Even the Good Stuff Has Flaws.

This issue doesn't have anything outstanding in it--even the stories I liked seemed flawed. Consider "Way Down East" by Tim Sullivan. Two lobstermen allow their boat to be chartered by a visiting alien (or more accurately, its support staff). The main lobsterman is at first horrified by the alien, then comes to terms with it, even as the alien chooses their boat as its place to quietly expire. This parallels the man’s estrangement from his openly gay son; at the end he appears ready to reconcile that relationship as well. This is one of the most explicit pairings of Gayness with Alienness/Otherness I've ever seen, and it's generally a lovely story. The flaw in it stems from the protagonist. A lot of the story deals with his internal state and his own introspection. It's a little hard to swallow that such a reflexively introspective man would need the prod of coming face to face with an alien to get over his knee-jerk dislike of gayness. Basically, this story sold us too well on the man he becomes to convince us of the difficult transition from the man he was.

"Welcome to Valhalla" is a story by Kathryn Lance and Jack McDevitt. I'm a fan of McDevitt's work (I’m unfamiliar with Lance), but this story struck me as too simplistic by half. A valkyrie visits Richard Wagner on the eve of the debut of the Ring cycle opera. She shows him the horrors that will be perpetrated by the Nazis, and asks him to kill his own epic saga—to cancel all performances and bury it. She admits that this will not stop the Holocaust, but she's offering him the chance to not have his name associated with that period. Wagner refuses (and who can blame him?), and the show goes on. Basically, this story throws a premise against a wall to see if it'll stick; it doesn't examine its thesis in any depth.

Steven Utley gives us "Perfect Everything," another story that didn't quite work for me. It has some clunky dialog, but the main problem is that its two plot threads don't reinforce each other. In one, a man is on a spaceship that is heading back to Earth after failing in their mission to look for extraterrestrial life. To help pass the time, he spends his off-duty hours immersed in a tech-enabled dream world, where he and his perfect girl lounge around on a perfect beach. Unfortunately, all has not been well back home, and when they return they find Earth under siege by aliens. In the course of the story, his dream-bauble gets damaged, and his perfect girl, based on someone he knew in real life, starts rebelling. It turns out that she never liked him "that way" back on Earth, but he's so pathetic that he couldn't let it go. Knowing how he's built her up in his mind, she feels a bit used. Anyway, he volunteers for a mission to go down to Earth and see what's left. The end. So you've got this alien invasion/Earth's been destroyed story playing backdrop to a "Dude, she's just not that into you" story. This leaves the story with skewed priorities, and the additional problem that the reality thread and the dream thread don't reinforce each other terribly well. They do in terms of tone: normalcy on the ship is broken by the aliens, normality in the dream world is broken when it gets damaged. However, the whole invasion plot ends up seeming like an excuse to break the bauble and then an excuse for the guy getting all distraught over the possibility that the real girl is dead. That seems like a flimsy reason for killing off most of humanity, I'm afraid.

A story that works much better (and is easily the best of the issue) is "In Concert" by Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem. They describe a woman who has always had (or suffered from) telepathic glimpses into other minds, totally at random. She is getting towards the end of her life, but she starts seeing situations that indicate that she is making contact with an astronaut who has gotten lost in space with no hope of return. She contacts the NASA-equivalent at his behest, and is able to convince one of his co-workers of the reality of this connection, thus giving the astronaut the chance to pass on final messages. Both the astronaut's and the woman's grasp on life is tenuous and fading. It is in this beautiful duet of plot and character that the story works so well. It's not Earth-shattering; it's all very quiet and sedate, but quite moving.

Geoffrey Landis gives us "Still on the Road," a purely stylistic exercise of putting the beat poetry style of "On the Road" into space. Unfortunately, I'm not up on that style of literature (my catching-up-with-literature-project, both genre and "mainstream" is currently around 1920 for the former and ~1200 for the latter), so I can't say how well it worked.

Unfortunately, the issue fails to end on a high note. "The Flowers of Nicosia" by David Ira Cleary never resolved into a story I liked. It's got a silly premise: a band ('Downtown Dharma') of middle-aged rockers obsessed with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain are close to an outbreak of Islamic terrorism. Their response is to try to use rock music to heal the rifts. Thanks to the lead singer's aunt in the State Dept., they get to perform in divided Cypress, especially on the Turkish side of the island. They meet lots of interesting people: a Muslim woman who also fronts her own rock band, and older rejected lover of hers that acts as the band's manager, and other characters on both sides of the cultural divide. They have some success in their two concerts, but there is a severe bioterrorism outbreak on the island and in the end there's nothing they can do to help. The drug-addict drummer had hooked up with the woman, but they both succumb to the disease. In reading the story I was afraid that the characters were being set up to fail, and it disappointed me when they finally did. It takes a long time and a lot of whingeing about by the main character/lead singer to get there, and if the message is simply that well-meaning people can't actually do anything to help solve the tensions between the Americanized West and the Islamic world, that's the kind of nihilism I can do without. I got to the end of the story and wished I'd skipped it.

So What Should SF Be Talking About?

The stand-out story of the Oct/Nov Asimov’s is "'Dhuluma' No More," a short story by the up-and-comer Gord Sellar. I appreciated it for its truly international perspective. In this story a documentary film-maker goes along with a bunch of African iceberg herders. However, that's just a cover; the African guys have a radical agenda. They hijack a submarine containing a bunch of UN climate scientists. In this future, the UN has sponsored a sort of anti-global warming pollution project; they spew specific particulate matter into the sky to reflect more sunlight away from the Earth's surface. However, this has drastically changed weather patterns, benefitting some and hurting others. The Africans are pretty sure that they're (as has been true throughout history) on the short end of that stick. This passage has some qualities of wish-fulfillment:

"That's a baseless overstatement..." Follesdal said

Ngunu lifted his pistol, aiming it at the CEO's heart, and ground his teeth. Follesdal eyed the gun, and raised his hands a little. "Uh, yes, some scientists think that."

"Some?" Ngunu cleared his throat, tensing the hand holding the gun very slightly. I zoomed in carefully on Follesdal's face, to keep the gun out of the videos. "Hands down. Quit lying," Ngunu said, moving the gun closer to Follesdal's chest.

I almost smiled then. After all those years, looking for a way to make businessmen quit lying and admit the truth--and here it was, really so very simple. I almost wished I'd thought of it before.

This story hits a lot of Big Issues, and Makes You Think. Obviously there's the idea that whatever we come up with in the West to mitigate climate change will have a real effect on real people; they may come looking for us someday. This often gets left to the side in writing like Kim Stanley Robinson's Capitol Trilogy or Ben Bova's climate engineering columns in Analog. There's also the dilemma of the passive observer: the filmmaker is forced to make a decision to stay uninvolved or to actually help the Africans in their violent action. He can't hide behind his cameras anymore and he has to take a side. This is something of a call to action to all of us who read the news but think that news is what happens to other people. I'd like to see more of this sort of story, and I'll be thinking of this one when I look at the Hugo ballot this spring. This is a short story, but with enough weight that it feels longer. In this case, that's a good thing.

Another story I particularly enjoyed is Nancy Kress' "The Erdmann Nexus." On first blush it's a weird little story: in a nursing home for the elderly, people start to have weird mental experiences, and apparently they start to affect reality. The eponymous Erdmann is a physics professor emeritus, and he's trying to figure out what's really going on. There's a much larger cast of characters than is normal for a novella: Erdmann's favorite nursing home assistant is a young woman with an abusive husband; he's a cop so restraining orders have been hard to enforce. There's a neurological researcher studying something completely unrelated but he gets drawn into the mystery. Then there's the population of the nursing home: the insatiable gossip, a retired famous ballerina and a man with a crush on her, a new-agey woman, and assorted others. At times it all threatens to spiral out of control, and it seems that Kress sometimes allows it to ramble, just to give us a feel for humanity in all its messiness. In the end however, it all adds up to Something Transcendent, and all the people involved get to make consequential choices. I've had trouble with Kress' stories in the past for some reason, but this one finally overcame the resistance I'd had to her style.

My other favorite was Robert Reed’s novella on "Truth." The elevator pitch would be "Government operatives try to extract intelligence from a member of a group of time-traveling terrorists." It's a psychological story, very claustrophobic. I think it's a bit too long, but the twist is pretty awesome. It also makes a strong case for the fact that when we over-react to terrorist threats, we do far more harm to ourselves than the terrorists ever could. Preaching to the choir there! But that's a timely debate, and stories like this one, written by an author who is unfailingly entertaining, add a valuable dimension to the discussion.

Amongst the other stories: Brandon Sanderson, the poor man assigned to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga, provides an action-adventure story in “Defending Elysium,” a novelette. It felt longer than that, which I'm not sure is a good thing. It was fun to read, but not much more.

"Prayers for an Egg" deals with strict class barriers in an alien species. It's a bit of Uncle Tom's Cabin set far, far away. It rang true, but I'm not sure that we need these sorts of stories now. In general, stories like this either appear to be about causes long since won, or they're too over-the-top to address the more subtle concerns we have today. Today we need less parables about how slavery is wrong (and that when you put your future generations in the hands of an oppressed people, those kids may be at risk) and instead perhaps we need tales about the dangers of more subtle forms of class oppression. I'm trying to think of some examples and none are jumping to mind: economics like Bruce Sterling's “Kiosk?” Charlie Stross' economic wars? Bacigalupi's future dystopias? Stories like Reed’s “Truth” speak more to 2008 than this one. However, I’m willing to entertain counter-arguments on this assertion; I may be on shaky ground here.

Fianlly, Ian MacLeod provides an alternate history in which various events lead to India conquering and occupying England instead of vice-versa. When "The English Mutiny" it is both more violent and less successful than Ghandi's movement, let’s just say that. This is an interesting story, looking at class differences that MacLeod feels would be preserved even in the face of occupation by a foreign power. I think it could have packed more of a punch had it been a bit shorter. Sometimes the narrator starts wandering around to show us more of the landscape, and the story loses focus.

September Asimov's

Sept. seems to be a bit of a lull month in Ye Olde magazines. Although I'm sure I'm making unwarranted inferences, one could believe they're holding back their best material for the big fall double issues; those generally seem to have award nominees in them. In the Sept. issue of Asimov's I ended up skipping two stories ("In the Age of the Quiet Sun" by William Barton and "Slug Hell" by Steven Utley) but they didn't commit any grievous sins, they simply failed to capture my interest. Of the more RUMIR ones "Soldier of the Singularity" by Robert R. Chase has a good twist and "Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a well-done emotional tale about standing up to a verbally abusive mother (but offers no new perspective on the time-worn scenario). None of the remaining ones will necessarily be award winners, but they did pique my interest enough to warrant further comment.

"Horse Racing" by Mary Rosenblum tells a story of back-room dealing in human futures. It's a great concept: shadowy corporate interests scan the gene pool for raw talent, work behind the scenes to make sure it's nurtured, then gain an interest/stake in the person's eventual output. Some of these particularly bright young things get to see behind the scenes and some of them even start trading in their own "futures." I love the idea, although probably for all the wrong reasons. It's presented as quite benign which is a BIG change from the usual depiction of back room dealings; it'd be nice if things could be so win-win for everyone. Then there's the slightly "Fans are Slans" aspect of it: smart people really are really special and someone out there will recognize that. So, probably a wish-fulfillment tale, but a nicely done one.

"Midnight Blue" by Will McIntosh takes Collectable Card Games as the structure for its world-building. A boy is growing up relatively poor in a time that feels like the 1950s. A generation earlier, a whole bunch of magical charms had appeared all over the world. When you matched the stones and staffs that made up the charms, they passed on powers to whoever held them. Most of the powers were inconsequential and common: "Sense of Smell," "Singing," "Talk to Animals." Some of them were rarer, but more elaborate, like "Flyer" or "Skin that's Hard to Puncture." However, no new charms ever appeared. People alive then got lots of free powers, and there are none left for kids like our hero to find. You know where this is going. He finds one, and it's incredibly rare, and he has to figure out what to do with it. He finally makes a decision, and the consequence was something I didn't see coming, which I appreciate. This could have profitably been a shorter story, but other than that it was well done.

"Usurpers" by Derke Zumsteg actually showed me a different perspective on an issue, in this case drug abuse by athletes. Told from the interior perspective of a poor, black, natural runner, it shows him trying to win a major race against rich, white, juiced-up runners. The stilted prose style: "Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over…" works very well for this kind of story. (I didn't like it at first, especially after my experience with the serial "Tracking" in recent issues of Analog. But here it developed its own compelling rhythm that really got you inside the guy's head and helped ratchet up the tension.) The guy is an asshole, but he's good at what he does, works hard, and doesn't have the resources to cheat like the other kids do. You root for him, despite all the jerk jock stuff. It makes you realize why it shouldn't be OK to just throw open various sports to doping, as I've occasionally thought myself. I definitely appreciated it.

Finally, "The Ice War" by Stephen Baxter gives us a decidedly odd, but really enjoyable homage to H. G. Wells set in the late 1600s. England is invaded by ice creatures. Our hero, Jack, is initially just trying to survive in whatever sneaky way he can, but via the sort of coincidence typical of historical fiction, is co-opted by Daniel DeFoe, Jonathan Swift and Isaac Newton to help save the country. The ending is predictable and entirely Wellsian, but Baxter tells a heck of a tale here. Jack is a fun character to root for, a charming rogue which is not one of the typical Baxter archetypes. His animation of the historical characters is probably over-the-top but still fun, and he throws in some lit references for the fans: Robinson Crusoe as early SF? Interesting thought! It's a great way to round out the issue.

Slowly Catching Up on Magazines

First off, I did read F&SF for August, and nothing there particularly stood out. I didn’t skip any of the stories, but neither did any of them rise above the RUMIR designation (again from Joanna Russ’ comment: “The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable”).

Most of the stories in the August Asimov’s fall into the same category (of course, almost by definition, most short stories everywhere will be RUMIR). “Old Man Waiting” by Robert Reed ends with a good twist but doesn’t have much else. “Lucy” equates a robotic probe on Saturn being abandoned with people in an apartment complex being unpleasant to one another. “What You Are About to See” by Jack Skillingstead has the misfortune to follow one of the non-RUMIR stories (about which more later) which does quantum effects much better, leaving this one suffering in comparison. (It doesn’t help that Skillingstead’s style has never worked well for me; I appreciate it intellectually but it’s usually so unrelentingly depressing that I remain disengaged emotionally. This one impressed me the most of his that I’ve read so far.) “Wilmer or Wesley” is a nicely ambiguous tale by Carol Emshwiller—the protagonist may be human but is being displayed as if he’s some sort of experimental ape. The moral seems to be “treat animals as you would want to be treated.” Finally “Radio Station St. Jack” by Neal Barrett, Jr. continues his post-apocalyptic future. Somewhere around northern Texas, various groups have devolved to roughly Civil War times. There’s a settlement that’s basically friendly with local “Indians,” and they’re all threatened by a big bad group of bandits. A local “priest” runs a radio station and as a local leader, has to try to save the town. I wasn’t totally into the story but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt… until the end when it turns out that all of the priest’s actions didn’t matter and the story was resolved from completely out of left field. Quite frustrating.


However, none of that should detract from the two most interesting stories in the issue, “Lagos” by Matthew Johnson and “Divining Light” by Ted Kosmatka.

“Lagos” takes place in a near future Nigeria. Lower class women find work going into VR and controlling various remote robotic appliances for rich Westerners—robot vacuums, dish washers and the like. Safrat is our protagonist and her brother (who sells water to make a little money; he’s hoping for one of his relatives to find him a better job) discovers that she talks in her sleep, in English. Needless to say, the VR firewalls are acting a little funny. They go see a traditional healer and find out what the problem is. At the same time her supervisor believes that her dreams may point him to a fortune, but he gets a big surprise when he tracks it down.

I appreciated this story on several levels. One is simply the fact that it is set in Nigeria and all the actors in the story are Nigerians: good, bad, and indifferent. I also appreciated the extrapolation: much like some spammers already hire kids in third-world countries to decipher all those little random “type the letters you see” boxes meant to defeat automated spam-bots, one could easily imagine it being cheaper by far to hire third-world women to run appliances than to come up with adequate artificial intelligence to do so. Finally, I appreciated that the characters (to a limited extent) rise above the level of stereotypes—difficult to do with a short story. Particularly the supervisor is not one-dimensionally greedy and exploitive, although others around him are. Also, the “shaman” is neither the deus ex machina nor a useless impediment, but someone who helps to resolve the mystery. Overall, a nicely done story that helps to push sf to more awareness of the non-Western world’s future.

That said, the real stand-out in this issue is Kosmatka’s novelette “Divining Light.” I expect to see this in many Year’s Bests and a whole bunch of awards ballots. It’s one of the few stories to unflinchingly wrestle with the implications of quantum wave function collapse, and it does it with style and emotional realism. It is pretty bleak (the tone closely resembles his previous widely recognized story, “The Prophet of Flores”), but fascinating and unique.

Our protagonist is a burned-out scientist, once an up-and-coming star. A friend takes pity on him and hires him on at an R&D firm. To amuse himself, he starts replicating the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics. If you fire a photon stream (beam of light) at two slits, the pattern on a screen on the other side will be a diffraction pattern; the photons act like waves and interfere with each other. However, if you place a detector on one of the slits, the pattern become two solid groupings behind the two slits—the act of measuring which slit the photons go through makes them behave like particles, not waves. That part is absolutely true by the way, and it’s weird enough.

Then comes the big “what if” of the story: what if it makes a difference whether or not an observer knows about the detector results? Here’s what he does: he runs the experiment with the detector on (one would expect 2 groupings on the screen behind the slits). Without checking the screen, he clears the memory of the detector, then looks at the screen—it’s an interference pattern as if the detector had never been on. He calls it retrocausality: the system behavior depends on the actions of a conscious observer in the future. If a conscious observer doesn’t “collapse the wave function” (cause the pattern to go from interference to blobs), it remains an interference pattern.

Kosmatka goes all the way with the implications of this: they start testing the meaning of a “conscious” observer. They rig up a series of lights so that animals have the capacity to collapse the wave function; none of them can. In a twist I hadn’t thought of but makes perfect, depressing sense, a pro-life group decides to test fetuses in the womb to see when they become conscious. They refuse to release their results—in fact as studies continue, it turns out not all humans can collapse the wave function. However, at this point the whole thing has already become some sort of test—of “humanness,” “consciousness,” or “soul,” depending on your agenda. In the end, the characters have to interpret and deal with what they’ve discovered. It’s an absolute triumph of taking pure, hard science and digging into the human implications. Although I might wish for a tone less bleak (I really think it’s possible to consider quantum indeterminacy without becoming an alcoholic wreck), I appreciate the characters he’s created and their investigations: pursuing the truth of the universe no matter how bizarre, and not shying away from the consequences. I haven’t done this story justice—go read it!

July Asimov's

So I’m really behind, but I swear I’m catching up. I’m reading August’s stuff now, and it’s only the beginning of September! Lookit me go! Dated as it is however, I’d like to mention some things about the July issue of Asimov’s. Things in it may pique some folk’s interest, and some things I’ll want to remember around awards time.

First, a novelette titled “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons” by Gord Sellar. It’s an alt history written in the first person. A 1940s jazz musician narrates, and he writes with the cadences and informal, slang-laden style of that time and scene. (In the introduction the author says he’s specifically mimicking the style of Miles Davis’ autobiography.) Here’s the opening:

His first night back on Earth after his gig on the Frogships, Bird showed up at Minton’s cleaner than a broke-dick dog, with a brand new horn and a head full of crazy-people music. He’d got himself a nice suit somewhere, and a fine new Conn alto. Now, this was back in ‘48, when everyone—me included—was crazy about Conn and King and only a few younger cats were playing on Selmer horns.

But it wasn’t just that big-shouldered suit and the horn; the cat was clean. I mean clean, no more dope, no more liquor, no more fried chicken. Hell, he was always called Bird—short for Yardbird—on account of how much fried chicken he liked to eat. This was like a whole different Charlie Parker. He was living clean as a monk. He was walking straight and talking clear. His eyes weren’t all fucked-up and scary anymore, either.

As you can tell, this 1948 is a bit different from ours. Aliens came down sometime around WWII and started throwing around money and tech. They hire human entertainers to perform on their intra-Solar System cruise ships, including the narrator. (Not just jazz entertainers—ballerinas, rodeo riders, trick shooters, can-can girls, you name it.) The aliens dose up the performers with some sort of drug that enhances play-back memory and also allows them to “blur.” (Phase-shift? Inhabit differing quantum realities simultaneously? The narrator doesn’t understand it, so we don’t get the full picture.) This allows for some crazy musical ensembles. However, the whole thing takes on a creepy and xenophobic air when one of the musicians reacts badly to the drugs. Amongst other side effects he loses his creative ability and can only perform exact playbacks; that’s death for a jazz man. The narrator orchestrates a working-within-the-rules rebellion to get out of their contract early. It’s a bit simple, but interesting both from an alt-historical point of view and as a story.

What really stood out for me was that narrative tone. If the antecedent hadn’t been stated right up front, I’m pretty sure I would’ve found it offensive. The language of the 1940s was casually racist and misogynist, and it’s not much easier to read even if the narrator is black. (Certainly in this alt-history the discovery of aliens hasn’t ushered in an immediate era of racial harmony.) Linking it to a known figure like Miles Davis made it much easier to swallow, and once you get into the rhythm of it it’s great fun to read. I’m wondering if that reaction, letting an outside source dictate the extent to which you can allow yourself to enjoy the story, is good-bad-or-neutral. Not sure about that one.

The stand-out story in this issue, the one to remember come awards time, is “Vinegar Peace, or, the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage,” a novelette by Michael Bishop. In it if your children pre-decease you, you get picked up by the government and stuck in an inverse-orphanage old-folks home. (After all, now you have no kids to take care of you when you’re old and decrepit.) The place is surreal, having several different areas with different purposes. There are different ways to mourn; the Cold Room is a particularly intense and horrible metaphor. Despite the over-the-top satire and surrealism (the protagonist’s kids died in the “Worldwide War on Wrongness;” some of the rules at the “Orphanage” seem as random as Terry Gilliam's’ Brazil), this is a moving depiction of the grief a parent feels at losing an adult child. The story intensifies when you realize that Bishop lost his son just last year. Jamie Bishop was killed in the Virginia Tech massacre, April 16, 2007. Jamie was 35.

The story makes progress towards some healing, at the end. It moves through confused anguish, towards a reasonable adjustment and accommodation with the knowledge of tragedy. That’s not to say that it ever becomes OK, but perhaps that it becomes livable, survivable. Given that Bishop is the voice of tragic experience here, it’s particularly reassuring. This is an amazingly written story that I hope doesn’t get overlooked.

There’s also a cute short story in this issue, “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson. I enjoy her writing quite a bit. Her use of animals to tell tales that illuminate human characters was also on good display in the 2003 novel Fudoki. “26 Monkeys” is a story about a troop of performing monkeys that move from owner to owner. The monkeys know the magic trick, the human just enables them. It’s a fairy tale sort of story, but a nice one. Although it feels familiar, it is also unique.

Finally there’s the latest installment in Brian Stableford’s series of stories set in an alternate early Elizabethan world. Each one claims to be a stand-alone; this one is a novella titled “The Philosopher’s Stone.” This is the third one that I’ve read, and it most seems like part of a novel. I suspect that we’ll see all of these together in a book someday. The conceit is that several of the best minds of the era built a working ether ship in the mid-1500s, sailed into space and met aliens. There are many alien factions, and humanity is about to get caught up in their conflicts. Upon their return to Earth, the various luminaries can’t agree on how to move forward: one believes it was simply a dream, another goes off to do experiments elsewhere, yet another tries to agitate for human politics to become engaged with this implausible threat from beyond (a difficult sell while Protestants and Catholics are at each other’s throats throughout Britain).

In this installment Edward Kelley accidentally/fortuitously winds up with an alien artefact. The artefact tells him that he has to get it to John Dee, the famous alchemist (and one of the original ether ship sailors). After tribulations, Kelley completes his mission and finds not only Dee but also Giordano Bruno, the famous Italian heretic. (Kelley’s reputation as a Con man doesn’t help matters.) The Queen’s religious purist squad captures all of them, but the artefact reveals some of its powers and gets them freed. Kelley is now deeply enmeshed in plots that go to the highest levels, up past mere monarchs and into lofty dimensions. This is a fine story, but it felt like its main purpose was to move pieces around, getting them set up for the next set-piece in the sequence.

The whole series is a bit odd. One needs a significant amount of historical knowledge to really appreciate it. I felt reasonably conversant with this time period, but I had to keep running to Google and Wikipedia to see me through. It will be interesting to see how it all ties together in an overall narrative eventually—it may end up being simply too esoteric for its own good.

"The Hob Carpet" by Ian R. MacLeod

"The Hob Carpet" by Ian R. MacLeod is an explicit depiction of the horrors of slavery. The hobs in the story are a native species enslaved by the humans of the planet. (I first pictured them as very small, like gnomes, but later realized that they were the size of small humans.) There are thousands of them for every human, and they do everything. A human butcher never cuts meat, his hobs do. Some people are carried everywhere by hobs. They raise the children, farm, build, carry—they do everything. The humans live in almost complete decadence, only taking up the more "intellectual" chores such as arranging trade.

The lives of the hobs are horrible, and this triggers the Reader Warning at the beginning of the story. They're mostly mute, often castrated, raped by human overseers, and sacrificed by the hundreds during religious ceremonies.
We learn all about them from our first-person narrator. He's a misanthropic naturalist. He studies his hobs in order to get more efficiency from them, and soon has the most productive plantation around. This is a dangerous spot to occupy when the climate is changing and the humans around you are suffering. Rumors spread about him, labeling him a hob lover and eventually a devil worshiper, until eventually the priests arrest him and arrange for a show trial. During his long captivity our hero develops many theories of natural history by observing what he can and reading religious texts that his wife brings him. He eventually discovers evolution while being locked up like Galileo, and makes some interesting inferences about the relationship between hobs and humans. He and his wife were long estranged because of his impotence around her, but they reconcile during his imprisonment.

This man is basically a classical sf protagonist: a keen, cold, brilliant intellect. Yet MacLeod makes clear is that those attributes are in no way sufficient when it comes to righting wrongs. While he was a kinder hob master, believing that light treatment will get better results from them, he doesn't feel any empathy for them. He never seeks to appreciate them as individuals or to free them from servitude (until his plantation is overrun by angry neighbors). It is his humanist wife, one who cares about suffering, who really starts to make a difference in the lives of the hobs.

At the end of this story, MacLeod pulls out all the stops, attacking religion as it perpetrates injustice, valorizing religion as it can right injustice, celebrating science for its enlightening knowledge, and castigating science for not acting on that knowledge. It may have been a more powerful story if we'd gotten to know the wife a little bit better—as it is she is a bit of a stereotyped woman, very sexual and caring, without a lot of depth. She's portrayed more as the narrator's opposite than as a person in her own right, although that may be the consequence of having a misanthropic narrator. It's a powerful story nonetheless. It may preach to the choir but it challenges our complacency.

Slipstream Nostalgia

"The Auctioneer and the Antiquarian, or, 1962" by Forrest Aguirre illustrates a trend in stories that ride the genre/slipstream line while tapping in to the rich vein of nostalgia surrounding the 1950s and 60s. (See also "The Boarder" by Alexander Jablokov in March's F&SF.) However, in "1962" it doesn't add up to much.

In 1962 Hayden is a young boy suffering from cancer. The US space program is in the midst of setbacks, suffering several significant (and public) failures to get unmanned probes on the Moon. Hayden's father passed away, so his mom has encouraged him to hang around Mr. Simms (the Antiquarian) and Lenny (the Auctioneer) who can act as father figures. Mr. Simms seems to represent rationalism, talking often about Cuba and worries about politics. He's rooting for the space program to work. Lenny seems to symbolize more magical thinking. He gives Hayden a "space helmet" with "healing" properties to help him fight his cancer. He thinks that aliens around the Moon must be sabotaging the NASA missions, and he's getting Hayden worried that the aliens may not appreciate human expansion. The reader is never sure how much Lenny believes and how much is him just trying to help the boy by making up stories.

Hayden is pulled in both directions. He's naturally skeptical, but after getting the helmet his cancer eventually goes into remission. He starts to think that he's hearing alien voices through the helmet as well. At the end of the story, the Cuban missile crisis is on, and the US is on the brink of nuclear war. The story ends without any clear resolution between the poles represented by Mr. Simms and Lenny. One would expect Hayden to either choose one or represent a compromise between them, but the story ends abruptly before that can happen. It has an interesting premise, but I found the ending didn't pay off the set up.

Doh!

OK, I feel like an idiot. The central metaphor of "Burgerdroid" is not about the human/machine interface. It's all about how the drudgery of mundane day-to-day life saps our artistic and creative impulses. Elsa is an artist, a ballerina. To make ends meet, she essentially takes a (glorified) job flipping burgers. Her "robot" act, and even her costume, represent the walls that go up around a person to protect them from the outside world, but can inhibit emotional connections. She realizes that she can't dance as she used to (all her movements are too robotic now), and when she begins a romantic interlude with one of her co-robots, their costumes literally get in the way until they "come to their senses" and give it up. Basically, the day-to-day drudgery of her job has cost Elsa her artistic self and her ability to make real attachments to others, all in the name of making ends meet. This story would be just as true set in a McDonalds instead of a "Burgerdroid." In this context the nihilistic ending, which I'm still trying desperately not to spoil, makes much more sense.

I suppose I could "cover" by saying that it's admirable that the story can be read on multiple levels, that it's as much about the cultural and social oppression of the working class as it is about female cyborgs and the human/machine interface, but really I feel pretty stupid for missing the metaphor that was the glaringly obvious one. Mea culpa! It's all part of my learning process.

Human-->Cyborg-->Machine

"Burgerdroid" by Felicity Shoulders is awesome in a completely different way than the sf stories that I usually consider awesome. It could be set in any near-future time—actually with the tech involved it could be set today. The story doesn't have a plot to speak of, and ends in a fairly nihilistic way. It spends a lot of time describing the emotional state of a single mom. And yet, it's still really awesome. Let me summarize before getting to the root of its awesomeness.

Elsa is a single mom. She's an under-employed ballerina, working at Burgerdroid to make ends meet and get health insurance. See, Burgerdroid isn't your run-of-the-mill fast food joint. Its conceit is that it's fully automated—no humans, just robots. Obviously they do this through trickery, hiring actors and dancers to play the parts of the robots. They invest a lot in keeping up the charade: relatively high pay and health insurance to reduce employee turnover, renting out adjacent building space so that human workers aren't observed entering the Burgerdroid facility, etc. There's a risk that Elsa's son Henry might spill the beans, another source of tension for Elsa.

So it's a lot like Disneyland, a carefully maintained corporate facade. One of the most fascinating parts of the story comes from the descriptions of the customers: some who assume everything really is automated and like the fact that they don't have to deal with people at all, some who come for the novelty, some who come over and over to try to catch the robots out, and some who come in with vandalism at heart.

So that's all awesome, and really well imagined. What puts this over the top though, is the way it investigates our relationship to machines. SF often romanticizes its robots, but as Elsa plays a robot day after day, she feels her artistic side draining away. She's worried that she's becoming too mechanical. The way that the customers treat the dehumanized robots is also telling. It implies that robots are unlikely to be our bestest friends; they're at least as likely (as, in all fairness, Isaac Asimov also portrayed) to be disassembled by hoodlums. This is a short story that packs a lot thinking about the human/machine interface into a short number of pages. Well done, and another one to keep in mind for awards time.

Skipping Norma Desmond

James Patrick Kelly is a good writer and a great guy. So I fully expected to read through "Surprise Party" and enjoy it. Unfortunately, I ended up skipping it. It starts out with a portrait of an aging starlet. This already does not thrill me, since the whole Norma Desmond/Sunset Boulevard thing never worked for me. It's got a nice sf cast to it though, where the medium she worked in was all neural. People experienced her life recorded from her brain. Nothing new there, though. She's got one faint customer today, but she doesn't give it much mind. She's got stuff to do.

As I read the story, there were two questions with the potential to make me stick around to find out the answers: what might happen at the "surprise party" her friends are throwing for her, and what is the "neutrality" issue that she mentions without explanation? However, before we get into that, we join her as she works on a draft of a crappy series novel, continuing a series started by her late partner. This could have been funny, but instead it really dragged on. And on. And then the two questions didn't seem enough for me to stick around for more of this.

I did skim the ending, and it looks like one of the questions I should have been looking forward to was an explanation of the faint presence in her head. However, since she gave it so little thought, I didn't give it any weight. It seemed inconsequential. I'm not quite sure if that's what Kelly was going for there.

Full Disclosure: when I was reading this I was feeling a bit under the weather and was generally in a bad mood. I wonder if the hack story excerpts might have been funnier if I'd been in a better frame of mind. As it was after I abandoned this story I went and read non-fiction for the rest of the day. Non-fiction is my comfort food now, since I don't have to review it. It takes a lot more effort to closely read something you're going to review than to just read something for enjoyment. It's odd to say that reading Herodotus is more relaxing than reading Asimov's now, but such is the odd place to which my life has come.

Emo Teens, But in a Good Way

I'm not a huge fan of reading about immature teenagers. However, Nancy Kress' novelette "Call Back Yesterday" easily sustained my interest. We're first presented with a girl, Caitlin, who sees figures in her mirror besides herself. ("This morning the bathroom mirror shows only a lone person—besides Caitlin herself, of course.") She tries to ignore them and instead focus on normal teen concerns ("She washes her face, brushes her teeth, and tries the effect of pinning her dirty hair on top of her head. She looks like a dork. More of a dork.") So there's the first question to pique our interest: what's up with the mirror figures?

Next she is called to group therapy of some kind. It turns out she's institutionalized with other teenagers with similar issues—and aside from the mirror figures there's also some sort of amnesia going on. There follows a description of the sort of nasty group politics you'd expect with a random group of less-than-stable teenagers, but the "doctors" also seem a bit off. The next question for us is why these kids are institutionalized, completely cut off from the outside world. The fact that there are no windows is a nice touch to make us wonder about what's being hidden.

The story really picks up with the escape attempt. One of the boys, Josh, leads Caitlin and her friend Sheena out of the institution during a power outage. It turns out that the place is surrounded by some sort of wild vegetative jungle—not what you'd expect from North Carolina, which is where the girls think they are. Even more intriguing. The emotional intensity of the story picks up as Sheena and Caitlin begin to remember more things, Josh seduces Caitlin, and we begin to suspect that Josh is not quite what he seems.

This story grabs you and doesn't let go. The emotional intensity of the teenagers rings very true. The ending is a little disappointing; it answers some questions but not all of them, and some of the answers seem to come a little too easily to Caitlin. However, the story is less about the world the characters inhabit and more about the characters themselves, and the characters and the drama are very well done.

To Sum Up: April/May Asimov's

"Memory Dog" by Kathleen Ann Goonan (nt, good)
"Slidin'" by Neal Barrett, Jr. (ss, skipped)
"The House Left Empty" by Robert Reed (ss, good)
"An Almanac for the Alien Invaders" by Merrie Haskell (ss, OK)
"An Art, Like Everything Else" by Nick Wolven (ss, good)
"An Alien Heresy" by S. P. Somtow (nt, good)
"Ghost Town" by Catherine Wells (ss, good)
"Strangers When We Meet" by Kate Wilhelm (nt, good)
"Another Country" by Matthew Johnson (ss, good)
"The Advocate" by Barry B. Longyear (ss, OK)
"The Room of Lost Souls" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (na, good)

I was a little surprised that there weren't any stories in this issue that were immediately award-worthy. Usually some of the best of the year goes into the two yearly double issues for the digest magazines. Overall impression: good, but nothing to necessarily write home about. (But writing about it on teh Intertubes? Solid gold, of course.)

And hey, I got the reviews done while it's still on the shelves! Next up will be Interzone #215, a little late since #216, the Mundane SF issue edited by Geoff Ryman came out recently. Still, with a little more acceleration, I hope to be reliably reviewing things during or before their official month of publication, the better to serve y'all.

April/May Asimov's (Part the fourth)

"Another Country," by Matthew Johnson is a story about time-traveling refugees. It centers around a community of ancient Romans trying to integrate into modern day Seattle. One, a man who arrived when he was young, has assimilated well and now assists others. Some of his compatriots are having difficulty, especially young boys whose fathers didn't make it. Rome was intensely patriarchal, and they feel they are being pulled in impossible directions. As American pre-teens they cannot provide for the family, but as the oldest male that's exactly what they feel they should be doing. Some of the older men, having an even harder time adjusting, may be exploiting them. This story is similar to "Lost Continent," another story about time-traveling refugees by Greg Egan, which can be found in the excellent Starry Rift sf YA anthology. However, where Egan's young protagonist never makes it out of the government refugee processing center, Johnson takes the next step in describing the difficulties immigrants, especially involuntary immigrants, face in adapting. It's a good story, with an unexpectedly ambiguous ending.

"The Advocate" is another story about aging and our collective fear of losing our minds, this one by Barry Longyear. It's narrated by an ailing author. His mind is beginning to go, and as his illness progresses the narrative becomes as incoherent as that implies. The science fictional twist offers the possibility of hope, the author's constructed doppleganger of himself, but that is a very feeble hope. This is a sparse and disturbing tale, the sort of thing you don't enjoy but do appreciate.

Finally we get "The Room of Lost Souls," a novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It's a follow-on to her earlier story, "Diving the Wreck," but can be easily read as a stand-alone. It's about a retired wreck diver tempted back into service by a woman on a quest to rescue her father from the eponymous room. He was a war hero in the last major wars (described with the post-9/11 military scene in mind), but disappeared before the peace treaties were signed. The protagonist researches the woman's father, but eventually has to also meet with her own father and begin to face her own family's history with the room. In the end, she outfits a very reasonable, well thought out expedition and goes in to face the artifact with all due precaution. The information that will bite you is the information you don't have, and of course things don't go smoothly. It's generally a character driven story. The protagonist, while not a particularly nice person, is empathetic. She appreciably grows and changes through the course of the novella. The plotting is well done, and no one has to act like an idiot, which is always appreciated. Rusch is good at dramatic tension, and shows off her skill well here. All in all, a very satisfying story to close out the issue.

April/May Asimov's (Part the third)

The April/May Asimov's has a novelette by someone I had never read before, although I had heard the name. S. P. Somtow contributes the disturbing "An Alien Heresy." Readers may recall last year's highly acclaimed Hugo-nominee, Eifleheim by Michael Flynn. In that novel (which I unfortunately couldn't finish) aliens land in medieval Germany. The gentle, kind, and humanistic local priest helps them out. "Alien Heresy" is the evil twin of that story. Here an alien lands in medieval Europe, and a priest working for the Inquisition does all the unpleasant things one would expect. He also discovers he's got a bastard son in the town from the last time he was through there (during the trial of the early pedophilic serial killer who inspired the Bluebeard legend), and has to decide what to do about that. I'm not sure anything in the story is graphic enough to warrant the "viewer discretion is advised" message, but it all adds up to leave you wanting to give your brain a good scrubbing. Certainly it's a strong reminder that medieval times were often nasty and brutish, not noble and Disney-fied.

Helping us to recover from that experience is "Ghost Town" by Catherine Wells. A returned astronaut wanders through her much-changed hometown. She was only supposed to be gone for two years, but while she only experienced two years, everyone else aged sixteen. Her little sister is older than she is now. Her experience of time-shock is vividly drawn. In the end the solution to her problem is pretty darn obvious, but the portrait of an emotion that no human has experienced yet is well-done.

Kate Wilhelm provides a long story, "Strangers When We Meet," using that rather-more-common-in-fiction-than-it-is-in-real-life device, the unique and unexplained mental illness. A college student has survived the car crash that killed her family. She's fine, but has day-by-day amnesia now: every night she forgets everything since a bit before the crash. She wakes up not knowing that her family is dead. She is the perfect subject for a researcher who needs to do repetitive and boring scanning of a single brain to get the best possible maps of neural function. (Normal volunteers get bored or leave for the summer, etc.) Unfortunately, she could also be the perfect tool of a corrupt and abusive government (for what, exactly, is never specified. It's just implied to be evilly nefarious). A young man also becomes involved, falling in love with the young lady. He's quite nonplussed when she fails to remember him, so he goes barging in, demanding to know what's going on. Despite my uninspired summary, this is a great tale to read. The characters are well drawn, and you start to really care for them. Wilhelm is expert at ratcheting up dramatic tension. My main criticism (aside from the story dodging the question of whether the researcher is any better than the government officials in terms of using the poor girl) is that the ending is very abrupt. I wished I'd learned more about what happened to the girl, instead of having the story just stop. With the ending it becomes obvious that the girl is only a macguffin, and the story is really about the people around her.

April/May Asimov's (Part the second)

Oh noes, I'm falling behind! (It's been time well-spent though: two days as a referee at a youth fencing tournament where I earned as much as I would selling two reviews and an article, then yesterday I wrote 2200 words for a review for Strange Horizons that might turn into something *very* good indeed.) There shall be three short stories today to make up time—full speed ahead!

The ever-prolific Robert Reed contributes a thoughtful story to the Asimov's spring double-issue. "The House Left Empty" contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of small, communal, environmentally-friendly living with those of capitalist, nationalist, anti-social living. He makes it clear that neither is inherently superior. However, for all those who, like me, probably knee-jerk towards the green option, he makes clear his opinion as to which system is more likely to get us out into space. It's hard to dispute his assertion.

Another short story, "An Almanac for the Alien Invaders" by Merrie Haskell is interesting. It describes the journey of a dissatisfied Post-Doc joining up with our new alien overlords. It's an interesting examination of colonialism from the POV of the colonized; looking at what's gained and what's lost by throwing your lot in with the colonizers. However, the "Almanac" framing device didn't really work for me, as it never seemed well integrated. The structure was always like this passage: "In February, the groundhog will see his shadow, and a million people will disappear overnight." I'm not sure if the idea is to make everything that happens seem inevitable, but it seemed to make things trivial instead. Also, the story is told in a mixture of future and present tense that made everything seem slightly distant and surreal. This was obviously intentional, but it didn't work for me.

"An Art, Like Everything Else" by Nick Wolven is a beautiful story with a tear-jerker ending. It all takes place after humanity has uploaded into a massive computer simulation. However, after centuries, people still start to, not "grow old" exactly, but to degrade ( a bit like Alzheimer's). A man is haunted by the ghost of his lover and the places they used to enjoy together. He has to face his grief at the loss instead of trying to run away from it. It is a lovely tale, and makes the VR environment seem real. It also features a positively-depicted gay couple without acting like that's anything special, which is nice to see. It mirrors a big concern that sf stories seem to be grappling with right now: aging. There appears to be a massive fear of Alzheimer's, which makes sense for a community founded on intellect and imagination. (Once again let me pimp the Match it for Pratchett campaign to raise funds for Alzheimer's research.) Also, it may reflect the slowly aging audience for the print magazines (and some of the authors themselves). Over the past few years several Mike Resnick stories have picked up this theme, as well as current Hugo-nominee Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, among many others. As the Baby Boomers start to go (probably not gently) into that good night, I suspect we'll see much, much more of this sort of thing.

April/May Asimov's (Part the first)

The spring double issue of Asimov's starts off with a good story by Kathleen Ann Goonan, "Memory Dog." She continues her focus on bio- and nanotech (seen in her "Queen City Jazz" tetralogy and other short stories). Thus this story is narrated by a very special dog, or rather the person within the dog. Stories such as this depend on the slow reveal, where the audience keeps reading to find the answers to mysteries and get new enigmas to draw them forward. It's almost impossible to review that kind of story without spoilers. Let's just say that the narration and world-building is very cool, with an interesting extrapolation of dispersed blogging going on. The story is a paean to dogs and dog lovers (and as a dog person myself, it's mighty refreshing after all the cat stories!). However, the ultimate solution to humanity's problems, as presented here, didn't really fly with me, no matter how tear-jerking and dog-related it may be. (The tears are honestly come by in this story; it doesn't feel horribly manipulative.) This is a good story, but again (see my Marsbound review from yesterday) I'm not sure that the intimate milieu of the story can support the global scale of the ending.

Next up was the only story in the issue that I skipped, "Slidin'" by Neal Barrett, Jr. It relies heavily on amusing dialects in the dialogue:

It's bad enough your baby sister's hopping 'round like a frog. Worse still she flat looks like one, ick-warts and all. 'Course, there's folks look worse than that. I got family it is hue-miliating to call 'em kin. Like ol' Jeb-Reb and Ducko Bill. Don't even talk about Grandpa Foot. 'Least Ducie's got a head, and just one, we can be thankful for that.

It keeps going on in this vein for quite some time. Everyone's ugly (mutated) as the result of an "ugly bomb" (nuclear weapon, I assume we're suppose to assume). Laureen (the narrator) is a typical teenager and is being bratty. It's not very pleasant reading, but the author has a good ear for dialogue and good rhythm, so I decided to keep going despite my initial reservations.

What tipped me over the edge was what I regard as just a tease. Laureen's Mom promises something big:

Now, you're going to see something not ever'one gets to see, and I expect you to behave and do as you're told. This isn't no ordinary place we're going, I don't have to tell you that. It'd be something to tell your younguns 'bout. I mean, if you was going to have some, which, God help us, you're not.

After a build-up like that, I expect something interesting, cool, and central to the plot, if there is one. However, after the "big reveal," they go on like nothing's changed. Laureen keeps being snarky and observing her ugly family. They don't interact with the special place/thing, and it doesn't look like they're going to. That's when I decided to bail out and head on to the next story.

Finishing off March's Asimov's

"Spiders" by Sue Burke is a nice, quiet short story. It depicts a man and his son walking through the forest on an alien planet. The father knows that some of the life on this planet is dangerous, but wants to teach his son about it, instead of having him always be afraid. The eponymous spiders watch them as they pass, and the father hopes his son doesn't notice. Of course, five year olds are always more observant than we think they are. The story doesn't follow any of the well-worn paths that our arachnophobia might dictate. The man is a little worried about the boy's mother and her influence on him, but mostly it's a natural history lesson. There is obviously more to this world than we see in the story; there's a feeling of depth to the world-building. I would be interested to see more stories set on this world, to see what else the author has thought up but hasn't shared with us yet.

Finishing off the issue is a novelette by Carol Emshwiller, "Master of the Road to Nowhere." This long story depicts a group of people with unusual tribal customs. They're nomads, like gypsies only more stand-offish. The people in each group have well-defined roles, and as older members die, younger ones take their place. Wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape (population and tech levels have obviously fallen, but no reason is ever offered), they are finding it difficult to maintain their way of life.

Each group has one strong man. He hunts, gathers, scouts, and performs the most physical labor, although he does not lead. The society is matriarchal. His other physical attributes are shared equally amongst the women of the group; there is no private ownership in their society, not even exclusive relationships. However, the man for this group falls in love. It is a real and oft-told tale, the individual rebelling from a collective society and its strictures. In a story that feels as quiet, desperate, and heroic as The Grapes of Wrath, we learn what he and his lover gain and what they lose.

I enjoyed this story: Emshwiller's writing is always beautiful and very emotional. However, I always seem to get so wrapped up in the emotional content of her stories that it's only when I get to the end that I find questions that haven't been answered, meat that I expect from sf stories that isn't there. I'm always left with a lingering sense of beauty and perhaps tragedy, but not much else. Her craft and prose are wonderful, and I almost never fail to finish one of her stories, but I always feel like there's something missing. I imagine that for many people, this won't be an issue, and I hope you enjoy this story.

"How It Feels" by Ian Creasey

To all four of my readers out there, let me know if you think this review has too many spoilers. In a short story, it's really hard to avoid. Without giving away the ending I couldn't think of any way to talk about the morality/genre subversion aspects of the story. However, if I hear that people would really prefer to find these things out on their own, I'll limit my reviews to accomodate. Thanks!

This is a classic "what if" story: one big idea and an examination of the implications. Now, this idea isn't particularly plausible, and it's certainly not on the horizon. So this is a bit of an abstract exercise. Given that it doesn't have any immediate political implications, this particular story instead goes for the personal moral. It's not a bad moral, but it ends up feeling heavy-handed.

We meet a man grieving for his daughter, trying to get through his day. However, it becomes clear that he never had a daughter. Upon being arrested for speeding, he has been sentenced to carry around a module that installs in him the grief and memories of a man whose daughter was killed by a speeding driver. The man is completely unable to drive faster than 30 mph, even on the highway, and it's ruining his ability to work. He tries to think his way around the problem, to remind himself that it's not real, but the grief is too overwhelming - it never fades with time. In the end the guy decides to embrace the lesson of the module: it's OK to slow down. It's not worth anyone's life to go faster. It's better to live in the moment and value the time you have, instead of relentlessly pursuing career advancement.

Creasey's evocation of the emotions the guy is wrestling with is powerful without being melodramatic or weepy, and the contrast between what the module is thinking and what the guy is thinking is well done. However the moral ending feels incongruous. I was trying to get at the root of my mild dislike of this well-told story, and I think it comes from an intentional or unintentional subversion of a genre convention.

Usually in stories like this, we see a government-imposed, heavy-handed "solution" to crime, and we learn why it is a Bad Thing (especially in Analog stories). And my thought on a technology like this, if such a thing were possible, is that it would indeed be a Bad Thing — you shouldn't force people to respond emotionally to other people's traumas. As the protagonist discovers, if we all had true empathy, we'd all be frozen and unable to act. So that's where I expected this story to go.

However, the author chooses to side-step this message and instead have the protagonist learn a valuable lesson about life, one straight from pop-psychology land. Although it isn't a bad message, even the best wisdom can feel facile when it's been repeated by large numbers of shallow and commercial self-help gurus. Perhaps the author felt no need to emphasize a political message because it's so obvious, or perhaps because there's no real-world risk of such technology coming into being anytime soon. I'm honestly not sure if this subversion of my expectations is a good thing or not, or even if it is intentional or not. Nonetheless, I think it's at the root of the fact that when I finished this story, I felt like I didn't like it very much.

"Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear continues to bring the awesome. This year her short story "Tideline" is nominated for the Hugo Award (and of the three nominees I've read so far is my clear favorite), and this novelette may end up making my nomination lists for next year.

As one might expect, "Shoggoths" is a Lovecraftian story. It's set in cold windy New England, in the 1930s with WWII looming on the horizon. It deals with alien and eldritch creatures. However, instead of being a Lovecraft homage or pastiche, this is a rather pointed critique.

The main important change that Bear has made to the Lovecraft formula is that the protagonist, Dr. Harding, is black. Everything else really stems from that. He is a professor coming in to do field research on these shoggoths and their life cycle. They are huge gelatinous creatures, usually inhabiting the deep sea, except for times when they roost on the rocky New England shoreline. They appear to be immortal, but not much else is known about them.

Dr. Harding doesn't encounter any overt racism from the locals, and the fisherman who takes him out to the shoggoths is as friendly as a taciturn Maine native can be. Bear's points are much more subtle. When Lovecraft's protagonists go looking for knowledge, they are usually driven insane by coming face-to-face with the unknowable, horrible eldritch. Instead of recoiling in unthinking horror, Harding reaches for understanding instead, and achieves it. He embraces their alien, Other nature. It makes sense, given his alienation as an outsider in America.

Likewise, by firmly grounding this story in a time when almost unthinkable horrors were about to be unleashed, Bear seems to be dismissing Lovecraft's "horrors" altogether. If you want horror, she seems to say, skip the stories and go straight to the documentaries.

Once more, like all the best stories with a point, in this tale the polemics never dominate the story itself. Bear is a great story-teller, and this one has some good humor and some in-jokes for the Lovecraft fans. Even on its own, without any background in Lovecraftian fiction, I think this story would stand up well. The message and the critique are embedded nicely within an enjoyable tale, just the way they should be.

March Asimov's

In the March issue of Asimov's, Cat Rambo contributes a cute story about alien life on a space station. In "Kallakak's Cousins," our eponymous merchant hero is trying to keep his store front, but some more powerful aliens appear to be trying to legalistically maneuver it away from him. The station administration turns over every few months, and if they win this time it will be a fait accompli when the next administration comes in. To add to his very bad day, when he gets back to his quarters he finds himself with a trio of his wife's cousins to deal with. They are comically inept, messing up everything as they try to be helpful.

Kallakak is a down-on-his-luck, weary, but fundamentally good guy. He's easy to root for, and his robotic shop assistant is awesome. The resolution of the story comes from manipulations of alien psychology, in a traditional yet well-done manner. It's a light story, but genuinely entertaining.

Another very short story comes from Steven Utley. "The World Within the World" involves physicists at a station, observing that things seem haunted. There are all sorts of places a story can go when you mix physics and spooky apparitions, but this story takes one abrupt twist and then ends. I felt let down - I was settling into the story nicely, reading what felt like a developing plot, when the words seemed to simply stop. I hope it will be taken as a testament to Utley's skill that I really wanted more from this story - more development after the twist, more examination of the core concept. Maybe he'll go there in a future story.