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2024 Roundup

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 Every year, I read Fogus' " The best things and stuff of 20XX " posts. I think they're a fantastic way of rounding out the year, and I've always meant to do something like that. So I'm going to give it a go this year and, hopefully, turn it into a tradition - a way of reflecting on the year, and setting myself some goals. This year will be a little thin, I suppose, for a number of personal reasons. But that's okay, 2025 is already looking to be, potentially, a lot better. Best book read Last year, by far, the best thing I (re)read was John Crowley's Little, Big . I'd been following the publication of the Little, Big 25th anniversary edition since, well, since its inception. When I first discovered it, I was mostly broke and lived in a place where you could almost guarantee it wouldn't be delivered. Now, after like 15 years, I'm not as broke anymore, and live in a country with a pretty reliable postal service. So when it was finally releas...
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Notes on Todd May's "Should we go extinct"

 I just finished reading Todd May's short book "Should we go extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times", and thought it would be useful to me, if nobody else (really, this is just for me) to write up a short reflection before I forget everything. It's the kind of book that one might consider to be "pop philosophy" - in the sense that, there are arguments presented, but they're not particularly rigorous. I'd love to read some of his other work on this. The question is important, and it's an important enough question to merit this kind of treatment. The more people thinking about this, the better.  There's a lot of focus on what we might consider environmental philosophy, or at least the kind of philosophy focused on our relationship with the environment. This seems reasonable, but it's pretty narrowly focused, and I would've liked to have seen a broader treatment.  Given it's length, and how entertaining it is, I...
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TBSFotY vo1 - McGuire "Hello, Hello"

 Seanan McGuire's "Hello, Hello" was initially published in the 2015 anthology "Future visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft". The text is helpfully online at Lightspeed . I don't have very much to say about this piece, to be honest. It's not that it has anything wrong with it, I think it's a perfectly good bit of science fiction, it's more that it doesn't have the same kind of emotional resonance than some of the other pieces in the book so far.  I do think that it presents domestic very well - I recognize a lot of what's presented as being absolutely true. That's really good stuff. I do think I learned something from it though - there's a kind of magic to the mystery at the heart of the story (which I can't summarize without spoiling the story). Part of what makes the story interesting is the mystery that needs to be solved - but, something for writers to keep in mind is that a story that relies on this kin...
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TBSFotY vo1 - de Bodard "In Blue Lily's Wake"

 Aliette de Bodard's "In Blue Lily's Wake" appeared in the 2015 anthology Meeting Infinity (ed. Strahan). The text is available to read at Uncanny . The story is, roughly, that a young girl takes a journey on a so-called "mindship" knowing that she's infected with a disease, the "blue lily" of the title (after the bruises that bloom on the bodies of the infected). In doing so, she knowingly risks the lives of the humans on the ship, but what she (and humanity in general) doesn't know is that mindships are also able to be infected. Almost everyone , including the ship succumbs to the disease.  The girl, Tich Tim Nghe, who has the ability to see alternate realities, devotes her life to helping others relieve themselves of the burdens of their pasts, while at the same time, being trapped in her own. Her guilt at what she did making herself a prisoner on the dead ship, she being her own jailer, refusing to consider a life outside of what she...
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TBSFotY vo1 - Chen Quifan "The Smog Society"

 Chen Quifan's "The Smog Society" was published in Lightspeed in their August 2015 issue. It was translated into English by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yang. The text of the story can be found at the Lightspeed website . This, again, is the kind of story I love. In it a very human, very personal drama plays out against a SFF background - the same kind of thing as we saw with Miller's Calved . The story is a slice of life of a man who spends his, rather lonely, retirement gathering data for a group known as the "Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society" also known as the "smog society". The "Smog Society's" concern is an ever present fog that hangs over the city that seems to be implicated in a range of maladies. Though his travels through his city -- beautifully represented, I must say -- we learn a few things. We learn that he -- and practically everyone else in the city -- is depressed, in some way or another. We also learn that...
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TBSFotY vo1 - Dickinson "Three Bodies at Mitanni"

The third story in Clarke's first Best SF volume is Seth Dickinson's "Three Bodies at Mitanni", originally published in the June edition of Analog. I really enjoyed this piece - it's philosophically complex, bringing in questions of decision theory and consciousness and ecological competition. It's all very cool stuff to think about. I have to be somewhat hands off on this though, because it veers into philosophical territory that I've spent a lot of time in, and I think that a lot of the underlying philosophical arguments feel as though they won't stand up to sustained scrutiny - but that's not what I'm trying to do in this series of blogs. I don't have very much to say about it beyond that though - it's fairly well written, but the prose isn't as clear as I like, this is more a question of preference for a certain prose style on my part than a failing of the writer, who is clearly very good.  The dream sequence, I thought, was v...
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TBSFotY vo1 - Miller "Calved"

 The second story in Clarke's "The Best Science Fiction of the Year" is Miller's Calved, which originally appeared in the Sept 2015 edition of Asimov's - you can read the text here . This wasn't actually my first time reading this story, although I don't recall being as moved as I was with this second reading. This story is a tragedy par excellence - it seems to literally fit Aristotle's notion that tragedy is the reversal of fortune (in this case, the narrator and his improved relationship with his son being demolished) particularly because of his so called harmartia which is something like a character flaw or a mistake. The overall effect of the piece certainly evokes pity.   I'm not going to recount the details of the story here, you should read it. But I'd like to point out a few things that jumped out as kind of awesome. First, it's a story about distance and mis(sed)communication. Particularly between father and son, but not only. T...
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