(Volume 11)
Editor: Jonathan Strahan
Publisher: Solaris
In the introduction to this short fiction collection, editor Johnathan Strahan celebrates diversity and inclusiveness in SF and Fantasy publishing, even as intolerant ideologies gain more and more traction in society at large.
My sad conclusion from that would be that SF&F must therefore not be a very good tool for sharing ideas, thoughts or beliefs. At a time when SF&F has not merely become part of the mainstream, it IS the mainstream (e.g. currently 8 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20 highest-grossing movies in history are SF&F), most of them chock full of bromides on the virtues of friendship, teamwork and equality, it's disheartening to note how little impact this has had on the public consciousness.
Another point to mention is that I grow somewhat cynical of people like Johnathan Strahan or Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy celebrating diversity, when the upper echelons of their respective professions seems to remain fairly solidly white. They're in favor of diversity for other people, it seems. Diversity so long as it doesn't cost them anything or require them to give up a nano-particle of power and privilege. Like car companies that insist they have to shutter factories and 'go where the talent is', and then install the founder's grandson as president.
The stories in this collection are a mixed bunch, as any one person's "best of" are bound to be. I note with little surprise and much cynicism that the year's "best" short stories all just happen to have been written by previously-published, well-known authors, and literally zero by first-time writers.
Together with traditional stories, there are a number that are self-consciously progressive, including feminist fantasy and urban fantasy by a person of color. Overall, what strikes me is how angry this stuff is, how polemical, how absolutely drowning in their own rage and vitriol. (As an adjunct to this, it's striking how many stories are about the protagonist's feelings, rather than any action or event.)
There was a time when that would probably have made me feel 'got at', that the writers were unfairly blaming me just because I happen to be a white male, but now? I just feel kind of sad. I just want to read happy, fun stories about people going to amazing places and doing amazing things, and I'm sorry that's not the sort of dreams people have anymore.
With that in mind, here's what the collection has in store:
The Future is Blue, Catherynne M. Valente: A girl living on a garbage island in the middle of the Pacific after climate change has drowned every landmass tries to stop the inhabitants from making a grave mistake. Inventive but vicious, scathingly critical of modern consumer society.
Mika Model, Paolo Bacigalupi: In keeping with this writer's fetish for Japanese android women, features a cop investigating a case in which a sex bot has killed its owner. More of a vignette than a story, and tries to make you question whether to believe the android's profession to individuality and autonomy. Bit bland, and the themes here were better explored in "Blade Runner".
Didn't think much of his novel "The Windup Girl" either.
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik: The story of a girl who makes a deal with the faerie-folk to turn their silver into gold. One of the few upbeat stories in the collection: light-hearted, fluffy fun.
I liked one of her dragon books, reviewed here, which was also fluffy fun.
Two's Company, Joe Abercrombie: Entirely devoid of plot, existing only to showcase Abercrombie's writing style as rough, tough swordsmen and -women exchange anachronistic patter ("Someone's compensating for something," one character says in reference to another's large sword), kill a couple of people, fuck, then kill some more people. More of a commercial for Abercrombie's books than an actual, self-contained story.
See my other reviews of Abercrombie's books here and here.
You Make Pattaya, Rich Larson: Predictable double-cross story about a con-man trying to blackmail a celebrity in Thailand.
You'll Surely Drown Here if You Stay, Alyssa Wong: Overly long, and written in second person which I haven't liked since I first stumbled across it in "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" by Tom Robbins. (Incidentally, that's pretty much the only thing I remember about either story).
A Salvaging of Ghosts, Aliette de Bodard: Intriguing SF about salvage crews exploring ships lost in hyperspace.
Even the Crumbs Were Delicious, Daryl Gregory: Slightly gonzo Hunter S. Thompson tale that begins with a pusher's roommate holding a wake by giving away their entire stash of drugs. Sadly, not quite as much fun as the premise suggests.
Number Nine Moon, Alex Irvine: Sort of a very compacted version of "The Martian" by Andy Weir.
Things with Beards, Sam J. Miller: AIDS allegory I think, only instead of a disease there's an alien a bit like the one from John Carpenter's "The Thing", except when the alien takes on a new shape it preserves the identity and consciousness of its victim.
Successor, Usurper, Replacement, Alice Sola Kim: A circle of aspiring writers meet to share stories, but are interrupted by an eerie stranger who seeks to explore their darker thoughts. Odd that in a city being terrorized by a nameless horror, literally nothing else is different about this world.
Laws of Night and Silk, Seth Dickinson: This is a neat one, about a society that creates the ultimate wizards by raising magically-talented children in complete isolation. Without the psychological restraints that come with knowing what is "normal", they become capable of anything. Interesting mix of psychology and fantasy, with a teasingly ambiguous end.
Touring with the Alien, Carolyn Ives Gilman: Aliens that have evolved intelligence without self-awareness or consciousness seek to explore the human condition, and one of them hires a woman still in mourning for her dead daughter to drive it about the USA. Other stories in the collection do a better job of marrying the conceptual side with the protagonist's emotional journey, but here the two never quite gel together.
The Great Detective, Delia Sherman: Predictable Victorian steampunk about Watson and an animatronic Holmes. Sickeningly twee.
Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home, Genevieve Valentine: Laughable premise about a virtual reality games developer that uses incarcerated prisoners to beta-test a game, without the prisoners' knowledge, to see how believable the game environment is. Supposed to be sad how one prisoner just wants to go back to the fictional world even when the plot is revealed, but everything about the setup is just so mind-bogglingly stupid.
Those Shadows Laugh, Geoff Ryman: Odd. About a scientist visiting a kind of unisex Amazonian island society to teach them in-vitro fertilization techniques and ends up falling in love with one of the inhabitants. About our obsession with ownership and control, even in relationships, but again I found the initial concept too unbelievable for the rest to grab me.
Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar: Angry, outraged feminist fantasy about a woman imprisoned at the top of a glass mountain and one consigned to wearing iron shoes. Powerfully written in places, but feels to me as though it has all the intellectual weight of a Spice Girls song. Yay, girl power.
The Art of Space Travel, Nina Allan: Hotel worker takes care of her senile mother while preparing to welcome two celebrity astronauts at the hotel. Didn't really seem to be about anything in particular, or perhaps too many things. As a result, nothing really gelled for me or held my interest.
Whisper Road, Caitlin R. Kiernan: Couple murder a husband and wife in a robbery gone wrong, then start to hallucinate about lights in the sky and strange noises following them. Odd, more about the atmosphere and the writing rather than the plot.
Red Dirt Witch, N. K. Jemisin: Okay, we get it, white people are terrible. Like I said, there's so much anger here. Justified or not, I just find it depressing.This and the next one (by Theodora Goss) both go on a bit, too.
Red as Blood and White as Bone, Theodora Goss: Starts of promising, with a tale of a wolf seeking revenge on the man who killed its mate, then drags on in an oddly long epilogue recounting the rest of the narrator's entire life.
Terminal, Lavie Tidhar: Sorry, didn't get this one at all. Confusingly structured, possibly leaps back and forth in time, or not, I'm not sure. There's a mass exodus from an overpopulated Earth to Mars in cheap, junkyard spaceships I think, though I'm probably wrong.
Foxfire, Foxfire, Yoon Ha Lee: Balls. Just utter balls.
Elves of Antarctica, Paul McAuley: More ecological SF, about a helicopter pilot wandering around a newly-habitable Antarctica. Mostly filled with long dialogues and monologues as the protagonist putters about, not doing much of anything except moping.
The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight, E. Lily Yu: A kind of modern fairy tale about a witch who goes on a quest with a knight. Again, seems to come from a dark place of deep hurt, almost despair, at the misunderstanding and miscommunication that screws up both the quest and the relationship between the two characters.
Seven Birthdays, Ken Liu: Takes place over billions of years, told in first person by an uploaded consciousness contemplating humanity's desire for rational solutions to irrational problems. Told to who?
The Visitor from Taured, Ian R. MacLeod: A bit self-congratulatory: A near-future SF story about a guy who reads SF stories. Takes a while to get to the point: a scientist obsessed with proving the existence of parallel universes. Lacks tension, stuff just happens, until it doesn't. Ho hum.
Fable, Charles Yu: I'd read this one before, and holy mother of god if this opening doesn't bring tears to my eyes every single goddam time: 'One day, the man woke up and realized that this was pretty much it for him. It wasn't terrible. But it wasn't great, either. And not likely to improve. The man was smart enough to realize this, yet not quite smart enough to do anything about it.'
And I'm crying again.
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