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.
Showing posts with label anthologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthologies. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2020
Sunday, February 16, 2020
The New Voices of Science Fiction
This review originally appeared in Interzone 284 (Nov/Dec 2019).
The New Voices of Science Fiction
Ed. Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
Tachyon, 2019.
Science fiction is about, at least partly, the future. So here is a collection purporting to be about the future of science fiction: the future of the future. What does the future2 hold in store?
This is not a collection that sets out to discover anybody or give anybody their big break: this is an assembly of very accomplished stories, mostly published in the last five-ish years in major magazines like Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, written by writers whom you may well have heard of or read, and may even have seen scoop up a Hugo or a Nebula Award. They ply their speculative art using a formidable albeit mostly familiar set of tools, plus some modest formal experiments. When a story does something formally striking, it generally has a clear justification closely related to its particular premise; for example, S. Qiouy Lu’s ‘Mother Tongues,’ in which neural interfacing can directly alter linguistic cognition, is very lightly macaronic: it’s almost all in English, but studded with bits of Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue. Across the anthology, far future is out, near future is in; distant planets and ETs are tired, some planet called Earth plus the alien-within-the-human are wired. None of the stories feel out of place, although a few of them could also easily blend into The New Voices of Fantasy or The New Voices of the Weird.
Two of this guy's favourites were by names new to me: Amman Sabet’s ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ and Samantha Mills’s ‘Strange Waters.’ Sabet’s Issa is a foster child raised by a robo-mom, who turns out just fine. Mills’s fisherwoman Mika is adrift on the seas of the centuries, desperate to get back to her children and afraid to check the history books to find out if she ever will. The theme of family threads through the anthology, although I felt like it was a theme that was used more often than explored. For example, the forms of non-monogamy that already exist in the real world are scarcely represented, let alone speculative reinventions or usurpations of the family. Maybe if you’re trying to cram all that rich character-driven narrative into only a few pages, the out-of-the-box resources of trad familial resonances are hard to resist?
Mills’s story exemplifies another big theme, time travel, appearing in six or seven stories. Why so much time travel, New Voices? Well, I felt like these time travel stories emerge more from the matrix of digital connectivity and self-fashioning -- that is, from the feeling of gazing at your Facebook photos from fifteen years ago, or searching for some deeply personal experience to find a forum of folks who share something similar -- than they do from Wellsian musings over future history, or from mindfuck “which-version-of-Baby-Hitler-will-killed-your-future-grandfather?!”-type hijinks. True, Alice Sola Kim’s ‘One Hour, Every Seven Years’ explores the chaoplexic ripples of a moment in time minutely variegated again and again. But in general the deep abiding questions are not so much, “Is causation necessarily linear?” “What dynamics shape social history?” and more things like, “Who am I?” “How literally should I take the term ‘self-care’?”
Nino Cipri’s ‘The Shape of My Name’ is exemplary here, with its interest in the intimate temporalities of an evolving subjectivity within one lifetime: in gender, in memory and identity, in hope and expectation, in personal nostalgia, in loss and grief, and in the changing horizons of who and how it is possible to be. In other words, this is partly a story about everything you wish you could tell your younger self. I liked it a lot, although I felt there was room for a richer exploration of the historically changing nature of masculinities and femininities, as well as the historically changing affordances for liberation, transformation, and subversion.
Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘Madeleine,’ which maybe isn’t strictly a time travel story, forms an interesting counterpoint. It’s a science fictional writing-through of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, especially the famous episode in which the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea vivifies a long lost fragment of Marcel’s memory. ‘Madeleine’ is about Madeleine, and about the strange things that are happening to her: and so it half-invites us to imagine things from the cake’s perspective. Or at least, Madeleine’s reality is so fragile, so ready to crumble and dissolve, that we start to imagine what it might be like to lack your own story, to be merely a figment, trigger, or a cache of memories implicated in somebody else’s story. At the same time, Madeleine is clearly a privileged person (packed with cultural capital, for example: I love how she brandishes the maxims of continental philosophers as talismans to banish hexes). In its own discreet way, I think ‘Madeleine’ sets up subtle dialogue between Proustian preoccupations with memory gone privately astray, and questions of collective remembrance, questions of whose experience dominates history, and whose is marginalised or erased. Who gets to have their cake and remember it?
‘Madeleine’ is also part of a cluster of tales built on VR / simulation / out-of-body-experience conceits. ‘Utopia, LOLS’ by Jamie Wahls was very enjoyable -- a full unapologetic mash of late 2010s cutesy internetspeak and geek pop culture references with post-singularitarian ambiguous utopia in the vein of Banks’s Culture or Egan’s Permutation City. I bet some readers will find it cloying, but I was charmed. I admired Rebecca Roanhorse’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning 'Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™' for its elegantly constructed eeriness. As an exploration of cultural appropriation and the commodification of indigenous identities, however, it felt like it was often pretty broad brush. It could have been nice to dive into murkier and more conflicted aspects of these same themes?
On the cusp of 2020, we are allegedly in the early stages of a profound new wave of automation, occasioned in part by the rapid growth of machine learning AI, and the big data on which it feeds and flourishes. ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ addresses automation overtly; E. Lily Yu’s snappy and engaging ‘The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi’ does so indirectly, portraying a humane, post-work future in which the world self-divides into Doers (who actively participate in society) and Don’ts (who passively consume). Yu claps back a little at the knee-jerk veneration of hard work for its own sake, without totally dislodging that paradigm.
Other stories, perhaps, address automation allegorically. There is certainly a little cluster about being assimilated into something spooky and transcendent. Of these, Lettie Prell’s ‘The Need for Air,’ sticks closest to a techno-scientific register, exploring that tricksy transition to posthuman singularity, again through the lens of parenthood. Jason Sanford’s ‘Toppers’ and David Erik Nelson’s ‘In the Sharing Place’ both have a nice pulpy, slipstream-inflected vibe. Nelson’s reminded me a lot of Google’s convolutional neural network DeepDream, the one that spawns the trippy of oily-irridescent eyes swimming around in fractal puppies. The eye-mouths are calling: “What are you waiting for? Jump in!” What are you waiting for?
Sarah Pinsker’s marvellous ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ is near-future punkpunk, which takes its sweet time and never feels slow, and is partly about the fear of being replaced by a hologram Bruce Springsteen (a Universal Fear). Luce and her band are on tour till they choke, in a US of A where there are precious few live gigs left. The nature of this technological displacement is interesting: the story assumes humans will still want humans making music -- even if we are content to have bands holographically beamed in by Amazon-esque content aggregator megaplatform StageHolo -- rather than imagining human bands being displaced by AI bands. Luce’s principled stance is emblematic of something larger, of course. Not only will Luce not sell out to StageHolo, she won’t even use a phone. Then again, Luce is no luddite: she just likes tech she can get her hands dirty with, tech that extends and empowers her, like her band kit and her van Daisy.
Still … as Luce doggedly crashed for the umpteenth time on a stranger’s slightly moist sofa, somewhere in the vicinity of a cat litter, I got to wondering. I got to wondering about automation anxiety itself as a species of Americana. The almost-lone refusenik is not the only way to represent resistance to the future decreed by Google et al., right? But I don’t believe there are any workers’ unions anywhere in New Voices. Much as I stan Luce, much as I see where she’s coming from, I’m not sure I like where she’s headed. Social and economic consequences of technological developments are never inevitable -- people matter, and the choices we make can change history -- and I feel like the story’s underlying idiom of ferocious resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness ultimately deserves better than Luce’s stoic rugged individualism, even if it comes with generous side-servings of friendship, community, and countercultural solidarity.
So I can heartily recommend The New Voices, although given how it helps itself to hype like “new kids” and “avant-garde,” I was a little wistful for a few more risks. Then again, what looks like a solid and safe strategy from the outside may well have felt fraught and conflicted from within. If the editors did feel they were taking risks, I’d be interested to know what those were? I guess if anything, some of these tales felt a bit too polished, almost as though they were ticking the boxes of what a really good piece of speculative short fiction should do. I’m looking at you, Sam J. Miller’s ‘Calved’: oh, you’re you’re going to deftly deploy ice imagery as you explore taciturn masculinities at the intersection of class, race, and sexuality, in a gritty climate change-centric near future, are you? Well, that really annoys me for some reason.
I was very grateful for the slow boil of Kelly Robson’s ‘A Study in Oils,’ the gung-ho chibi space opera japes of Suzanne Palmer’s ‘The Secret Life of Bots,’ the ‘here-is-a-robot-dinosaur’-ness of Darcie Little Badger’s ‘Robo-Liopleurodon!’, and the rough, ungainly energy of Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks,’ which is very much “maybe the real getting blackmailed to 3D print boutique beef by a shadowy cartoonish villain ... was the friends we met along the way!”
The New Voices of Science Fiction
Ed. Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
Tachyon, 2019.
Science fiction is about, at least partly, the future. So here is a collection purporting to be about the future of science fiction: the future of the future. What does the future2 hold in store?
This is not a collection that sets out to discover anybody or give anybody their big break: this is an assembly of very accomplished stories, mostly published in the last five-ish years in major magazines like Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, written by writers whom you may well have heard of or read, and may even have seen scoop up a Hugo or a Nebula Award. They ply their speculative art using a formidable albeit mostly familiar set of tools, plus some modest formal experiments. When a story does something formally striking, it generally has a clear justification closely related to its particular premise; for example, S. Qiouy Lu’s ‘Mother Tongues,’ in which neural interfacing can directly alter linguistic cognition, is very lightly macaronic: it’s almost all in English, but studded with bits of Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue. Across the anthology, far future is out, near future is in; distant planets and ETs are tired, some planet called Earth plus the alien-within-the-human are wired. None of the stories feel out of place, although a few of them could also easily blend into The New Voices of Fantasy or The New Voices of the Weird.
Two of this guy's favourites were by names new to me: Amman Sabet’s ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ and Samantha Mills’s ‘Strange Waters.’ Sabet’s Issa is a foster child raised by a robo-mom, who turns out just fine. Mills’s fisherwoman Mika is adrift on the seas of the centuries, desperate to get back to her children and afraid to check the history books to find out if she ever will. The theme of family threads through the anthology, although I felt like it was a theme that was used more often than explored. For example, the forms of non-monogamy that already exist in the real world are scarcely represented, let alone speculative reinventions or usurpations of the family. Maybe if you’re trying to cram all that rich character-driven narrative into only a few pages, the out-of-the-box resources of trad familial resonances are hard to resist?
Mills’s story exemplifies another big theme, time travel, appearing in six or seven stories. Why so much time travel, New Voices? Well, I felt like these time travel stories emerge more from the matrix of digital connectivity and self-fashioning -- that is, from the feeling of gazing at your Facebook photos from fifteen years ago, or searching for some deeply personal experience to find a forum of folks who share something similar -- than they do from Wellsian musings over future history, or from mindfuck “which-version-of-Baby-Hitler-will-killed-your-future-grandfather?!”-type hijinks. True, Alice Sola Kim’s ‘One Hour, Every Seven Years’ explores the chaoplexic ripples of a moment in time minutely variegated again and again. But in general the deep abiding questions are not so much, “Is causation necessarily linear?” “What dynamics shape social history?” and more things like, “Who am I?” “How literally should I take the term ‘self-care’?”
Nino Cipri’s ‘The Shape of My Name’ is exemplary here, with its interest in the intimate temporalities of an evolving subjectivity within one lifetime: in gender, in memory and identity, in hope and expectation, in personal nostalgia, in loss and grief, and in the changing horizons of who and how it is possible to be. In other words, this is partly a story about everything you wish you could tell your younger self. I liked it a lot, although I felt there was room for a richer exploration of the historically changing nature of masculinities and femininities, as well as the historically changing affordances for liberation, transformation, and subversion.
Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘Madeleine,’ which maybe isn’t strictly a time travel story, forms an interesting counterpoint. It’s a science fictional writing-through of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, especially the famous episode in which the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea vivifies a long lost fragment of Marcel’s memory. ‘Madeleine’ is about Madeleine, and about the strange things that are happening to her: and so it half-invites us to imagine things from the cake’s perspective. Or at least, Madeleine’s reality is so fragile, so ready to crumble and dissolve, that we start to imagine what it might be like to lack your own story, to be merely a figment, trigger, or a cache of memories implicated in somebody else’s story. At the same time, Madeleine is clearly a privileged person (packed with cultural capital, for example: I love how she brandishes the maxims of continental philosophers as talismans to banish hexes). In its own discreet way, I think ‘Madeleine’ sets up subtle dialogue between Proustian preoccupations with memory gone privately astray, and questions of collective remembrance, questions of whose experience dominates history, and whose is marginalised or erased. Who gets to have their cake and remember it?
‘Madeleine’ is also part of a cluster of tales built on VR / simulation / out-of-body-experience conceits. ‘Utopia, LOLS’ by Jamie Wahls was very enjoyable -- a full unapologetic mash of late 2010s cutesy internetspeak and geek pop culture references with post-singularitarian ambiguous utopia in the vein of Banks’s Culture or Egan’s Permutation City. I bet some readers will find it cloying, but I was charmed. I admired Rebecca Roanhorse’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning 'Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™' for its elegantly constructed eeriness. As an exploration of cultural appropriation and the commodification of indigenous identities, however, it felt like it was often pretty broad brush. It could have been nice to dive into murkier and more conflicted aspects of these same themes?
On the cusp of 2020, we are allegedly in the early stages of a profound new wave of automation, occasioned in part by the rapid growth of machine learning AI, and the big data on which it feeds and flourishes. ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ addresses automation overtly; E. Lily Yu’s snappy and engaging ‘The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi’ does so indirectly, portraying a humane, post-work future in which the world self-divides into Doers (who actively participate in society) and Don’ts (who passively consume). Yu claps back a little at the knee-jerk veneration of hard work for its own sake, without totally dislodging that paradigm.
Other stories, perhaps, address automation allegorically. There is certainly a little cluster about being assimilated into something spooky and transcendent. Of these, Lettie Prell’s ‘The Need for Air,’ sticks closest to a techno-scientific register, exploring that tricksy transition to posthuman singularity, again through the lens of parenthood. Jason Sanford’s ‘Toppers’ and David Erik Nelson’s ‘In the Sharing Place’ both have a nice pulpy, slipstream-inflected vibe. Nelson’s reminded me a lot of Google’s convolutional neural network DeepDream, the one that spawns the trippy of oily-irridescent eyes swimming around in fractal puppies. The eye-mouths are calling: “What are you waiting for? Jump in!” What are you waiting for?
Sarah Pinsker’s marvellous ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ is near-future punkpunk, which takes its sweet time and never feels slow, and is partly about the fear of being replaced by a hologram Bruce Springsteen (a Universal Fear). Luce and her band are on tour till they choke, in a US of A where there are precious few live gigs left. The nature of this technological displacement is interesting: the story assumes humans will still want humans making music -- even if we are content to have bands holographically beamed in by Amazon-esque content aggregator megaplatform StageHolo -- rather than imagining human bands being displaced by AI bands. Luce’s principled stance is emblematic of something larger, of course. Not only will Luce not sell out to StageHolo, she won’t even use a phone. Then again, Luce is no luddite: she just likes tech she can get her hands dirty with, tech that extends and empowers her, like her band kit and her van Daisy.
Still … as Luce doggedly crashed for the umpteenth time on a stranger’s slightly moist sofa, somewhere in the vicinity of a cat litter, I got to wondering. I got to wondering about automation anxiety itself as a species of Americana. The almost-lone refusenik is not the only way to represent resistance to the future decreed by Google et al., right? But I don’t believe there are any workers’ unions anywhere in New Voices. Much as I stan Luce, much as I see where she’s coming from, I’m not sure I like where she’s headed. Social and economic consequences of technological developments are never inevitable -- people matter, and the choices we make can change history -- and I feel like the story’s underlying idiom of ferocious resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness ultimately deserves better than Luce’s stoic rugged individualism, even if it comes with generous side-servings of friendship, community, and countercultural solidarity.
So I can heartily recommend The New Voices, although given how it helps itself to hype like “new kids” and “avant-garde,” I was a little wistful for a few more risks. Then again, what looks like a solid and safe strategy from the outside may well have felt fraught and conflicted from within. If the editors did feel they were taking risks, I’d be interested to know what those were? I guess if anything, some of these tales felt a bit too polished, almost as though they were ticking the boxes of what a really good piece of speculative short fiction should do. I’m looking at you, Sam J. Miller’s ‘Calved’: oh, you’re you’re going to deftly deploy ice imagery as you explore taciturn masculinities at the intersection of class, race, and sexuality, in a gritty climate change-centric near future, are you? Well, that really annoys me for some reason.
I was very grateful for the slow boil of Kelly Robson’s ‘A Study in Oils,’ the gung-ho chibi space opera japes of Suzanne Palmer’s ‘The Secret Life of Bots,’ the ‘here-is-a-robot-dinosaur’-ness of Darcie Little Badger’s ‘Robo-Liopleurodon!’, and the rough, ungainly energy of Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks,’ which is very much “maybe the real getting blackmailed to 3D print boutique beef by a shadowy cartoonish villain ... was the friends we met along the way!”
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Big and Embrous
The last thing I need is a thing, let alone a book, let alone a book of science fiction, let alone a collection of short sf stories.
But I just might be tempted by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Big Book of Science Fiction (contents at i09, plus inevitable thread of outrage at omissions). A big introduction, some interesting story picks to represent well-known authors, a lot of authors I've vaguely heard of and never read, a few authors I've never heard of, and evidence of real efforts to recover erased histories and to adopt an international outlook (including some original translations).
And Rose Lemberg's An Alphabet of Embers, also just out, looks hot. An anthology of very short unclassifiables, "between poetry and prose," mostly by speculative fiction type writers, including plenty of newer voices. (And I think mine is already probably winging its way to Bristol as my Kickstarter reward).
But I just might be tempted by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Big Book of Science Fiction (contents at i09, plus inevitable thread of outrage at omissions). A big introduction, some interesting story picks to represent well-known authors, a lot of authors I've vaguely heard of and never read, a few authors I've never heard of, and evidence of real efforts to recover erased histories and to adopt an international outlook (including some original translations).
And Rose Lemberg's An Alphabet of Embers, also just out, looks hot. An anthology of very short unclassifiables, "between poetry and prose," mostly by speculative fiction type writers, including plenty of newer voices. (And I think mine is already probably winging its way to Bristol as my Kickstarter reward).
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Review of "Twenty-First Century Science Fiction"
Edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Tor hb, 576pp, $34.99
A shorter (and probably better) version of this review originally appeared in Interzone 249.
Is it too early for an anthology called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction? Maybe not. Maybe there's already not that much science fiction left, or that much century. At any rate, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction assembles thirty-four stories from the last thirteen odd years. It showcases the fiction of this period, but it also showcases the authors, insofar as “nobody in this book came to wide notice before 2000” (p. 9).
One drawback of that selection criterion is that the editors are less free to include authors who should have come to wide notice, but for one reason or other have not. The anthology conveys that faint, inexpugnable belligerence of a definitive textbook, positioned somewhere between “here’s the state of the art, by its acknowledged masters” and “here’s the next big thing.”
Stories do range from quite good to extremely good. They’re nicely sequenced too (though maybe only easily baffled reviewers really read start-to-finish).
I’m less wild about the editorial meta-text. We get a terse preface, mostly just to say hi (hai!). Then each story gets its own little fanfare: a few bars of bio, followed by a parp of hype. These intros are smart and speckled with clarity and titbits, but they’re fairly spoilerish. Without quite divulging any endings, they manage to upset some of the more delicate calibrations of pacing and expectation. For instance, they may give away the middle, or hint at what kind of ending to expect, or what the ending won’t be, or reveal that there will be a reveal.
When an author has deliberately arranged a dissembling arras, and now strains with all their might not to glance over in its direction, what’s with the two esteemed editors leaning elbows against it and waggling their eyebrows? If you can tear your eyes off the intros, save them as a post-anthology treat.
I do find it fascinating that genre anthologies so often use this format, of potted bio and frenzy-stoking prior to each tale, whereas mainstream literary anthologies so rarely use it. It’s probably worth thinking about that more carefully some time. Why has it happened, what does it imply? Harlan Ellison’s famous 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology is an extreme precedent, with its tales sprinkled throughout its the editorial apparatus like raisins in a sponge cake. I also wonder if editors may even do themselves a disservice by using it, demoting themselves to warm-up acts, whereas these nuggets could probably easily have been cut-and-pasted onto the preface and worked up into an intriguing critical introductory essay. But then, perhaps SF editors are keen to differentiate themselves from literary critics?
The preface of Twenty-First Century Science Fiction points to “a world in which SF, far from being marginal, is a firmly established part of the cultural landscape” (p. 9). That makes sense, but 2000-2013 has also been the era of a certain sexy vampire called Harry Potter. Fantasy fiction is the mithril-barded three-trunked oliphant in the room, and its ascendant presence shapes and colours this anthology in subtle ways.
Alaya Dawn Johnson’s faintly Zelazny-remniscent “Third Day Lights,” for example, feels like fantasy that simply happens to be as confident in borrowing from SF as from any other mythology. Liz Williams’s “Ikiryoh” is delicately poised on the threshold between fantasy and SF. “It would have been called black magic, once. Now it is black science” (p. 372). Indeed, the story turns on that undecidability: when a kappa (not even a space kappa) is faced with a tough choice, the right decision probably depends on whether her world’s logic is magical or technological. Paul Cornell’s faintly Moorcock-esque “One of our Bastards is Missing” is my pick of the swashbuckling yarns, though it may have more in common with historical fiction than fantasy per se. One of its virtues is a protagonist whose mind is likable, recognisable, and yet unquestionably not of our time and place.
Three stories (by Rachel Swirsky, Genevieve Valentine, and Madeline Ashby) deal in different but complementary ways with sex and love between humans and robots. These stories share an interplay between: (a) the robot as metaphor for some real kind of oppression; and (b) the robot who implies a new axis of identity altogether, one which intersects with race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, age and others. I took two things from this: first, a fierce reluctance to blur the lines between different forms of oppression; our zeitgeist even takes care not to appropriate the experience of fictional robots. Second, prophetic expectation of a new figure of oppression may suggest unease with existing struggles, unease with the existing ensemble of politically-organised dimensions of identity. Perhaps: a sense that some people not only fall through the cracks, but also still fall through the cracks of the very best societies we can yet dream up.
John Scalzi’s breezy Golden Age reboot sits nearby thematically – Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, only hold the robots. Hannu Rakeniemi’s jailbreak caper involves a droll and slightly unhinged account of what it is like to be an artificial intelligence – to be simultaneously constrained and constituted by artificial rules. James Cambias’s and Elizabeth Bear’s compelling and elegant contributions prod at machine morality and machine mysticism. Ken Liu and Daryl Gregory could also fit into this general cluster, with stories drawing on neuroscience-savvy Anglo-American philosophy of mind. It’s an interesting relationship, considering philosophers working in this area have already drawn liberally on speculative fiction imagery (Chalmers’ zombies; Searle’s Chinese Room; Jackson’s Mary’s room; also zimboes, swampmen, blockheads, twin earthlings, weather watchers, brains in vats, brain tissue gradually replaced with circuitry, etc.). Such philosophers also frequently turn storyteller: many of their significant positions are so dependent on thought experiments they are already more-or-less science fiction. So I dunno: could this be an area where science fiction writers have an unusually pronounced duty towards philosophical rigour? Liu’s “Algorithms for Love” blurs distinctions between ‘determined’ and ‘predictable,’ whilst Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense” likewise seems to fudge two different kinds of ‘self’ – stream-of-consciousness self (the linguistic aspect of the phenomenology of working memory, maybe?) and psychological and interpersonal self (traits, habits, cathexes, social ties and so on). However, both stories are affecting and intellectually provocative, and their elisions do serve narrative purposes, and are anyway not uncommon in the philosophical literature itself.
Overall Twenty-First Century Science Fiction offers a good diversity of subject, style, mood, length, and accessibility. There seem to be a lot of kids; a fair bit of grief and loss; dogs tend to be funny (Stross’s bong-hitting bro hound perhaps the funniest); whether these are statistically significant signs of the times will be hard to tell until I’ve read some sort of control anthology packed with completely neutral content.
Of course it doesn’t cover infinite territory, and it’s easy for any reviewer to lament their pet baffling omissions – but maybe a better approach is to suggest some complementary reading? Most of the contributors are British or North American in one way or another; there are no names shared between this collection and for instance last year’s The Apex Book of World SF 2 (ed. Lavie Tidhar) or the recent colonialism-themed We See A Different Frontier (ed. Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad).
Also, with the exceptions of Karl Schroeder’s “To Hie from Far Cilenia” (a techno-thriller threaded through a tapestry of augmented reality, MMORPGs-within-MMORPGS, digital post-nations, and steampunk cosplay, plus some unabashed infodump design fic thrown in), Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler” (about clickbait journalism), and perhaps Cory Doctorow’s “Chicken Little” (about various things including nudge economics), Twenty-First Century Science Fiction contains little sustained and direct exploration of the hereafter of the buzz. As far as I can remember, nobody hacks cryptocurrency, snaps a selfie or 3D-prints a harpoon. The anthology TRSF (2011), ed. Stephen Cass, contains several of the same authors, but writing in more of a near future, extrapolative modality. Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic SF (2010), ed. Jetse de Vries, could also be worth a look? I love the lone one-star review on Amazon: “SHINE is a sadly depressing collection of dark stories, which are set in a dystopian nightmare world of tomorrow.”
There’s also not much by way of New Wave legacy, not much formal experimentation or innovation. Okay, ‘experimentation’ and ‘innovation’ aren’t quite the words I want here. What I actually mean is, few stories stop ploughing the Marianis Trench-esque furrow of narrative realism even just to stray along the most well-worn paths of modernism, post-modernism, metafiction, hypertext, verse, collage, poioumenon, a story implied by an imagined advertisement or how-to manual or email chain or whatever . . . let alone to attempt to experiment!
Maybe it doesn’t matter. There are partial exceptions. Jo Walton’s “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” gathers up some fragments of a 1960 America in a world where which Axis Powers won the war. It is a massive bummer, but it is definitely not a story about how lucky we are the good guys won the war. It is something far more persnickety and lingering. Hmm. Then there are the two opulent and tyrannically witty anthologies-within-the-anthology – Catherynne M. Valente’s “How to Become a Mars Overlord” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” – which are a little reminiscent of Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984/1988) or Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965/1968). Valente is also channeling the overwrought loftiness of the fin de siecle Martian reboot of Gothic Romanticism; the mock heroic here becomes the perfect cover for a real craving. Oliver Morton’s “The Albion Message” is probably an email; the storyettes from Lingen, Kowal, Buckell and Lee also feel a little less formally conventional by default: there isn’t quite enough space for their structures to unfold into utterly familiar configurations.
I don’t quite know what to recommend as complementary reading on that point. The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade (2012) ed. Cameron Pierce, or the Bizarro Starter Kits? The New Weird, ed. Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer (2008)? Collections by individuals authors? – Steve Aylett’s Toxicology (1999/2001) and Smithereens (2010) (or indeed Lint (2005/2007)), Adam Roberts’s Adam Robots (2013), or Kelly Link’s slipstream-ish Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic For Beginners (2005)? Jeff VanderMeer provoked some interesting chat and useful shout-outs in 2011 with the question “What’s the Craziest or Most Experimental Science Fiction or Fantasy Book You’ve Ever Read?”.
But perhaps I’m gliding off topic now, and perhaps also into other genres. (Maybe that’s a helpful point, actually: maybe the reason there seems to be so little formal play is that most of the play is going on in the genre dimension (you can do a lot with ticklish little code switches between different sub-sub-sub-subgenres), arguably agitating genre structures to such a temperature that they start to evaporate).
I’ll just finish up by mentioning my personal favourites from the anthology: the robot triptych, especially Ashby’s “The Education of Junior Number 12”; Catherynne M. Valente’s “How to Become a Mars Overlord” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel”; David Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk,” a charismatic story of the Other, which has led me to believe that David Levine has been somewhere on holiday; Tony Ballantyne’s “The Waters of Meribah,” which out-Dicks Dick; and two incisive, physics-respecting space operettas, Peter Watts’s “The Island” and James Cambias’s “Balancing Accounts.”
Elsewhere: Dudes Review SF >
John Clute's review at the NYRSF.
Damien Broderick's review.
Steve Donoghue's review.
Eamonn Murphy's review.
Jeremy Estes.
Rick Feldschau.
John Walters.
Mark Thistle.
Gardner Dozois's review in Locus (requires purchase)
Ben.
Partial review from Daniel.
Tor hb, 576pp, $34.99
A shorter (and probably better) version of this review originally appeared in Interzone 249.
Is it too early for an anthology called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction? Maybe not. Maybe there's already not that much science fiction left, or that much century. At any rate, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction assembles thirty-four stories from the last thirteen odd years. It showcases the fiction of this period, but it also showcases the authors, insofar as “nobody in this book came to wide notice before 2000” (p. 9).
One drawback of that selection criterion is that the editors are less free to include authors who should have come to wide notice, but for one reason or other have not. The anthology conveys that faint, inexpugnable belligerence of a definitive textbook, positioned somewhere between “here’s the state of the art, by its acknowledged masters” and “here’s the next big thing.”
Stories do range from quite good to extremely good. They’re nicely sequenced too (though maybe only easily baffled reviewers really read start-to-finish).
I’m less wild about the editorial meta-text. We get a terse preface, mostly just to say hi (hai!). Then each story gets its own little fanfare: a few bars of bio, followed by a parp of hype. These intros are smart and speckled with clarity and titbits, but they’re fairly spoilerish. Without quite divulging any endings, they manage to upset some of the more delicate calibrations of pacing and expectation. For instance, they may give away the middle, or hint at what kind of ending to expect, or what the ending won’t be, or reveal that there will be a reveal.
When an author has deliberately arranged a dissembling arras, and now strains with all their might not to glance over in its direction, what’s with the two esteemed editors leaning elbows against it and waggling their eyebrows? If you can tear your eyes off the intros, save them as a post-anthology treat.
I do find it fascinating that genre anthologies so often use this format, of potted bio and frenzy-stoking prior to each tale, whereas mainstream literary anthologies so rarely use it. It’s probably worth thinking about that more carefully some time. Why has it happened, what does it imply? Harlan Ellison’s famous 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology is an extreme precedent, with its tales sprinkled throughout its the editorial apparatus like raisins in a sponge cake. I also wonder if editors may even do themselves a disservice by using it, demoting themselves to warm-up acts, whereas these nuggets could probably easily have been cut-and-pasted onto the preface and worked up into an intriguing critical introductory essay. But then, perhaps SF editors are keen to differentiate themselves from literary critics?
The preface of Twenty-First Century Science Fiction points to “a world in which SF, far from being marginal, is a firmly established part of the cultural landscape” (p. 9). That makes sense, but 2000-2013 has also been the era of a certain sexy vampire called Harry Potter. Fantasy fiction is the mithril-barded three-trunked oliphant in the room, and its ascendant presence shapes and colours this anthology in subtle ways.
Alaya Dawn Johnson’s faintly Zelazny-remniscent “Third Day Lights,” for example, feels like fantasy that simply happens to be as confident in borrowing from SF as from any other mythology. Liz Williams’s “Ikiryoh” is delicately poised on the threshold between fantasy and SF. “It would have been called black magic, once. Now it is black science” (p. 372). Indeed, the story turns on that undecidability: when a kappa (not even a space kappa) is faced with a tough choice, the right decision probably depends on whether her world’s logic is magical or technological. Paul Cornell’s faintly Moorcock-esque “One of our Bastards is Missing” is my pick of the swashbuckling yarns, though it may have more in common with historical fiction than fantasy per se. One of its virtues is a protagonist whose mind is likable, recognisable, and yet unquestionably not of our time and place.
Three stories (by Rachel Swirsky, Genevieve Valentine, and Madeline Ashby) deal in different but complementary ways with sex and love between humans and robots. These stories share an interplay between: (a) the robot as metaphor for some real kind of oppression; and (b) the robot who implies a new axis of identity altogether, one which intersects with race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, age and others. I took two things from this: first, a fierce reluctance to blur the lines between different forms of oppression; our zeitgeist even takes care not to appropriate the experience of fictional robots. Second, prophetic expectation of a new figure of oppression may suggest unease with existing struggles, unease with the existing ensemble of politically-organised dimensions of identity. Perhaps: a sense that some people not only fall through the cracks, but also still fall through the cracks of the very best societies we can yet dream up.
John Scalzi’s breezy Golden Age reboot sits nearby thematically – Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, only hold the robots. Hannu Rakeniemi’s jailbreak caper involves a droll and slightly unhinged account of what it is like to be an artificial intelligence – to be simultaneously constrained and constituted by artificial rules. James Cambias’s and Elizabeth Bear’s compelling and elegant contributions prod at machine morality and machine mysticism. Ken Liu and Daryl Gregory could also fit into this general cluster, with stories drawing on neuroscience-savvy Anglo-American philosophy of mind. It’s an interesting relationship, considering philosophers working in this area have already drawn liberally on speculative fiction imagery (Chalmers’ zombies; Searle’s Chinese Room; Jackson’s Mary’s room; also zimboes, swampmen, blockheads, twin earthlings, weather watchers, brains in vats, brain tissue gradually replaced with circuitry, etc.). Such philosophers also frequently turn storyteller: many of their significant positions are so dependent on thought experiments they are already more-or-less science fiction. So I dunno: could this be an area where science fiction writers have an unusually pronounced duty towards philosophical rigour? Liu’s “Algorithms for Love” blurs distinctions between ‘determined’ and ‘predictable,’ whilst Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense” likewise seems to fudge two different kinds of ‘self’ – stream-of-consciousness self (the linguistic aspect of the phenomenology of working memory, maybe?) and psychological and interpersonal self (traits, habits, cathexes, social ties and so on). However, both stories are affecting and intellectually provocative, and their elisions do serve narrative purposes, and are anyway not uncommon in the philosophical literature itself.
Overall Twenty-First Century Science Fiction offers a good diversity of subject, style, mood, length, and accessibility. There seem to be a lot of kids; a fair bit of grief and loss; dogs tend to be funny (Stross’s bong-hitting bro hound perhaps the funniest); whether these are statistically significant signs of the times will be hard to tell until I’ve read some sort of control anthology packed with completely neutral content.
Of course it doesn’t cover infinite territory, and it’s easy for any reviewer to lament their pet baffling omissions – but maybe a better approach is to suggest some complementary reading? Most of the contributors are British or North American in one way or another; there are no names shared between this collection and for instance last year’s The Apex Book of World SF 2 (ed. Lavie Tidhar) or the recent colonialism-themed We See A Different Frontier (ed. Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad).
Also, with the exceptions of Karl Schroeder’s “To Hie from Far Cilenia” (a techno-thriller threaded through a tapestry of augmented reality, MMORPGs-within-MMORPGS, digital post-nations, and steampunk cosplay, plus some unabashed infodump design fic thrown in), Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler” (about clickbait journalism), and perhaps Cory Doctorow’s “Chicken Little” (about various things including nudge economics), Twenty-First Century Science Fiction contains little sustained and direct exploration of the hereafter of the buzz. As far as I can remember, nobody hacks cryptocurrency, snaps a selfie or 3D-prints a harpoon. The anthology TRSF (2011), ed. Stephen Cass, contains several of the same authors, but writing in more of a near future, extrapolative modality. Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic SF (2010), ed. Jetse de Vries, could also be worth a look? I love the lone one-star review on Amazon: “SHINE is a sadly depressing collection of dark stories, which are set in a dystopian nightmare world of tomorrow.”
There’s also not much by way of New Wave legacy, not much formal experimentation or innovation. Okay, ‘experimentation’ and ‘innovation’ aren’t quite the words I want here. What I actually mean is, few stories stop ploughing the Marianis Trench-esque furrow of narrative realism even just to stray along the most well-worn paths of modernism, post-modernism, metafiction, hypertext, verse, collage, poioumenon, a story implied by an imagined advertisement or how-to manual or email chain or whatever . . . let alone to attempt to experiment!
Maybe it doesn’t matter. There are partial exceptions. Jo Walton’s “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” gathers up some fragments of a 1960 America in a world where which Axis Powers won the war. It is a massive bummer, but it is definitely not a story about how lucky we are the good guys won the war. It is something far more persnickety and lingering. Hmm. Then there are the two opulent and tyrannically witty anthologies-within-the-anthology – Catherynne M. Valente’s “How to Become a Mars Overlord” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” – which are a little reminiscent of Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984/1988) or Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965/1968). Valente is also channeling the overwrought loftiness of the fin de siecle Martian reboot of Gothic Romanticism; the mock heroic here becomes the perfect cover for a real craving. Oliver Morton’s “The Albion Message” is probably an email; the storyettes from Lingen, Kowal, Buckell and Lee also feel a little less formally conventional by default: there isn’t quite enough space for their structures to unfold into utterly familiar configurations.
I don’t quite know what to recommend as complementary reading on that point. The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade (2012) ed. Cameron Pierce, or the Bizarro Starter Kits? The New Weird, ed. Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer (2008)? Collections by individuals authors? – Steve Aylett’s Toxicology (1999/2001) and Smithereens (2010) (or indeed Lint (2005/2007)), Adam Roberts’s Adam Robots (2013), or Kelly Link’s slipstream-ish Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic For Beginners (2005)? Jeff VanderMeer provoked some interesting chat and useful shout-outs in 2011 with the question “What’s the Craziest or Most Experimental Science Fiction or Fantasy Book You’ve Ever Read?”.
But perhaps I’m gliding off topic now, and perhaps also into other genres. (Maybe that’s a helpful point, actually: maybe the reason there seems to be so little formal play is that most of the play is going on in the genre dimension (you can do a lot with ticklish little code switches between different sub-sub-sub-subgenres), arguably agitating genre structures to such a temperature that they start to evaporate).
I’ll just finish up by mentioning my personal favourites from the anthology: the robot triptych, especially Ashby’s “The Education of Junior Number 12”; Catherynne M. Valente’s “How to Become a Mars Overlord” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel”; David Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk,” a charismatic story of the Other, which has led me to believe that David Levine has been somewhere on holiday; Tony Ballantyne’s “The Waters of Meribah,” which out-Dicks Dick; and two incisive, physics-respecting space operettas, Peter Watts’s “The Island” and James Cambias’s “Balancing Accounts.”
Elsewhere: Dudes Review SF >
John Clute's review at the NYRSF.
Damien Broderick's review.
Steve Donoghue's review.
Eamonn Murphy's review.
Jeremy Estes.
Rick Feldschau.
John Walters.
Mark Thistle.
Gardner Dozois's review in Locus (requires purchase)
Ben.
Partial review from Daniel.
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