Adventures in Time and Space: Lester del Rey's "Nerves"

Adventures in Time and Space series table of contents

The work of art does not refer immediately back to the person who presumably made it. When we know nothing at all about the circumstances that contributed to its production, about the history of its creation — when we do not even know the name of the person who made it possible — it is then that the work comes closest to itself. This is its true direction; it is this characteristic which is expressed in that superlative phenomenon, the masterpiece. Perfection, in the sense given this word by estheticians, is not what distinguishes the masterpiece, nor is the mastery which belongs to the artist and not to the work. Valéry is right to say that mastery is what permits one never to finish what one does. Only the artisan's mastery culminates in the object he fashions. For the artist the work is always infinite, unfinished. And thus the fact that the work is, the singular event of its being absolutely, is disclosed as not belonging to the mastery we associate with achievement. It belongs to another order. ...
        But: does an object fashioned by an artisan or with a machine refer to its maker any more than the work of art does? It too is impersonal, anonymous. It does not bear any author's name.
        Yes, this is true; it does not refer to the person who presumably made it, but neither does it refer to itself. As has often been observed, it disappears altogether into its uses. It refers to all it does, to its utilitarian value. The object never announces that it is, but how it serves. It does not appear. In order that it appear, — this too has often been said — a break in the circuit of usage, a gap, an anomaly has to make it leave the world, leave its senses. And it seems then that, no longer there, it becomes its appearance, its image — what it was before being a useful thing or a significant value. This is also when it becomes, for Jean-Paul Richter and for André Breton, a veritable work of art.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. Ann Smock)

Where others were primarily storytellers, he [Hugo Gernsback] was a didacticist who framed his expositions either as mild japes on fascinating facts or as guided tours through the technologically marvelous world of the future. Although he came to reprint Verne, Wells and Burroughs, he personally did not aspire to literature; he aspired to something much more like propaganda.
        To some, it was potent propaganda. The significance of Amazing Stories is not in having been the first all-speculative-fiction newsstand magazine; it was not, Weird Tales having been founded in 1923. The primary significance lies in that it was the first such magazine to employ the new technological optimism as distinguished from older, classic foci for speculation.

—Algis Budrys, introduction to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era

[Erle Melvin Korshak, founder of Shasta Press] began reading science fiction in 1934, regularly getting issues of Astounding Stories and Wonder Stories from an older cousin after he had finished reading them. (The cousin later became an oil geologist, a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines.)

—Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder

After this, what more need be said about Lester del Rey's story "Nerves"? I am constitutionally incapable of leaving it at that, but I encourage you to stop reading now. Everything that follows is mere elaboration — perhaps dilution — of what has been said in the juxtaposition of these quotations.

There is a subclass (not a "subgenre") of sf that "disappears altogether into its uses." A strange fact is that as far as I can tell no writer specialized in this subclass, no writer was always an artisan — for all that many of them insisted that they were "only" craftsmen; indeed almost all of the major (or at any rate majorly productive) writers of the first several decades of sf regularly produced both it and the "broken" works that become something else.* I always think of Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote many works that seem intended only for use (Prelude to Space, for example) alongside many others that "announce that they are," the grand visionary works like Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End that he's loved and loathed for. The same goes for del Rey; a story like the famous "Helen O'Loy," odious as it may be, has that break in the circuit, where "Nerves" truly does disappear altogether into its uses.

*I want to make very clear here that to say that there is a difference between art and craft is not to say that a work of art is "better" in any way except that it is better at being art. In the specific case(s) I'll be talking about in this post I'll be speaking negatively of those works that "disappear into their use," but that is because of the nature of their use. I'm also aware that these kinds of distinctions have often been used in very damaging and oppressive ways, but even if they've been misidentified and misused the distinctions do exist; if we can't acknowledge that between a tool, in itself as a tool, and a painting, in itself as a painting, there is a fundamental difference of kind, then we can't talk about paintings at all.

The defining characteristic of this type of sf is that it does nothing other than to present something which does not currently exist, but which maybe could soon, as if it does in fact exist, and then proceed to examine some parts of its workings. And by "nothing else" I mean nothing else. So for example Prelude to Space has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than examining how a manned space vessel might be launched from the surface of the earth, and "Nerves" has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than how a nuclear facility might deal with an accident.

(In his essay on sf, Blanchot writes: "A good work of science fiction, to the same extent that it purports to anticipate the future on the basis of genuine knowledge, has interest only in and for the present. Posterity stops here at ten years. The more authentic the creation, the more rapid its descent into the commonplace. There remain literary merits, the pleasure of reading; the book then moves on to a different shelf, having betrayed its kind by hypocritically staking a claim on eternal values." It would be easy to take him here as engaging in the old "if it's good it's not sf," but I believe he is referring instead to what I'm talking about here, what he was talking about in the passage from The Space of Literature, and is suggesting that by "betraying its kind" the work of the artisan becomes the work of art. I would use different terms to make the observation, but the observation itself is sound.)

The use that I'm claiming for this type of sf work, in case my recourse to Eshbach (whose blithe assumptions, and what they reveal about sf, I've discussed briefly here) and Budrys did not make this clear, is propaganda.

Nerves was written early in 1942, when atomic power was discussed publicly only in the science-fiction magazines. It presupposes a world where atomic power is an accepted fact, where atomic-power plants are as commonplace as automobile factories. Writing in a curiously prophetic vein, Mr. Del Rey has furnished some very plausible — albeit fictional — answers to the questions in everyone's mind. What is an atomic-power plant like? How does it operate? What would happen if things got out of control?

—blurb introducing "Nerves" in Adventures in Time and Space

It is important to remember, now and for the rest of this post — indeed for the rest of this series of posts — that every move this anthology makes is one of active canon-creation, not passive canon-reflection. To overstate: it was this anthology and not the age itself that called "the golden age" into existence.

Keeping that in mind, what fascinates about this blurb is how completely inaccurate it is, in the strictest factual sense. The story is not about atomic power plants but rather about facilities for the production of atomic byproducts for use in industry and agriculture.* In the world of the story these atomic facilities are neither accepted nor commonplace. Rather, they are deeply contested, though the contestation occurs almost entirely outside of the story, and the few facilities that exist are operated mainly by one company, in a near-monopoly. The story itself deals far more with the possibilities of near-future medicine than with "prophecies" about the practical functioning of atomic facilities. And indeed, del Rey is writing not in a "prophetic" but rather, to borrow an observation from Samuel R. Delany, in an incantatory vein: he wishes to call what does not exist into being merely by describing it.

*From here on I'll keep using "atomic" even where we'd normally say "nuclear" to help distinguish the setting of the story from what we might be familiar with now from real life.

The several ways in which the blurb is factually inaccurate are revealing, though, because in a broader sense it is entirely accurate. How does a story that looks always slightly to the side of, seldom directly at, the functioning of a facility for the production of atomic byproducts, while focusing much more directly on the brutal violence these byproducts can do to the human body, manage to be read as, far from a dire warning of the inhumanity to come, a "prophecy" of the exciting coming world of atomic power?

"There's an answer somewhere, has to be!"

—Dr. Jenkins, in "Nerves"

And indeed there is. There always is. Science and technology create a problem (an atomic accident kills and maims hundreds, and threatens to destroy a vast swathe of North America if some way of averting disaster is not found quickly), and science and technology are there to find a solution, over and over and over again as "Nerves" careens through its seventy interminably action-packed pages. Radioactive substances have infiltrated a man's nervous system, causing his limbs to jerk so spasmodically that bones break and he may literally die of exhaustion? Not to fear, science has found a way to synthesize curare in doses far more controllable than nature (and the "South American primitives" to whom it was known "for centuries") ever dreamed, and it can dull the motor function long enough to effect a cure; and the pain can be stopped safely with "neo-heroin." A man's heart has stopped due to his exposure to intense radiation and heat? Send for the new machine that can be used to get it going again, and it will be helicopter'd in within the half hour. Byproducts of the accident due to decay within hours into substances that will react and blow up most of the continent?

        "You've got sort of a river running off behind the plant; get everyone within a few miles of it out of there, and connect the blower outlets down to it. Where does it end, anyway — some kind of a swamp, or morass?"
        "About ten miles farther down, yes; we didn't bother keeping the drainage system going, since the land meant nothing to us, and the swamps made as good a dumping ground as anything else." When the plant had first used the little river as an outlet for their waste products, there'd been so much trouble that National had been forced to take over all adjacent land and quiet the owners' fears of the atomic activity in cold cash. Since then, it had gone to weeds and rabbits, mostly. "Everyone within a few miles is out, anyway, except a few fishers or tramps that don't know we use it. I'll have militia sent in to scare them out."
        "Good. Ideal, in fact, since the swamps will hold stuff in there where the current's slow longer."

—"Nerves"

For the first time the story looks directly at the heart of the problem — the atomic facility and the accident itself — and for the first time the solution is not to throw a scientific-technological fix at the scientific-technological problem, but — "the land meant nothing to us" — to throw the scientific-technological problem into the natural world. (The way it ends up working is that the dangerous byproducts mixed with the water form a colloid that keeps the individual molecules far enough apart to stop them from reacting; they can then be treated with a substance that reacts with them more safely, generating nothing but heat that the water can absorb — "It'll cook the river bed up and dry it, but that's all!") Despite this very telling change, though, the cycle of problem-solution problem-solution continues, and only extremely rarely is there any suggestion that it might even be possible — let alone desirable — to step out of the cycle.

And every time there is such a suggestion, it comes always from the stupid mob, sf's traditional enemy. We've just seen them in the passage I quoted just above, the landowners (and other users of the land) whose fears of radioactive contamination somehow remain foolish (the dismissiveness fairly oozes out of that word, "trouble", and har har, look, they were willing to take money) even in the face of a potentially world-historical catastrophe caused by precisely that radioactivity. A few pages earlier we've seen the competent scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors who are running things fretting about the fact that "the population" (always a group separate from those who matter) might resort to "lynch law" if forced to evacuate, even though the scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors know, as one of them says to the plant manager (on whom "the mob's" anger would likely focus) that "it wasn't your fault." And then of course there are several disparaging references to the delays and restrictions imposed by "Congress," a body sf writers often misunderstand as having some relation to "the people," which serves the convenient propaganda purpose of convincing budding technocrats that government can never facilitate business and technology enough, that it is always restricting and should be pressured to be more helpful.

You might be interested to know that at the party one very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures.

—Joanna Russ, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's"

But of course "Nerves" doesn't even have those, or anything equivalent. All it has is the cardboard heroes (and, after a fashion, heroines) and the values. (The jokey male camaraderie of the last page, the "ribbing," the slapping on the back and the winking...) Now, I'm not arguing that "Nerves" is bad because it wants a world I think is bad, or even because it's dishonest in its methods of trying to call that world into existence. (If that disqualified a work of art for me, I wouldn't — couldn't — be an sf reader, nor could I be a reader of much else.) Much of the analysis I've just done, of the ways in which "Nerves" is politically dangerous, is of a kind that I find — in isolation — tedious and pointless. That the sf of the first half of the 20th century hated the greater mass of the people, manufactured itself and its readers as an elite, and desired a technocratic nightmare world that it in many ways successfully effected, is, or should be, obvious. That it also did other things, things that often manage to achieve a kind of depth and truth difficult to articulate (and Russ's young woman articulates only a small portion of it), is perhaps less obvious but is nevertheless true. The difficulty here, looking at "Nerves," is trying to understand how it is that it, unlike many stories just as reprehensible, has nothing — nothing — to offer apart from its hideous incantations.

Is it a matter of setting? Most of the problems I've been talking about are difficult to imagine arising in anything but a near-future story; on the other hand, space operas and other far-future settings come with their own problems.

Is it a matter of technique? I have tended to argue that the most important defining characteristic of any given work of sf — the single thing that most sets it apart as its own work and that most drives what it is capable of doing — is the way it alternates between exposition methods, here infodumping, here incluing, here mixing the two in this way, here in that. Perhaps it is not insignificant that "Nerves" is almost 100% infodump, with incluing playing almost no role. It's not that infodumping is in itself "bad" (a foolish, meaningless thing to say) but that in the absence of any counterpoint with incluing (which even the sfnal "essays" of a writer like Lem have in abundance) the work succumbs to the kind of intellectual weakness that Delany identifies in the utopia, a form which no amount of clueless academic criticism can make identical with sf* but which this particular story comes very close to, in terms of structure at any rate.

*To say that works of sf can be utopian is to say something entirely different than to say that sf is utopia, or that utopia is sf.

Or is it a matter of outlook? The attitude toward technology I've been looking at in this post is very much the kind of mystification Russ was referring to in her "SF and Technology as Mystification," where the notion that technology is some force of nature that just "advances" on its own, without human input, is a cover for the machinations of capitalism; whether this mystification is presented by a booster, as here, or a nominal opponent, as in the academic panels Russ discusses, is essentially irrelevant: the mystification serves its purpose either way.

Of course it's all of these things — they all contribute — and none of them — many stories that live and breathe do some or all of these things and somehow manage to be more than propaganda.

We know that all ancient art was other than it seems to us to be. The white statues deceive us, but if we restore their colored coating to them, it is then that they appear false to us (and they are false, because this restoration disregards the power, the truth of time, which has erased the colors). A painting ages; one ages badly, the other becomes a masterpiece through the duration that decomposes its tones, and we are familiar with the fortuitousness of mutilations: this Victory to which only the flight of time could give wings, the heads from Bardo, of mediocre craftsmanship, that the sea has resculpted, has made fascinating. Moreover, the very means of our knowledge transform almost at will that which they help us to know: through reproduction, art objects lose their scale; the miniature becomes a painting, the painting separated from itself, fragmented, becomes another painting. Fictive arts? But art, it would seem, is this fiction.

—Blanchot, "The Museum, Art, and Time" (trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg), in Friendship

Obviously not nearly as much time separates us from "Nerves" as from the statues, but in the terms of modernity, of modern science, and of science fiction (again: "Posterity stops here at ten years," and though this has not in actual fact been the case, the observation remains true of the writing itself), 1942 was several eternities ago. The colors have worn, duration has decomposed the tones; and then, too, the story's being ensconced in an authoritative (and, in my secondhand copy, solidly built but heavily battered) hardcover from a major press, rather than in the disposable newsstand magazine it originally appeared in, makes it lose its scale, separates it from itself.

Plastic art is first in the service of religious sentiments or invisible realities around which the community perpetuates itself; art is religion, says Hegel. At this stage one finds it in churches, in tombs, under the earth, or in the sky, but inaccessible, invisible in a way: who looks at Gothic statues? We do; the others invoked them. The consequence of the disappearance of prayer was to make monuments and works of art appear, to make painting an art within reach of our eyes.

—"The Museum, Art, and Time"

To combine Blanchots, and to reassign the values attached to his observations all willy-nilly:

I tend to suspect that the difference between "Nerves" and, say, "Forgetfulness" — or indeed even "Requiem," which for all its self-serving propagandistic sentimentality, for all that I hate it, is something other than that as well — was largely invisible when these stories were first read. It is easy now to laugh at early sf readers (and tempting to compare them to contemporary ones in this regard) but what at first appears a simple lack of discernment may conceal something deeper: where we "look at" these stories, their first readers invoked them. They all disappeared into their uses, and the uses of all of them were, in a sense, propagandistic; it was these stories, after all, that made it "a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines" to take his place in the oil industry — for countless like him to take their places anywhere in the emerging technocracy.

The stories, as "stories", were invisible. It is only the passage of time, the change in context, the coming to pass of what has, indeed, come to pass since they were written — and the way this changes the stories' "futurity," the way it transforms them into something that can laughably be called "prophetic," or just as laughably not — that makes them appear. It is only this that brings them within reach of our eyes. The passage of time and the change in context have transformed all of these stories, some into art, some not. However much I like to imagine that, had I been an avid sf reader in the era of Campbell's Astounding, I would have dismissed "Nerves" as garbage while recognizing "Forgetfulness" as a masterpiece, I'm not so sure. Perhaps "Forgetfulness" was always "broken" in the way it is now, and "Nerves" never was; perhaps not. Perhaps it is impossible to say.

Short fiction recommendations - January/February 2015

Now that I have entered the 21st century and have one of those newfangled gadgets everyone else has had seemingly forever, it's much more possible for me to do what I've been wanting to do for a long while now: explore the contemporary short science fiction field — most of which is online — thoroughly. So I've been reading a lot. I've read, or at least looked at,* every story published in January and February in every single free online sf magazine (and other magazines that regularly publish sf) that I'm aware of (a total of, good lord, forty-four magazines), as well as two magazines I subscribe to. If possible (a big if, as you'll see later on), I'd like to keep doing this and make a monthly thing out of recommendation posts.

*I made a pact with myself that'd I'd make it at least three dotepub pages into every single story, and...most of the time I did.

Before I get into talking about what this has been like, here's the list of magazines I've looked at. All are free online magazines except for Asimov's and Interzone. (For the sake of vertical space, I will not be putting this in bullet-list form, so apologies for the difficult-to-readness.) If there are any conspicuously missing from this list, please let me know!

[Click here to skip the boring lists]
[Click here to skip the boring general commentary and get to the recommendations]

The list: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Aphelion, Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omenana, Omni Reboot, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review.

Of these, no fiction appeared during January and February in The Book Smugglers, The Future Fire, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Omenana (does anyone know if there's gonna be an issue 2?), Scigentasy (they don't put a friggin year on anything, do they still exist?), or Three-Lobed Burning Eye.

Of the remaining, no fiction I found to be of any note (remember that I'm talking only about fiction) was published in Acidic Fiction, Aphelion (so terrible I'll probably stop looking at it), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (though admittedly fantasy has to work a LOT harder to convince me than sf does), Betwixt (more devoted to formula even than most), Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction (not so much relentlessly trivial as trivially relentless), Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, Galaxy's Edge (where every story feels exactly like the worst story in an all-original anthology from 1969), GigaNotoSaurus, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omni Reboot (and honestly their website is such a pain that I'm probably going to stop looking), Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons (sorry), Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, and Weird Fiction Review. Each of the rest had at least one story I thought was worth recommending.

Before I go on, some general comments: first of all, nearly everything I read (or looked at, if I couldn't make it through) was terrible beyond belief. Not incompetent — perhaps surprisingly, nearly everything I read, even at the smaller magazines, was competent, even accomplished — but just pointless, formulaic, tedious, unnecessary.

Second, it's become pretty clear already, only two months in, that there really isn't any such thing as a "good magazine" in this field, as far as fiction goes (there are probably all kinds of "bad magazines," but it's too soon to call for most of them). Even the magazines that had more than one good story in them, the other things they published, and in one case the editors' comments, made it clear that the editors were not recognizing what I recognized in those stories, and had decided to publish them for reasons I would find...untrustworthy, at best. Unlike Jonathan McCalmont, I don't generally want magazines to focus on a specific "type" of story. And indeed, many of the magazines (Perihelion, say, or at the other end of the spectrum Apex) clearly do have such a focus, but nevertheless seem unable to distinguish between stories that live and stories that do not. But despite this difference, and despite my many problems with his arguments, McCalmont is absolutely right that there is a desperate need for stronger editorial stances in this field.

(Incidentally, the "major aesthetic sea-change" in short sf that he identifies — and, in my opinion, mis-analyzes — in Short Fiction and The Feels, it turns out, is not as widespread in the field as it actually stands, as a whole, as I had expected. It is, however, omnipresent in the work that attracts the most attention, and it remains a problem.)

Third, related to both and more important by far, this is just a terrible way to read. It's an awful feeling to go from story to story feeling nothing but suspicion, knowing that the chances are that what you're about to read will be trivial — if you're lucky. Far from any reputation I may have gained (in the teensy circles in which I have a reputation at all) for being negative-and-loving-it, I don't want to hate things, I don't want to be closed off, to be always suspicious. I want to approach everything with sympathy and openness. But this field simply does not allow for that approach. It's true that the rare good stories are wonderful surprises in this context, but they would be that in any context. Then, too, there's simply so much of it that if you're to have any hope at all of reading any significant portion of it you simply have to move quickly, be unforgiving, give up on most stories long before they're done. This is not a good way to read, and I have serious doubts if I'll want to keep doing it.

But at least for these two months I've already done it. So what did I find that was good, or at least decent? Arbitrarily arranged by the magazine in which they appeared, those magazines arbitrarily arranged in alphabetical order, and with largely superficial comments, there was:

Abyss & Apex

Corie Ralston, "Faith Is a Nanooka"
Not the most important story ever, but I appreciated this little unassuming thing about an elderly woman spending her last day of life in search of her robot dog and an understanding of God, life, and love. I especially liked the way the sequence of encounters she has during this day doesn't particularly pretend to be "realistic."

George S. Walker, "Dreadnought Under Ice"
Though I wish Walker would allow himself a little more time in between hitting the "enter" key, this story of the encounter between two very different minds removed, in different ways, from Earth, encased, in different ways, in metal, and placed in the under-ice oceans of Europa, by capital, is very much the kind of thing that science fiction should be doing.

AE

Stephen Case, "Drying Grass Moon"
I have an irrational, indefensible, and honestly inexplicable fondness for stories about grouchy farmers stubbornly refusing to leave their farms IN SPAAAACE, and this is one of those. For me it even made up for the unsavory "heterosexual robot marriage is illegal and oppressed" storyline. I make no claim that it will do the same for anyone else.

Apex

Rhoads Brazos' "Inhale"
The language tries much too hard for a kind of warmed-over "loveliness," and the gambit at the end, as executed, is reductive, a closing off, but the conceit (time begins to run backwards, and cause-and-effect sense must be made of it), and Brazos' thoughtfulness in carrying it through, mostly makes up for the problems.

Asimov's

Eneasz Brodski, "Red Legacy"
I suspect that what I liked in this story is entirely different from what Brodski — who seems to be into a horrifying-sounding thing calling itself "rationalist fiction" — wanted me to like in it. Its investment in cycling through "tropes" and its treatment of personal tragedy are both frankly insipid, but the collision of the bizarrely, almost humorously disjointed structure with the melancholic tone is intriguing, as is its exploration of an alternate world in which strict Lysenkoism is both 100% true and useful.

Buzzy Mag

Paul Levinson, "Sam's Requests"
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, "The Obvious Solution"
Both messy nostalgia, both the kind of dumb-but-fun stories I can enjoy while rolling my eyes at them.

Clarkesworld

Tang Fei, "A Universal Elegy" (trans. John Chu)
Bewilderment on a vast scale. I'd hoped to re-read this story — which I didn't know what to make of and am not even sure I liked — before writing this post, but it wasn't to be. But it is rare enough for a contemporary sf story to call for re-reading that I feel moved to recommend it regardless. The story's transmutations live in a realm very little sf cares to inhabit anymore.

Interzone

Christien Gholson, "Tribute"
A bit schematic, like so many stories a bit too trying-for-beauty in its language, but the central action of the story, a centuries-long encounter in which both parties feel themselves to be facing an inexplicable monstrosity, is immensely striking.

The New Inquiry

Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Space"
Surprise! The New Inquiry wasn't on my list, and it isn't even an sf venue. Of course not — there is no way that Kriss's "Manifesto", which is already likely to be the best work of science fiction for all of 2015, could have been published in any of the existing sf spaces. This is why I protest. If I were fool enough to buy a Worldcon membership, I would nominate this for a Hugo in both the short story and related work categories. If you only read one item on this list, if you only read one thing ever again in your life, make it this. And then work, please work, to make sf a field in which this piece, both in its perspective and in its form, could have a place.

Perihelion

First of all, let me just say: Perihelion publishes a lot of fiction, and most of it is not only bad but reprehensible. Most of the stories seem to have all of the weaknesses of quote-unquote "golden age" sf, with none of the strengths. Before I came across the first of the stories from them I liked, I started to wonder if their submissions guidelines said, "When describing women, objectifying language is a must." Just for example. Go to almost any of their stories and search in the page for variations on the word "curves" if you don't believe me. (Their sub guidelines, by the way, do not say that, but they are gross in other, intimately related, ways.) In amongst all the dreck, though, I did find two pretty good stories, of a kind I doubt I'd find anywhere else. Dammit.

Karl Dandenell, "Human Faces"
Structurally reminiscent of Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah," but with a sentimentality that put me in mind, not unpleasantly, of Clifford D. Simak's lesser works, and a well-done feeling of dislocation throughout.

A.L. Sirois, "Halieis Anthropon"
The Biblical reference in the title is a bit of an unnecessary distraction in this case (he said, as he prepared to send a story with a Biblical reference in the title to yet another magazine). Melancholy and the remembrance of things lost. The quailing of the mind in the encounter with the inexplicable. I may sound like a broken record sometimes with these things, but it's not repetition, it's necessity. This story is, though not without flaws, necessary.

Shimmer

Malon Edwards, "The Half-Dark Promise"
If you'd asked me what I was looking for when I started out reading these stories, "YA steampunk" would not have been any part of my answer, but — if that's what this is — here we are. Not My Kind Of Thing, maybe, but it's real.

SQ Mag

Michelle Ann King, "The Visitors"
As with many (or most) good contemporary sf stories, I could wish that King had let this story stay longer in her mind before writing it, or before finishing it (or at least I presume that is the problem; it is unfinished, not in the sense of being unpolished or too short or not detailed enough or lacking an ending, but in the sense of not being fully thought, fully experienced). But its puzzled, dread-filled approach to that classic sf theme, "transcendence," is more than welcome.

Tim Major, "Like Clockwork"
I read this story, centered on a powerful man who tries to make his Martian environment as much a nostalgic portrait of Earth as possible, as a critique of sf's frequent tendency to retreat inwards, playing around with "tropes" and trying to make everything always-already familiar. (In this way the steam-, gears-, and train-oriented nature of that portrait is particularly telling.) That it performs this critique without being condescending — indeed, with a very sympathetic sadness — is impressive. Meanwhile, the editors' comment that the "detail of Tim Major’s world and the strange characters who inhabit it recommended this story" to them is almost horrifying in its tone-deafness, the world being very pointedly undetailed (when pieces of the world outside bleed through toward the end it is with a jolt), the characters being anything but strange.

Terraform

Yes, Terraform. I'm as surprised as you.

Julie Steinbacher, "Inter-Exo"
This story of teenagers sneaking off to get out of their body-covering suits (which they must wear at all times to avoid contagion) and have sex is little and almost inconsequential, but wonderful in its sense of bodies and the amazement of embodied, tactile experience.

Mark von Schlegell, "How a Dream Machine Works, Exactly"
This story is, frankly, 90% stupid bullshit of various kinds, but something in the other 10% nags at me. Every once in a while its account of reality's encounter with its own destruction-from-within (most of which account is, again, just bullshit) brushes against something that resists articulation.

tor.com

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "And the Burned Moths Remain"
More than anyone — anyone — else who uses the contemporary sf formula (the one-line opening and closing paragraphs, the heightened, "poetic" diction, etc etc), Sriduangkaew seems to me to be, one, using it in order to slip more lively work past editors who wouldn't otherwise know what to do with it, and two, thinking about what this formula is doing. To a large degree this just makes me sad, thinking about what she could be doing if she weren't forced into it (as with all of her stories that I've read this one seems to be straining uncomfortably against limitations not of its own choosing and not conducive to its own health), but nevertheless it is nice to see.

Uncanny

Richard Bowes, "Anyone with a Care for Their Image"
I can easily see a reading of this story that would dismiss it as "kids these days with their newfangled internet," but there's much more going on here than that. It's not even, as it would be easy to think, about disconnection, because its narrator is very often In The Thick Of Things and very well aware of it. It's more to do, perhaps, with the shifting of priorities that occur when mediation — or representation — achieves both primacy and invisibility, and of course with the infinite weirdness of the rich.

---------------------------------------------------

So...it's both better and worse than I'd expected. Worse, because it's looking like sorting through all the noise to find the good work will be an unsustainable amount of labor. Despite the interventions of so many editors, it's essentially still slush reading. I'd hoped to be able to identify a good magazine or three but, again, it's already apparent that there are none, there are only randomly-placed good stories. Then, too, it is disheartening to realize that, though some of the magazines have distinct characters, there is no real difference between the large magazines and the small ones — the small ones serving mainly as overflow for the large ones. There don't seem to be any magazines taking advantage of their smaller size to publish work that could not find a place elsewhere.

But better, because I didn't expect when I started out to be able to recommend nineteen stories in this post — if we're talking averages, almost ten a month. (Speaking of statistics, yes, I'm aware that these stories skew male, at a rough count slightly more than the field-at-large does. I could speculate as to why this is, but it would probably sound, possibly be, disingenuous, and I prefer to wait and see if the pattern repeats itself.) Though then again — will any of these stories matter to me, or anyone else, after any amount of time has passed? They've all lingered in the mind enough that I didn't have to refer back to any of them to write these blurbs, but even just a year from now, or even next month? It's hard to say. With "Manifesto" as one major exception, in most cases it seems unlikely.