Summary:
This issue has three solid stories from Rich Larson (Wants Pawn Term opens with Mother creating Red to recover a “sleepyhead” that has fallen from orbit), David Levine (Kora is Life has Kestrel Magid become the first human to race jet powered hangliders on an alien planet), and Oskar Källner (Gamma sees cosmic beings fight a civil war in a dying universe). Also worth a look is Liang Qingsan’s story of literary detection in a Chinese library.
Not a bad issue.
[ISFDB] [Issue: CW, Amazon US/UK]
Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace
Non-Fiction Editor, Kate Baker
Other reviews:
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads
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Fiction:
Wants Pawn Term • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗
Tea Parties around Nebula-55 • short story by Adriana C. Grigore ∗
Hatching • short story by Bo Balder ∗
Kora Is Life • novella by David D. Levine ∗∗∗
The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng • short story by Liang Qingsan (translated by Andy Dudak) ∗∗+
A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life • short story by Oyedotun Damilola Muees ∗
Gamma • short story by Oskar Källner ∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Of Time and Travel • science essay by Galen T. Pickett
Making Short Work of Commentary: A Conversation with Dennard Dayle • interview by Arley Sorg
More Complex Than Caricature: A Conversation with Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas • interview by Arley Sorg
Editor’s Desk: Recognition • editorial by Neil Clarke
Shrine of Nameless Stars (Cover Art) • essay by Daniel Ignacio
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Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson gets off to a flashy start:
Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red
.
wakes
.
up!
Later:
Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?
Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
∗∗∗ (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.
•
Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.
•
Hatching by Bo Balder opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend.
The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.).
The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:
At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting.
Alzey blinked.
A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life. p. 27
Aw, bless.
The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.
•
Kora is Life by David D. Levine opens with Kestrel Magid practicing for an air race on the alien planet Kora. He is the first ever human to fly in this particular competition:
A roar off to my right caught my attention. A pure white practice wing like mine, but with struts painted in red and blue . . . it was Skeelee. Of course. She gave me a roguish salute as she passed me, climbing fast.
My patrons were the Stormbird clade, their colors yellow and black. The Sabrecat clade, red and blue, was Stormbird’s longest-standing and most hated rival, and the loathing was mutual; Skeelee had given me nothing but shit since I’d arrived here last month. I had tried to maintain a professional, sportsmanlike attitude in the face of her provocations . . . but this was no competition, not yet. This was only a practice session. So maybe I could rag on her a little without betraying my principles. I squeezed the throttle and surged upward after her. p. 29
This passage illustrates the personal and clan rivalries that run through the remainder of the story.
Skeelee gets the best of Magid in this duel (his Earth-built jet engine flames out on short finals to their landing zone on the beach), and (spoiler) she goes on to do the same again in the two formal practice runs before the final race.
In between these contests we see: Kora’s planetary and inter-clade politics at work; internal tensions in the Stormbird Clade that Magid represents (later on in the story their engineer commits suicide because the Stormbird Clade’s engine isn’t being used); and Magid generally acting like a fish out of water (getting into trouble with the aliens when sober, and also when drunk).
The story comes to a climax in the final race, during which Magid has to cope with not only the murderous Coral Clade, but also the stormy weather and the knowledge that, if he wins, the culture of Kora will be changed forever. Needless to say, Magid wins even though he crashes short of the finishing line (his engine runs out of fuel this time, but the nose piece of his wing crosses the line first).
This piece has pros and cons and, as it happens, most of the pros are noticeable when you are reading the story, and most of the cons occur to you afterwards. So, the pros: it is a good light adventure story (verging on YA) which is well paced, generally well-plotted, and is concisely and transparently told (oh, the joy of not having to hack through endless MFA verbiage). The cons: this is essentially a non-SF story about jet powered hang-gliders which has been moved to an alien planet; the bouncing nose-cone ending is weak and unconvincing; and the aliens are sketchily drawn (apart from the fact they have fur, we find out little else about their physicality). I’d also add that Magid starts off the story as a fairly callow sort, and ends up pretty much the same despite everything that happens to him. Notwithstanding the latter reservations, this is an enjoyable and easy read.1
∗∗∗ (Good). 18,050 words. Story link.
•
The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan,2 translated by Andy Dudak gives the narrator’s account of his researches into Xijin Guang Hansheng, the author of Ascent to the Moon: Travel Notes of Guang Hansheng (an incomplete Chinese newspaper serial from 1905-1906):
It wasn’t the content of the fiction that drew me in, but the small, blurry illustrations accompanying it. Ratlike humanoids stood on the cratered surface of the Moon. They were rigging up a crude, concave reflector like a present-day satellite dish, using a crater rim for support.
I knew it was a reflector because in the far corner of the image was the Sun, shining a beam of light onto the Moon, which the dish redirected at Earth. Black smoke rose from the focal point on Earth.
This gave me pause. Someone from the Late Qing knowing the Moon was cratered? Then again, it made sense. Part of the ether fantasy propagated back then was a notion that the fabled substance might fill the Moon’s craters, so that from Earth, the Moon would appear smooth. But my brief doubt caused me to linger on this newspaper, originally no more interesting than the other exhibits. Serialized novel chapters, each with a summarizing couplet, were the main form of fiction in the Late Qing.
This sheet of newspaper featured the ending of the seventeenth chapter of the novel in question. pp. 70-71
The rest of the story isn’t much more than an account of the narrator’s obsessive and detailed research (mostly of the library’s microfilms), but his commentary on what he finds paints a interesting picture of China at the turn of the century. As various leads go cold, others turn up and, along the way, we also learn a little more about the narrator (he isn’t an academic, but won’t reveal his social status to the librarians he chats with).
Eventually, the narrator finds what he thinks is Hansheng’s last article (most of the rest of Hangsheng’s work is popular science), and his research ends. He concludes with an observation about the writer (and, perhaps unwittingly in the final part, himself):
I like to imagine an awkward, cantankerous savant possessed of scientific insight transcending his epoch, but unable to communicate it effectively. Understanding much that others can’t, proud yet distracted, getting no approbation, insignificant, at the end of his rope, nowhere to go, nowhere to vent, and not even knowing himself clearly—and suddenly, death is coming. He has squandered his rare smidgeon of talent, while watching others advance while he stays where he is. Alone. Just like countless literati of the time, and now, and even the future. pp. 82-83
I suspect that this will be a Marmite piece—some will be engrossed by the detail of the library detective work, and amused by the narrator’s occasionally mordant observations (“Self-important people cannot abide silence or anonymity”, “I’d heard the PhD student looking for Reunions in the [vast ocean of the] microfilm archive had ended up with detached retinas”), while others will be bored witless. Even those in the former camp (such as myself) may find that, ironic ending or not, it rather fizzles out. Still, an interesting piece if not a totally satisfying one, and I’m glad I read it.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 5,500 words. Story link.
•
A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:
Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her.
“Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.”
Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces.
“Where’s the place?” Harafat asked.
“See for yourself.”
Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around.
Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view? pp. 88-89
The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there.
When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps.
Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:
More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted. p. 93
Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps).
This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings are too long, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action. I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles).
∗ (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.
•
Gamma by Oskar Källner, translated by Gordon James Jones3 opens with two interstellar beings, spawn of earlier civilizations who now live in the “quantum foam” of the universe, meeting at a black hole. There, Gamma, and another of the “Collective”, Kthelk’tha, absorb energy by flying through its Hawking radiation. We subsequently learn more about them and the universe’s recent history:
When the stars had begun to fade, none of the contemporary civilizations were bothered. There would be thousands of millions of years before dark energy ultimately tore the galaxies apart, before the hydrogen ran out and the residual heat dissipated. And of course, they were right. Not the slightest trace of their civilizations remained when the end came. The races that were unfortunate enough to be born in the twilight era tried desperately to find ways to slow down the cosmic expansion, to invert the dark energy and make the universe contract. They were doomed to fail.
Others tried to accumulate enough matter to build new suns. Some such projects met with success. Controlled wormholes stripped nearby galaxies and interstellar space, and enough elementary building blocks were amassed to construct yellow, fusion-driven suns. Dyson spheres as big as solar systems were built around each new star, to harness all its energy. Thereby, they created the conditions necessary to prolong life for a few billion years more. Yet eventually even those stars burned out, the Dyson spheres fell apart, and the last remaining stardust was consumed by supermassive black holes. The universe entered the era of darkness. p. 97
Some time after this encounter they fall out and separate, and then Gamma learns of a war started by a Collective faction called the Light Connexion. Gamma subsequently finds Kthelk’tha and sees she has been infected by a virus. Gamma destroys the virus and revives Kthelk’tha, and they decide to head into deep space as there will only be ongoing war at the black hole.
Out in the depths of the dying universe they begin to run low on energy and become dormant, but later wake when they find a Dyson sphere with an anti-matter generator that still has fuel. They explore the sphere and we learn about the builders.
The story ends (spoiler) with Gamma and Kthelk’tha having children (even though their progeny will only have limited life-spans). Then they discover that the builders of the Dyson sphere had developed an Omega device that can change the structure of the universe, alterations that would make it contract and cause suns to be formed. However, to do this, one of them will have to spread themselves throughout the universe and activate the device. Gamma realises that whoever does this will die but, despite Kthelk’tha’s protestations, she sacrifices herself anyway:
Then she plunged into a subdimensional barrier, and her fingers touched the outer boundary of the universe. With the last of her strength, she activated the inversion protocol and several of the universe’s constants were rewritten. The universe slowed down. She could feel it. It would soon begin to contract. New stars. New life. New possibilities.
Her body dissolved and spread as virtual particles throughout the universe. Through them vibrated a final thought:
It is finished.
A suitably transcendent ending. This tale probably resembles other cosmic tales that have appeared in the field over the decades, but it is well enough done and a change from some of the usual subject matter you find nowadays.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,200 words. Story link.
•••
The cover for this issue is Shrine of Nameless Stars by Daniel Ignacio, an eye-catching piece if one similar, in some respects, to the kind of “floating objects” covers that Astounding did in the 1950s.
The first of Arey Sorg’s two (presumably) email Q&As (they are not “conversations”, or interviews, as they don’t have the spontaneity of those) is Making Short Work of Commentary: A Conversation with Dennard Dayle. Dayle appears to be more a stand-up comic, prankster and mainstream author than SF writer,4 but his answers are correspondingly livelier for it:
As an author who has sold work to a range of venues, but who often plays in speculative settings and ideas, do you draw a distinction between “literary” and “science fiction”? Do you feel like these categories hold important meanings?
.
The distinction helps marketers and egoists. Marketers have a hard job, especially around a launch, so I sympathize. Egoists are harder to deal with.
I should be a little more precise. Literary fiction has a few competing definitions, which leads to people talking past each other. Commentators referring to literary fiction generally mean one of three things:
.
1. Books more focused on interiority or form than plot.
2. Books in a broadly realistic milieu.
3. Books regarded as serious art.
.
Fans of definition one should dig deeper. Plenty of sci-fi focuses on the interiority and formal experimentation praised in MFA day care. Moreover, a lot of work uncontested as literary fiction deals heavily in plot.
Advocates of definition two are simply fans of vanilla ice cream, white bread, and Brooklyn barbecue. Leave them in peace.
Three, however, is the most common, and often the subtext of the other two. I invite anyone insisting science fiction can’t be serious art to discuss the matter in a Chili’s parking lot. The winner gets to teach my class at Columbia. p. 123
The next Q&A, More Complex Than Caricature: A Conversation with Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas, reverts more to the marketing release feel that these pieces often have (this one is plugging a new foreign language anthology, The Rosetta Archive,5 from the editors of the foreign SF magazine, Future Science Fiction Digest). At times the responses sound like they are coming from politeness bots:
Tarryn: Working with Alex is always extremely pleasant, even when I drop the ball, which is why I’m always motivated to give my best. p. 134
Alex: Generally [. . .] we had surprisingly little trouble gaining permissions to publish the stories we selected, even if the process involved dealing with authors, translators, and agents across the globe. Everyone was super helpful and the editors who originally published some of these stories really went out of their way to put us in touch with the authors and rights holders. Everyone wants the author/story they published to gain some extra attention, and I never get tired of the level of good will that’s present in our field! p. 136
I’m probably being cruel; there are some snippets of interest:
Tarryn: I think my main focus is always first story and then style. You have to have a good story, and my job is to both add and take away from the story to its benefit. I take away the poor style choices and bad grammar and spelling, and I add to the flow and the consistency. So these things are important whether it was written by a first language or a fourth language speaker. And don’t be deceived: one of my absolute worst-written projects came from the US. So my approach is to look at each piece on its own merits. p. 134
Sometimes the editors don’t exactly seem to be on the same page:
Which, for you, are some of the most important pieces in this book, and why?
.
Tarryn: Of course, this was primarily a Rosetta Awards showcase, and in fact the first story in the anthology is the winner—“Rœsin.” I found the concept fascinating, and I’m really glad it won. It traces a fine line through ideas about prejudices and what ultimately makes us human.
But I feel to single out a piece as more important than the others is to miss the point here: we wanted to bring together an experience, like a blended whiskey if you will. If you want to focus on one story in particular at the expense of the others, it becomes too much like a single malt.
.
Alex: Asking an editor to select their favorite story is a bit like asking a parent to select their favorite child. Like parents, some editors may actually have such thoughts, but we’ll never ever share them out loud, because we don’t want to make the other story-children feel bad.
And later:
What, for you, are the “must-read” stories in this anthology? If a reader picked one or two pieces to look at, what would you want them to read, and why?
.
Tarryn: I would recommend “Just Like Migratory Birds” and “The Ancestral Temple in a Box,” although I’m rather fond of “Cousin Entropy” as well. They just spoke to me in terms of their vibrant imagery and outstanding story concepts.
.
Alex: I will refer you to my previous answer about stories and children.
Alex may be the diplomatic one here, but Tarryn’s answers are much more interesting.
There is also a science article in this issue, Of Time and Travel by Galen T. Pickett, which is a short piece about Special Relativity, cause and effect, and FTL drives.
Finally, Editor’s Desk: Recognition by Neil Clarke mentions award nominations for stories published in Clarkesworld, the tenth anniversary of his heart attack at a convention in Chicago (gulp), and his tenth nomination for the Best Editor Hugo Award.
•••
Although this issue has almost as many misses as hits, the three stories by Rich Larson, David D. Levine, and Oskar Källner (not to mention the interesting tale by Liang Qingsan) are worth a look. ●
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0. All page references are from the PDF version of the magazine available to Paetron subscribers.
1. In some respects, David Levine’s story reminded me of the kind of thing that used to appear in the George Scithers-edited Asimov’s Science Fiction (or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as it was then) of the late 1970s. I think there is probably a gap in the current magazine market for a publication that emphasises light entertainment and more traditional work, and which avoids political division and lectures, solipsism, apocalyptic fiction, and MFA-inspired writing in general.
2. The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Supplemental issue, 2016.
3. Gamma by Oskar Källner was originally published in Swedish in Efter slutet, Catahya, 2017.
4. The only story of Dennard Dayle’s I can find in an SF publication is Own Goal (Clarkesworld #165, June 2020). He has just published a collection of short fiction, Everything Abridged.
5. The Rosetta Archive, edited by Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas, is available on Amazon UK/USA. Normally I’d run a mile from something like this as most of the recent translated SF I’ve read has not been particularly good—but I bought this one as it was only £4.99 (the moral of this for publishers is, “watch your price points”).
Nice cover, but it makes it look like a fantasy anthology. ●
