.

Splinters of Glass, Mary Rosenblum

A very well-done story about an outlaw hiding out in ice-caves under the surface of Europa. An old flame tracks him down and leads an assassin to him.

Remembrance, Stephen Baxter

Well-written, but this did not move me at all. Aliens conquer Earth. Humans overthrow aliens. Military commander has to decide what to do with a small number of aliens found hiding decades later. Old man who remembers the history of the war tells the story so commander can decide. Ta-da! I think this exemplifies the problem I noted in my first paragraph of this review. It’s hard to make a grandiose landscape into something personal. This one didn’t manage that.

The Emperor and the Maula, Robert Silverberg

Wow. I hated this story! Human travels to emperor’s home world and tells him stories of how his species conquered Earth. First, boring. Second, predictable.

The Worm Turns, Gregory Benford

Characters: bland, boring. Snarky artificial intelligence. Sexually voracious female ship captain. Hard science fiction: confusing. Something about a worm hole. Some sort of intelligent group mind on the other side that doesn’t like visitors. Don’t forget standard creditor makes an offer debtor can’t refuse cause debtor needs to pay off debt.

Send Them Flowers, Walter Jon Williams

Another story I really liked. A take on the whole multiple universes thing that gets about the right amount of detail in the science speculation. Sometimes hard S.F. writers spend way too much ink trying to hash out every little detail. This happens quite a bit with time travel stories, and sometimes with theories of multiple universes. The heart of the story is a philanderer and his accomplice, the trouble they get in to, and how they get out of it.

Art of War, Nancy Kress

Art historian catalogs human artwork stolen by aliens at war with humanity. They were stealing it to learn something practical about us that they could use in war. Sub-plot about the historian’s relationship with his perfectionist authoritarian mother and now the commanding general in the war was just… I dunno, it felt pretty unoriginal. Also, what the aliens were trying to learn results in a trick ending which cheapens it. Once you know what it is, there is no reason to read the story a second time. A reveal should make you want to read the story a second time.

Muse of Fire, Dan Simmons

If I had to guess something about Dan Simmons from his writing, I’d guess he really loves classic literature. Hyperion is an ode to past writers. Muse of Fire is all about Shakespeare. Out of all the stories in this anthology, this one sucked me in the most. Long enslaved by alien Archons, humans are reduced to worker slaves, with some itinerant actors traveling the galaxy. The troupe in this story performs Shakespeare. The Archons are but the lowest levels of rulers. Three levels above them exist. For reasons explained toward the end, the company must perform for each level of ruler, up to the god Abraxas. It is a test. At each level the fate of humanity rests on them performing Shakespeare. I’m not even a lover of Shakespeare, but between the sense of awe that Simmons manages to impart into the ever more spectacular worlds and the minutiae of actors’ egos, I loved this.

Five or six of these stories really got me, so I’d have to say this is a successful anthology from my reader’s perspective.

And after reading the whole thing, I am kinda getting tired of Dozois’ introductions. They sound all the same.

Person X made their first sale in 197X, and became a regular contributor to magazines X, Y and Z. Their first novel was X, which was followed by Y and Z, of which M and N were nominated for the Hugo/Nebula. Author Q now lives in San Chicagiana with their wife and three dogs. In the story that follows, protagonist X really learns what it means to dance to the sound of a different drummer!

I haven’t read any of the other Best of S.F. anthologies that have proliferated in recent years. Are they copying the same introduction format from Dozois? Someone remind me to look next time I am at the bookstore. He selects generally good stories though, and I assume in this case he and Strahan had a hand in editing the stories themselves, since these are all original publications.

Title: The new space opera
Editors: Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Cover artist: Stephan Martiniere
Imprint / publisher: EOS / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: 515 p.
Publication date: July 007
ISBN-10: 0-06-084675-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-084675-6
LC classification: PS648.S3 N47 2007

This book has a really cool cover by Hendrik Dorgathen. I didn’t like much else about the book. This was an impulse buy based on the cover. Let that be a lesson to me.

Each of the stories in this collection centers on some sort of family, and mostly from the point of view of one of the characters of each story. The stories are mostly something akin to inner dialog. In some, particularly Twilight of the Superheroes, Eisenberg includes some sort of narrator-like pronouncements. All of it feels overwrought. The reviews I’ve read of it praise Eisenberg for her insight into human nature. I don’t see it.

One of my shorter reviews.

Title: Twilight of the superheroes
Author: Deborah Eisenberg
Cover artist: Hendrik Dorgathen
Imprint / publisher: Picador / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: 225 p.
Publication date: January 2007 (originally 2006)
ISBN-10: 0-312-42593-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42593-7
Subject: New York (N.Y.) — Social life and customs — Fiction
LC classification: PS3555.I793T87 2006

It’s kind of surprising that I’ve never read anything by Sherman Alexie, given that he’s pretty close to what Seattle has for a literary star. Plus, isn’t The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven the best title you’ve heard for a book in ages? Please come up with something better that isn’t a Philip K. Dick work.

This collection of short stories is set primarily on the Spokane Indian Reservation. There’s a lot of drinking involved, but in the introduction to this 10th anniversary edition, Alexie notes that “When I write about the destructive effects of alcohol on Indians, I am not writing out of a literary stance or a colonized mind’s need to reinforce stereotypes. I am writing autobiography.” The Indians in his stories are laconic, as best as I understand the word. They spend much of their days drinking, waiting for something to happen. It reminds me a lot of teenagers, but without the frenetic impulsiveness seeking to find feeling of the teenagers I know. But there’s a sense among these stories that the Indians will live forever. That stories about each of them will go on without them, and that’s more important than actually living.

Some of the later stories in the book though veer into territory that isn’t quite my bag. They go from realistic stories tinged with metaphor and simile to something else. Not exactly magical realism. Something more akin to essays, where the play of language with time and nature seeks to evoke images.

However, much as I don’t get that kind of writing, Alexie is pretty damn good with turning the phrases. “I am in the 7-11 of my dreams, surrounded by 500 years of convenient lies.” “They all had the gift of storytelling, could pick up the pieces of a story from the street and change the world for a few moments.” “We touched hands and our skin sparked like a personal revolution.” There’s a lot better in the book than these even, but I didn’t paperclip the pages like I should have.

Title: The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven
Author: Sherman Alexie
Cover artist: Wendell Minor
Imprint / publisher: Grove Press / Grove/Atlantic
Format: Paperback
Length: 242 p.
Publication date: 2005 (original edition 1993)
ISBN-10: 0-8021-4167-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4167-5
Subject: Indians of North America — Fiction
LC classification: PS3551.L35774L66 1993