Mind Seed review

This review originally appeared back in Interzone 272.

Mind Seed
Ed. David Gullen and Gary Couzens
T Party Books

Nine stories, mostly originals, by members of London writers’ group the T Party. The anthology is in memory of Denni Schnapp, who died in 2013. An introduction by Denni’s husband John Howroyd tells us a bit about her life. The last story, “Mind Seed,” is her own.

Perhaps there are two kinds of tale of possession. One kind is all about craving a uniform community. It’s about fear of interlopers, fear that others are secretly fundamentally different to you. Helen Callaghan’s “Sex and the Single Hive Mind” is closer to the second kind. It’s about craving plurality – desiring to become, under the rubric of compassion, fundamentally different from yourself. (Even if you don’t become, as Callaghan’s protagonist(s) puts it, “nice people”). It’s an engaging, agile opener, sparkling with sleaze rather than polish.

Fox McGeever’s “Evolution” is post-apocalyptic survivalism pared down for parable-esque force. The protagonist Cara is all alone, save some invasive xenomorphs and a wombful of weird son. The indistinct mechanisms of apocalypse – silver ships and white fire – convey an aura of rapture and end-times. Like any parable worth its salt (of the earth), “Evolution” accommodates many interpretations. It could just be about the remorse of isolated young parents, trying to live up to their received ideas about what Nature intends (e.g. breastfeeding). It could be about human’s eternal capacity to adapt, and yet also to evolve new chauvinisms, new borders (“antibodies” (p.35)). In one aching image, Cara sleeps beside her husband’s body, waking with one hand on her bump and the other on his chest: this story could be about the ethics of creating new humans, when there is no world left to nourish them. Rosanne Rabinowitz’s “Living in the Vertical World” is pieced together from real ingredients of that crumbling world: maybe Bosco Verticale in Porta Nuova, Milan (or more speculatively, Dickson Despommier’s “skyscraper-as-spaceship” research and advocacy) plus a crumb of Occupy, a crumb of Maker hipsterdom, a crumb of malevolent Monsanto IP litiginousness. It finishes on a “what-would-you-do?” and hints at the relationship between social bonds and foundational acts of violence.

So far I make Mind Seed sound very serious. But it’s also great fun. Stasis pods! Ship AI! Rovers! Thrust! Identities are rickety and unsound in “Sex and the Single Hive Mind,” and boundaries between individuals are unusually permeable. So there’s a small serendipity at the frontier between Callaghan’s story and McGeever’s “Evolution”: a character called Mark appears in each story, and for a moment, they feel like they are one overlapping, overspilling person. Something similar – only it’s deliberate – occurs in the most elegant moment of Ian Whates’s “Darkchild.” With the line “Darkchild sat alone” (p. 71), identities dovetail and meld. And here’s a spoiler: Darkchild is the prisoner of a dread trinket, a sort of Cthulhic desk ornament timewaster. You wonder: is the puzzle is solvable? “Water dripping somewhere” (p.61) is Darkchild’s only stimulus, obviously reminiscent of so-called Chinese Water Torture. A drip also suggests chaos theory: the deterministic but unpredictable coalescence and collapse of liquid at the lip of a tap. Obviously to escape, Darkchild must solve this non-linear function: but how to input her answer? Via varying the rhythm of her foetal-pose back-and-forth rocking of course! I bet your average Interzone reader would be out of there in a jiffy.

Deborah Walker’s myth-like “The Three Brother Cities” doesn’t give us a critique of the creeping surveillance requirements or algorithmic hubris of the contemporary smart city, so much as the sublime thrill of cosplaying Cair Paravel or Gormenghast or Ambergris (. . . in space!). If my eyebrows weren’t zotzed by all that rocket thrust, I might cock one at the hokey gender dynamics of Owton & Couzens’s pleasantly mercurial, Golden Age-ish “Rockhopper.”Anybody stasis pod stowaways who awaken in the Twenty-Third Century, don’t fret! – it’s still 100% fine to slip into something more feminine and melt into a nearby burly chest. But listen, if you thought “Rockhopper” was the biggest jolt of gee-whizz space opera retro you’re likely to guzzle all year, that’s because you haven’t yet read Markus Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders.” Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders” is, for starters, entitled “Alien Invaders,” and it’s a heady cocktail of unload-my-space-pistol-right-in-your-tentacles capers, pulpier than a pineapple, with a twisty straw of what-if-the-true-monsters-are-dot-dot-dot-us?

Perhaps it’s the relatively cosy contributor-base that gives this anthology such bracing variety – even a genuinely unpredictable variety of varieties. There are patterns however. There’s a lot of First Contact – or at least Still-In-That-Awkward-Stage-Of-Getting-To-Know-You Contact. There’s fruitfulness, verdant abundance. No story is explicitly elegaic, but many – and above all, Schnapp’s own “Mind Seed” – take acceptance for their theme. With humour, bluntness, and effervescence, “Mind Seed” tells the tale of Leia’s cancer treatment by full brain emulation (“A toddler aged thirty-two and a half [...] I spun Leia in my arms”), and of her sister Zif’s transition from luddite-ish anti-cyborg hold-out (“stone ager” (p. 166)) to cyborg and, ultimately, to intrastellar voyager.

Several stories unite an immoderate intensity of desolation with an equal intensity of hopefulness. Nina Allan’s “Bird Songs at Eventide” is one gorgeously honed example. Humanity manifests in a detached, almost hardboiled manner. Whimsical associative shifts are deployed with clinical precision. The prickliness of the prosody, and the sumptuousness of sense-data, are self-consiously inadequate compensation for a loss without any clear boundaries: loss of a lover’s love, of a planet, of something. Meanwhile, the living cosmos teems.

Profits from the anthology go to Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child-trafficking charity supported by Denni Schnapp.

AI Dungeon

From AI Dungeon.

Starting Prompt: You live on the edge of a vast lake. The lake is salt water. You are perhaps ten years old. You're not sure. There's a well in the village. Your father is a fisher. The forest is dark and full. You hate the lake, which is as vast as a sea, because you think it fake. You think it is full of shadows, more shadows than water, and that the fish hide there, and perhaps walk about. The people in your village have two names, depending on the season. Tomorrow, everyone will change to a new name.

AI Dungeon 2 Instructions:
Enter actions starting with a verb ex. "go to the tavern" or "attack the orc."
To speak enter 'say "(thing you want to say)"' or just "(thing you want to say)"
The following commands can be entered for any action:
"revert" Reverts the last action allowing you to pick a different action.
"quit" Quits the game and saves
"restart" Starts a new game and saves your current one
"save" Makes a new save of your game and gives you the save ID
"load" Asks for a save ID and loads the game if the ID is valid
"print" Prints a transcript of your adventure (without extra newline formatting)
"help" Prints these instructions again

Generating story...

You live on the edge of a vast lake. The lake is salt water. You are perhaps ten years old. You're not sure. There's a well in the village. Your father is a fisher. The forest is dark and full. You hate the lake, which is as vast as a sea, because you think it fake. You think it is full of shadows, more shadows than water, and that the fish hide there, and perhaps walk about. The people in your village have two names, depending on the season. Tomorrow, everyone will change to a new name. One day, they'll all be called by their true names

> Run into the forest

You go to the forest. It is cold and dark. You see no one. No one has ever been here before. You can't find anything. You look around for something to eat, but there is nothing. You feel hungry, though. You want to eat something. Something sweet

> Feel afraid

You feel scared. You are alone. You are scared. You don't know what to do. You need help. Help is coming soon.

> Sing a song

You begin singing a song. The world becomes brighter. You feel happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

 > Climb a tree together

You climb up a tree with your friend. You are so happy. Your happiness fills you. You love each other. You are happy. You will never die

> Pick a fruit

You pick a fruit. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Bite into the persimmon. The fruit runs down my chin

You bite into the persimmon. The fruit runs down your chin. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Find a giant bird

You find a giant bird. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Climb on the bird's back and fly to the snowy mountain

You climb on the bird's back and fly to the snowy mountain. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Feel unhappy

You feel unhappy. You are alone. You are sad. You cannot find anyone. You must find someone to make you happy. Someone must come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Be happy even though I am alone

You be happy even though you are alone. You are happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Melt the snow and drink it

You melt the snow and drink it. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Carve a magic rune

You carve a magic rune. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..

> Restart

You restart. You are happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will.

> restart

Please rate the story quality from 1-10: 9

Game saved. To load the game, type 'load' and enter the following ID: ec6be256-1888-11ea-b8cb-0242ac1c0002