{"id":12679,"date":"2020-05-01T13:49:54","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T13:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=12679"},"modified":"2020-05-10T12:47:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T12:47:59","slug":"the-long-list-anthology-5-edited-by-david-steffen-2019-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=12679","title":{"rendered":"The Long List Anthology #5, edited by David Steffen, 2019 (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Summary:
\nThis anthology collects all the short stories and novelettes (and one novella) that made it on to the 2019 Hugo nominations list but didn\u2019t reach the final ballot. This part of the review looks at the ten short stories (the other ten are longer lengths) which include one very good story by G. V Anderson, Waterbirds<\/em>, and good or better work by S. Qiouyi Lu, Rich Larson, Isabel Yap, and A. T. Greenblatt.<\/p>\n

ISFDB link<\/a>
\nAmazon UK<\/a>\/US<\/a> copy<\/p>\n

Other reviews:
\nGoodreads, Various 1<\/a>\/2<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

Editor, David Steffen<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nMother Tongues<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by S. Qiouyi Lu \u2217\u2217\u2217<\/strong>+
\nField Biology of the Wee Fairies<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Naomi Kritzer \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nMeat and Salt and Sparks<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Rich Larson \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nSour Milk Girls<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Erin Roberts \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nAsphalt, River, Mother, Child<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Isabel Yap \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Starship and the Temple Cat<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Yoon Ha Lee \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nWaterbirds<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by G. V. Anderson \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nYou Can Make a Dinosaur, But You Can\u2019t Help Me<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by K. M. Szpara \u2217<\/strong>
\nAnd Yet<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by A. T. Greenblatt \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nShe Still Loves the Dragon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Elizabeth Bear \u2217<\/strong>
\nAn Agent of Utopia<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Andy Duncan \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nA Study in Oils<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Kelly Robson \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nThe Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Jos\u00e9 Pablo Iriarte \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nNo Flight Without the Shatter<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Brooke Bolander \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nHow to Swallow the Moon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Isabel Yap \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nA World to Die For<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Tobias S. Buckell \u2217<\/strong>
\nThirty-Three Percent Joe<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Suzanne Palmer \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Privilege of the Happy Ending<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Kij Johnson \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Nearest<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Greg Egan \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nUmbernight<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by Carolyn Ives Gilman \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nPoisson D\u2019Arte<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 cover by Amanda Makepeace
\nForeword<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 by David Steffen<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

This book was suggested as a group read in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year<\/em> Facebook group1<\/sup> that Jim Harris and I run (it was on special offer, so a number of us bought it), and we are currently about three-quarters the way through the volume.
\nAs this is a big anthology I thought I\u2019d break this review into two parts (a single 10,000 word post here would just add to the global death toll), so here is the first, which covers the ten short stories.<\/p>\n

In the Introduction<\/em> to the first volume of the series, David Steffan explains the idea behind the anthology:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve followed the Hugo Awards for years, and have found them the most compelling of the science fiction literary awards for a variety of reasons. [Anyone] who pays for a Supporting membership for the year\u2019s WorldCon2<\/sup> also has the right to nominate for and vote for the Hugos. Another reason is the Hugo Packet, which is a package of many of the nominated works [that voters can reference before the final round of voting]. I pay for a Supporting membership every year for the packet, which makes a great recommended reading list. If that sounds like a great deal, it is [. . .].
\n[. . .]
\nEvery year, after the Hugo Award Ceremony at WorldCon, WSFS publishes a longer list of works that were nominated by the Hugo voters. I use this list as a recommended reading list, too, but I have mused that it would be nice if that longer list were all in one place like the Hugo packet, for convenient reading.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hence this anthology and the four earlier volumes in the series.<\/p>\n

The first story is Mother Tongues<\/em><\/strong> by S. Qiouyi Lu, which opens with a woman called Jiawen Liu completing a spoken language test before going to see a language broker. The latter tells Liu that she hasn\u2019t done as well as she thought in her English test, and Liu realises that she won\u2019t be able to sell her poor English language skills for much money (the story\u2019s gimmick is that machines can scan\u2014and remove\u2014a person\u2019s language ability and implant it into another person). Now she may not be able to pay for her daughter\u2019s education at Stanford.
\nThe broker asks her if she wants to sell her native Mandarin, and Liu says she will consider the matter.
\nFor the rest of that week Liu experiments with not using her native language, but it is difficult, especially when she shops with her elderly mother:<\/p>\n

You can cheat with your mother a little bit: you know enough Cantonese to have a halting conversation with her, as she knows both Cantonese and Mandarin. But it\u2019s frustrating, your pauses between words lengthy as you try to remember words and tones.
\n\u201c\u5e72\u5417\u4eca\u5929\u8bf4\u5e7f\u4e1c\u8bdd?\u201d your mother asks in Mandarin. She\u2019s pushing the shopping cart\u2014she insists, even when you offer\u2014and one of the wheels is squeaking. She hunches over the handle, but her eyes are bright.
\nNgo jiu syut Gwongdungwaa,\u201d you reply in Cantonese. Except it\u2019s not exactly that you want to speak Cantonese; you have to, for now. You don\u2019t know how to capture the nuance of everything you\u2019re going through in Cantonese, either, so you leave it at that. Your mother gives you a look, but she doesn\u2019t bring it up again and indulges you, speaking Cantonese as the two of you go around the supermarket and pile the shopping cart high with produce, meat, and fish.
\nYou load the car with the groceries and help your mother into the passenger seat. As you adjust the mirrors, your mother speaks again.
\n\u201c\u4f60\u5728\u62c5\u5fc3\u4ec0\u4e48?\u201d she asks. Startled, you look over at her. She\u2019s peering at you, scrutinizing you; you can never hide anything from her. Of course she can read the worry on your face, the tension in your posture; of course she knows something\u2019s wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When she tells her mother about her test the latter is surprisingly sympathetic (the latter\u2019s responses are in Mandarin, so English speakers don\u2019t know exactly what is said).
\nThe story ends (spoiler) with Liu selling her Mandarin and, as a result of the process (and this is perhaps the story\u2019s weakness), she loses her ability to speak and read the language. When Liu, her daughter, and her mother get together for a meal she also discovers that some of her Cantonese has gone as well (the language has similar roots to Mandarin), and she doesn\u2019t understand a lot of the dinner table conversation.
\nThe use of untranslated Mandarin and Cantonese in the text is a clever touch as it makes English-only speaking readers\u2014who will not understand\u2014empathise with Liu at the end of the story (which also has a neat last paragraph and last line). One for the Best of the Year anthologies, perhaps.
\nField Biology of the Wee Fairies<\/em><\/strong> by Naomi Kritzer is set in 1962 and starts with this:<\/p>\n

When Amelia turned fourteen, everyone assured her that she\u2019d find her fairy soon. Almost all girls did. You\u2019d find a fairy, a beautiful little fairy, and catch her. And she\u2019d give you a gift to let her go, and that gift was always beauty or charm or perfect hair or something else that made boys notice you. The neighbor girl, Betty, had caught her fairy when she was just nine, and so she\u2019d never even had to go through an awkward adolescent stage; she\u2019d been perfect and beautiful all along.
\nNot all fairies were equal, of course. Some of them would do a much better job for you. The First Lady Jackie Kennedy, for example, had caught the fairy queen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amelia is a science geek however, and not interested in boys. She thinks, \u201cIf I did catch a fairy, I\u2019d keep her in a jar like my mice and study her,\u201d and this pretty much outlines the arc of this emancipation story, which involves, among other scenes, Amelia sabotaging a hairdo that her friend Betty does for her; see a fairy but ignore it; perform Romeo and Juliet<\/em> with a girl-only cast; and fail to get into the males-only school science club.
\nThen Amelia catches a determinedly attention-seeking fairy (spoiler) and imprisons it, eventually learning that fairies can\u2019t grant wishes but can only look into the future. When the fairy does this for Amelia she learns that she will never be allowed to join the school science club. So, after winning a science project competition, Amelia convinces an elderly female teacher into starting a girl\u2019s science club.
\nThis story suffers on two fronts: first, it deflates like a punctured balloon when the quirky and entertaining fairy gimmick is laid bare; second, why did the author think it would be a good idea to write a story refighting 1962\u2019s cultural battles? (Presumably because they are more black and white than today\u2019s, and therefore easier to write about.)
\nMeat and Salt and Sparks<\/em><\/strong> by Rich Larson teams up a male detective called Huxley with an uplifted female Chimpanzee called Cu. They are investigating a murder, and the story opens with them attempting to interview the suspected shooter, an \u201cechogirl\u201d\u2014someone who takes instructions from a remote viewer who can see where they are and what they do:<\/p>\n

By the look of it, Elody had been in that same call for just under six months. Cu moves backward through the log, perplexed. There are small gaps, a few hours here and there, but Elody had been in near 24\/7 communication with her client for half a year preceding the murder.
\nCu tries to imagine it: a voice whispering in her ear when she woke up, telling her what to do, where to go, what to say, and whispering still as she fell asleep. All of it culminating in Elody Polle walking up behind a man in a subway and executing him in broad daylight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Their investigation leads the detectives to a bar where other echogirls hang out, and it isn\u2019t long before they find someone that knows Elody, and who reveals that Elody\u2019s handler is called Baby. When the informant comments on the oddness of the extended 24\/7 contract, seasoned readers will probably guess who or what Baby is.
\nAfter their visit to the bar Cu goes home, where she receives a short, enigmatic message that refers to her time as an experimental animal. We then get some backstory about Cu\u2019s time in captivity\u2014the period before she won her court battle for personhood:<\/p>\n

For a long time Cu had no name for the place where they cut her without her feeling it, where they tracked her eyes and fed filaments through holes in her skull. But she learned the word nightmare from her cube, watching a man with metal hands hunt down his children, and the moniker made sense. By the time she learned about surgery, neural enhancement, possible cures for degenerative brain disease, the name was already cemented.
\nFor the last few years she went to the nightmare room willingly and offered them her wrist for the anaesthetic drip. In exchange, they were kinder to her. They took restrictions off her cube\u2014some she had already worked around herself\u2014so more of the net was available to her. They let her walk in certain corridors of the facility. After a week of asking them, they even let her see her mother.
\nGoing back to that particular memory wrenches her apart.
\n[. . .]
\nHer mother was bent and graying, fur shaved off in patches, surgical scars suturing her body, and she was angry. She jabbered and hooted, spittle flying from her mouth. Cu tried to sign to her, but received no reply. Cu tried to offer her food; her mother seized the orange from her and made a feint, teeth bared, that sent Cu scurrying back to the furthest corner of her cage.
\n\u201cTranq wore off sooner than we thought,\u201d one of the women in white said. \u201cWe did warn you. We did tell you she wouldn\u2019t be like you. You\u2019re unique.\u201d
\nCu signed take her away, take her away, take her away<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Further research by Cu reveals that the murder victim was the head of the conglomerate that owned the research labs which kept her. Cu then wonders whether the sender of the message is also an uplifted chimpanzee, although this idea puzzles her as all the others were supposedly euthanized.
\nWhen the sender of the anonymous message gets in touch once more, Cu agrees to a meeting, partly in the hope of gaining some relief from the angst and loneliness she feels at being the only one of her kind. At the rendezvous (spoiler) she finds a man waiting, but he isn\u2019t the contact and he points to a videolink before leaving. Cu discovers the sender of the messages isn\u2019t another uplift but an AI, which tells her that it can\u2019t bear its solitary existence, and wants Cu to execute the safeguard code that will erase it (the AI can\u2019t do so itself, and it doesn\u2019t want a human to do so).
\nAfter she runs the code that terminates the AI, Cu goes home and also contemplates suicide, but eventually makes, for the first time, a social call to Huxley.
\nAll of this is slickly done, and is successful on two levels: first, it seamlessly meshes together a number of standard SFnal tropes (uplifts, telepresence, sentient AI, etc.) and, secondly, it sketches a convincing and affecting portrait of what it must be like to be (or feel like you are) the only one of your kind. However, when I finished the story I had reservations about describing it as \u201cvery good,\u201d but couldn\u2019t quite put my finger on why. After reflecting for some time I came to the conclusion that the final scene is a sentimental cop-out: the AI meets its existential angst by committing suicide while Cu attempts to address hers by phoning Huxley (which hints at a post-story Hollywood movie ending where intractable problems are solved by friendship or love).3<\/sup>
\nGiven the story\u2019s setup I think there was an opportunity to present a tougher ending which, perhaps, shows Cu accepting her despair and responding with stoicism. This (admittedly less crowd-pleasing) finish would be an organic fit with what had gone before, and it would have similar narrative weight to the AI\u2019s actions. It would also have made the story art rather than entertainment.
\nI know this sounds like I\u2019m criticising the story I wanted Larson to write and not the one he has, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019m doing that: the tale I\u2019m talking about is clearly there.
\n(And yes, I\u2019ll probably complain that the ending of Larson\u2019s next story is \u201ctoo gloomy.\u201d)
\nSour Milk Girls<\/em><\/strong> by Erin Roberts has as its protagonist Ghost, a teenage girl in an orphanage where the inmates have their painful memories removed and replaced with fakes (until they are eighteen, when they leave and get their real memories back). She watches along with two other inmates, Flash and Whispers, as a new girl, Brenda, arrives.
\nAfter Brenda settles in, and we find that she still has her own memories, Ghost organises a trip to a memory booth where they can swap. Ghost relives what Brenda thinks are happy memories of her father (which actually end with him dying in his rocking chair). Further investigation by Ghost as to why Brenda\u2019s memories are still intact reveals that, although they are harrowing, Brenda shows no negative behaviours because of them. During this hack of the orphanage\u2019s systems, Ghost also discovers that some of her own memories have been permanently deleted, and that she hasn\u2019t been adopted because there has been \u201cno demand\u201d for her.
\nThe story ends with (spoiler) Ghost and Brenda going back to the booth where, with Flash\u2019s help, Ghost restrains Brenda, hacks the booth system, and extracts Brenda\u2019s memories. She intends to implant them into herself so as to make herself more attractive to adopters but, after reviewing them, Ghost sees that Brenda\u2019s memories are of a broken life (the mother leaves early on, the father is a drunk, etc.) and she gives Brenda\u2019s memory cube to the lecherous booth attendant on the way out.
\nThis story is competently plotted (although it drags at times), but it is essentially a misery memoir where semi-feral girls screw each other over.
\nAsphalt, River, Mother, Child<\/em><\/strong> by Isabel Yap is a supernatural story about government death squads in the Phillipines, and opens with Mebuyen greeting one of the victims of their extra-judicial murders in what we later learn is the underworld. As she speaks to the young girl who has just arrived, we learn that Mebuyen is a mother\/ferryman figure who is there to guide people along the river to the \u201cnext place\u201d.
\nThe sections that follow tell of the arrival of two other victims (a suspected drug dealer and a trans girl). We then see how all three met their ends, which is told from the point of view of JM, a policemen involved in the murders. We also learn of his increasing disillusionment with his role in the killings.
\nMebuyen is troubled by these arrivals, and decides to visit her brother in our world:<\/p>\n

She sends her emissary, a little maya bird, to let her brother know she will be ascending. She makes sure to add that because it is so rare for her to do so, and her knees are particularly creaky these days, he may perhaps wish to meet her halfway.
\nHe greets her at Carriedo Station in Manila, wearing a nice button-down polo and maong jeans. Lumabat looks older, but his skin is much nicer than hers, which makes her a little jealous. Mebuyen has not come up in what men might describe as a decade, so she feels proud of her sleeveless shirt and khaki shorts, which make her look like any other manang. She notices everyone holding a small, rectangular skinny box, and glaring at it, their thumbs pounding away.
\n\u201cThose? Those are cellphones,\u201d Lumabat says. \u201cOh, they call them smartphones these days.\u201d
\n\u201cPhones? But they aren\u2019t talking at all?\u201d
\n\u201cThey\u2019re texting. Or surfing the web. You know, Facebook?\u201d
\nMebuyen is mystified, but does not try to understand. The world gets stranger each time she visits.
\nOver lunch at Ma Mon Luk, she explains her quandary.
\n\u201cThey\u2019re different. You know how I haven\u2019t had a visitor in a while, that men these days aren\u2019t beholden to our magic? But suddenly, there they are, by my river . . . they\u2019re older, they\u2019re not infants, but somehow they are still innocent.\u201d She pours soy sauce into her mami, brooding. \u201cThe river cannot wash their stains away. It runs clear, not dark. They aren\u2019t moving on to the next place. What have you observed?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her brother tells her about his nightmares, and says that she needs to see what is happening for herself. That evening they drift over the city so she can observe what is happening below, and they watch as the death squads commit several murders.
\nAfter another section involving JM the policeman (who is now having nightmares too, and has also started to question his superior\u2019s orders), Mebuyen takes her three dead charges into the dreamworld where they confront him.
\nThe story finishes with Mebuyen washing the three in the river, and they move on.
\nThis superior piece has some good local colour and a gripping, contemporary storyline but, if I have one criticism, it is that JM the cop is perhaps portrayed too sympathetically, and gets off too easily. This gives the piece a soft, slightly anticlimactic ending and, but for that, it would have been a four-star story.
\nThe Starship and the Temple Cat<\/em><\/strong> by Yoon Ha Lee is the only story here I\u2019ve read previously, and gets off to a promising start:<\/p>\n

She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.
\nStrictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City\u2019s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.
\nProperly, the cat\u2019s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn\u2019t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station\u2019s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artefacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.
\nTo be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the starships involved in the attack returns years later, a renegade pursued by the Fleet Lords. While the ship talks to the cat they catch up, and then battle commences. The cat (spoiler) summons other ghosts to aid the ship and, after they win, joins it on its journey.
\nThe story does not combine the fantasy and SF elements successfully, and does not suspend disbelief.
\nMy favourite story in the first half of this book is Waterbirds<\/em><\/strong> by G. V. Anderson, which opens with a policeman called Kershaw interrogating Celia, a female android companion whose employer has committed suicide. After Kershaw finishes his enquiries and leaves the holiday home that Celia and her employer were renting, the android recalls her first encounter with Kershaw several years earlier, when he was an unpleasant teenager in a bar asking her whether she was a \u201cfuckbot\u201d. We then get an account of Kershaw\u2019s subsequent serial abuse of Celia during her and her employer\u2019s annual holiday visits to the cottage (the aftermath of the final encounter is related in squirm-inducing detail). These encounters only stop when Mrs Lawson, Celia’s employer, becomes aware of the situation and intervenes.
\nThe second part of the story tells of the relationship between Celia and a local artist called Irene, which develops over the course of several annual visits before Mrs Lawson\u2019s death. The story\u2019s conclusion draws all these threads together in a surprising and satisfying conclusion.
\nThe story\u2019s mousetrap ending and seaside location vaguely reminded me of Michael Coney\u2019s work, but there is much more here as well: Celia\u2019s \u201chostess\u201d programming, her inability to refuse consent, the egret feathers motif, etc.
\nIf this has one weakness it is that the rules which govern Celia\u2019s behaviour seem a little fuzzy (you could maybe call them Three Laws-ish) but it is, nevertheless, a very good piece, and the best of this first group of stories.
\nYou Can Make a Dinosaur, But You Can\u2019t Help Me<\/em><\/strong> by K. M. Szpara starts with the protagonist Emerick and her boyfriend Leo choosing which dinosaur-themed dildo they should use while they have sex (both are trans, I think, but I still wasn\u2019t entirely sure after ten minutes of trying to puzzle it out). During, and after, this scene there are big data dumps about the protagonist\u2019s transition, his problematic (\u201ctoxic\u201d) parental relationships, and his wish that he had been born cis. There is also a brief mention about his father\u2019s \u201cportal\u201d, which pretty obviously (spoiler), and even at this early stage of the story, telegraphs the story\u2019s future arc as a trans wish-fulfilment story.
\nWhen the couple later go to Dad\u2019s island, and site of the portal, they have a car-crash breakfast with Emerick\u2019s father, who still treats her as his son; matters do not improve when Dad gushingly introduces his assistant Noelle, who then dead-names Emerick too.
\nAlthough the father is something of a straw-man (he seems remarkably dim for someone who has invented a portal to another world), the character interplay in this section makes it seem as if the story might spark into life, but all we get from this point on is a lot of nonsense about how the dinosaurs (yes, more dinosaur-themed fun) that Dad has brought through the portal have changed sex:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou probably know, Owen Corp had been attempting to engineer its own dinosaurs\u2014unsuccessfully, for many years. You see, the portal mutates DNA. They had no idea where to start. Not until I walked through.\u201d
\nNoelle chuckles to herself as she holds up her hands.
\n\u201cSometimes, I feel like an imposter, despite the degrees I earned in my home world. Whatever happened to the dinosaurs, when they crossed through the portal, happened to me. I can perform genetic manipulations no one in this world ever imagined. It\u2019s almost\u2014and I feel silly using the word\u2014like magic?
\n\u201cAnyway.\u201d She shoves her hands back in her vest pockets. \u201cI\u2019ve made a few mistakes along the way, while we figure out the science behind it all. These dinosaurs are isolated because they had spontaneous sex changes!\u201d Noelle looks at the two of you as if you will of course find this hilarious. \u201cApparently the single-sex environment did not agree with their DNA. They dissolved their genitals and re-grew the opposite. Awesome, but not in line with our safety protocols.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This ends predictably enough with (spoiler) Em trying to break into the lab to go through the portal. She is caught by Noelle and, after a Big Talk, she eventually assists Em to achieve her transition by means of some hand-wavy genetic manipulation.
\nHowever much one may sympathise with the issues raised in this story there is no escaping the ridiculous plot, and the transgender data dumps that periodically strangle the story. I realise that there wouldn\u2019t be much left without the latter, but I can\u2019t see the difference between these and the scientific lectures you get in 1930\u2019s SF in terms of their effect on the story. I\u2019m also not a fan of stories where characters work out their Daddy issues.
\nAnd Yet<\/em><\/strong> by A. T. Greenblatt starts with woman4<\/sup> who is a theoretical physicist going back to a \u201chaunted house\u201d of her youth:<\/p>\n

Nothing in the house has stayed the same since the last time you worked up the nerve to come in. Nothing. This shouldn\u2019t surprise you, because you have this theory that the house reacts to its visitors. The visitor is the catalyst and the catalyst is not a bullied eight-year-old kid anymore. Thus the reaction is different. And yet.
\nYou were hoping, god you were hoping you could take the same path as before. Have the same escape routes. But the haunted house of your childhood has become an unfamiliar landscape. Instead of the front door opening to a wide landing and a staircase, you are standing in a foyer, at the mouth of a narrow hall with rooms on either side. There\u2019s no staircase in sight.
\nThe walls are slanted inward. They\u2019re covered in dark, dizzyingly patterned wallpaper and you aren\u2019t claustrophobic until you are. Vertigo and your pulse skips so badly you don\u2019t even notice the frames on the walls at first. But when you do, you bite back a scream.
\nThey\u2019re full of pictures of you<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She eventually stumbles into a room full of her childhood friends, who are watching a looping video of various permutations of a truck accident involving her kid brother (which later caused his death). After seeing this she suspects that the house may contain multiple parallel universes. When she explores further she ends up on the floor above and, when she climbs out of the window using a rope ladder, she finds herself outside the house twenty years in the past\u2014on the day she first went in.
\nThis is essentially a story about the protagonist\u2019s childhood and her (spoiler) trying to save her brother, but it is all wrapped up in a tricksy multiple-worlds house scenario that vaguely recalls Heinlein\u2019s \u201c\u2014And There Was A Crooked House\u2014<\/em>\u2033<\/em>. It\u2019s not entirely convincing, but it\u2019s not bad.
\nThe last of the short stories is She Still Loves the Dragon<\/em><\/strong> by Elizabeth Bear, which is over-written, pretentious, and has too many passages in italics.5<\/sup> It begins with a female knight-errant climbing a mountain to meet a dragon, whereupon (as the story would put it) they have Deep Conversations:<\/p>\n

\u201cI made myself,\u201d says the dragon. \u201cA long time ago. By deciding to exist, and take up space in the world.\u201d
\n\u201cIs that all it takes for you to be real?\u201d
\n\u201cAre you the litany of things you have accomplished?\u201d
\nThe woman is silent for a while. Then she says, \u201cYes. That is how we make ourselves real. That is what we are.\u201d
\n.<\/span>
\nAn eye that as one regards it, is in its turn regarding one as well.
\n.<\/span>
\n\u201cYou are because you are,\u201d the woman says. Her hair is growing in again, a thick black cloud that has never pressed beneath a helm. \u201cAnd I love you because you are.\u201d
\n.<\/span>
\nEverything is pain.
\nBeneath the pain is freedom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suspect that (spoiler) the knight\u2019s burns (she eventually gets a light toasting from the dragon) and the subsequent healing process is a metaphor for the pain love causes and people\u2019s eventual recovery.
\nOne final point from the Fantasy Language department:<\/p>\n

She is still singing as she achieves the hollow top of the mountain where the dragon nests, glaciers gently sublimating into steam against its belly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ice sublimates into water vapour at normal temperatures and pressures, not steam, which is invisible (the misty stuff you see when you boil a kettle is water vapour, tiny droplets of water suspended in the air). Regardless of whether I\u2019m right about all that (my Physics and Chemistry degree was a long time ago), \u201csublimating\u201d is likely to cause the googling of triple point diagrams in the middle of your fantasy mini-epic.<\/p>\n

Not a bad bunch so far: let\u2019s see what the second half of the anthology brings (my hunch is that the novelettes\u2014SF\u2019s natural length\u2014will be stronger).\u00a0 The second part of the review is here<\/a>. \u25cf<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

1. The Facebook group is The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction of the Year<\/a>.
\nThe next group read (if we ever get finished the current one) looks like it will be The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology<\/em>, edited by Edward L. Ferman, 1974\u2014unless a load of dodgy postal votes reach us before midnight on Saturday.
\nThis anthology collects the stories and ancillaries from the first six \u201cSpecial Author\u201d issues of F&SF<\/em> (Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, James Blish). The full contents list of this volume is at ISFDB<\/a>, but it contains these stories:<\/p>\n

When You Care, When You Love<\/em> \u2022 (1962) \u2022 novelette by Theodore Sturgeon
\nTo the Chicago Abyss<\/em> \u2022 (1963) \u2022 short story by Ray Bradbury
\nThe Key<\/em> \u2022 [Wendell Urth] \u2022 (1966) \u2022 novelette by Isaac Asimov
\nShip of Shadows<\/em> \u2022 (1969) \u2022 novella by Fritz Leiber
\nThe Queen of Air and Darkness<\/em> \u2022 (1971) \u2022 novella by Poul Anderson
\nMidsummer Century <\/em>\u2022 (1972) \u2022 novella by James Blish<\/p>\n

2. Supporting membership for this year\u2019s Worldcon can be obtained here<\/a>. Currently $75 NZ, around \u00a335\/$45.<\/p>\n

3. On the discussion thread<\/a> for Larson\u2019s story, Jim Harris made a couple of interesting comments:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the trouble with a lot of SF stories, they go for the easy\/obvious answer [. . .] it would have been more interesting if Cu had come up with a deeper philosophical or emotional solution to her isolation.
\n.<\/span>
\nI worry that writers are too influenced by TV\/movies. They picture their stories being filmed, and the ending does feel like something that would end a TV show. What makes a story really stand out is when a writer imagines something that feels like it\u2019s right or real, but something we never thought of ourselves, so it gives us an Ah-Ha moment. What would an uplifted chimp really feel? It was interesting that Cu went into law enforcement because she observed things in humans that most humans don\u2019t. That\u2019s kind of logical. But what would make an uplifted chimp feel at home in human society?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

4. The gender of the narrator isn\u2019t explicitly stated in Greenblatt\u2019s piece but reading your brother bedtime stories is more a big sister thing (big brothers would just wedgie your pyjamas), and both the narrator\u2019s best friend and personal trainer are female.<\/p>\n

5. My understanding is that large blocks of italics are hard for dyslexic readers to process, which is why I changed the formatting of the quoted text here some time ago.
\nThe Triple Point diagram<\/a> for water makes my head hurt. \u00a0\u25cf<\/p>\n

Edited 10th May 2020 to add ratings and link to second review.<\/em><\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: This anthology collects all the short stories and novelettes (and one novella) that made it on to the 2019 Hugo nominations list but didn\u2019t reach the final ballot. This part of the review looks at the ten short stories (the other ten are longer lengths) which include one very good story by G. V […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-the-year-anthologies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-3iv","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12679"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12737,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12679\/revisions\/12737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}