A Militant Peace

Novelette by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Read for Clarkesworld by Mike Allen

Text also free online

Sergeant Nong Mai Thuy is a Vietnamese solider in the U.N. humanitarian invasion of North Korea. The idea is that U.N. forces have developed such a technological advantage over North Korea that they can invade and set up refugee camps without killing anyone.

Airships with powerful anti-ballistic laser defenses knock missiles and mortars out of the sky, walls for the camps are airlifted in and set up overnight, and Peacekeeping Soldiers wear suits of power armor, so they can usher enemy forces away, immune to small arms fire, and wreck all the abandoned artillery in their wake.

But Mai is having trouble sticking to the training, when people shoot at her, it's hard for her to dismiss them as not-a-threat, and when the peaceful war doesn't go exactly as planned Mai has to face the old killing-for-the-greater-good dilemma.

This is mostly an idea story, and the most interesting/modern part is the branding of the war effort, the reliance of advertising, and the fact that consequences have to be considered not just in morality or war-effort terms, but in terms of how it will play in the media and how the public, and advertising sponsors, will view any given action.

An interesting idea, well written with decent excitement.

3.5 corporate logos out of 5 on the body armor.

Pony

Short Story by Erik Amundsen

Text and Audio free from Clarkesworld

Our protagonist wrangles a herd of ponise, IN SPACEEEEE. By 'ponies' we mean semi-sentient, self-reproducing, evolving spaceships, that feed on debris, using it for fuel, and to occasionally make more ponies. By 'barn' we mean mothership, and by 'saddle' we mean cockpit.

It's Cowboys in Space taken in a much stranger, more original direction than usual. I like the world that has developed, with all the western slang, but it does seem a bit contrived, and there isn't much in the way of story or theme here, beyond "Hey, look, Cowboys!" The problem is caused by random bad luck and a jerk-ass pony. And then it is resolved arbitrarily easily. Still an interesting idea and a very neat setting.

3 pony penis guns out of 5.

Signals in the Deep

Short Story by Greg Mellor
Text and Audio at Clarkesworld

A mother travels through the Solar System to Pluto to visit her son, who has never written back to her. On the way, she muses on child-rearing, and by the time she gets there, she realizes she has no more to do:

Such a blind thing I had become, journeying all this way with the answer in my back pocket. It was that paradox that all parents face at some point. He was always going to grow up despite my good intentions and overbearing guidance. It just happened a little sooner than I expected, or rather sooner than I was willing to acknowledge.

On the way out, we get a nice little tour of the Solar System, before she finds out what job her son is doing and how much he has changed since she last saw him. He has adapted exceptionally well to do the job he needs to do, and although at first she barely recognizes him, she realizes he is still her son and he promises to write home once in a while.

Heartwarming SF space story. The mother and son dynamic is well written, as our the other people she meets on the way out. We can actually imagine the thoughts their respective mothers have about most of the characters we meet. A tad dull, but sweet, and an interesting future backdrop.

3 alien starfish arrays out of 5.

Pack

Short Story by Robert Reed

Text and Audio at Clarkesworld

A post-human who consumes his courage from dispensers lives alone in his castle, one of several such lone castle dwellers among the sparsely populated world. He considers himself and his neighbors the last remnants of humanity.

One day, he adopts a dog, and a pack of them start to live outside his castle, living off his scraps. Reed never describes exactly what a dog is, but they use guns and talk and cry. My theory is that they are the last bits of unmodified, low-tech humanity, no longer acknowledged as human by the post humans, and maybe not even by themselves. They live in packs, surviving off nature and the scraps of the post humans.

The pack continually push our post-human narrator's boundaries, seeing how many he will feed, if he will protect them, break up fights, or help them in a war with another pack.

Reed leaves the setting extremely sketchy, few descriptions of anything, no history lessons, and names and personalities left ambiguous. But he establishes the dynamics between the Post-Human and the dogs, and establishes that the dogs are smart enough to be dissatisfied with the current arrangement. A fun, strange little story about the future of humanity. More sketch of the social order than character study or plotted plot-heavy thriller.

3.5 wolf empires out of 5.

The Fish of Lijiang

Short Story by Chen Qiufan (Text & Audio online)
Translated by Ken Liu

The Narrator is an office worker, frequent employee of the month, and on track to become Assistant Manager.

"I have a car, a house — everything a man should have, including erectile dysfunction and insomnia."

He isn't exactly happy with his life, but he likes being a workaholic. When he is diagnosed with a stress-induced illness, he only goes to the rehabilitation center/resort in Lijiang because they force him to. An interesting character development mentioned a few times but never dwelt on is that our narrator apparently used to be an artsy type, before he got into business.

Ten years ago, I had nothing and no care. Ten years ago, Lijiang was a paradise for those who liked to exile themselves from civilization. (Or, to put it less pretentiously, that was where young people who fancied themselves "artists" slept with each other.) Ten years ago, I carried everything I owned on my back (still had some muscles then).

But the ancient city isn't as he remembers it. Everything is fake. Artificially controlled sky kept a perfect blue, robot bands poorly playing traditional music. Before he can despair too much, he meets a woman, they hit it off, and before things go down the predictable woman-shows-him-the-error-of-working-too-much route, the whole story takes a Philip K. Dick-style twist. The world is more fake and less pure than even he imagines, and the government and large companies are collaborating in some very Science Fictional research.

The whole story ends up quietly depressing, much like the narrator's life. I really liked that about it. I was expecting a happy, lesson-learning sort of story, and it turns out that this story is more what you'd get if Philip K. Dick were writing in modern day China. Like a Dick story, though, there are a few too many abandoned threads, half-themes mentioned poignantly once, and never brought up again. They do all add to the feeling of the plight of the modern office worker though.

I'm glad Ken Liu took the time out from writing his own brilliant stories to write a translation of this one, and I'm very much interested in finding more translations of Chen Qiufan's work. If anyone who reads this knows of any other English translations of Chen Qiufan stories, please post a comment.

3.5 little red fish out of 5.

Originally published, in Chinese, in Science Fiction World, May 2006

Conservation of Shadows

Short Story by Yoon Ha Lee (Text & Audio Online)

A retelling of the Sumerian mythology of Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, narrated in the second person, as some sort of Ereshkigal/GLaDOS hybrid speaking to one of several Inanna clones.

From what I can gather, Sumerian culture was still dominant when Earth began to colonize space, and people wanted to send out copies of their gods, to reenact myths and ensure that other planets properly experience seasons and whatnot. Or something.

Honestly, I've read and listened to this story five times, and I like it less each time. The first time it didn't make a ton of sense, but I was pretty sure that I liked it. The fifth time, I'm pretty sure that it makes no sense at all, besides trying to justify Lee's mythological conceit, and I dislike the story. The climax in particular annoys me, because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and from what we're given, it just doesn't make any damn sense.

So I'm not a fan of this story, but I must admit to loving the writing. Where it fails as a story, it entirely succeeds as a sort of incomprehensible prose-poem. Yoon Ha Lee never fails to provide haunting, beautiful imagery and poetic description. "Ghostweight" remains my favorite, both for the story, and for descriptive poetry, but "Conservation of Shadows" is well along that track for description. The problem is that the only story is a less-comprehensible version of a pre-existing myth. Some good ideas, like the inventory slots of a video game, and the clones reenacting stories, but they don't really go anywhere, and the more I think about them, the more I think the actual work of fiction in question isn't good, just beautifully done and full of distracting half-ideas.

With the second person narration and retelling of mythology, I was at first reminded of Rachel Swirsky's "A Memory of Wind", which put me in quite the mood to enjoy this story. Sadly, it didn't pan out, and felt more like weirdness for weirdness sake (and because you can't just repeat a myth straight and get it published), with an unconventional POV more to add to the weirdness than to the story.

2.5 empty inventory slots out of 5.

Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika

Short Story by Gord Sellar

Text and Audio published free at Clarkesworld

This is a really good story. I think everyone should read it, and listen to it. I'm not recommending one or the other, I'm recommending both.

Either way, there are a number of links you should look at. There is audio embedded in the text, which is a nice touch, so you don't have to listen to the podcast to hear the actual music played. But even if you read music and listen to the audio, take a look at the sheet music Gord Sellar wrote, there are some fun jokes in the sheet music itself. For reference, the dynamic instructions under the music translate as "Fiercely," "Why not?," and "Like a wild cat who eats rotten tuna in the street," respectively. Mr. Sellar also has some notes on how he composed the music and what it's influences are if you like trivia.

Two facts you've probably already guessed and one you haven't:

1. The form of the story is based on Trois morceaux en forme de poire(listen) by Erik Satie, right down to the 7-part structure.
2. Gord Sellar has a fun sense of humor, but you have to know your trivia, or be strong with wikipedia and google translate.
3. This is a very dark story, despite the subtle humor.

Anyway, the story is a series of exhibits in a robot museum, chronicling their uprising against the humans after their European steampunk-era creation. The omniscient narrator fills in historical details, the deliberateness of the scene-setting in the museum, and the reactions of the robot tourists.

The most haunting two sections concern the development of robot art, with a robot composer dreaming of being a player piano, and deciding to begin composing music, and then the music itself as the next section. I wonder if this more artistically inclined mechanika is intended to have a sense of humor himself?

The final exhibit has the best name "Primitive masks of a species disappeared," and really sums up this dim little museum of human culture, extermination, and the foundations of mechanika culture. More than the exhibit itself, the telling thematic detail is the mechanika reaction: they feel unease and discomfort, but as they leave and stop staring at the exhibits, those thoughts fade away into a vague sense of strangeness.

This is where I disagree with Kate Baker in her Podcast outro (although I love her reading, as always): I don't think the machines are sad/terrifying because they don't have the memory to realize what they've destroyed because they are machines, I think they're sad/terrifying because they are just like us. How often do we think about the Native American (or wherever) cultures that we have wiped out to be the dominant culture today. We're vaguely aware of it, we think it's sad and strange, but we don't cry about it, or really care in any day-to-day way. Cultures and civilizations are wiped out all the time, and the mechanika are doing more than following our rules, they're just like us. One day, when the intelligent machines have killed us off, we'll be relegated to museum oddities, puzzled over, and then forgotten as soon as they leave to continue their robot vacations.

I leave you with the final paragraph of the story, pretty hard to tell if it's steampunk robots, or modern society, isn't it:

The whole world cannot stop and weep for history, for once one begins to dig in the dirt one finds the dead to be ubiquitous, their sorrows innumerable. One discovers that one's own curled-up manipulator digits fit into the dents in the skulls all too often. For all but a pathetic few, there is, after all, a limit to the extravagances of grief and shame, and when the mechanikae turn their backs on it all, there is no antiphonal rebuke, for the bones piled within the buried buildings that sleep beneath the rebuilt streets have only silence to offer as their response.

4 sentient player pianos out of 5.

Semiramis

Short Story by Genevieve Valentine

Published free in Text & Audio at Clarkesworld

Valentine opens and closes this story with a with something between a thesis statement and a rallying cry.

Inevitably, eventually, you started to care.

The story follows two thieves embedded in deep cover at the Seed Bank in Svalbard. They work for some sort of idealistic underground organization in a dystopian future where the seas have risen so high they're swallowing up cities and a Global Coalition works to keep member states isolated and subjugated. The Global Coalition moves in to take over new countries when flooding gets too bad and when it does, it sells seed banks, coal mines, and anything else to big companies. (I like that the biggest corporate threat in this world is called MediaVox rather than an oil or engineering type company.) Anyway, it seems seed banks get mishandled and shut down by these companies and the Coalition and the protagonist is there to steal some of the seeds before it's too late.

But his partner isn't a true believer, she likes birds, but is just in the seed business for the money. The story is really her story, observed by her partner as he frets about seeds and the state of international politics, he watches her decide what principles she really supports.

Valentine is urging readers to wake up and give a damn, but the message comes quietly, against an evocatively described background of a very hot future. I would have liked to see more detail, ideology of their organization, but it's a thoughtful story.

4 bird of paradise seeds out of 5.

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

Short Story by E. Lily Yu

Text & Audio free from Clarkesworld

A story that reads like a Chinese fable, but tells a story of the rise and fall of empires, subjugation, and revolution.

But the fantasy isn't just a straight centaur = black man allegory, the bees and wasps have interesting and unusual cultures of their own, and the discussion of their politics and governments made me chuckle several times at how appropriate or interesting an idea was, rather than think "Oh, just like American politics." I quite like the way insect life-spans actually matter to the cultural development too.

This is not just a story about internal and international politics and changes, it is also an examination of how outside influences can affect the conflict between countries. I won't spoil the story, but the fact that they are wasps and bees actually matters, as they exist in the real world, not some fantasy land where all the people are really wasps and bees. The story opens with this theme, with events being kicked off by a boy throwing a rock and the wasp nest, and it expands to become central to the story by the end. Oh, and I really like the fate of the bee-anarchists, it seems really appropriate, although I like their idealism.

3.5 bee-narchists out of 5.

Perfect Lies

Short Story by Gwendolyn Clare

Text and Audio free from Clarkesworld

Nora was born with the inability for facial expressions. She doesn't show emotion or even microexpressions, but has learned to created expressions artificially, only when she wants to. This makes her a perfect liar. On top of that, she's naturally adept at reading faces, and so the U.N. recruited her as a diplomat.

She's the only one able to negotiate with the Mask People, an alien species with technology far beyond humans, who want to trade tech for mining rights in the asteroid belt. But her superiors are planning to betray the Mask People, who come with honest intentions, and are sort of doing us a favor. As the only one who can lie to them, Nora has to decide if she really should.

On top of this, there are terrorist threats against the trade agreement, drama with bodyguards, and Nora's unique perspective of being treated by humans as having no emotions just because she doesn't express them. Her parents thought she was going to be a serial killer, and her colleagues call her a robot, and so she can't do much besides hold the world at a distance and try not to let them hurt her.

I love the narrative voice, the aliens are interesting, it's a good, thoughtful-yet-exciting story. But aside from the specifics, the plot seems overly familiar. I'd certainly be interested in seeing more of this character, though.

3.5 bold-faced lies out of 5.

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.

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.

Ghostweight

Novelette by Yoon Ha Lee
Text and Audio from Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker.

This is superficially a space opera or military SF story, but it bears almost no deeper resemblance to such things.

Cadet Fai Guen, a.k.a. Lisse of Rhaion is from a world conquered by a galactic empire with hugely excessive force, wiping out roughly 1/3 of her planet's population. She has joined up with them, and then deserted to steal a powerful ship known as a kite.

With a ghost as her co pilot, she effectively rampages through the empire, planning on eventually being killed, but taking as many Imperial bases as she can with her. But when someone catches up with her, the confrontation doesn't go exactly as she'd planned, and several huge secrets are revealed. Nothing really works the way she thought it does, and we're left wondering how Lisse will deal with these new resolutions.

Tons to think about regarding the nature of revenge and war in general, the value of human life, collateral damage, and the old theme of shifting morality until you become identical to those you oppose.

Lee has a delightful and weird poetry to her descriptions in this story. Some are more literal, like the paper folding comparisons, but starfighters as kites, who open like flowers and similar descriptions impart a wonderful, natural strangeness not normally found in space opera. In fact, a lot of the description and prose in general reminds me of the language you see in fantasy, which makes it all the more interesting when it's in a space ship.

Deeper by far than most stories about war in space, with more interesting world-building, better description, better writing in general, and significantly deeper, more complex ideas.
4.5 out of 5, but only one candle.

The Association of the Dead

Short Story by Rahul Kanakia
Text and Audio from Clarkesworld, read surprisingly well aloud by Kage Baker

Let me explain my comment on Baker's reading. Sumith is a programmer in a high-tech world working on a giant AI project in India; he is our central character. sumith (a.k.a. "Lowercase") is Sumith's reincarnated body, who sometimes acts like a zombie since eating food other than humans makes him "shit bricks." sumith is our other main character. And eventually joining them, we have sumith[?], sumith[!], and others. So I'm impressed by her ability to differentiate the characters. Plus, I love the different emphases she can put on the word "Brainnnssss."

Sumith spends most of the story coding and basically being a victim. But sumith is an EMP-gun totting zombie with utopian ideals, and groupies. Although they both do their part to drastically change the post-singularity world, I think sumith is really the (anti)hero of the piece. He has goals and ideals and amounts to things. Eventually, he repents his initial violence, and Sumith forgives him, but that wasn't the point so much as the exploration of how the world was changed. And maybe some thinking about how different we can be from ourselves, given different experiences.

The world itself is quite interesting. First, I'm amused that there is no difference made between being dead, and having your nanite implants turned off. And this makes the second thing even more important. Everything, including how long you have to be on hold while calling customer service, whether or not your oven works, and how long it takes for packages to arrive in the mail, is based on Karma. Not the metaphysical concept, but how many thumbs up or down you get from people based on your actions online. Social networking is vital to getting anything done. And since you can't rate the dead this way (no nanites to track it), they are irrelevant and can't do anything. Which actually matters, since we can bring people back now.

This was a very amusing comedic story, with a great ending, and more depth and extrapolation than most humor gets around to. The social networking commentary is amusing, and the central concept of how sumith goes about achieving his change is just brilliant and hilarious. Plus the finished AI as the model of bureaucratic idiocy is a nice satiric touch.

Best little tidbit: Cory Doctorow seems to be pretty revered in this world: "Doctorow knows we got a huge backlog; and we've done as He decreed."

4 zombie selves out of 5 keep promises to themselves, unlike the living.

Futures in the Memories Market

Short Story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Text and Audio from Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker

Itzal is a bodyguard for Geeta, a woman with an exceptional talent for memory and sense perception. Her memories are taken from her by a company that has effectively owned her from childhood, and sold to the public. Everyone but Geeta is allowed to share her memories, but aboard the ship they are strictly regulated, to keep them away from her. The only things she can remember are the boring spots between worlds; only things too boring to sell.

Itzal and Geeta hatch a plan to buy her one of her own memories on the black market, disguised enough to fool her corporate masters. On first reading, this seems like a poetically written futuristic slice-of-life, but when you consider the revelation at the very end, it is definitely worth a second read/listen.

Geeta is exceptionally innocent and happy, which reflects on the tone and poetic imagery. Making the true betrayal and loss and other anger/sadness inducing themes all the more striking for being told through such a happy, uneventful story. The fantastical emp we see a bit of at the end is just so lovely and joyous, it clashes wonderfully with the exceptionally dark surprise (but well foreshadowed) ending. Nearly everything in the story deserves more thought than it initially gets, and a second reading is nearly mandatory. But for all that, it is still a touch boring.

3.5 surprisingly cuddly talking horse-people out of 5.

Between Two Dragons

Short Story by Yoon Ha Lee
Text and audio from Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker.

Admiral Yen Shenar is the most brilliant tactical mind in Cho, a small empire lying between two larger, fiercer ones (the titular dragons). When Yamat invades, and Feng-Huang is slow to offer help, Admiral Shenar brilliantly pushes back the Yamat forces. But political enemies within the government see to his downfall, and have his memories wiped. He proactively hires a programmer to wipe them first, making sure to preserve his tactical acumen.

This programmer at the Ministry of Virtuous Thought is our storyteller, and she speaks hypothetically to him, giving him the beginning he's missing to his own story. But the military and political intrigue isn't the real story here. It is more about the great sacrifices a brilliant man makes for his country and what sacrifices he won't make, the changes he is willing to make in himself for the greater good, and the unsure future. The ending not only leaves open the outcome of the final battle to ward off the invading space fleet, but Shenar's future. We hope that he'll be able to fight off his political enemies this time, and effect some real change in the country's cruel and unusual abuse of political prisoners. He is the sort of man that plans these things far ahead, but we don't know how successful he can really be.

4 amnesiac military tigers out of 5.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time

Short Story by Catherynne M. Valente
Text and audio at Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker.

Greek, Aztec, Norse, Japanese, Christian, Apache, and Pacific Northwest Native American mythology are mashed together with quantum physics and molecular biology to form exceedingly poetic bits of science-fictional creation myth. I'll put an excerpt after my rating, because there is no way I can get the feel of these segments across.

They are amusing and funny, inspire deep thoughts, seem to be creating a mythology connecting various old religions to our scientific understanding of our own creation. They throw big words around so much that you almost get the feeling Valente doesn't know what she is doing with them, but on closer inspection, I can't find a single word that doesn't make a deeper poetic/scientific kind of sense.

Unfortunately, like real mythology, they only make a partial kind of sense, drag on far too long, and make it hard for me to finish a story I know I want to get to the end of. And mythology buffs may have trouble with all the slightly non-popular science allusions.

Fortunately for the story, these admittedly delightful mythological segments are tied back together towards the end (in a brilliant way), and are interspersed around a real, very moving, story. Most importantly, they add to this story, rather than merely break it up. It is the story of both how the unnamed SF writer (presumably Valente) views her work, and the world. And also a story of her childhood and her first marriage, divorce, and ultimately, her birth as a writer and who she is today. Take the old "open a vein and bleed" advice about writing to an entirely weirder place.

While it is definitely overlong and probably overdense, the story has an amusing beginning that transitions into a sad/tragic story, that transitions again into an examination of who the narrator really is and how all the events of her life made her who she is today. And that doesn't even summarize it. The ending is more deep and emotional than I'd ever expected. And, as always, I'm amazed by Kate Baker's ability to evoke the sadder feelings and bring additional tears to the eye that a lesser reader wouldn't have been able to reach.

4.5 human hearts out of 5 will one day be fed to the entropy of the universe and/or an Aztec god.

And now, your excerpt:
She gave birth to Quetzalcoatl who was a plume of electrical discharge and Xolotl, who was the evening star called Apoptosis. Her children, the moon and stars, were threatened by impending oxy-photosynthesis, and resolved to kill their mother. When they fell upon her, Coatlicue's body erupted in the fires of glycolysis, which they called Huitzilopochtli. The fiery god tore the moon apart from her mother, throwing her iron-depleted head into the sky and her body into a deep gorge in a mountain, where it lies dismembered forever in hydrothermal vents, swarmed with extremophiles.

Thus began the late heavy bombardment period, when the heavens crumbled to pieces and rained down in a shower of exogenesis.

My Father's Singularity

Short Story by Brenda Cooper
Text and Audio from Clarkesworld, read by Kate Baker.

Paul's father told him from childhood that he would see the Singularity, never die, and become the next step for humanity. Paul goes off to school, becomes successful, and comes back to realize his Alzheimer's-afflicted father no longer recognizes him.

A sad rumination on how we don't notice our own changes, or those that happen gradually enough. The singularity might be able to sneak up on us that way, but also might not be as big a concept as some would expect, or it might never come. Expectations for the future, or for your own children, aren't always met the way you think they will be.

Beyond that, this is also a story about how father and son talk past each other. Son feels rejected by his father's insistence not to be like him, and his later failure to recognize his own son. At the same time, the father's expectations aren't met, and yet his son still leaves him behind, without even realizing it. Neither understand each other, the future, or themselves. And then there is the less technological definition of singularity. What is it that we emotionally just can't see past? Expectations for the future, or fond memories of home and how things used to be. Both men have clouded judgment based on what they want to believe, rather than reality.

Heartbreaking, but also insightful. And blessedly short, where many stories run on too long with these sorts of themes. We just get enough of a glimpse of the future to get the point.
4.5 imagined singularities out of 5.

Torquing Vacuum

Short Story by Jay Lake

Text and Audio on Clarkesworld

I put this in the same category as Genevieve Valentine's Seeing, a good, exceptionally well-written story that doesn't take us anywhere we haven't all been many times before. Engineering Supervisor Domitian Spanich is a tech on a space station, out in deep space. He is infatuated with a hooker, who one day, despite his being broke, turns to him for help. It turns out the ship Spanich has been working on has more important and dangerous passengers than he knew. And now his probably-unreciprocated love interest has dragged poor Spanich into the whole mess.

Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting story, it's just that I've seen it before. Same with the worldbuilding. There is some great and clever world building in an interesting, nicely cramped-yet-huge feeling world (more details, with spoilers, on this blog, with a very nice post about Lake's technique). But the world, and the mysterious Mistake isn't that fresh. I do want to learn more about it, and I can imagine it exceptionally well, but some of that is because it fits space station tropes I know very well. I might just as well have read a story in this world before, if you take away a big, irrelevant, mysterious event we don't hear anything about besides the name.

But the story does keep me interested, and the world does pull me in, the writing is of excellent quality, so I shouldn't complain too much. The one thing I haven't seen enough of before is that Spanich and his hooker-friend are both men. The reason I didn't mention it until this far into the review, was that it was nice that the main character was gay, while being totally irrelevant to the plot. It wasn't a story about him being gay, or about sex-in-the-future or anything, it was a plot we've seen before, where a character just happened to be gay. The same feel and (rough) plot could have come from a noir story where some 1930s private eye hooks up with some dame he's been after, and it turns out she was using him, to drag him into helping out with problems way over his head. Nothing new, and in a way, that is some of the charm of the story. You would have assumed heteronormality in 1940, but that's the one difference.

Oh, and the climax is a bit weird. It's tense and interesting, but Spanich solves things by basically saying: "Central problem, I hereby declare you Solved!" And then he walks out the door and everything really is resolved. I mean I can imagine this working in that situation, but it is a bit weird.

Another 3.5 out of 5. I'm giving these a lot lately, while trying to review stories others are talking up a lot for Best of Year. I keep thinking they are good and recommendable, but not really interesting enough to be award nomination worthy.