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 - 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.