I picked up Distances at WisCon last year, but it sat on my shelf for months. Earlier this month, the Carl Brandon Society gave it their Parallax Award for 2008, so I thought now was as opportune a time to read it as any.

The back cover blurb made the book out to be one that dealt with higher order math. I was worried that this would be too Greg Egan-esque for me. He’s the fellow who likes to write stories where the math itself is what is important, the characters are just foils for plot around the math. It’s generally been not my thing when I’ve read his short stories, but perhaps some day I’ll pick up one of his novels and see if it works better in long form.

Distances central character experiences math as a sixth sense, like vision or hearing. It turned out to be quite un-Egan like. Anasuya’s visions of mathematics for a key stretch are basically a form of virtual reality, requiring little of my It’s Been 20 Years Since I Took Math. I did not need a paper and pen to take notes while I read, as Egan recommends for his stuff.

Anasuya is a member of a tribe where most receive super-power like abilities sometime between the age of 5 and adolescence. Some learn languages for societies that don’t exist, for instance. Anasuya’s is the math thing, which first manifests as sensing the harmonies of waves as she swims. Her tribe is also very water oriented. Much of the plot takes place in a large city, where many tribes make appearances. Hers does not, though how she came to be in the city and not with her tribe comes much later. In the city, Anasuya works/studies at a temple devoted to mathematics, where offworld visitors come to get help mapping out some complex mathematics. As the best, Anasuya becomes the key person helping them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy most of the book. What I did like was the world-building, which was inventive though not particularly well fleshed-out. The key problem was that it seemed so very disconnected at an individual level.

Anasuya lives in a pentad, a five-person coupling. Her living situation receives the focus for several scenes, and then only cameos afterward. The Master of her temple plays a large part in the beginning and once again toward the end. But in the middle he only pops in to criticize and then he’s gone. Anasuya sees a ghost in the machine as she explores the off-world mathematics. This Vara mouths to her that she must make art. Why? Why does she show up in the mathematical virtual reality? Why does Anasuya care so much about this non-corporeal being who can barely communicate with her? The reclusive member of the pentad goes away and the relationship for everyone else falls apart. How did the one who won’t talk to anyone else become key? I constantly had questions like these, for most of the characters.

It’s not that these things are wrong. It’s that I didn’t get any motivation or backstory for the characters. Got plenty for the cultures and the world, but not for the individuals. Distances might have succeeded better for me had it been novel length, with more space to get me invested.

Title: Distances
Author: Vandana Singh
Cover creator: Lynne Jensen Lampe (designer) / Thomas E. Duchamp (artist)
Series: Conversation Pieces; 23
Imprint / publisher: Aqueduct
Format: Paperback
Length: 154 p.
Publication date: December 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-933500-26-3

Nicola Griffith’s Slow River is the first selection of the Feminist Science Fiction Book Club that I joined. It’s also the first electronic book I’ve purchased from the Barnes & Noble bookstore. I am not impressed with the formatting job that Random House did to convert the book to epub (or whatever base format the B&N store uses). The book tells four stories of Frances Lorien van de Oest: before, during, immediately after and long after she is kidnapped. There’s no visual cue when the text transitions from one to another. No horizontal rule, no graphic, nothing. Every transition not done at a chapter break confused me until I figured out I was in a different setting. This could have been done much better.

The story itself qualifies as mundane s.f. In the somewhat near future, we appear to have suffered a slow ecological disaster due to pollutants. The van de Oest family business repairs environmental disasters, up to huge sizes. They also control the patents for a number of methods of clean up and for the genes for a number of bacteria and plants that are used in their methods. Consequently, they are very very rich. While the details are not central to the story, Griffith geeks out including some elaborate information on the running of a water treatment plant. Much more interesting than some of the hard s.f. that’s out there.

Slow River starts with Frances Lorien Lore van de Oest’s escape from her kidnappers. Bloody and beaten, she’s left on the street and no one will help her. No one except Spanner, who uses no other name in the book, who just happens to work outside the system in a number of scams. That suits Lore just fine; she does not want to resume her life as a member of one of the richest families in the world. She’s come to believe her father molested her siblings and wouldn’t pay the ransom to free Lore because she might reveal his perfidy.

So begins a life of grifting for Lore. But at the beginning of the book she’s also left Spanner, one of the four periods of Lore’s life that gets its own narrative. While still disillusioned by the rich life, she’s come to think of her life with Spanner as degrading. Assuming the identity of a recently deceased person, she takes a job as a grunt in a water treatment plant she’s qualified to manage and struggles to establish herself honestly based on her abilities. It’s not so easy though.

I didn’t care much for Lore in the first half of the book, but I did come to like her later on. Too much rich kid. Despite being a capable manager of large projects for the family business, she reverts to being a child after the kidnapping. I suspect I’m just a little too callous for wanting her to hold it together better. I also didn’t like that, at the water treatment plant, she couldn’t sit on her knowledge in order to maintain her fiction as a grunt. It was just too tempting for her to point out things that revealed she knew way more than a basic grunt would. I didn’t like these qualities. I kept on thinking If you want to live your life a certain way, you have to commit to it. Over the course of the book I gradually warmed to caring about what happened to Lore.

Still, my favorite character of the book was Cherry Magyar, Lore’s immediate supervisor at the water treatment plant. She’s got her position without adequate training and doesn’t have the power to do much about it, but was smart enough to know it. Magyar also had the self-assurance to listen to people who knew more even if they had a lower station. She treated her employees as genuine people on whose success hers depended. I checked Ms. Griffith’s web site, but I can’t tell if Magyar has featured in any other stories.

Pretty damn good book.

From here on out, I’m gonna write up some thoughts in preparation for the book club. These will contain spoilers, so look away if you care.

Everyone has a set of privileges that arise as a result of their race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, class, etc. For instance, I have the privilege of not working due to family inheritance and lucky timing in a former job. Some of my hard work went into getting me this position, but quite a bit more is the result of outside factors. More subtle is that I have different fears when travelling after dark than a woman generally would. I don’t have to worry about getting raped, for instance. I can also be driven and ambitious at work and be admired for it, while a woman runs a far greater risk of that attitude being viewed negatively. See how Hillary Clinton was treated in the media for a prime example of that.

In Slow River, Lore tries to renounce her privileges that stem from membership in the van de Oest family. She’s unsuccessful in a lot of ways. For one, she can’t unremember her education. She can’t unremember the confidence the family bred in her. Is it laudable to even try? Should someone give up their privilege just because someone else doesn’t have it? Most of Lore’s privileges are good. If she doesn’t use them as a sword, she could in good conscious keep them. Claire Light has a really good piece on privilege titled White Privilege in which she knocks out her thoughts on privilege that can and should be given up, and ones that can’t or are destructive to take away. I haven’t found anything to quibble with in her article, and I re-read it every few months since I came on it about a year ago.

Giving up privilege comes to a head in Slow River. Lore’s workplace is subject to sabotage, and people would die if Lore did not use her superior knowledge of water treatment to avert disaster. Her and Magyar’s budding attraction faces a test. Not only has Lore really lied, but their stations can no longer be viewed as equal.

While Lore can give up being van de Oest, she cannot give up the option of being van de Oest. Just having the option makes her different. When Lore reveals who she is to Cherry Magyar, Magyar’s reaction is angry:

I don’t understand. Why are you angry?

Because I feel like a fool Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.

Just like that. Dismissed. But…

But what? Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She could just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else … But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it — to be treated as a real person?

That she always had the option to return to the rich life meant she always had an out. It might be distasteful. It might have problems. But it’s something she can do that Magyar can’t. And for Magyar, the revelation of Lorien’s identity brings further complications. She’s now with someone who can walk away from her at any time. If she stays, it’s a testament to the relationship. Most of us, however, are with partners who can’t walk away from us free and clear. We shouldn’t want them with us merely because they have these ties, but they are something we assume and both get to live with and have to live with. Magyar runs a greater risk of her love walking away than most do, simply because she can without consequence.

A few years ago, I walked away from a high paying software development job. I took a job at Barnes & Noble shelving books. That I could walk away from that job at any time, that I didn’t depend on it in any way, made my experience there very different than most of the employees. If a customer got irate with me, I didn’t fear managerial backlash. Twice, managers publicly and overbearingly berated me. I shrugged it off. In fact, I told fellow employees to blame me if a problem came up, and I meant it. The job was a fun pastime for me.

A lot of the moral issues in Slow River deal with class issues. However, gender issues play a part too. Less as an item that is food for thought, I liked very much that the female characters got the majority of the ink. The Bechdel rule is so far in the rear view mirror that it puts the rest of the field to shame. Lesbian relationships merit no particular mention, they are presented as perfectly normal, and that’s exactly how it should be.

But Griffith does reverse some gender stereotypes though. Child sexual abuse features prominently, but the perpetrator is a woman. Not female sexual abuser as a sidekick to a male abuser, or even a teacher/counselor/person in power who exploits her position for favors from a vulnerable nubile young man. That’s something that rarely gets our approbation to the same extent that men using teen girls does. The van de Oest matriarch, the one who runs the business, molests her own children. I haven’t unwound my feelings toward this phenomena in general, and I haven’t the head space at the moment to do so even with the book as a spur. I think the role reversal is important to unpack though.

The last (at this time) moral issue brought to my mind by the novel is one of consent. For a chunk of the book describing Lore’s life with Spanner, Spanner’s normal scams are insufficient to live by, and Spanner turns to prostitution. Not only that, but Lore participates. Spanner drugs her. Griffith makes it somewhat less of a moral quandary later on by revealing that Lore got dosed only after the sex started. Things aren’t completely clear cut to me.

I don’t really call myself a feminist except in the broad sense of the word: I believe in equal political, social, and economics rights and opportunities for women. There’s a lot of different feminist theories, and I only know the beginning pieces of a few of them. I say this because I’m not sure where my next opinion falls in the grand scheme of feminism, if at all.

When negotiating consent, I don’t believe there’s a bright line that divides the acceptable from the unacceptable. There’s a lot of shades of gray. Things that fall to one end of the spectrum or another are clear. Situations in the middle are murky. One one hand, Lore has a (self-induced) power imbalance with Spanner, she can’t just walk away. She is also placed under the influence of drugs which make the experience pleasurable. Although after Lore’s initial decision has been made, she can’t change her mind when drugged like that, and she didn’t choose to take the drugs. On the other side of the ledger sit the fact that Lore participates for a year (if I remember correctly). She has ample opportunity to walk away, and eventually does. The length of time isn’t clearly on one side though. That inures a person. What’s one more time, since I’ve been doing it so long? Things can become acceptable in a person’s mind if they’ve been repeated long enough. In spite of Lore’s perception that Spanner holds power over her, she still holds her option of being Frances Lorien van de Oest, which tilts things strongly in her favor.

One reason why I don’t fall into the camp that consent is only legitimate if there is no power imbalance whatsoever is that power is never perfectly equal. It can be roughly equal. But at best, in my opinion, relative power between two people will shift from one person to another.

So I’m not sure where exactly I stand with regard to Lore’s consent to be pimped by Spanner. She doesn’t seem too worked up over that Spanner perpetrated a wrong against her, though she does question her own consent somewhat after she’s withdrawn it. Her attitude seems to be one of pragmatism, of moving on and not dwelling too much on it. That tends to be my own reaction to things, but I’ve also never felt as if I was pressured to do something sexually that I didn’t want to do. And I’m not likely ever to either.

Other blogged reviews:

• This Ain’t Livin’
• Libritouches
• Eve’s Alexandria

Title: Slow River
Author: Nicola Griffith
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine Books
Format: electronic book
Publication date: originally 1995
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-46448-4

Seemed to me like the stories were shorter in this issue of Lightspeed Magazine, but perhaps that’s because I got into the issue and read quickly.

In-fall by Ted Kosmatka

A space-ship is heading toward a black hole. On the ship are two people, one an interrogator the other a prisoner. See the prisoner thinks he’s going to go to paradise for the cause if he dies a martyr. The side running the ship have figured out that it will never actually cross the event horizon. It will just asymptotically approach, meaning they will never die. I actually had a hard time with the story because this seemed like a very ineffective and expensive way to question someone. But then, so is Guantanamo Bay, so what do I know?

The Observer by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Let’s turn women into super-warriors by enhancing the protect your children part of their psyche. The effect of being turned into a soulless killing machine has been written about before, many times. But this is one of the more effective versions of that theme that I’ve read. Nasty, brutal, and short. Excellent.

Jenny’s Sick by David Tallerman

Although the interview with Tallerman that accompanies the story compares Jenny to an addict, I think a better comparison is to bulimics or cutters. The future brings cures for all diseases, so a new wave is drugs that make people sick. One pill to make you sick, a second to make you better. Jenny likes being sick, so she holds off on the second pill as long as she can. And then there’s her friend and roommate who sorta wants to help, and sorta doesn’t. The story is made by his complex character. Jenny is almost a prop.

The Silence of the Asonu by Ursula K. Le Guin

An alien world where the residents do not speak. Like kittens, they chit-chat a lot as children, with somewhat older children teaching the younger ones the language. But after a few years, they just stop speaking. I love the people in the story who follow the aliens around recording the few short utterances they actually do make, then construct epistemologies based on the revealed nuggets of wisdom. Because obviously, if someone doesn’t speak much, when they do it must be full of great import.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: December 2010 (#7)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: John Picacio

For the first time since they started publishing this summer, I waited until all the stories were published on Lightspeed Magazine’s web site before I read the issue. I intended to read them there, rather than buy the epub, because copying the file to my nook is somewhat cumbersome. It’s really not all that difficult, but it does mean grabbing a USB cable and bringing it into the living room where I use my laptop, then taking the cable back to the bedroom where it lives. If only I had an end table with a drawer I’d keep it there. I did not get the same taste in furniture that my grandparents and parents’ had.

I did end up buying the issue for my Nook though. Since the last time I checked, Lightspeed is available through the Nook store. That meant I could download it over WiFi. So I did.

Solid issue. I like the non-fiction piece by The Evil Monkey on neurological sources of madness. The rest of the non-fiction didn’t do it for me. They had another interview with a game designer/writer. A lot of science fiction geeks are into gaming; I am not. Also a lot of author interviews and profiles. Those are better than a lot of author interviews on the web, but author interviews almost always seem flat to me. The fiction, well:

Standard Loneliness Package by Charles Yu

Premise is that if you don’t want to feel guilt, or any other emotion, you can pay to have someone else feel your qualia. No need to cry during a funeral. Guilt over cheating on your partner, erase it! And like a lot of crap jobs right now, the job of feeling for others gets shipped to India. A very fine story, and it might even have convinced me to read the author’s highly touted literary science fiction novel.

Faces in Revolving Souls by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Body mod people who want tolerance aren’t very tolerant of someone they think is a tourist to their ways. Nothing about the story grabs me really. I generally agree with the sentiment that there’s no reason to treat people worse because they look different, or because they want to do things to their bodies that nature didn’t provide for originally. But while I don’t want to treat people differently, I don’t understand extreme body modification. It weirds me out. I can’t look and not think why? Despite my desire to not treat them differently, I probably do.

Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters by Alice Sola Kim

A year or so ago I read Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine. Alice Sola Kim’s story is sort of the same premise. The main character skips forward in time, and with each appearance feels displaced by the changes. From the author profile, I get the idea that the vignettes are out of order, to increase the reader’s feeling of displacement. I couldn’t tell that things were out of order, but I did feel disoriented for sure.

Ej-Es by Nancy Kress

I’m not very fond of Prime Directive stories usually. Avoiding contaminating cultures with our technological ways seems kind of patronizing to me, but I have read more than one piece from someone in a colonized culture where they are upset by the loss of the possibility of their culture being the primary driving force in their lives/art/etc. Leaving aside the effect on any one person for moment, a monoculture probably isn’t the best for our species, but neither do I think it’s possible to preserve all cultures. There’s a bit of a sociological Heisenberg uncertainty principle going on here. When this topic is explored in fiction, it usually feels to me like the discussion just spins in circles, leaving me little to grasp and think about and no wiser. Nancy Kress’ story is entertaining as a what happens next first contact story, but it didn’t push me into thinking harder about culture bleed.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: November 2010 (#6)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Kai Lim

Here’s a book that combines science fiction and fantasy in a way that I actually enjoyed. Normally, I don’t like these two genres mixed, despite the fact that the line between them is blurrier than my unaided right eye at 2 feet (I’m farsighted).

Half of the story takes place in a near future dystopia. Nation states on the wane, some multi-nationals on the rise. Many large land mammal species dead. The war on terrorism still ongoing. Laura Byrd and two co-workers are at a research station in Antarctica on a publicity stunt for Coca-Cola, which intends to use the ice to make and sell a drink. Back in civilization, someone releases a virus that kills people within a day, and is particularly virulent at the same time. Millions die, but Laura Byrd is oblivious because of her remote location.

The other half of the book takes place in the afterlife. After dying, everyone lives in The City for as long as living people can remember them, or at least that’s the guesswork of the people residing in The City. When the last person who remembers you dies, you move on. It’s a large city, millions stay there. Until the Blinks start wiping out people. As the population of Earth gets smaller, there’s fewer people to do the remembering, and The City empties out.

But not only is The Brief History of the Dead an apocalyptic tale, and a tale of the afterlife, it’s also an adventure story. Having more important things to do, the Coca-Cola corporation abandons Laura Byrd’s team. Though they have some more advanced technology than we do now, it doesn’t work well because the expedition is a publicity stunt and the company scrimped to save money on it. Byrd and her mates must travel from their interior camp to one on the Ross Ice Shelf, where a working radio exists. It’s not a pleasant journey.

I loved the interplay between the remaining residents of The City as they tried to figure out why they were still there when so many people disappeared. It’s a different version of a person’s life flashing right before their eyes just before they die. That vision comes to life and gets to interact with other people’s flashing lives.

One chapter follows a Coca-Cola PR executive in the afterlife. He still goes to the Coca-Cola office. And despite the approaching end of the world, still cares about the reputation of the company he works for, and the people who ran it with him. No one cares anymore but him. It’s a powerfully pathetic scene.

I’m somewhat disappointed in the ending, though it has a lot of symmetry with the first chapter. Both the first and last chapters are woo-woo visions of the city. In between Brockmeier treats us to some pretty nuts and bolts experiences. If there is an afterlife (which I sincerely doubt), I want it to be like The City. Lots of stuff just happens, for instance new streets materializing without anyone noticing to accommodate new residents. But those people live day to day lives, they fall in love, they eat, they pursue the dreams they didn’t when they were alive. It’s refreshing. The mystical stuff I could do without.

Other blogged reviews:

• Bookfraud
• Coalescent
• Book Cannibal
• Try Harder
• Stainless Steel Droppings

Title: The Brief History of the Dead
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Cover creator: Archie Ferguson (designer) / Patrik Giardino (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Pantheon / Random House
Format: Advance Readers Copy (ARC)
Length: 238 p.
Publication date: February 2006
ISBN-10: 0-375-42369-9

I’ve wanted to try out Walter Mosley’s work for a while now. I’ve picked up a few books of his, but they’ve sat in my massive 900+ high To Be Read pile for a while. He most known for his crime fiction, but he’s got a number of works that are contemporary, literary, and even a few science fiction novels. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is mostly contemporary, with one science fiction twist.

Ptolemy Grey is 91 years old. He lives alone. He’s outlived his generation of his family, his children’s generation, and most of the following generation as well. His grand-nephew Reggie stops by every couple of weeks to take him shopping, but mostly Ptolemy sits in his apartment in a state of confusion. He watches a lot of the news and a lot of memories. He’s also a bit of a hoarder, to the point that he no longer sleeps in his bedroom because it’s so full of stuff but rather under a table in his living room. He’s lived like this for 20 years or so, his mind and hoarding gradually getting worse.

What upsets the apple cart is that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting. Another family member first gets the task of looking after Ptolemy, but the job quickly falls on the shoulders of a young girl named Robyn. She’s not even related actually; just a girl taken in by Ptolemy’s grand-niece Niecy. She gently leads Ptolemy through cleaning up his place, keeping the things he wants, but making the place livable. She helps him with his money, and unlike his own relatives doesn’t attempt to steal any of it.

Then Ptolemy gets the opportunity to try a new drug for his dementia. He’ll get to think clearly for the first time in years. The catch is that the longest anyone has lived afterward is a few months. He jumps at the chance. He has secrets that he’s kept, that even he can’t remember anymore. Long laid plans that he’s forgotten.

There’s been more than one celebrated science fiction novel that works on the same premise. Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon and Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark both took place from the perspective of someone who’s mental perception wasn’t normal and presented them with a possible cure. In Flowers for Algernon, Charley’s cure for mental retardation unfortunately doesn’t last. Moon’s Lou might get a permanent reprieve from autism, but he has to decide if removing his autism is really a reprieve or if it’s going to make him not himself. For this genre trope, there’s always a catch. Ptolemy think of it as a deal with the devil.

I’m not sure that The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey will win the same accolades both those novels did. I enjoyed the first half of the novel quite a bit, and was looking forward to the later part. But Mosley filled the second half with a lot of sub-plots and situations and that prevented it from having much focus. There’s Ptolemy and Robyn, Ptolemy and Hilly, Ptolemy and the crazy woman, Ptolemy and Coy, Ptolemy and his second wife, etc. The story almost becomes a bucket list with a clock. Check this off. Check that off. If there was a message, I missed it in the clutter.

Ptolemy Grey is very charming, as is Robyn. The portrayal of dementia might be authentic, or not, but it’s certainly engrossing. The nemesis characters are quirkily bad to Ptolemy, adding to the charm. The plot, I won’t spoil it, but if you’re reading it and think you know where it’s going, you are probably right.

Some good qualities, some bad qualities, but a decent read.

Title: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
Author: Walter Mosley
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Advance reader’s copy
Length: 277 p.
Publication date: November 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-772-9

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for providing a review of the book on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $17.13 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

My general feeling after I finished Monsters of Men last night was one of disappointment. This is really a pretty good book, but I had such high expectations given Ness’ skill at concepts and characters. The themes that I loved and that dominated book one got pushed to the backburner. However, I highly encourage folks to read it though, as it was quite enjoyable. The new themes, while less novel, were well done. It has a relentless pace that kept me turning pages and characters I really cared about, so I had a reason to turn those pages.

If you read through to the next page, there will be spoilers.

Other blogged reviews:

• Things Mean a Lot
• Drew Review
• Jenny’s Books
• The Book Smugglers

Title: Monsters of Men
Author: Patrick Ness
Series: Chaos Walking; 3
Imprint / publisher: Candlewick
Format: Hardcover
Length: 603 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-7636-4751-3

Time for the next issue of Lightspeed Magazine. October was a horror themed issue. I don’t read a lot of horror, and even less science fiction horror. Mostly I stay away from the genre because scary makes me tense and anxious, and I don’t like that.¹ However, an occasional read here or there is just fine. This is my favorite issue of the magazine, so far. The fiction was pretty disturbing, so it fit the horror bill pretty well. The non-fiction still feels really light and introductory to me. I really wish the editors would include at least one fairly deep science article every issue.

Hindsight by Sarah Langan

Black Betty appears within our solar system. Black Betty is a point of contact between our universe and another universe with very different laws of physics. Everything starts going screwy: birth defects, magnetism. Humanity reacts badly. An escape ship is built, except we can’t escape by zooting out of the solar system. Where would we go? So they decide to head into the anomaly, hoping to transition to the other universe. Nothing in the experience goes well exactly. A good story, though it didn’t really have that sense of dread that I think makes a horror story. I didn’t particularly worry about what was going to happen to the main family in the story. Perhaps that because the story focused so much on the current hell they were going through rather than how much worse it could be.

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back by Joe R. Lansdale

The scenario starts off pretty standardly: scientists emerge from underground fortress after nuclear war. It’s not a zombie story. I’m glad, because I inevitably compare post-apocalyptic zombie stories to Night of the Coment. What the scientists face is a whole nuther ball of wax. This one gets kudos not because the horror and dread is all that great (I didn’t really feel it) but for being a creative way to make something disturbing.

The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz

Fultz’ story starts off similarly to one of the stories that became a chapter in Allen Steele’s Coyote. Man in suspended animation on the way to a distant colony planet is awakened early and has to face the rest of the long voyage alone. In both stories, the crewman goes a bit mad. In Fultz’ story, the key is that there isn’t enough food stored on board the ship for the crewman to last the entire voyage and he’s the only person on the ship who can operate equipment that will be needed by the colony. The colony is already established, but is failing due to the lack of the equipment. Crewman is on the rescue mission. After he eats the limited rations, he starts to look around for other sustenance and there’s only him and a few other crewmen on the ship, the rest in suspended animation. You can guess where this is going. Pretty good. Very disturbing. I do not want to read this story again.

Beachworld by Stephen King

Two crewman crash land on a desert world comprised as far as the eye can see by dunes of sand. No food and little water. Will they get rescued before they starve? Oh yeah, and the sand has a hypnotizing effect. Not quite as disturbing as the previous story, but with Stephen King, you know bad stuff is going to happen.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: October 2010 (#5)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Scott Grimando

This month’s issue of Lightspeed Magazine was my plane reading for my trip to Virginia Beach to see my sister and my nephew (he turns 2 today!). To be fair, I traveled on four hours sleep, so this isn’t highest quality reading or reviewing. I didn’t really enjoy this months issue. The characters in the fiction were lacking in personality. Too much third person maybe? Too much alienness? Maybe I was just too tired to connect.

As for the non-fiction, I liked Jeff Hecht‘s piece on future weapons, and Gerald Nordley’s on the physics of space ship engines. Introductory information is all, but since I know very little about the subjects, I personally enjoyed them. Perhaps if you think more than I about the physics of such things it’ll be less interesting. The author profiles were mixed. Without the interview with Yoon Ha Lee, I wouldn’t have understand her story. Robert Silverberg’s profile told less about him than Adams’ preface/introduction to Silverberg’s story in the issue. I didn’t like the interview with Cat Rambo, but that was because it was too brief. Her answers were philosophical, but direct and based on solid reasoning. I’d love to see her writing critical pieces for a place like Tor.com (ala Jo Walton’s work there, which I love).

Adrian Michael Mulryan’s cover painting is pretty cool, although it has nothing to do with any of the stories. But why is the robot using a paintbrush?? How about a robot as a tagger with a spray paint can? Delinquent robots would be awesome!

Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain by Yoon Ha Lee

I liked the idea for this story a lot more than I liked the story itself. Rather than having a universe where every choice splits off multiple future time lines, it works in reverse. Rather, multiple time lines converge to single events. The items in the title are names of weapons which have interesting effects on the time lines that converge to the point of their use. Flower, for instance, wipes out the target’s forebears. Unfortunately for me, the story is told in a little bit more experimentalist fashion than I was capable of understanding. Other than the broad outline I couldn’t follow. The interview with Lee that followed helped some.

The Long Chase by Geoffrey Landis

After a war, one of the vanquished struggles to live separately from the victors. The main character’s brain has been uploaded into a microscopic computer. Perhaps owing to her past as a married and hating it woman, she really wants to remain independent. The winners of the war are other computer mediated minds that joined together to form a cooperative group mind. Why they fought a war over joining the group mind, I don’t know. Landis made that intentionally nebulous, if you read the interview that follows. Now she’s attempting to escape on her ship by heading out of the solar system, but the winners pursue her to get her to join. Most interesting of the issue’s stories because it has the most personality involved. Some of the piece is even about editing one’s personality. What pieces would you consider indispensable?

Amid the Words of War by Cat Rambo

A former prisoner of war works as a prostitute in a brothel on a space station. It’s been rejected by its own species, and doesn’t fit in with the human-like Espens who run the station either. It probably would have ruined the alien-ness had the story gotten more personal with Six, but I felt a distance from it that I wished wasn’t there. It’s a pretty good story, but I didn’t enjoy it due to that distance. According to the interview with Ms. Rambo, she’s set other stories in the same brothel, the Little Teacup of the Soul. I’m intrigued.

Travelers by Robert Silverberg

Four thrill seeking people travel the universe to look for new experiences. The world they visit, Sidri Akrak, is dismal, filled with grumpy anti-social residents, ferocious animals, and gray weather. In short, not such a thrill. But one of the band, the youngest, Nikomastir, reveals this is where he was born and raised. The others don’t believe him. As with other stories, the story had some distance between the text and the characters that made it not so enjoyable. It’s even told in first person and I still didn’t connect.

So, was it the travel? The tired-ness? Something inherent in the stories that wouldn’t have changed had I been in better condition. I don’t know. And I can’t really re-read them a first time again. (Perhaps in a few years I’ll have forgotten enough for a fresh read.) I liked the concepts. There wasn’t anything obviously bad about the stories. Probably me.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: September 2010 (#4)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Adrian Michael Mulryan

Ted Chiang writes only a few stories per year at best, but many of them win awards. I mention him to most anyone and the response ranges from admiration to out and out idolization. I’ve never heard anyone speak of disliking his stories. Often people openly idolize him. I will read any story of his. He’s really quite good.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is his longest work yet, published as a standalone hardcover novella by Subterranean Press. It’s a gorgeous edition. Simple but evocative cover. The occasional interior illustration similar to the cover. The maps that precede each chapter are gorgeous. I should also mention that the type design and layout are among the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Very easy on the eyes for reading. They’ll likely be sold out of the book by the end of the month, and I have no idea if there are plans to print another run. If you are at all interested, go buy a copy now.

Chiang’s stories tend to be idea stories infused with realistic personalities, though not driven by them. The Lifecycle of Software Objects promotes the idea that artificial intelligence can only be created through the use of genetic programming algorithms with lots and lots of training. For those not familiar with the term, genetic programming is a kind of computer design that incorporates feedback loops into how it works. Standard programming figures out how something should be done and then programs the computer to do it. Genetic algorithms have the software start off at a reasonable point. After that the software will repeat what it does making small changes each time, getting feedback whether it’s successful or not. For example, the following video shows a robot learning how to flip pancakes with this kind of software.

In the novella, two employees of a software company that makes A.I.s for virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) struggle with raising the programs they’ve adopted, called digients. At the beginning, they aren’t very bright. They get smarter through interaction with people in the virtual worlds, but at a pace that isn’t much faster than actual people. They aren’t exactly people though. They react differently. They have different motivations and constraints. And digients can’t really be let to run in their own virtual world by themselves. That’s essentially a closed system where they can’t really learn from each other. They need new experiences that can only come from interacting with real people.

So what does that life look like? From creation to adolescence (of a sort), the two employees raise the digients, dealing both with some expected pitfalls as well as interesting philosophical questions. For instance, when is an artificial intelligence ready to move out on its own?

One thing that’s really clear to me is that this story really benefits from Chiang’s involvement working in the software industry. The narrative is infused with little details (and key plot points) that would be extremely hard to write realistically without having 20 years experience in the field. Much like like A.I., stories written about A.I. work much much better when they incorporate actual software development experience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen fiction about the software development business be so spot on.

I’m still not quite sure where I’d rank this compared to other Ted Chiang stories. That’s partially because I have enough of a background in programming that the A.I. ideas as well as the philosophy isn’t particularly new to me. Chiang still makes me think, though. Irrespective of it’s place in the Chiang oeuvre, The Lifecycle of Software Objects deserves year’s best consideration.

Other blogged reviews:

• Damien G. Walter

Title: The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Author: Ted Chiang
Cover creator: Christian Pierce (artist) / Jacob McMurray (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Subterranean Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 150 p.
Publication date: August 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59606-317-4