Ideas in abundance

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, utopias, dystopias, robots, zombies

By page count I am a bit more than a third of the way through The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. I reviewed stories in the first volume in six posts, beginning with SF from everywhere, almost a year ago. As with that volume, I'll review story by story, 12 in this post, focusing on new ideas.

"The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi (Bahrain). It takes an aging woman a very long time to come to terms with the death wish within. A technological ability to experience a dying person's last moments don't seem to make her journey any easier than ours.

"The Ten-Percent Thief" by Lavanya Lashminarayan (India). With most of the world a slum of poisoned air and water, devoid of nature, a woman risks her life to plant a single flower bulb outside the protected enclave of a city of the rich.

"At Desk 9501" by Frances Ogamba (Nigeria). A technology permits those with the constitution to live extra-long lives to confer some of their lifetime to extend the lives of others who are dying untimely, for a fee of course. The life-givers experience side consequences.

"Milagroso" by Isabel Yap (Philippines). One translation of "milagroso" is "miracle". A producer of technological miracles is confronted with the real thing. Magical reality, in a controlled, subdued way.

"Bring Your Own Spoon" by Saad Z. Hossain (Bangladesh). In a dystopia that is not too different from much of life in Bangladesh, a poor man who is a superb cook is helped by a Djinn to open a restaurant for the dirt-poor, who can pay only with bartered goods. Of course it is illegal, and doesn't last, even with the power of the Djinn. Magical reality with a slightly hopeful ending.

"Blue Grey Blue" by Yukimi Ogawa (Japan). It's ambiguous whether the colors seen are in the world around or the eyes themselves. In this fantasy, eye colors and the colors of the people change with mood and the fortunes of life.

"Your Multicolored Life" by Xing He (China), translated by Andy Dudak. This seems peripherally related to The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain, without the happy ending. I would retitle it "The Slave and the Scholar". Two men do indeed change places, and though the circumstance of each is actually improved, it doesn't last.

"The Easthound" by Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica). A kind of zombie story, where all adults became monsters that destroyed and devoured first each other, and then attempted to do so to their children. Some children survived by killing the remaining "sprouted ones". Then they learned that puberty results not in adulthood, but in "sprouting" as a monster. It's the most dystopian story I have ever read; the extinction of humanity is at most a dozen years in the future.

"Dead Man Awake, Sing to the Sun!" by Pan Haitian (China), translated by Joel Martinsen. Not all who die are fully dead. Some are undead, and the undeadness is spreading, transmitted by a bite. Perhaps the human race is being transformed into a new kind of creature that cannot die all the way dead. Zombie or vampire, or both?

"Salvaging Gods" by Jacques Barcia (Brazil). AI to the max. Manufactured gods, and at least the one limned in this story can perform miracles of the sort that genies (or Djinn) perform in Arabian folk tales. But nothing lasts, for God is flawless, while these gods are flawed.

"The Next Move" by Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), translated by Jessica Sequeira. An occupying soldier has gone rogue, "saico" (psycho) in the parlance of the story, which has a number of phonetic spellings of colloquialisms. Of course he is eventually "eliminated". Much of the story is his own stream of consciousness.

"The Child of Clay" by Dilman Dila (Uganda). A robot world, in which the strongest motivation is reproduction, by a technology full of mystery. One robot is childless, and in seeking a solution, returns biological life to a barren land. It took a page or two to realize that "rit" and "rits" are pronouns, the pronouns "it" and "its" preceded by an "r" for "robot". I suppose the making of new pronouns arose from the recent "choose your own pronouns" fashion. That's the closest to anything positive to arise from recent "woke" fashions.

By comparison with the best stories I've read in recent anthologies of both science fiction and mainstream fiction published in the US, nearly all of the stories in Best of World SF are better.