Category: Short Fiction

Interzone 226: Stephen Gaskell, ‘Aquestria’

23rd February 2010 / / 1 Comment

On the planet of Aquestria, the two resident human factions — the Loyalists and the Senastrians — are at war, though both are suffering the effects of a plague which is killing off plants and animals alike. Isiria and Kelif, two Senestrian Special Investigations officers, respond to a call and find a strange man with his tongue cut out.  Thinking he might be a Loyalist, Kelif interrogates the stranger, until his methods become so aggressive that Isiria takes matters into her own hands.

This story is… okay. There’s a nice idea at its heart, and some deft touches in Gaskell’s writing where he evokes Isiria’s unease with Kelif’s tactics. But, though it’s always readable, much of the story doesn’t really leave a lasting impression. ‘Aquestria’ is decent enough, but nothing special.

Link
Stephen Gaskell’s website

Click here for all my Interzone 226 posts.

Interzone 226: Rachel Swirsky, ‘Again and Again and Again’

8th February 2010 / / 4 Comments

Oh, but I loved this. A two-page chronicle of children rebelling against their once-rebellious parents, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the future, where technology makes the possibilities for shocking the previous generation ever more extreme, until…

Well, if I’m any more specific, I’ll spoil all the fun for you. And that’s what this story is – great fun, and (one suspects) only too true.

Link
Rachel Swirsky’s website

Interzone 226: Jay Lake, ‘Human Error’

6th February 2010 / / 1 Comment

Again, I find myself thinking: nearly there, but not quite. ‘Human Error’ is about three miners on a distant asteroid who chance upon an artefact which is apparently the product of non-human intelligences. Reporting such a  find will make the ‘rockheads’ fabulously wealthy — if they can only settle their differences first. The relationships are the core of Lake’s tale, and I appreciate what he’s aiming to portray (as summed up by the ironic pun in the story’s title); but I don’t tink he manages fully to capture the claustrophobic intensity of the situation.

Link
Jay Lake’s website

Interzone 226: Mercurio D. Rivera, ‘In the Harsh Glow of Its Incandescent Beauty’

2nd February 2010 / / 1 Comment

The solar system has been made inhabitable to huamns, thanks to the technology of the alien Wergens — and all they asked for in return was our time and cooperation, because the Wergens are simply infatuated with us. Covert experiments with Wergen DNA by Maxwell and Rossi produced a drug — a love potion in all but name — which was stolen by Rossi, who used it on Max’s wife, Miranda, before fleeing with her to a colony on Triton. And Now Max has travelled there to find his love and bring her home.

One of the interesting things about blogging Interzone in this way has been that it’s made me reflect on what makes a story good, or better than good. Take Mercurio Rivera’s piece, for example. I like it — which is not hard, as it’s a very likeable story — but have ended up with reserations about it nonetheless.

There are many things about the story which are good — it combines thrills, appropriately exotic aliens and scenery, and philosophical questions. But, still, I needed it to do more. If the descriptive prose had been that bit more evocative, or the action sequences that bit more thrilling; if the aliens and their technology had been that bit more remarkable, or the examination of love that bit more developed… Even one of those would have taken the story up a notch. As it is, Rivera’s tale is good enough — but, somehow, ‘good enough’ still doesn’t feel quite enough.

Link
Mercurio Rivera’s website

Interzone 226: Tyler Keevil, ‘Hibakusha’

31st January 2010 / / 1 Comment

‘Hibakusha’ tells of Kellman, who is returning for one last time to a London ruined by a nuclear explosion; he’s going ostensibly as part of a salvage team, but actually has his own agenda. This is the kind of story which is particularly frustrating to write about, because it’s just okay – not bad, but not great, either. The deeper relevance of the title comes across (the word ‘hibakusha’ translates, says the text, as ‘explosion-affected people’; and the story shows how Kellman was affected by the blast in more than just physical ways); but, at the same time, nothing about the tale feels particularly remarkable or new. It’s a case of, yes, it was decent enough; now, on to the next story.

Link
Tyler Keevil’s website

Interzone 226: Jason Sanford, ‘Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas’

25th January 2010 / / 3 Comments

Well, we’re off to a good start with this. In the port of Windspur lives Amber Tolester, who knows which sailors are fated to die at sea, because their names appear on her body – and she knows when they’ve died, because then the names disappear, causing her great pain. One day, a mysterious name appears on Amber’s skin – David Sahr, who apparently left Windspur many years ago, as a child. Amber soon finds out who Sahr is, though, when he turns up in Windspur repeating her name – and, when she refuses to come away with him, Sahr takes revenge…

I enjoyed this story. The idea feels fresh to me; there’s a wonderful atmosphere of strangeness; and I appreciate the elegant symmetry of the ending. If the rest of Interzone 226 is as good as Sanford’s piece, it’ll be a treat.

Link
Jason Sanford’s website

Two Stories: Nightjar Press

23rd November 2009 / / 3 Comments

‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ (2009) by Michael Marshall Smith
‘The Safe Children’ (2009) by Tom Fletcher

Nightjar Press is a new venture by the writer Nicholas Royle, specialising in individually-bound short stories. They’ve launched with two titles, one by a well-known writer, the other by a newcomer. Very handsome volumes they are — and, more importantly, the stories are also very good.

The well-known writer is Michael Marshall Smith, whose name is pretty much a guarantee of a good read, and ‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ is no exception. It’s narrated by a little girl named Maddy who hates the dark, so (she tells us) made a deal with her mummy that she could keep the light on all night, as long as she didn’t disturb her parents. But tonight, Maddy has woken up in darkness; what’s happened to her light?

The first thing to say about this story is that Smith gets Maddy’s voice pitch-perfect: with all the breathless sentences and repetitive structures, it feels as though this is a small child addressing us. And it’s the naiveté of Maddy’s viewpoint which is key to the success of the story. It becomes clear as the tale progresses that something strange is happening — and, all credit to Smith, it was something I didn’t see coming.  But we get some idea of what’s going on, even though Maddy doesn’t; the gap between her knowledge and ours generates great poignancy. It was with something of a wry smile that I closed the book, having read Maddy’s final words: ‘Mummy and Daddy do not talk much any more, and this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed.’ There’s a lot going on behind that sentence which I can’t reveal without spoiling the story — and I’d hate to deprive anyone of the superb reading experience I had with Smith’s tale.

Nightjar’s second launch title is the beautifully harsh ‘The Safe Children’ by a young new writer named Tom Fletcher. Set in western Cumbria, it follows James Thwaite as he travels to his new job as overnight security guard at a factory which makes… well, that’s a secret. The plot leads towards the revelation of the factory’s purposde, which is appropriately nasty — but that revelation isn’t enough, by itself, to make the story stand out.

What does make this tale stand out for me is Fletcher’s prose, the way he captures the fundamental bleakness of his setting. The story is set in the near future, and perhaps its main theme  is that of the promise of a shiny new tomorrow versus the failure of reality to deliver. Here, for example, is how James describes his train to work:

All of the seats are ripped; all of the tables are black with cigarette burns. Somebody is playing music on some portable device and it sounds like an insect trapped behind glass. The train moves slowly. I just stare out at the sea. Some things haven’t changed at all.

There are flashy, hi-tech trains and suchlike in this future world, but only in rich areas; where James lives, a couple are lucky if they can afford for both to eat at the same time — and the only hint of that shiny tomorrow is the shimmer of wet sand on the beach. The real horror of ‘The Safe Children’ is not the factory itself, but the socio-economic conditions that allowed it to come into being, and made people desperate enough to take jobs there.

Fletcher’s story is not without its flaws: the background details aren’t always integrated as naturally as perhaps they ought to be; they end up feeling ‘crammed in’, as though the story doesn’t give them enough space. Overall, however, ‘The Safe Children’ is an effective piece that marks Fletcher out as a writer for whom it’s worth keeping an eye out; he has a novel due to be published next year, which is now on my to-read list.

Also on my to-read list is anything that comes from Nightjar Press; if all its publications are going to be as good as these, they’ll need reading.

Pump Six and Other Stories (2008) by Paolo Bacigalupi

19th November 2009 / / 1 Comment

I have heard a lot about Paolo Bacigalupi, much of it good; and I thought it was about time I got acquainted with his work. I’ve started with what built his reputation – his short fiction. Pump Six is a collection of ten stories, presented in chronological order of publication, and dating as far back as 1999. From reading it, I’ve discovered that (with a few reservations), Bacigalupi’s work deserves to be spoken of so highly.

Right from the start, Bacigalupi shows himself to be a writer of great texture; he knows just how to bring his worlds to life. Here, for example, is an extract from the book’s very first page, describing the construction of a new ‘biologic city’, which is being grown as much as built:

It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals frmo the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.

(‘Pocketful of Dharma’)

Time and again, Bacigalupi captures this disorientating sense of the future’s being alien-and-yet-not. And the futures he creates are typically under stress: a problem from now stretched into a crisis and beyond, until it shapes the world. So, in ‘The Tamarisk Hunter’, water shortages mean there’s a bounty on the stuff, and good money to be made by anyone willing to seek out the plants that store large amounts of it. In ‘The Calorie Man’, the problem is energy: with traditional sources (presumably) depleted, we have turned entirely to biofuels. In this world, crops have effectively replaced money, so even the smallest amount of energy is expended with caution – and the scale and structure of society have naturally been affected by this.

A particularly harrowing example of Bacigalupi’s futures is the world of ‘Pop Squad’, whose key problem was one of population. The solution was ‘rejoo’, a technique which halts the ageing process – with the side-effect of infertility. But who’d want to reproduce, when they could be immortal? Some still do, apparently, even though it’s illegal and (effectively) a death sentence – but there are ‘pop squads’ for dealing with the results of that.

This piece is a very effective portrait of a pop squad member questioning his assumptions. Bacigalupi’s control is superb, as the tale progresses from the initial shocking moment, through the growth of the protagonist’s doubt (though the ending doesn’t have quite the same impact). I also appreciate Bacigalupi’s refusal (as I see it) to reduce the issue of rejoo to a simple choice between good or bad (though I think the story is more of the opinion that it’s a bad thing). Leaving aside the issue that the utterly reprehensible pop squads were created because of it, there are both advantages and disadvantages to accepting or rejecting rejoo; and ‘Pop Squad’ is a stronger story because of that.

Another characteristic common to a good number of the stories in Pump Six is that they show how people have become distorted by what’s happened to the world, and often in ways that are deeply troubling to us. We see this in the protagonist of ‘Pop Squad’, and also in the altered humans of ‘The People of Sand and Slag’.  In this tale, environmental change has precipitated the development of ‘weeviltech’, which enables people to heal from even extreme injury (severed limbs can just grow back), and  to eat rocks and mud – but their mentality and ethics have become so far removed from ours that reading about them is a highly discomforting (though powerful) experience. It’s not really necessary for Bacigalupi to have one of his characters ask ‘If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?’ and another reply, ‘No, they’d call us gods,’  because the narrative itself makes the same ironic point forcefully enough. But it’s an arresting point all the same.

Bacigalupi’s characters with alien mentalities don’t all reside in the future. ‘Softer’, the one non-sf story in the collection, is narrated by a man who has just killed his wife – they were in bed, she nudged and chided him for not doing  the dishes, he retaliated with a pillow, and… well, there you go. What’s so chilling about this story is that the narrator is so casual about what he’s done; and that he convinces as a character, even though his thought processes are unfathomable.

And it’s not just minds which are transformed in these stories – so are bodies. ‘The People of Sand and Slag’ is one example, of course; but the physical transformation is perhaps even more dramatic in ‘The Fluted Girl’. Here, we find a society which has organised itself into fiefdoms, one of which is ruled by Madame Belari, an actress with ambitions to become an entertainment mogul, as it were.

Her star attractions are Lidia and Nia, twins whom Belari enslaved as children, and forced to undergo treatments that arrested their physical growth, sculpted their bodies, and left them with brittle bones. It’s the slow, elegant unveiling of the situation that makes this story work, along with the subtextual examination of the desire for ‘fame at any price’, and the effect it may have on others.

‘The Fluted Girl’ is hardly a rosy vision; but there’s a kind of cautious optimism towards the end, with the possibility that Lidia might be on the way to breaking out of her present circumstances. And this is an example of something else that features in several of Bacigalupi’s stories: characters and lives on the cusp of change.

Take, for instance, ‘Pump Six’, a somewhat uneasy but interesting fusion of two different kinds of sf story. It starts off reading something like a spoof of old-school sf, wherein our narrator has a few casual digs at the women in his life, then tries to work out why one of his city’s sewage pumps isn’t working – then the tale mutates into something rather more solemn, and we discover that this world is not as we thought it was. I don’t think ‘Pump Six’ is entirely successful – for example, the protagonist’s dismissive attitude towards women doesn’t get the comeuppance it warrants, which makes its inclusion more problematic – but I was certainly surprised where (I assume) I was meant to be surprised; and, in that sense, the story does its job just fine.

What can I say about the stories of Pump Six as a whole, then? They don’t make for easy or light reading; yet they’re not unwelcoming, either. They are snapshots of worlds and people in the midst of difficult times – one might even say at times that difficulty has become a way of life – but not without a sense of resilience. Life (or at least the world) goes on. I’m glad I discovered the work of Paolo Bacigalupi; if you haven’t yet, I’d recommend you do the same.

Three of the stories from Pump Six are available to read on Paolo Bacigalupi’s website:

‘The Tamarisk Hunter’

‘The People of Sand and Slag’

‘The Fluted Girl’

Two Stories: Tim Pratt

7th October 2009 / / 0 Comments

It’s occurred to me that, if I’m going to do the occasional random short fiction review (as I did yesterday), it might be more interesting to cover two stories at once, to give a point of comparison. So let’s try that, and see how it goes. The author I’ve chosen today is Tim Pratt, whom I’d heard good things about but never actually read – though I’ve had a story collection of his on my shelves for several months, and really must get around to reading it.

Anyway, the first story I’m covering in this review is ‘A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness’ (2009), published in Futurismic. The story is described by the site’s Pail Raven in his introduction as ‘a little Gonzo, a little retro, but all Tim Pratt’. I can’t really judge the last of those yet (though I suspect, and hope, that it’s true), but the first two are definitely right.

This is a robot story that has an air of old-school science fiction about it, but not in a way that comes across as a tired retread or too-knowing pastiche; it’s more that Pratt knows the area in which he’s writing, and uses its history and conventions as a way in to the story he wants to tell. Our narrator is Kirby, a sentient android who has married a human woman, April. Essentially, the tale is a portrait of familial (and extra-familial) relationships, though there are also mysterious ‘emotional viruses’ in the background (April’s daughter Wynter, usually a moody goth, has contracted a virus that makes her happy – which explains why she’s being unusually civil towards Kirby).

What I like about this story is that it’s deceptively light: it’s humorous, but searching questions are being asked underneath humour. I’ll quote a passage which illustrates both of these points (context: Wynter has just explained to Kirby why she is often difficult with him:

“I understand.” I do. Like most of my kind, I am exceptionally good at running theoretical models of human interior experience, and of constructing self-coherent theories of mind.

There’s humour here in the incongruity between the typical human platitude and Kirby’s robotic literalness (I should add that the over-formal diction Pratt uses for Kirby’s voice is just right); but deeper issues are being explored here: is a model constructed inside a sentient computer truly equivalent to human feelings? There’s more elsewhere in the story: if a robot like Kirby can reprogram himself to feel anything he wants, is a robot emotion equivalent (or less genuine? or more?) than a human one, caused by chemical changes in the brain? Then there are the ethical dilemmas, which I won’t get into, because it would spoil the story for you. Go and have a read.

The second Pratt story I read (I should say, I chose these more-or-less at random) is ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ (2009) from Subterranean magazine. This is a very different tale from the previous one – more serious in tone, magical realist rather than science fiction – but I can see common characteristics: playfulness and seriousness combined, and a sense of putting a well-worn theme to work. I still haven’t made up my mind about the story – not about whether I like it (I do), but about whether it pushes its luck too far.

You see, the protagonist is a fictionalised version of Pratt himself, yet the story purports to be ‘filled with true stories of my life’ (I say ‘purports’ because I have no way to judge how far that’s true), whilst acknowledging and reflecting upon its own fictitiousness. I’m wondering if the piece is too self-referential for its own good… on balance, it probably isn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking myself the question! And, to be fair, the metafictionality (is that even a word?) is integral to the project of the story.

So, we have our protagonist, Tim (for the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the character as ‘Tim’ and the author as ‘Pratt’), who tells us about his ex-girlfriend, Meredith, who flits in and out of his life like a recurring dream. I use that phrase quite deliberately: she is apparently able to appear and disappear at will; no one other than Tim actually ever meets her; and nothing else is quite as real to him when he’s in her presence.

All this leads naturally to the assumption that Meredith is a product of Tim’s imagination, made flesh only in his own mind; but Pratt knows this, and addresses it directly – coming to the conclusion (as I read it) that whether Meredith is real or not makes no difference, because the effect she has is the same either way. ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ evokes a kind of young love that’s like a whirlwind, that seems more vivid in later years than it probably (but who can say?) than it was at the time; and the story asks, would you want to return and find out what it was really like, or are you content with your memories, inaccurate though they may be? A fascinating, thoughtful piece. Go and have a read of this one, too.

These two stories are very different, but I found both to be equally accomplished and a joy to read. I really, really do need to read more of Tim Pratt.

‘Even If You Were Here’ (2009) by Angi Becker Stevens

6th October 2009 / / 1 Comment

‘Even If You Were Here’ by Angi Becker Stevens is a great little story which appears in the September issue of The Collagist. Essentially it’s a character study of a thirteen-year-old girl who, I realise now I come to think about it, is never actually named. I didn’t notice this when I was reading, and I think that’s because the character is so solidly imagined – she becomes familiar enough to us that we don’t need to know her name, because we know her.

The first-person voice that Becker Stevens creates is pitch-perfect: halting (almost staccato at times), candid, spilling thoughts out almost as they come to mind – it sounds like a teenage girl talking to you, sorting through a confusing time of life as she does so.

And what a time this girl is going through: her younger sister Francie is preoccupied with death; her older brother Peter has gone of travelling to who-knows-where; her mother is struggling to cope; she wonders who her father is (whoever he is, he’s also Peter’s father, but not Francie’s); and she’s exploring her own burgeoning sexuality.

What I particularly appreciate about this story is that, even though we see everything through the eyes of the protagonist, the other characters nevertheless come to life independently. We can sense the whirlwind of emotions that Francie must be feeling, even though we mostly only have her sister’s wry observations of Francie pretending to die every day (‘Some days she freezes to death and the house is nice and quiet so I can pretend I’m home alone.’). The presence of Peter looms large, even though he isn’t there; our protagonist wonders whether her brother is searching or just escaping:

‘I didn’t understand what it meant to find yourself [she says]. I didn’t know how Peter could possibly find himself anyplace we weren’t in. I thought losing yourself was a better phrase for what he was trying to do.’

The girl’s mother is a closed book to her; all she really knows is that she’s ‘very tired’ – but even that is enough to open the character to us as readers. Then there’s Stacey, the girl who – tentatively at first, then less so – is becoming the protagonist’s lover. One gets the sense that Stacey is as much an anchor as a lover for the girl, the only person in her life who speaks plainly – the only person, perhaps, who is there for her.

Through these waters, our protagonist tries to navigate, tries to shake off her family and become herself. Perhaps she can do that; perhaps it’s beyond possibility at the present time; perhaps distancing herself is the wrong approach. ‘Ever If You Were Here’ is a thoughtful, well-written piece at which I recommend you take a look.

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