Review of The Stars Seem So Far Away by Margret Helgadottir

I am far from the most knowledgeable person on the subject, but in my web wandering and scattered reading it has certainly come to my attention that post-apocalyptic YA fiction is ‘a thing’ (or at least recently was ‘a thing’).  A sub-genre niche publishers and authors have rushed to capitalize on, the number of titles in the sphere has risen sharply.  But as with all such rushes, one must pick and choose carefully; quality requires weeding from quantity.

Margret Helgadottir The Stars Seem So Far Away (2015, Fox Spirit Books) is post-apocalyptic YA fiction.  Part of the third-wave of such texts, it wears its taxonomy on its sleeve.   But the devil is in the details. 

The Stars Seem So Far Away is ostensibly a collection.  But it quickly becomes apparent that the stories function more like point-of-view chapters, creating a cycle that rolls toward an all-inclusive conclusion.  A handful of teens anchoring this overarching story, Aida, Bjorn, Simik, Nora, Zaki, and a couple of others start at different points in a Europe torn apart by catastrophe and plague, but eventually wind up together in the same plight.  Foregoing the sensationalist details that many other post-ap YA novels seem to focus on (looking at you, Bacigalupi), Helgadottir keeps the spotlight on the young people, their interrelationships and emotional stances, and their reactions to the events they experience traversing the scarred landscape, trying to stay alive and find a better life.

Review of Sleeps with Angels by Dave Hutchinson

One of life’s little pleasures, it’s always nice to encounter a writer for the first time and discover a keen sense of style.  Mollifying whatever the actual content may be, it leaves a good first impression that goes a long way toward organizing a second encounter.  A magical ace seemingly forever up its precisely starched sleeve, Dave Hutchinson’s 2015 collection Sleeps with Angels (2015, NewCon Press) left such an impression on me.  I’m off to find his novel Europe in Autumn.

Containing six solid stories, one of which is never before published, Sleeps With Angels is, above all, very well written.  Each story carefully crafted, the prose is polished to high shine.  Like Ted Chiang, Hutchison is apparently one of those writers with a day job to pay the bills (he’s averaging about one story per year over the past couple of decades), allowing him to take his time, making sure the dross is pared away and what remains, on point.  “The Fortunate Isle”, the story leading off the collection, is a mini-police procedural that opens at the scene of a murder and quickly has the reader begging for more given the defined manner of presentation.  An elderly man shot through the head sitting in his own armchair, the woman in the house says its her husband before being whisked away to the hospital with her own emergency.  When an old Irish mafia feud turns out to be the cause, nobody is surprised.  It’s when somebody tries to steal the body, however, that the police are taken aback. 

Review of Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction

From cyberpunk’s focus on near-future political and technological concerns to the explosion of singularity/post-human texts which followed a decade or two later, science fiction has moved from one end of the temporal spectrum to the other.  Cyberpunk generally more tactile, concrete, and relevant, post-humanism, by default, spends more of its time swimming in the waters of fantasy.  Though Charles Stross is best known for conveying just how wacky the far-future can be, there are other writers who capture the incredible possibilities of super-futures in intensely aesthetic fashion.  Hannu Rajaniemi is one, and his most recent collection Collected Fiction (2015, Tachyon) is one of the imaginative reasons why.  Whether or not Rajaniemi’s short fiction as a whole was ready to be collected, however, remains another question.

Rajaniemi has one minor collection under his belt (Words of Birth and Death, three stories), which essentially makes Collected Fiction his first.  Bringing together nearly all the short fiction he has published to date, it confirms the title while adding three pieces not previously published.  Totaling nineteen stories, none stretch into novella length; all are bite-sized vignettes of radically technical futures with a dash of mythic/pagan-ized fantasy.

“Deus Ex Homine” (translated to ‘god from man’) sets the post-human tone for Collected Fiction. 

“As gods go, I wasn’t one of the holier-than-thou, dying-for-your-sins variety. I was a full-blown transhuman deity with a liquid metal body, an external brain, clouds of self-replicating utility fog to do my bidding and a recursively self-improving AI slaved to my volition. I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t Jesus, I was Superman: an evil Bizarro Superman.”(1)

Also Rajaniemi’s first published story, it tells of a man and woman separated by a godplague—an intrusion of post-humanism that destroyed the man’s corporeal humanity (he requires a head implant to tell him others’ emotional projections) and subsequently the relationship.  The emotions are a bit forced, but informs the reader of the type of story to come.  Following this story is perhaps Rajaniemi’s most celebrated short to date: “The Server and the Dragon.”  A far-far-far future story of abstract dimension worthy of Iain Banks’ Excession, it’s about a world seeding by an AI computer that possesses significantly more mythic ambiance than hard sf.  Mother Goose on post-human steroids, “Tyche and the Ants” is about a young girl cavorting on a fairy tale lunar landscape.  But it isn’t before running into the Jade Rabbit, Moon Girl, Hugbear, and the Brain AI that she meets the miscreant little “ants”.  This is the first ever post-human bedtime story for children I have ever read, and perhaps the best of this collection.

Review of Saint Rebor by Adam Roberts

Liberace revived, a neural net guillotine, robot brain builders, designer illnesses (like perfume!), endorphin drought, lunar Kafka—Adam Roberts is one of the most dynamic figures in science fiction at the moment, and his 2015 collection Saint Rebor (NewCon Press), which this list of ideas is a partial representation of, proves precisely why. 

Containing eleven stories (and one poem), three of which have never before been published, Saint Rebor is a brisk, vibrant collection that highlights the elasticity of Roberts’ imagination. “Gerusalemme Liberace” is the story of that flamboyant pianist, brought  back to life and parading the streets of the ancient city.  Preaching universal love in an awkward manner, Islamic and American governments join forces to put an end to the ‘threat’ in witty, relevant fashion.  Wikipedia defines ‘anhedonia’ as “the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable”.  After aliens arrive in the solar system, humanity experience the phenomenon in the story of the same name.  Begging aliens for the secret to interstellar travel, what are they willing to pay?

Review of Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo

I think it’s fair to say the name Paul Di Filippo is known to the majority of modern science fiction and fantasy connoisseurs but by few readers from the genre’s mainstream.  Experimental stylistically, imaginatively unlimited, in dialogue with genre, sophisticated presentation, and often ahead of his time, there is a genre radar, and Di Filippo flies under it for most of fandom.  Exhibiting these talents is his wild 1996 collection Ribofunk.  As abstract as can be, it is the off the wall science fiction written in dynamic prose that vacillates between poetic, experimental, and straight-forward narratives to present a biopunked worldview of the future. 

Like randomly hopping trains at every station, Ribofunk is a loosely connected series of stories that are definitely going somewhere but the destination is not important.  It’s the view along the way that counts for Di Filippo.  Characters and settings not the main linkages, the possibilities of human/animal biology coupled with neuroscience are the ideas cohering the collection.  And the possibilities are untamed.  “Little Worker” is the story of a human-imal servant, gene spliced sex toys, a prime minister, and southern rebels—bizarreness that works its way to a satisfactory ending.   “One Night in Television City” is that of a city boy who goes looking for drugs one night.  Getting what he wants, it takes him to the highest of highs.  But how to get down?  “McGregor”, which is Beatrix Potter’s tale of Peter Rabbit flipped on its head, spun in circles, then induced into a round or two of cartwheels is the story of how Peter looks for revenge on the farmer.  Along with the three blind mice and Flopsy, he works to free the other barnyard animals from the farmer.  With Peter puffing cigs and hanging a leary eye on Flopsy, this is not the children’s story you remember.

Review of City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer

I cannot think of a suitable place to begin my review of Jeff Vandermeer’s 2004 City of Saints and Madmen, my notes shooting off in wild directions.  I guess the title sums up the book perfectly; it is a smorgasbord of odd, paranormal, tragic, sinister, delicate, macabre, slithering, comedic, dreamlike, twisted ideas, with the eerily weird, eerily strange forever hovering in and around.  But as abstract as it may be, Vandermeer always keeps one toe in our reality, making the collection an art piece that can be enjoyed at several levels.

City of Saints and Madmen is an extremely varied conglomerate of writing.  From short story to transcribed interview, historical abstract to scientific monograph, letter to appendix, bibliography to memoire, all the pieces directly and indirectly describe the fictional city of Ambergris and its variety of inhabitants, human to mushroom.  The streets and buildings, homes and back alleys a muddy labyrinth of the industrial era, the mood of moist fungus overhangs all.  “The Story of Mr. X” regards a writer held against his will in the basement of a building.  “The Cage” tells of an antique collector and a strange piece he feels compelled to buy one day from a family experiencing a plague (of sorts).  “King Squid: Being a Brief Monograph Explaining Both the Phenomena of the Giant Freshwater Squid of Related Squid Folklore (Including the Festival of the Freshwater Squid)” is a monograph by Frederick Madnock on the rumors and scientific merits of the creature—entirely fictional, of course.  And there is much more, including an encrypted story within a story and the laugh-out-loud bibliography to Madnock’s paper.  Each piece with its own typeface and layout, the book was obviously prepared with care and an eye to the aesthetics beyond semiotics.  The entire book tied together by place, name, and idea, it was also prepared with multiple purposes in mind.

Review of Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s 2004 River of Gods was a return to writing after a three year break.  Batteries obviously recharged, the novel won the British Science Fiction Award and was nominated for others.  The premise of the book so fertile in fact, 2009 saw the publishing of Cyberabad Days, a collection of short stories and one novella—a spillover of creative effort from the novel.  While a couple of the stories have the feel of a writer in the drawing room, trying out characters and angles for a larger work, most have been polished into more-than-presentable form.  The quality of the collection building to a crescendo, the three final stories are glittering examples of the power of sci-fi in short form.  Each set in the same India of 2047 as River of Gods, the following are my notes: 

A rather standard sci-fi foot on which to start the collection, “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” tells of a poor boy and the stars in his eyes for the war mechs that battle outside his village.  Possessing little of the flare that makes McDonald such a great prose stylist, the narrative is written in straight-forward fashion compared to Riverof Gods, but has a nice ending.

Review of "Crystal Express" by Bruce Sterling

Crystal Express is a 1989 collection of Bruce Sterling short stories published between 1982 and 1987.  A variety, five of the stories are set in his Shaper/Mechanist universe made popular in Schismatrix, three are general science fiction, and four lean toward the fantasy end of genre.  The stories grouped along these lines, the following is a brief summary of each.

Shapers/Mechanist

“Swarm” (1982) – Certainly one of Sterling’s initial forays into the S/M universe if not the first, this story is poorly written (it has almost a cartoon presentation), but does a solid (if overt) job of delineating the differences between Shapers and Mechanists. Otherwise, it is the tale of two people trapped inside an asteroid filled with Investor youth and their plans for genetic modification.

“Spider Rose” (1982) – A heavily modified Shaper working alone as a deep space miner finds an unusual object for trade.  But the Investors who come looking to haggle have more than she bargained for.  A better written story than the first, not to mention containing more imagination, things turn out like no one could predict.  But then, that’s Sterling’s point when post-humanism is at play.

Review of "The Moon Moth and Other Stories" by Jack Vance

Neither prolific or close-mouthed, Jack Vance has written a few dozen short stories in his career.  And of these, “The Moon Moth” is the best.  Period.  Full stop.  End of story.  Thus, The Moon Moth & Other Stories is worth owning for the title story alone—or any other collection which contains it, for that matter.  But before I get ahead of myself, the following is a rough breakdown of the eleven stories in the VIE collection.

“The Kokod Warriors” – A funny caper involving mini-warriors on a touristy planet.  (George R.R. Martin may or may not have taken his inspiration for “Sandkings” from this.)  This story can likewise be found in a few other Vance collections.

“The New Prime” (aka “The Brain of the Galaxy”) - One man is thrown naked into a party; another suddenly faces a firefight with aliens; an artist must make impromptu mental creations; a relic hunter has his loyalty tested.  This is one of Vance’s better ideas given the insightful ending which draws these threads together.

“The Men Return” - A bizarre story with ‘80s computer animation imagery. Evolution has never been so surreal.

Review of "Pump Six and Other Stories" by Paolo Bacigalupi

Pump Six and Other Stories is a selection of short stories written between 1999 and 2008 from the up and coming Paolo Bacigalupi.  Published before the overwhelming success of his first novel, 2009’s The Windup Girl, the collection features a variety of mostly original bio- and cyberpunk stories, a handful nominated for awards.  Lacking the polished technique of many of these sub-genre’s great stylists and too often depending on shock value, the following is a brief rundown of the ten stories in the collection.

“Pocketful of Dharma” (1999) – This is the story of beggar boy Wang Jun in near-future Chengdu, China.  After a run in with a gang of thugs, Wang comes into the possession of an object that could make him rich or kill him in the offing.  Highly reminiscent of a Gibson novel (without the style), this story is a solid, but unspectacular opener to the collection.

“The Fluted Girl” (2003) – A girl named Lydia attempts to remain hidden in the castle of her patron, Baleri, who has biologically modified her and her twin sister.  A creepy story of the potential for bioengineering with a macabre, Gothic twist (reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground), it gets a bit sensationalist toward the end, but is overall a well-developed story.  Tim Burton would love it.

Review of "The State of the Art" by Iain M. Banks

The State of the Art is a collection of short fiction by Iain Banks written between’84 and ’87.  Surprisingly, it is the only such collection the author has published.  Given Banks’ fourteen mainstream novels and twelve sci-fi novels, one would expect a much larger output of short stories and novellas.  Continuing to defy expectation, all the stories in the collection (save one) are science fiction—the genre for which he is less known.  The following is a brief summary of the eight stories (three of which are Culture related).

“Road of Skulls” – Not a story in any conventional sense, the collection opens with the bickering of Mc9 and a companion whose name “he’d never bothered to find out” while they sit on the back of a cart being pulled over a road paved with enemy skulls.  A short, macabre tribute to storytelling.

Review of "Tales from Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin

In 1972 Ursula Le Guin completed The Farthest Shore and felt the Earthsea series was finished at three books.  However, in 1994 she published Tehanu:The Last Book of Earthsea in an attempt to revision the gender and social roles she’d laid out in that original trilogy.   Based on the title, this too was supposed to be the be-all, end-all.  Apparently not satisfying enough, 2001 saw Le Guin publishing two additional books in the Earthsea Cycle, The Other Wind and Tales from Earthsea, that both complement and redress the original books.  The former a novel that rounds out the entirety of Earthsea’s story into a nice whole, the latter is a collection of short stories that fills certain gaps Le Guin identified in Earthsea’s mythos.  The following is a loose breakdown of those stories.

“The Finder” – The opening story in the collection tells of the boy Otter, his imprisonment and escape, and subsequent joining of the Roke school of magic.  Not what is expected given the state of the school readers have become familiar with, Le Guin shows that education regarding wisdom and magic in Earthsea once had a different root.

“Darkrose & Diamond” is a short, simple tale of youth, lost love, and a person finding their way in life.  Traveling musicians and magic the motifs, Le Guin tells the story of a young man and the conflicts he has with an overbearing father.  A relatively light tale, thankfully Le Guin does not linger long on romantic elements, focusing instead on talent and the importance of understanding.

“The Bones of the Earth” – The shortest in the collection, it is the story of how Ogion saved Gont Town in his youth from an earthquake.  In addition to telling the real story behind the legends that have grown around the silent mage, the tale also tells of Ogion’s master and his training, proving there are different forces than nature to defy.

“On the High Marsh” is the story of a sick man wandering the wastelands of Semmel Island.  Suffering from fatigue and memory loss, the man knows only that he wants to help and heal.  He boards with a lonely family and offers what services he can to their inflicted livestock.  Given its themes of forgiveness and a new start, this may be the most emotionally impacting in the collection and is an excellent prelude to The Other Wind.

“Dragonfly” – Perhaps the least coherent story in the collection, “Dragonfly”, on top of being a sort of postscript to Tehanu, is the story of a young woman who becomes more than she is—or thought she was.  The symbolism inherent to In the tale’s conclusion slightly saccharine, not to mention the journey to that point overflowing with overt moralizing, the story nevertheless shows Le Guin walking the talk of her intentions to revision Earthsea from a feminist point of view.

“A Description of Earthsea” – Not a story, Le Guin offers a survey of the archipelago in demographic fashion.  Almost as if taken from her personal notes, the cultures, mages, history, dragons, islands, etc. are relayed in formal text that both summarizes what attentive readers already know, congealing the raw data of the setting and cultures into a single essay.

From the origins of the Roke school to the revelation of what happened to the Master Summoner in The Other Wind, Le Guin attempts to fill certain voids in the mythos of Cycle with Tales from Earthsea.  With the inclusion of thematic material like freedom of choice, gender equality, and the value of breaking from oppressive tradition, she likewise tries to bring into balance the qualities of theme in the Cycle as a whole.  Though not all the stories are award winners, they nevertheless have the desired effect: Earthsea becomes more multi-layered, and in turn relatable.  Recommended only for those who have read and loved the Cycle to date, including Tehanu.

(For those who have read the book and the Earthsea Cycle as a whole, you may be interested in reading a paper I wrote on its Daoist tenets and angles on contemporary theory called "Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle: Paralleling Contemporary Theory with an Eye to the Past".  Part I is here and Part II, here.)  

(This review has also been posted at www.fantasyliterature.com)