A space rescue and other great ideas

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In the past couple of days I've read five more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke.

The first, and my favorite so far, is "Falling Off the Edge of the World" by Suzanne Palmer. An interstellar spacecraft has been disabled by some sort of collision in whatever subspace the author posits for FTL travel. After about thirty years it is found by a crew searching along the ship's known line of travel. However, the story is revealed little by little, with many flashbacks and flash-forwards that sometimes confused me. The "light javelin" that speared the craft, it turns out, was peopled by enigmatic, benevolent aliens called "The E", and it is apparently their technology that enabled the human craft, and surviving crew, to live thirty years until rescue. They are either invisible in some way or too small to be seen. Rather than reveal (spoil) more, I'll mention a couple of unique ideas. Part of the spacecraft's hull has been re-formed into a kind of cocoon that protects it from random impacts and preserves the atmosphere. From outside it looks like a silkworm cocoon. Something The E put into tea preserves the health of Gabe, the man at one end of the ship, who cannot go to the other end because of the damage. The story is bittersweet, heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

Another story with an extension of current technology, and a political throwback (hardly unlikely, actually) to a more feudal age, is "When the Tide Rises" by Sarah Gailey. The main character (never named, as I recall) works to gather sea urchins in a kelp farm. Sea urchins eat the holdfasts and stalks of kelp, thus ruining the crop. 

Urchin harvesting is being done now, partly by professionals and partly by volunteers, at a number of natural kelp forests, to restore them. The sea urchins are multiplying because the sea otters that prey on them are a threatened species and may go extinct. Hardly anything else preys on the sea urchins. Nothing fast enough to stay ahead of their powers of multiplication, at any rate.

The kelp farm is a "company town," with all the evils that historical reference implies. An old song about mining goes, "Sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt. / St. Peter, don't call me, 'cause I can't go, / I owe my soul to the company store." The urchin picker of the story is in a similar pickle. The story ends with a possible out, but we don't know if she will take it.

One story is about "past life reconstruction", which is something I can't bring myself to take seriously. No trace of Hinduism in my soul, folks.

The story "A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language" by Nian Yu is a fresh take on alien invasion. Beinakans are tiny aliens from a water world similar to Europa but larger, with an ocean several thousand km deep, with an ice cover. They have a symbiotic relationship with another sentient species, the Ilian, which are a hundred times as large. Together, the two species, after 40,000 years of co-existence, find a way to penetrate the ice cap and discover the rest of the universe. Almost immediately, they find that a not-too-distant star is about to explode as a supernova. The star is called Rigel in the story, but I suspect the author was thinking of Betelgeuse and just doesn't know a lot of astronomy. Spaceships can be produced for the Beinakans to use to flee, but the Ilians can't go.

The story is told as "capsule memories", which refers to a way the Beinakans and Ilians pass on knowledge and history from generation to generation. In their fleeing, a Beinakan ship finds Earth, which has also been devastated by the supernova, but small numbers of humans are found to have survived. Naturally, the Beinakans take over. The result isn't pretty. I'll leave it at that.

Finally, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man" by Rich Larson is an ugly but effective story of a manufactured assassin and its target. This "butterfly" has nothing positive about it! The author's expertise is crafting highly convoluted plotlines. That, and being a potty mouth. This story is unusual in that I didn't like it but I was driven to complete reading it. The idea of some kind of crystal mind and memory, such that each successive butterfly man has all the memories of prior ones, is rather unsettling.

We're doing pretty well so far. A good number of stories that I am glad I read, and very few that I either skipped or was chagrined to have read.