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 kind of reveal, where does the re-readability come from?

In McGuire's story, I think there's some compelling family dynamics that might be cool to revisit, but I'm less likely to reread it than I am Miller's "Calved" or even Shoemaker's "Today I am Paul" where the personal is, at least in my reading, explored in a much deeper way.

This may be, though, because what we're presented with in these two other stories are families at a crisis point -- whereas the family in "Hello, Hello" is actually pretty well adjusted.

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's done.

The other strand of the story is that of Yen Oanh, a member of an organization devoted to researching/understanding blue lily, on the one hand, and providing support to victims of the disease on the other. They are a kind of one-stop-shop though, seeming to also have a policing aspect to them.

She has returned to the mindship's corpse 11 years after the first time she was there. Yen Oanh was, at the time of the mindship's death, deeply affected by all the death she saw around her -- and because of her perspective at that time, when she could have helped Tich Tim Nghe by offering her comfort and support, she chose not to, as she saw the girl as deserving of punishment, or at least guilt, given the fact that she knowingly boarded the ship with the disease, and was therefore responsible for the deaths of the crew and the ship itself.

Yen Oanh is, herself, like Tich Tim Nghe, haunted by the past -- now, 11 years after she refused to help the young girl on the ship, she has returned to provide solace, or comfort, or the truth.

The truth being that without the girl getting on the ship while infected, there would be no vaccine for blue lily -- despite the fact that she had inadvertently killed the passengers and ship, this also prevented the death of countless others.

The story is really about two characters, both haunted by the past - both needing to make things right.

What I thought, what worked, what I learned

I've yet to isolate it, but there's something about the prose that I find difficult to parse. To be clear, this isn't that I didn't like the writing, it's genuinely beautiful, but there was something about it that my brain found difficulty in parsing. It may have been the unfamiliar world, but I had to slow down to really understand what was going on. It also didn't help me (again, this is actually not a criticism) that there were multiple realities and memories all swirling together in the text.

BUT, I took this effect to at least be intentional - the "delirium" -- actually the seeing of alternate realities -- that blue lily victims suffer is also characterized by this kind of shifting.

What I learned from this story, though, and what really impressed me was that every single thing that was said about the world felt like it was justified by a world that was fully realized.

I felt as though de Bodard has justifications for everything they said, regardless of whether the justification appeared in the text or not.

That may have also partly explained my initial feeling of the text resisting me - perhaps something like the feeling I get when I'm reading history. Here is a real world, with substance and culture, etc.

Once I "got into it" things started going a lot smoother for me.

Brilliant piece of fiction - I'd love to read more of this world.

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 he has many regrets, chiefly the way things panned out with his wife -- how he let their relationship sink into a mire of indifference and silence (at least on his part). Finally, through the researches of the "Smog Society" we learn (and this is the science fiction, I suppose) that there is a deep connection between the smog and human feeling -- the smog and human unhappiness are in a mutually reinforcing relationship, the more people feel down, the more smog gathers, the more smog gathers, the more it affects them.

Anyone who has any experience of depression itself will recognize the smog's effects:

[T]he most immediate consequence of smog was the sense of removal from the world. Whether you were dealing with people or things, you felt as though you were separated by a layer of frosted glass. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't really see or touch.

 

This notion of distance, of being unable to touch and feel and see is repeated on practically every level in the story. It's in the story of Lao Sun and his disintegrat(ing/ed) marriage, it's in the way that people cannot see or speak to one another, in the way that the smog makes the rest of the (still beautiful) world invisible.

I genuinely loved the way that this kind of metaphor played out at different levels.

There is also clearly a political aspect to this -- which I'm not qualified to speak to, but it's there.

I found the sections of reminiscing on his marriage to be powerful and beautifully done.

What's interesting, finally, is that the first time I read the story a few years ago, I found the ending interesting, somewhat charming, but a little meh. Thinking about it a second time, though, I feel a lot better about the ending - Lao Sun's taking up the role of the clown is, in fact, a radical and rational act in a lot of ways. In bringing happiness to people, he's explicitly taking up the fight against the smog, he's acknowledging hope, and engaging directly with people. Bridging that gap.

Great story.

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 very effective in conveying background information.

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. This shows up at almost every level of the story. Dom, the father, is a kind of climate refugee from New York, with a less than rudimentary grasp of the languages of the space he finds himself in. He orders fries and coffee and is misunderstood. He misunderstands what's going on with his son, why his son is hurting. Ultimately it's misunderstanding and miscommunication that leads to the tragic turn in the story.

Once you start looking for it, it's clear that this is leitmotif. This story is riddled with miscommunication.

What's important here, though, is that at no point is there any trickery - Miller plays it completely straight with the reader - we know what Dom knows. I don't feel duped or lied to. The reversal of fortune is earned, as it were. This is the kind of writing I love. 

Second, I thought Miller did a wonderful job of showing the pain that everyone was feeling, and capturing the dance of emotions involved in strained relationships. Really impressive - the characters, in the short space we have to get to know them, are shown to be complex beings.

Third, the worldbuilding was spectacular. Again, read it.

Forth, the tragedy was foreshadowed brilliantly, and subtly.

Finally, and I think this was an important point -- there's a more general tragic "reversal of fortunes" displayed. The RSR review of this pointed out that this story doesn't necessarily need the "speculative element" and could be written as a straight up literary piece. I agree with that -- however, this misses something important. Dom is a representative of, arguably, the most important city in the world -- which has been absolutely decimated by climate change. I think that this reversal on a grand scale is a useful mirror of the personal tragedy playing out between Dom and his son.

There were two things that struck me as odd, though, about the way this story was told, as much as I enjoyed it. They both have to do with the perspective. The narration is first person, from Dom's perspective. Dom, in his narration, shows himself to be a genuinely intelligent and caring and deep thinker. He just isn't what Thede thinks he is - some macho bonehead. At least, that's the feeling I got reading the piece. There was something odd in the characterization of the act -- the beating of the young man -- that didn't quite work for me. Dom planned it like a sociopath, went out of his way to find a weapon, and then waited 45 minutes in the darkness in order to strike.

I know this was essential, but it was kinda weird when I thought about it.

 Still, I loved the story and thought it was brilliantly done.

TBSFotY vo1 - Shoemaker "Today I am Paul"

 Recently I've written two stories where part of the feedback was "it feels like old style SF."

In one of the stories it was something I was explicitly going for, so that was a win, but in the other, I wasn't quite sure I understood the response.

At the same time, I've been collecting Neil Clarke's "The Best Science Fiction of the Year" anthologies which, I imagine, probably best represent what's contemporary in Science Fiction these days.

I've been meaning to work through them chronologically, making notes on the stories with regards to what and what doesn't work for me and to really start understanding the shape of contemporary short SF.

 Start at the beginning ....

So the first story is Martin L. Shoemaker's "Today I am Paul", originally published in Clarkesworld, August 2015. It was also nominated for  a Nebula, among other things.

The story is about a healthcare android which cares for an alzheimer's patient named Mildred who is slowly deteriorating. This android, BRKCK-01932-217JH-98662 (BRK from here) is interesting for two reasons:

 

firstly, it is able to morph its body to some degree, extending its limbs and hair, changing its eye color, etc. 

 

Secondly, Mildred's family have chosen to have BRK augmented with what's called an 'emulation net', a subsystem allowing the android to "read Mildred's moods, match them against [its] analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity", including approximating their physical characteristics.

 

This "emulation net" is in addition to other subsystems, chiefly the "empathy net", which makes BRK attentive to Mildred's needs. 

 

The interesting thing is that BRK asserts that its "self" has somehow emerged from the interplay of these two subsystems, or at least, emerged in order to balance the two nets.

 

This is an interesting idea, although I doubt one we're supposed to take seriously as an actual model of selfhood (although, perhaps we are? Still, to me that question is secondary to the story).

The story is fairly simple - we're shown Mildred's decline, BRK interacting with her, emulating who Mildred needs to see, interacting with the family, etc.

Then there is a fire which threatens Mildred's life -- BRK has to take some drastic action to save her, which reveals them to her as an android, at which Mildred recoils.

Mildred passes away, and BRK plays some comforting role, after which they are essentially abandoned, but kept around for future, potential, caring.

What worked, what didn't, how does it work.

My interest in SF is not what you'd call one of hard-realism, so despite some potential philosophical nitpicks, I'm happy with the premise. 

More interestingly, it does provide us with some important food for philosophical thought. BRK augmented with an emulation net is essentially a lying machine. Ostensibly built for care, it has also become something that continually dupes Mildred.

It could be, though, that this is actually the moral choice, right?

 If I pushed this further, I could argue that this story is deeply cynical, that part of what it's suggesting is that people simply project what they need onto others, that the "other" doesn't really matter.

 I won't do that though, because I don't think it's true about this story - but there is part of the core of this story that lends itself to a deeply cynical solipsism, if pushed hard enough.

 

It does present an interesting set of ideas around what identity is generally, I think this is nicely explored. When BRK isn't required to "be somebody", it sees itself as nobody at all. That's a potentially deep point about isolation that I don't think is explored as well as it might have been.

In terms of the prose, I thought it worked well. It's not a story where the language was highlighted for me though.

I particularly liked the repeated "I am X" phrase.

The one thing that I felt really disappointed me what the fire and explosion scene. For me, it felt out of place, and particularly in the way it seemed to turn into an action film on a dime. All of that effort, all of that action, and Mildred still passes away from smoke inhalation. I thought it was entirely unnecessary and out of kilter with the rest of the story's gentleness.

But then I wonder, is this the kind of thing that people want in their philosophical fiction? I don't know. I think that the scene with the fire could've been left out completely and it would've had precisely the same emotional resonance. For me, the afterword/coda  could've been left off as well and it would've been, possibly even more effective - but they you wouldn't get the concluding "Today I am Mildred," which is nice.

All in all a solid story, well done.

General update

It has been a while since I've blogged -- this is the fate of all long running projects online, isn't it?

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant to blog here is mainly because I've been considering setting up a Hugo site and running it myself for my blogging platform. I got some way with this, and may still move to it eventually -- but for now I want to treat blogging in the same kind of way as I do running -- it works for me because there's almost zero friction.

When I run, I put on my shoes and go. I think I should prioritize this kind of ease-of-use with blogging as well (for now, at least). So I'll stick to this for the moment.

 

So what have I been up to

• By virtue of being an open source developer, I've continued making monthly contributions to open source. I was hoping to deep dive some of that here but, unfortunately, it's all so workaday that it's uninteresting.
•  I've graded for my orange belt in karate - however, I also injured myself (my hip! How old am I???), so I've unfortunately had to step back for a little while to let it properly heal rather than have it flare up every lesson.
• I've started writing again ... perhaps this deserves its own post. But maybe only after I publish something new.
• I've also picked up my reading pace, interestingly.
  

 

So there you have it. Not too much going on, except for writing.