Long Enough and Just So Long

Short Story by Cat Rambo

Published free online at Lightspeed (text & audio)

Two women fight over a man. Except they live on the moon, in a domed colony, and the man in question is a sex-bot. There is some barely-explained background about a gate which new technology seems to fall out of and spaceships and acid rain, but really the entire story is about these girls stalking, befriending, and being rejected by a sex bot.

I don't really like the title, it would be entirely irrelevant except for a phrase added on to the end seemingly to justify the title. Honestly, I spent the whole story waiting for the inevitable penis joke that never came. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed, but I don't think the title fits at all.

Really, not much happened, and there aren't really deeper themes beyond friendship. Rambo has a world that seems interesting enough, but this story could happen without it. The SF trappings are only that, but the story isn't poorly written.

3 emancipated sex-bots out of 5.

Black Fire

Short Story by Tanith Lee
Published in Text and Audio, Free at Lightspeed, January 2011

Long series of uselessly brief partial witness statements from a police report. Used to tell a kind of dumb story that goes nowhere (other than increasingly obvious allusions), and made confusing by an unhelpful and obnoxious numbering system for the witnesses (A numbers are males, E numbers are females, and if I've spoiled the whole story for you with that bit, well you'd have been pissed off three paragraphs in like I was).

The numbering of witnesses makes the story obvious and makes the writing more obnoxious, although I didn't otherwise mind the voice. The story neither makes sense, nor tries to say anything. It doesn't horrify, it doesn't describe emotion, it doesn't make me think. And it didn't entertain me either. It just left me vaguely annoyed.

1.5 sexed-up witnesses out of 5.

Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow

Short Story by Corey Mariani
Published Free Online, Lightspeed January 2011

In the future, kids have their brains enlarged at the age of four to better interact with people using social networking. Essentially, they have their Dunbar's Number increased, and further augment this with AI avatars used to interact with friends, and download the memories at the end of the day. Most people are friends with the majority of the world, and our ten-year-old protagonist wants to someday love everyone in the world at the same time.

What starts off as a vaguely creepy free-love utopia rapidly becomes dystopian when the terrified, empathy-conditioned adults decide a boy named Nick is a sociopath and thus potential dictator, based on his lack of friends and inability to love himself. Mariani takes an easy prediction about social networking, writes a happy, childhood story, and then shifts suddenly to a dark tale of child soldiers. It's a neat realization, how easy it would be for a person without empathy to take over a society built very literally on loving your neighbors. No one can bear the thought of stopping him.

But I'm not sure how they justify what they do to the underconditioned children, when they can't justify doing anything to the threats themselves. This doesn't hurt the story much, because the kids themselves can't stand this hypocrisy either. I like that the actual violence is a minor part of the story, mostly focused on cheerful, child-narrated world-building at the start, and grim, justified anger by the end. A simple story, but moving and thoughtful enough to stand apart from the crowd.

3.5 dictators out of 5 could use more friends on Facebook.

Diving After the Moon

Short Story by Rachel Swirsky
Text and Audio published free at Clarkesworld

Norbu is an astronaut who never appreciated his mother, Jamyang's, old stories. Norbu is part of the first moonwalk for the country of Qinghai, formed from a chunk of fallen-apart China and Tibet. When everything goes to hell because of the political posturing of larger powers (Egypt and Australia!), Norbu and his crew prepare to suffocate while Jamyang begins a fantastic plot to rescue them.

The combination of astronauts and fable-like fantasy involving monkeys may jar readers at first, but it's a really funny/apropos solution that Jamyang comes up with, considering the set of rules she's playing by, and any reservations you have about how, exactly, everything is working will be resolved by the end.

Let's just say that this is definitely a Science Fiction story in my book, and the ending is sweet and sad and very well written. The mother-son dynamic is what holds the story together, but it's also a reflection on the symbolic value of manned spaceflight and the importance of storytelling.

Three common themes in modern SF, but done exceptionally well, with a heartwarming/sad/thoughtful story to back them up, also monkeys.

4.5 chains of monkeys out of 5.

Three Oranges

Short Story by D. Elizabeth Wasden

Text and Audio published free by Clarkesworld

Stepan is ordered to use the Three Oranges, as in the fairy tale (but with more fairy sex), as a bribe to get Sergei Prokofiev, writer of "The Love for Three Oranges" the opera, to return to Stalinist Russia. Stepan wants to keep the Oranges for himself and defect to Canada.

You should definitely read the fairy tale, or at least a summary of the fairy tale or a summary of the plot of the opera (see my various links) before reading this story if you want to have much clue what is going on. Or listen to/read the story twice, that works just as well. But some bits of the secret fairy magic Cold War are more obvious with some background.

It's a neat setting and a neat type of magic, and I appreciate the lesson learned by sadistic Stepan. I really enjoy how this world works. But there isn't much to the actual story, although I can't get over how much I like the oranges and the magic left in the world. Also the writing is good.

3 oranges out of 5.

Widows in the World

Novelette by Gavin J. Grant

Free Online from Strange Horizons (part 1, part 2)

Frequently seeming weird for weirdness sake, part two is really making up for part one in this novelette. I'm not opposed to strangeness in fiction, in fact I generally like more of it, but for most of it's length, the rambling weirdness doesn't seem to be going anywhere, although there is, just barely, a comprehensible enough plot to keep me reading.

In the end, the positives about evenly make up for the negatives, but I'm not sure serialization was the best idea here, given the unevenness of the story and it's reliance on the second half. Either way, it was over-long.

I won't go into plot detail, as I can't summarize all the crazy details of the world in a reasonable length, and the plot is both so convoluted and so simplistically short that either I give it all away, or ramble for pages talking around the central issues (as the story does). All these things amount to my standard criticisms of surreal post-singularity stories, which often seem strangely alike. But there is some good humor here regarding the Husband and the dog and I actually laughed a few times during the more nonsensical bits, which counts for quite a bit.

But what really redeems the story is the ending, which throws a lot of the earlier nonsense into a more reasonable light, a promise the author seems to make early on which I'd given up believing in by that point. But there is a plot, and it is kind of sad, kind of funny. In the end, the story delivers a surprising emotional punch and fond reminiscence of childhood memories of your grandparents. The theme is that nostalgia is often better than perfectly accurate memories, and while I do enjoy the theme, and it was hinted before, it is so divorced from much of the story as to not have a strong enough impact.

I like the ending, and the prose amused me in places, but overall this story was longer than it needed to be. I'd dock points for that, but I read it quite fast, without putting it down, so although the wordcount is high, the reading time is lower than average for this sort of story. If you're going to read it, just keep reading without trying to figure out too much.

Oh, and using the term "haggis" for living chimera creatures is just awesome.

3 marauding haggises out of 5.

Asimov's January 2011

Short Pieces markedly better than long ones.
Novella:
Killer Advice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: 2

Novelette:
Two Thieves by Chris Beckett: 1.5

Short Stories:
Interloper by Ian McHugh: 3.5
Ashes on the Water by Gwendolyn Clare: 3.5
Dolly by Elizabeth Bear: 3
Visitors by Steve Rasnic Tem: 2

And two poems, rising as high as "meh"+ and sinking as low as "meh"-.

Ian McHugh's "Interloper" is far and away the standout story of the issue. I didn't blow me away, but it was the most exciting, most interesting, and probably second most thoughtful.

"Ashes on the Water" by Gwendolyn Clare was a very short, heartwarming tale of mourning in water-scarcity future India.

Elizabeth Bear's "Dolly" is the only other story I enjoyed, being an Asimov Detectives-And-Robots homage. It's funny and philosophical, but ultimately feels too familiar. Still, this is probably the most thought provoking story, and while I didn't love it, it is still worth reading.

I actively disliked all the other stories, which were much longer, making this issue a waste in terms of pagecount. Read the three short stories in the bookstore, or from a subscribing friend, or when they get anthologized later.

Ashes on the Water

Short Story by Gwendolyn Clare

A young woman mourns the death of her sister in a water-scarce India where every river is guarded by men with guns and razorwire. The desert is encroaching on what was once verdant farmland. But she wants to scatter her sister's ashes into the river so they can float down to the sea, as is tradition. The caper becomes complicated, and eventually comes to the solution I'd guessed at from the beginning, before our character decided to take a quicker but more dangerous option.

Not an exciting story, but concise enough that it doesn't drain the reader. Clare does an excellent job of fleshing out this future India in so few pages, and the narrator grows from the experience, finding purpose for her life and no longer wanting to spend it chasing after her sister. At first, I thought her plans at the end seemed rather obvious, but I realized that the point isn't that these were astounding ideas, but that she finally had enough hope for the future to plan for it. Direction in life and hope create a positive feedback loop, once she was done mourning. Sweet, simple story.

3.5 out of 5.

Interloper

Short Story by Ian McHugh

Text available free online.

Barnstable's circus act travels through a post-apocalyptic Australia, owned by big mining companies and decimated by "Interlopers": strange creatures that bleed through from another dimension, possess people, and spread like a plague. The circus is really a circus, but also acts as a cover for Barnstable and his crew to find people vulnerable to being used by Interlopers to open the way into our world. These people are shipped off to a government-run facility and no one thinks about it much until it turns out one of the Candidates is the strongman's child.

A fast paced, short piece where McHugh rapidly builds up a world and an elaborate system of defending that world against an extra-dimensional threat. Exciting but also thoughtful. Well worth the time, although the ending seems more sentimental than is reasonable and the first page or so is muddled with all the character and world introducing going on.

3.5 out of 5.

Visitors

Short Story by Steve Rasnic Tem

The most bland, boring one-word title in an issue full of bland one-or-two-word titles. There is only one title I like in this issue, but this is perhaps the most accurate: it precedes an awfully bland, boring story.

Two parents go to visit their son in cryosleep. Then they talk to him and leave. The only suspense is wondering when an obnoxious woman on the bus will shut up, why exactly the son is in cryosleep, which we aren't told until well into the story, despite the parents obviously knowing, and what obscure rules they worry they might be breaking. Basically the only drama is artificial or irrelevant.

The conversation could have been more interesting but it ends up just coming across as bland to me. The musing on parental advice is likewise old hat. And the whole thing is too long on top of all that boring.

The central idea isn't original, but the way the mother deals with it toward the end is both interesting and sweet. I just wish we'd been allowed to know what rules she worried she was breaking, so we could stop wondering about that and pay more attention to the way she bent them. It is hard to have a clever circumvention of the rules seem clever when you don't tell the reader the rules you got around until the last page.

2 out of 5 cryogenically frozen kids dream of wasting their time in more exciting ways.

Dolly

Short Story by Elizabeth Bear

Roz is a detective in a futuristic police procedural with a fair tip o' the hat to Asimov, and a light amusing yet noir-ish style. Joking-Asimov meets Caves-of-Steel Asimov meets Raymond Chandler. With a faint touch of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Bear's narration here is interesting, several lines made me chuckle just a bit and several others were sort of sardonically poetic. The opening line itself is great, but also threw me off a bit as it doesn't match well with the rest of the story. The first sentence or two are from a different point of view than Roz's third person limited which the rest of the story is told from. I liked the line, but I'm not sure I like it enough for an abrupt viewpoint switch on page one.

I'm also impressed that Bear managed to use pulchritudinousness although it strikes me as weird for the character who says it, and there mostly to have one big word in the story. I don't think "le mot juste" when I see it here, which is generally what you save big obscure words for.

Also, a minor advance in cost efficiency of PCR is hardly the Nature headline I'd expect to be a point of interesting discussion in a world with robotic sex slaves, autopilot cars, and DNA reconstruction of suspects' appearance. It's downright jarring to see an advance that could be published in next month's Nature being used as an indicator of intelligence in this far future. Over-conservative technological advancement predictions are taken to a whole new level with that one.

But I shouldn't spend quite so much time complaining about one-line complaints for a story that held my interest overall. Roz is a well-rounded, complex female detective, avoiding both the standard female-cop tropes and the classic noir-detective trope with a girl's name. She has her own sexbot at home, complicating the moral dilemmas she has to deal with at work. And the very fact that she is a woman improves the story, since we start with the initial theme of men abusing their sexbots, and how smart do they have to get for that to stop being okay? It makes the argument more about sentience and less about gender, which is a good decision for this story, at this time in history.

The ground this covers is nothing new, but it is a take on some things I haven't seen presented quite this way before. The line between thing and person is explored through the line between murder weapon, victim, witness, and murderer. And the nice touch is that Bear's story points out, rightly, that it doesn't so much matter what the correct answer is. More important is how legal precedent, popular opinion in a jury, and profit-motivated corporate lobbying can twist the outcome and fate of everyone involved. This one held my interest all the way through, despite a few hiccups. But despite the good writing, it's too familiar to be memorable.

3 billionaire industrialists out of 5 get killed in the sort of room you hire someone else to clean.

Poetry Roundup: Asimov's January 2011

Five Pounds of Sunlight by Geoffrey A. Landis

Kittens are nice and like sunlight in several ways. An interesting comparison, but entirely based on being cutesy.

Retired Spaceman by G.O. Clark

Some nice rhythm in this melancholy bit about a kid who loved space, tried hard to be an astronaut, and looks back from old age regretting his failure to become part of the future he dreamed of. Best of issue, but not great.

Killer Advice

Novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Far too many characters arrive on a space station after their ship has caught fire and three passengers have been murdered. Then there is another murder on the station, and the prissy hotel manager and drunken station doctor team up with one of the ship's crew to solve the murder.

Not really the Agatha Christie bottled up murder mystery we're set up for. The reader has no information to help with the actual solution until the last two pages, and neither do any of the characters. The characters themselves are mostly broad types, although the central two are a bit more interesting. Viewpoints shift among a large number of characters throughout, which is interesting in that Rusch shows us that other people don't see certain characters the way they see themselves.

But most of the characters are barely fleshed out, all the viewpoints make us fairly certain none of those characters did it, leaving a whole mess of others we don't know or care anything about as the only suspects. We have almost no information on any of the passengers that aren't viewpoints at one time or another, so we can't really suspect or not-suspect them, or indeed care about them at all. Combined with not really caring about the viewpoint characters either, and the relatively nonviolent method of death, I didn't experience the least suspense while reading, and bordered on losing even my curiosity as to who dunnit or why.

It is a mystery whose specifics could only have happened on a spaceship or station, although, as with all things, the broader motives and situations are timeless. So I did find the SF justified, just not the length the story took without any clues or suspense. The very end was cute, with the fate of our central crewmember, hotelier, and beautiful, drunken lady-doctor, but it doesn't make the time spent worthwhile in my opinion.

I didn't see the ending coming! But then again, I couldn't possibly have, and I didn't really care to by the time we finally got there. Still, the writing moved along fast enough, there were traces of humor in the narration, and there was the one interesting character. So not a total loss.

2 out of 5 nuggets of murder advice are actually useful.

Two Thieves

Novelette by Chris Beckett

The titular two thieves, Pennyworth and Shoe are sent to Australia Last Resort, a penal colony where they get a decent, if boring, life and manage to get on the cushiest work detail. A bit of worldbuilding implies a sufficiently advanced society has fallen to become the lower-tech one we see in the story, but the technology justification actually makes less sense than magic to me here.

Anyway, they discover a bottomless pit of nothingness, blindly jump through it despite radiation and possible death good thing it turns out to have been a portal that still functions. The pair find some riches, and supposedly halfway learn a lesson about greed, although general prudence would be a step up.

These two imbeciles are so aggressively stupid and irrational it makes it impossible for me to sympathize. Part of it is that I can rarely sympathize properly with characters who are too dumb to live, and part is that this sort of behavior seems like it would be hard for them to be effective thieves. It seems at times like this wants to be comedic, which would forgive some of the above commentary (well not quite here, but it conceivably could), but the problem is it just isn't funny. I mean I'd have trouble accepting this plot as a comic plot too, but there seemed very little humor, besides one bit about anal gem smuggling. And it tries far too hard to drive the moral of the story home.

Finally, I couldn't stand the writing. It almost wanted to make me go back and look at some of Beckett's other stuff to see whether this was experimental. It hasn't ever leapt out at me before, so I think it was something different about his writing in this story. But it was just annoying this time around. Beyond the abundance of telling and minimal showing, there are lots of little long-winded asides in the narration. I get the impression they are supposed to be clever but they come across as cutesy and obnoxious. He may be trying to do Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or something, but this pair have none of the charm or cunning and Beckett's writing has none of the wit or pacing. I'm growing rather sick of pulp tributes in Asimov's, but I'm not docking points for it yet...

1.5 thieves out of 5, or 0.6 out of 2.

Tying Knots

Short Story by Ken Liu
Text and Audio from Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker.

Soe-bo is an elder in an isolated Burmese village atop a mountain. They are subsistence farmers having a difficult time surviving due to increased droughts (climate change-related). Tom is a biotech researcher visiting from Boston, he sifts through ancient cultures for medicines and ideas.

A beautifully written, complexly political bit of present-day SF. Great scenery and ideas, exploration of other culture, and a lot to think about. And he gets the science right.
4.5 knot-books out of 5.

BEYOND HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

Tom is impressed by Soe-bo's ability to see how knots will change the shape of rope, developed because of the village's knot-based written records in place of writing as we usually think of it. The fictional system here is based on a few different ancient cultures. Anyway, Tom wants Soe-bo to help him with protein folding, which is more complicated than you'd think. An early part of the story that impressed my was Liu's explanation of the problems of computer modeling and protein folding. The science is very good in this present-day Science Fiction (in the fiction-about-science sense).

The story switches between the two men's viewpoints, characterizing each of them well, so you can see everyone's motivation and rationality. Events take a couple of surprising turns and lead to an ending that some will see coming (cynicism dependent), but doesn't reduce the impact any less. Initially a heart-warming story of cooperation and problem-solving, the story ends leaving me feeling both furious and sad (in a good way). This is a much more reasonable, measured, yet scathing take on some complex political issues than most stories addressing them tend to be. And some of these issues are tragically undernoticed.

Copyright and intellectual property, cultural invasion, exploitation, this is a story that could have happened today and just hasn't been leaked yet. Not so much near-future SF as present-day. Most significantly, the story takes a reasonable view of both the positives and negatives of genetically modified crops. None of the anti-science alarmism common to certain political extremes, but neither the blind defense of corporations unable to differentiate between helping people profitably and exploiting them. Overall, a suitably complex discussion of a number of important issues, told through the stories of an "illiterate peasant" and a clueless/self-deluding asshole of a scientist.