After the way of his own kind

What happens at the end of Craig Kee Strete's short story "When They Find You" is difficult to articulate — particularly when under the sway of our usual ways of talking about writing. What has happened before is easier to describe. A thinly-veiled transformation of any number of real-life colonization events; a transformation that is both a metaphor and nothing but its own literal self, because this is how things happen: a man from Earth with a quiet role to play in the violent subjugation of the planet Kingane, having bought an indigenous woman as a wife, finds it difficult to reconcile his feelings of superiority to and connection with her, particularly in the face of her seemingly total impassivity and under the simultaneous pressures of their scientifically conceived child and the increasing presence of a disapproving population of colonists from Earth.

(Of course this "easy" description leaves much out, as for example the harvesting of nerve tissue from the stefel dogs, which though it serves a familiar purpose — improving the quality of life of the very rich — cannot be reduced to something already recognizable, and cannot be separated from the rest of the story. But then no story is actually reducible, and the easy description will do for now.)

But the ending...? It is tempting to say that Strete makes the reader feel the human as alien, but this is not correct — not here, probably not anywhere, because surely this is impossible. We are human, and no matter how much estrangement we may sometimes (or often, or always) feel from some (or many, or all) of our fellow humans, this estrangement is itself only and always human. (In a way this is emphasized by Strete's ability to understand his human character, who is after all — among other things — a stand-in for the white people who perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate, genocide on Strete's.) Perhaps — and this is only an attempt — it would be better to say that by describing the human in the language of the alien Strete brings the reader to feel this very impossibility — the impossibility of our seeing the human as alien — in all its necessity. And with this feeling, again perhaps, comes the knowledge that the equally limited perspective of the alien exists, also, and possesses its own necessity.

He got up from the table slowly, his food untouched, and he moved toward them. She knew what was to happen and in that unreadable face, he found the knowledge of what he was about to do. He lifted the boy away from the mat on the floor and cradling him against his chest, turned and walked back to the table. She sat motionlessly in the corner and in that moment he knew, he finally knew she was capable of emotion, that she had feelings of her own.
        He pulled a chair up beside his and sat the boy gently down upon the chair. He turned to her, and without a word she knew that the boy's place would hereafter be at the table, she knew it by the sad, unrelenting look on his face.
        He took a piece of bread and put it unwashed into the boy's mouth. And then he heard it, and turned to look at her. Her face was turned away, her shoulders motionless.
        But he heard it and this time knew what it was. That melodious, birdlike sound, the way the creatures of Kingane cried, the sound the creatures of Kingane made when they were dying.
        But he had his back hardened against it and would not relent, having made judgment for the boy. But after the way of his own kind, his shoulders shook and he made the harsh, broken rasping sound, the way the creatures of Earth cried, the sound the creatures of Earth made when they were dying.

"When They Find You" appears in Strete's marvelous collection The Bleeding Man. Thank you to Jennifer Marie Brissett, whose lovely review of the book made me aware of its existence, and thank you to Christoph Endres and Strete himself for making it, and the rest of Strete's writing, freely available online. It should be read.

Behind the scenes of Rama II

It is the late 1980s. NASA scientist Gentry Lee is worried. "I sure do have a lot of anxieties related to race and gender," he mutters to himself. "I should probably write a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama to work them out," he continues thoughtfully.

He furrows his brow. "But it should have whimsical Shakespeare robots too," he adds. Nervously, he asks his secretary to get Sri Lanka on the horn.

When the call comes in, Sir Arthur is busy snorkeling with a twink. "Hello, Gentry," he says. He notices the twink sighing slightly. Oh dear, thinks Sir Arthur, is he losing interest? He decides to finish the phone call as quickly as possible. "Sure, fine," he says. "Good enough. I have no real standards anyway."

He hangs up the phone and puts the snorkeling mask back on his face. "Have I mentioned that I basically invented telecommunications satellites?" he asks the twink. The twink rolls his eyes, but replaces his mask as well.

Later on Sir Arthur remembers that Rendezvous with Rama should never have had a sequel, but by now he's much too rich to care.

Short fiction recommendations - April 2015

....and once again. My third monthly short fiction recommendations post, but the first that actually covers only one month. For whatever that's worth.

[Click here to skip the boring lists & things and go straight to the recommendations]

Once again I've come across some magazines I was previously unaware of; one new one has begun and at least one has ended. As I've done before I'll list all of the magazines (slash-websites-slash-whatever) I look at so that if anyone happens to see that something is conspicuously missing they can let me know about it. (Most are dedicated sf magazines; some are not but publish sf often enough to make it worth my while to look at them for these purposes. Apart from the three marked with asterisks, all the magazines I look at are free online; there are other pay magazines I'm aware of and would like to check out as finances allow — for example I plan to resubscribe to F&SF soon — but for the moment this is it. Nevertheless, if you know of a pay magazine I might not be aware of, please let me know.)

The magazines I consult, all fifty-three (!) of them, are: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's*, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, The Colored Lens, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago's Wainscot, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone*, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, The New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON*, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Truancy, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, and Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in April in The Book Smugglers, Diabolical Plots, Expanded Horizons, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, The New Haven Review, Omenana, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, SQ Mag, STRAEON, or Three-Lobed Burning Eye. The rest all did publish new fiction and I at least looked at all of it.

After this month I will be dropping Fiction Vortex (because it has ceased publication). Everything else survives in my reading for another month.

And now! Arbitrarily in alphabetical order by writer's given name, the recommendations!

Alastair Reynolds, "A Murmuration" (Interzone)
The "character-driven" story is inane and tiresome, and far too convinced of its own (nonexistent) cleverness. The writing is often spoonfeedingly insipid (the paragraphing, the fucking paragraphing), and as often just plain embarrassing ("I squeeze our data until it bleeds science"). The cruelty is wholly unjustified. But struggling out from under all the garbage are moments of fascination, with a focus on work and process that remind me of Josipovici's remarks on the second half of Exodus — only now this work and process, and the focus on them, are irremediably deranged.

Aliya Whiteley, "Blossoms Falling Down" (Interzone)
People searching for genuine experience, or trying to disappear into roles, or both, in a world that is paper-thin, in which cultures and traditions and histories are less than a costume, less than a tourist destination; a shipful of people traveling through space in hope of "finding a new place and not screwing it up this time," not knowing but almost feeling that they've already screwed it up, that their ship has managed to reproduce not even the problems of Earth, but a parody of them.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "The Petals Abide" (Clarkesworld)
As I was reading this I kept thinking of a comment Samuel R. Delany makes about Hart Crane's use of apostrophe — a use which many find embarrassing but which for Delany is a main element of "a language...in the process of knowing...an animate object world, a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else." Sriduangkaew — who does not particularly use apostrophe and whose "object world" is often much more visibly animate even than ours, given the technologies its characters are surrounded by — is not much like Crane, but I think her language is up to something similar. The collision between this language and the tales of her Hegemony universe — all expansion and control, forgetting and re-membering and remaking — is something I haven't quite been able to articulate, but it is powerful. This may be my favorite of her stories I've yet read; though I still find Sriduangkaew's work somewhat fettered by the formulas of her field as she finds it (a field clinging with all it has to "genre" even as its own imperatives push it away from it), the series of dialogues here between captive and captor, two of the points of a strange and violent love triangle, emerge out of the living surround and take on a life of their own.

Emily Devenport, "Dr. Polingyouma's Machine" (Uncanny)
I don't know enough about Hopi practices (and preferences) to know how to feel about their invocation here — brief in explicit terms, looming implicitly over the entire story — but in general theory at least I find the overlapping of "non-rational" and "rational" methods suggestive. This overlapping, too, is distorted-mirrored by the narrator's focus (a distant, less pathological relation to that of Reynolds's narrator) on the repetitive, practical, procedural concerns of labor — cleaning floors, mainly — in the presence of an Event that puts the viability not only of an individual life but of reality itself into question. I was disappointed in the ending, which has the structure (though not the "content") of something like a superhero origin story and I think too much closes off the openness of what preceded it. (When will the science fiction reader stop having to try to disregard this kind of ending?) I suspect that if Devenport had taken longer with her thoughts and her work, and perhaps had existed in a critical climate that did not foster patness, this same basic material (including the "what-happens" of the ending, which in pretty much every respect I do not object to) could have given rise to something transcendent. Even as it is, though, the event (or Event) she has allowed to unfold demands to be experienced.

Jetse de Vries, "Echoes of Life (Kaleidotrope)
I'm not actually recommending this story. What I'm actually recommending is that its writer stop writing about human relationships until he learns something about them, and until he resolves not to tell lies about them. What I'm actually recommending is a hypothetical severely edited version of this story, maybe a third its current length, removing the sexist (and banal, and pointless) mom's-new-boyfriend storyline and the sudden, blindsiding appearance of racist Zwarte Piet halfway through, both of which de Vries should be embarrassed (at least) to have written and the Kaleidotrope staff should be embarrassed (at least) to have published, along with less abominable but very peculiar lapses like a team of scientists interfering with an unknown species' life cycle because individual members of that species are too pretty to die (scientists interfering in situations they don't understand? yes; like this? noooo), and the hilariously on-the-nose actual appearance of the phrases "conceptual breakthrough" and "sense of wonder" at the end of the story. What would then remain — the investigation of life on Europa; the hints of extreme technological transformation like the gengineered humans and the "Spikes of Jupiter"; the deft details about UV-spectrum decoration on the otherwise homogeneous buildings of the Europan settlement — would be a powerfully expository sf short story. If it catches you on a day when you're able to take the shit in stride — to roll your eyes and read past it — the rest may be worth checking out. Otherwise: avoid, avoid, avoid.

Joe M. McDermott, "Paul and His Son" (Asimov's)
I suppose one way to describe this story would be to say that it presents an act of desperation carried out in a world in which surveillance — from above and below — is so routine that all actions, including desperate ones, have become automatic, unreflective. But that's just one way and not quite right (the narrator is reflective, though in a peculiarly performative way); and really the story feels so...slight?, but in a good way?, that I wonder if it's best not to describe it at all — there's so little to describe; it just exists. The taut-but-bland, repetitive language is marvelously affecting, though I have my doubts as to whether McDermott has found quite the right "subject matter" for it. The introductory blurb says the story is taken from a yet-to-be-published novel, and I either very much want to read that novel or very much want to pretend it doesn't exist and this is all there is.

Kate Schapira, Alternate Histories (climateanxietycounseling)
Full disclosure, Schapira is a local friend of mine, but I really think this is some of the most exciting writing going on right now. She explains the project in the introductory post (which is what I've linked above; the stories follow on immediately in the next-post links at the bottom of each), but briefly: a while back she set up a "climate anxiety counseling" booth near the downtown bus hub, where she asked/let people talk out their worries about climate change, the future, and, in practice, just about anything. Now this past month she's written a very short story every day based on these conversations, trying to take them in warm, meaningful, useful directions. Fragmentary, ongoing, reticent but generous, utilitarian but open. Total fantasies except that there is no reason that they have to be fantasies; vigorous explorations of that illusory conceptual construct called "the future"; rigorous localism that refuses the "universal" without renouncing a broader relevance. Schapira's project cuts to the heart of writing, of science fiction, of the state of the world and our place and responsibilities in it. And then there's all the local bus route numbers, I have very strong and specific emotional attachments to all the bus routes around here.

Michael Cisco, "Excerpt from UNLANGUAGE" (Lackington's)
Another excerpt taken from an unpublished novel. On balance I don't think I "like" this (maybe better to say I don't think I'm sympathetic to it); I kept thinking as I read it that it felt like something a Lovecraft scholar might write after taking Paul Auster's City of Glass too much at face value — like I did when I first read it as a teenager, say. (And I admit I laughed a little when I got to the author bio at the end and discovered that Cisco — whose name I had heard before but about whom I knew nothing — actually is a Lovecraft scholar. Not a bad thing to be, don't get me wrong!, but still.) But this is probably the most uncharitable of all ways to describe my reaction to this fragment that does, after all, have its provocative moments (the part about parables...); and regardless I have to applaud Lackington's for publishing it, in the process taking an enormous step toward becoming the kind of space I had hoped it could be: one at least as welcoming to uncertain attempts as it, and the rest of the field, is to mere successes.

Robert Reed, "The Empress in Her Glory" (Clarkesworld)
Robert Reed, "What I Intend" (Asimov's)
I think what I like about Reed is the sense I get that if he is prolific — and he is, though not perhaps exceptionally so by sf's standards — it is because he's always thinking, and his thinking comes out in writing. (In an interview in Fantasy Scroll, which this month reprinted an older story of his, he says "My Eureka moments are constant. I endure them every day, sometimes several times a day" — which feels right for him.) His thinking isn't always perfect: both of these stories, characteristically intriguing-but-frustrating, are unintentionally silly at least as often as they are profound; "What I Intend" is too frequently glib and has a good deal of that relatively-mild-but-pervasive sexism that mars much of Reed's work; there is an authoritarianism in the telling of "The Empress" that aligns Reed uncomfortably (and not, I think, self-critically) not just with its heroine (which would be bad enough) but with the aliens who empowered her. So: far from perfect, but his thinking is always ongoing, which is refreshing and, as a project, occasionally exhilarating.

Sarah L. Johnson, "Loud as a Murder" (Crossed Genres)
A lightweight but often charming story of an autistic proofreader's love for the UPS guy who delivers him his manuscripts. What is often referred to as the "speculative element" deserves that isolating and trivializing name here: it feels mechanical and honestly a bit half-baked — and really is there any reason this had to be "speculative fiction"? — but overall I enjoyed myself.

Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination" (tor.com)
Beginning and ending (roughly) with references to "negative space," "Ambiguity Machines" is itself a kind of glorious negative space defined by a very science fictional didacticism that does not actually exist in the story itself. Much more could be said; perhaps much less should: the story says what it needs to.

William Squirrell, "Götterdämmerung" (AE)
What interests me here is neither the setting (a perfunctory sort of post-singularity straggling-remnants-of-humanity thing) nor the "plot" (a just-as-perfunctory sort of male-coming-of-age-through-violence thing) nor the "ideas" (territory taken in more interesting directions by everything from Solaris to Star Trek: The Motion Picture) but the way in which the story, though it takes place over quite a number of years, consists essentially of one single action, brought to its conclusion. By placing this action in a recognizable sf context, though, with all of the object-focused discourse that comes with it, Squirrell brings to light the ways in which no action is self-contained and in which, indeed, "one single action" is not singular; the violent final encounter between Donald and Interface may bring both of them resolution of a kind, but it has no effect whatever on the context that caused that encounter to occur (and itself occurs for reasons basically irrelevant to Interface), which has its own business to attend to; and as the looking-back frame that begins the story indicates, life, and non-life, continues — not necessarily unaffected, but hardly brought to a stop.

Zen Cho, "Monkey King, Faerie Queen" (Kaleidotrope)
An entertaining, playfully told tale of a Chinese god in Britain's Faerie Court. I may not like that this is the kind of thing "SF/F" seems most interested in nowadays, but in isolation it's a fun little story.

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

Incidentally, as a corrective to the many things that bother even (or especially) me about this series of posts, I highly recommend Vajra Chandrasekera's beautiful post Atemporarility, on the subject of "keeping up" with short fiction, which I wholeheartedly endorse; I agree with every word. (With the exception of "professional," because surely not!)

Beginnings of thoughts on Nina Allan's The Race

When after a couple of weeks of knowing her I asked her if she'd read through an essay I was writing on Matilda of England she said it was excellent and that I should get serious about my writing.
        "What do you mean, get serious?" I said.
        "I mean you should stop being afraid of getting stuff wrong and put your arse on the line. Say it how it is, how you see it. You have an unusual way of looking at things, Christy. Hasn't anyone ever told you that before?"
        I shook my head.
        "Well, you have." ...
        I wondered what Robyn would think of my Sapphire journals, if I were to let her see them, of the stories I told myself about an imaginary town. They were an unusual way of looking at things, definitely. I wondered if Robyn would think they qualified as telling it like it is.

One is reminded here, almost inevitably, of Samuel R. Delany's comments (where? I can't remember right now — but they're all over the place) to the effect that in his younger days, pre-Stonewall among other things, he had to write science fiction because what he calls "mundane fiction" offered him no way (not only no models for "content" but no structures) to describe the world he saw around him and the people in it. One is reminded, but things are different here: Allan is writing sf not so much to describe the world to us as to return it to us, or us to it.

A simplistic reading of The Race would assign the first and last of its four sections to the category "science fiction," while the middle two would be assigned to the "mundane." But in a counterintuitive (or counter-received-wisdom) way reminiscent of Delany's comments these middle two sections are not the least but the most fictional, the most interior — even physically, when you hold the paper book. It is in these sections that most commentators locate the novel's "metafiction," and it is true that they are "about" writing, possibly even about the writing of the novel at hand (though this is not nearly so straightforward as some would have you believe); but any suggestion that they somehow "pull the rug out from under the sf sections" (the first of which takes place in a town called Sapphire in a world that is not our own, the second of which takes place elsewhere in an extreme but recognizable distortion of the same world, featuring recognizable distortions of some of the same characters) is simply tone-deaf. The two interior sections do not provide the ground from which the sf sections launch their fancies: if anything it is the reverse: when objects and figures and events from Sapphire are reflected (in at least one case literally, in a mirror) in the "real world" they seem almost unbelievable translocations from the more...credible? sensible? places we've seen them already. The feeling on encountering moments such as these (and others) is not aha! this is why Christy wrote x y or z; rather it is something more like now here we are moving deeper into the heart of writing.

[And Christy did not write x y or z, and not only in the so-obvious-it-bears-repeating sense in which Nina Allan wrote it all and wrote Christy too (and though I know little of Allan's biography, even in the unlikely circumstance that it mirrors Christy's in every respect, Allan still is not Christy). Read attentively and any number of details — not to mention the overwhelming feel — will make this clear.]

Deeper into writing. Familiarity with Blanchot makes it tempting to compare the trajectory traced by The Race's four sections to Orpheus's journey into and return from the underworld, and though this may not be quite right (and may be a bit overwrought) I think it is crucial to understand that this trajectory is nonlinear and non-progressive. We are not given "the real world" (Christy's life, Christy's trauma, Christy's writing, Alex's trauma, the epiphanic resolution of both traumas in the intersection of their lives) followed by the "fictional world" it produces, nor are we given the "fiction" and then given an illusion-shattering "real." (Either of these would be, as they frequently are in other works, essentially a fraud.) Nor are we given a retreat from one to the other. If this novel is interested in the production of art, it is not in the vulgar biographical sense that believes in therefores ("Her brother is linked in her mind to a disappearance, therefore she writes about a brother and a disappearance"); if it is interested in epiphanies it does not mistake them for resolution; if it is interested in the shattering of illusions it does not simply replace them with another, the illusion that the illusion has ended (or, for that matter, the illusion that now we "know better").

In one of my many false starts in writing this, I wrote something to the effect that the nonlinear trajectory of the four sections, the sf sections at the beginning and the end, project us out of the novel and into the world. And I still think it is true that the motion of this novel occurs in at least two directions in time: that as we read we move toward its beginning just as much as we move toward its end, that as we finish the novel we leave on its first words just as much as on its last; I also think it is true that, if these kinds of distinctions can be made, the sf sections are closer to "the world" than the non-sf sections. But to suggest that as we follow these multi-temporal movements we move out of the novel and into the world of reality is I think incorrect, and a misunderstanding of what reading and writing are. Such a suggestion does not mesh with the feeling I get, for example, when turning the page and finding that I'm no longer in Sapphire with Jenna but now with Christy talking about inventing Sapphire: a feeling, again, not of having had the rug pulled out from under my feet, but rather of having moved closer to the mystery that is writing. It is not real, it is crucial that we remember it's not real; but a simplistic "gotcha" or "it's only a novel" would be — far from a bit of (respectively) cleverness or maturity — a panicked and embarrassed obfuscation of both the inadequacy and the genuine power of fiction.

At such moments — and at other less obvious ones, like Jenna's walk on the marshes at the end of her section, her world opening to us as it in some senses closes to her, or those occasions on which Maree's mind brushes against the truly alien (whether terrestrial or not, whether present or not) — The Race seems to recede into the infinite, the ungraspable distance, while simultaneously coming so close, opening itself so fully and revealing everything so freely: the same double movement carried out by all writing, though most writers (Allan, at times, included) and readers (myself, certainly, included) tend to be too alarmed by it to allow it to proceed honestly; the same double movement, indeed, by which the world presents and refuses itself to us.

Short fiction recommendations - March 2015 (with some I missed from January and February)

Part two! Mostly stories from March, but last time I wasn't aware of some interesting work that had appeared in January and February (most especially Jalada's massive Afrofuture(s) issue), so I've included that as well. The list of magazines I look at has expanded a bit from last time (and I looked at these new ones back through January), though I've also dropped two (Aphelion, for being uniformly unreadable and difficult to use anyway, and Omni Reboot, for the same reasons plus god what a terrible thing that thing is). As I did last time, I'll list all the magazines I consult — if you know of any I'm missing please let me know! (And thanks to Niall Harrison for pointing me in the direction of Jalada and Words Without Borders — which, as they and a few others on my list indicate, I'm interested in non-"genre" magazines that will sometimes publish sf as well as in-"genre" magazines.)

(With three exceptions all of the magazines on this list are free online. There are some pay magazines I'm aware of that I don't subscribe to — Arc, Bastion [if it ever returns], Fantasy & Science Fiction [now that C.C. Finlay is editor I plan to resubscribe but haven't been able to yet], Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, Stupefying Stories, a few others; as finances allow I'd like to at least sample them, and if there are others I should know about let me know that, too.)

[Click here to skip the boring lists and go straight to the recommendations]

So, the magazines I now look at regularly: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's (pay), Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily SF, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone (pay), Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, Nature, New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON (pay), Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, The WiFiles, and Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in March (or, in those magazines new to my list, so far this year) in Abyss & Apex, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Expanded Horizons, Fantasy Scroll, The Golden Key, Interfictions, Interzone (more accurately, I haven't read the fiction in the March/April issue yet and will be covering it in next month's post), Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, New Haven Review, Scigentasy (I ask again: do they even still exist?), STRAEON, or Three-Lobed Burning Eye. The rest did publish new fiction, so if they are not represented in my recommendations it means I didn't find what fiction they published this month to be of any consequence. (I sometimes look at non-fiction and poetry, but don't include it in these posts.)

After this month, I plan to stop looking regularly at Beneath Ceaseless Skies (it is rare for me to love fantasy and they don't seem likely to publish those rarities; I'll look if someone asks me to and I'll follow a writer I care about there but otherwise no), Nature (because honestly), and the WiFiles (all soldiers, sadness about dead women, and rationalized religion; no thanks).

So now, arbitrarily in alphabetical order by writer name, the recommendations!

Gregory Norman Bossert, "Twelve and Tag" (Asimov's)
Thoroughly reminiscent of late-60s Delany, this story is however not pastiche but continuation — and it is both responsible and playful in that continuation. A strange story about strange people in a strange place telling each other strange stories for strange reasons; a moving, emotional story about moving, emotional stories that calls the concept and practice of moving, emotional stories deeply into question, in multiple ways. It shares, too, many of the concerns of Bossert's "Bloom," but explores them with greater integrity and deeper thought, to such an extent that it reads in (small) part almost as a critique of that earlier story — and certainly is a fulfillment of the promise it showed. Even the final page, an "action-packed" denouement that risks reducing everything that has preceded it into mere plot, manages to contribute rather than detract. Wonderful.

Suleiman Agbonkhianmen Buhari, "Discovering Time Travel" (Jalada)
This story has many things to recommend it (though neither its mostly pointless ending nor its shaky grasp of the history of knowledge is among them), but what primarily interests me is the disjunction between its brief opening, which establishes a narrator just as foreign to the story's future as we are, and the vast bulk of the story, told entirely (until the return of the narrator at story's end) in dialogue between two people completely — though differently — comfortable in that future.

Maria A. Bukachi, "Jestocost, Djinn" (Jalada)
The golden age of science fiction is twelve, they say, har har har, how clever. Well, I'm thirty-two and one of the better sf stories I read this month was written by a twelve-year-old. The notion that we adults have a lot to learn from kids is very popular when reduced to a condescending, Hallmark card-style sentiment but the sense in which it is true — and it is true — is much more complex and much more radical. Though there are ways in which greater "maturity" could perhaps have improved "Jestocost, Djinn," as it stands it dramatically reveals, among other things, that children understand — or at least this one child, Bukachi, understands — on a much more fundamental level than most adults what fiction ultimately is.

Tracy Canfield, "Bears Punching Bears!" (GigaNotoSaurus)
A curiosity: this is one of those "hectic day in the life of a person with a wacky job involving managing the weird needs of aliens" stories that I thought no one wrote anymore. The all-time master of this kind of story, for me — the only person who ever managed to do anything more than just breezy entertainment with them, and who I had thought essentially closed off the era in which they were written — is Tiptree: "Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion" especially, which periodically interrupts the entertainment with utter negation in the form of the extragalactic aliens. Canfield doesn't achieve anything close to this, but it's clear that she doesn't wish to; "Bears Punching Bears!" is light, clever, and fun (if retrogressive — capitalists in space, etc.), and I recommend it as such.

Vajra Chandrasekera, "Documentary" (Lightspeed)
"But then, after all, we are cameras, because we are nothing but perspectives. We have no meat. We remember nothing of ourselves, if we ever had selves of our own. We are the world regarding itself, hungry for somebody's narrative, anybody's narrative. And maybe we are the dead." I still think Chandrasekera isn't quite "there" yet, but it is abundantly clear that he's listening, carefully, to what the world is asking of him, and he's well on his way to responding fully.

Chikodili Emelumadu, "Story, Story: A tale of mothers and daughters" (Omenana)
Though my focus is science fiction, I would be remiss if I didn't make note of this decidedly not sf, folk-tale-esque "fantasy" (I guess?) of three generations of women in one mythically peculiar family, told with far greater integrity than most contemporary attempts at "folk tales."

C.C. Finlay, "Morytober" (Daily Science Fiction)
A quartet to Canfield's symphony, if I want to use ridiculous metaphors. Not likely to change anyone's life but entertaining nonetheless, this is a little day-in-the-life piece about a kind of human-alien diplomacy I could get behind. I particularly enjoy Finlay's over-the-top language, sometimes quasi-scientific (the alien "had drooped on its large, orbicular pseudopod" and has a "squeehole at the commisure of its lips"), sometimes from the board room ("If we can't monetize the technology, we'll monetize our efforts to monetize the technology"), sometimes both — a kind of poetry.

Maria Dahvana Headley, "The Scavenger's Nursery" (Shimmer)
All over an Earth that's this much closer to collapse than our own, "garbage babies" begin to wake up, grow, and take over. In some ways a triumph of everything that bothers me about the free indirect, in others an exhibition of everything I love about the extrapersonal perspective of sf (these two are of course frequently at odds in my reading). Periodically the story will throw out (pun unintended) a fascinating twist of language — not "beautiful writing," not "lovely sentences," but a fascinating twist of language that will suggest an openness, a spiraling outward of thoughts and events the story could have included, but wishes the reader to think about instead.

Laia Jufresa, "The Cornerist" (trans. Sophie Hughes) (Words Without Borders)
Often tedious, this story opens up at times — increasingly so as it goes on — to become one of the better stories of sfnal art that I've read, and even the tedium contributes. Among the many areas it explores are the ephemerality of art, and how trying to make art "timeless" can degrade it; and the coexistence in the artist of the awareness that (in this case) his art could not exist if not for the decadence of his society, and the feeling that the art itself is somehow nevertheless necessary — not untainted by that decadence, but not necessarily controlled by it, either.

Melissa Kiguwa, "Daughters of Resurrection" (Jalada)
In 735 words Kiguwa encompasses more than most multivolume sf epics could even imagine. "The bodies weigh something..." Perhaps most powerful here is the story's understanding of how far science can take it, and where it must depart from it — a reflection of its disgust with the way human life has been, and continues to be, rationalized into lifelessness (both figurative and extremely literal), and the way the rationalization itself is rationalized (in a different sense, but also the same) into nothingness.

Sanya Noel, "Shadows, Mirrors and Flames" (Omenana)
I'm too insular an American to know how to feel about the politics here, so I'll stay out of that. And I'm also unsure how I feel about the tendency to label stories "fantasy" (or "magical realism") that treat the perceptions of a child seriously (just as I was unsure above about calling a story in the form of a folk tale "fantasy"), but I'm glad at least right now for whatever categorization it was that brought this vicious story to my attention.

Mallory Ortberg, "It's 2050 and Feminism Has Finally Won" (The Toast)
Unlike last month's left-field entry — Sam Kriss's "Manifesto" — I don't particularly think this is "actually" a science fiction story, but I'm gonna include it here anyway and why the hell not. It made me laugh more than pretty much anything else has in a good long while (with the exception, of course, of everything else Ortberg writes).

Sofia Samatar, "A Brief History of Nonduality Studies" (Jalada)
Sofia Samatar, "Those" (Uncanny)
First, notes on a buried history, the interaction of lost pasts on the scale of human history and that of a human life: "I wrote these notes only for Sylvia, and she asked me to write them, I think, only for me, in the hope that they would lead me back into the world. 'It will help you to dream of the future,' she said, but I don't. I dream of the present, of the now." Then "Those," by my lights less successful, but even a less-successful Samatar is still a Samatar; I admire her efforts here at combining didacticism and deep feeling in the particular, risky way she does — culminating in the stunning final three words, which I wish I'd written but know I couldn't have.

Yoko Tawada, "The Far Shore" (trans. Jeffrey Angles) (Words Without Borders)
I went back and forth on this one a few times while reading it. First I thought it was just agit-prop — and even when, as here, the cause (anti-nuclear) is righteous and extremely urgent, I don't find pure agit-prop particularly interesting or (more importantly) effective. But then came a much more intriguing middle section, in which Tawada takes full advantage of the extrapersonal dimension of sf without succumbing to its inhuman tendencies, particularly thrilling in the moment in which she describes an economic-technological "new mechanism of corruption" while leaving it an open — and finally irrelevant — question whether she's concretely "worldbuilding" or engaging more in aesthetic reasoning. Throughout this section the story keeps falling into language, into writing, in a remarkable way — almost as if a number of Kafka parables have been strung together. But then the final section, in which the story descends firmly upon one individual human being while also accentuating the one area — its concept of the motivations of politicians — in which it has been most naive all along, is much weaker, for all that it can be sardonically satisfying at times. Overall, though, a fascinating, and welcome, attempt at something more politically engaged sf should be trying to do.

Tade Thompson, "The Monkey House" (Omenana)
In a sense — possibly a superficial one — this feels like a more human version of Thomas Ligotti's office stories. At times a bit too on the nose, at times a bit too "metaphorical" when what would serve better is the sheerest literalism, this story nevertheless Knows What's Up.

Laurie Tom, "Even the Mountains Are Not Forever" (Strange Horizons)
The writing is a bit too tastefully "good" (read: dreary) for me, and it stumbles a bit toward the end (where I wish it would be a bit more skeptical of its premises; as it is it comes across as pat triumphalism), but I otherwise admired this story, about continuity and change, about the transmission of knowledge. It lives very much in the space I talked about in my post on lost time, and in that regard I was particularly gratified by the religious aspects of it (though some more direct exploration of religious practice, along with a deeper insight into the experiential oddities that would come with the story's conceits, would have been even more welcome).

Michal Wojcik, "Home Untethered" (Unsung Stories)
It's hard to shake an unpleasant feeling that Wojcik's original impetus here was "what if The Doctor had no knowledge???"; and if I had been the editor I would have been ruthless with the ending (delete the whole last paragraph, maybe retaining a line or two to put elsewhere; shuffle the previous two around a bit...). That aside, this is a lovely meditation on location and dislocation, purpose and purposelessness.

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

Most of the same sadnesses I had last month remain — it's clear that there are not really good magazines (though Omenana easily puts pretty much the entire rest of the field to shame so far in its first two issues; I selfishly wish their focus was more on science fiction than fantasy!); and it's a terrible lot of plodding work and a bad kind of reading to find these relatively few good stories, even if some of them, this month more so than last, are truly great. (Last month I asked if I'd remember any of the stories in a year's time, this time I feel certain that at least the Bossert, Kiguwa, both Samatar, and Tawada stories will stay with me.) But there's a wider variety of stories here (much of this is down to Jalada and WWB and Omenana, but not all of it), everything that appeared to be a pattern last time is...not so much this time, and it increasingly seems that while there are a great deal of general things you could say about the vast bulk of bad or irrelevant contemporary short sf, there is nothing at all you can say generally about what is good. Which, I suppose, is always going to be the case.

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.