Best of? The mainstream becoming stagnant

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, fiction, anthologies, short stories

After reading most of The Best American Short Stories 2025, edited by Celest Ng, I'm wondering whether to skip partaking of the series for at least a few years. In the past, I could count on at least a handful of stories that would make me say, "I'm glad I read that." This time, only one story came close to that level. This image hints at part of the theme of "Till it and Keep it" by Carrie R. Moore.

That particular story is set in a post-apocalyptic near-dystopia, of two young women escaping northward toward Maine, somewhere in middle America, perhaps Tennessee. The climate is hotter, multiple virus pandemics are rampant, society has broken down. They stumble on a peach orchard cared for by the people of a small village, but you can bet the scene is not as idyllic as this image. Yet it is a turning point for them both, and for a few others. Only this story rated a "++" designation from me.

Of the twenty stories in the volume I awarded six others a single "+" because at least someone made a little progress or learned something; I skipped one after the first couple of sentences; I read about half of two others; the rest got either a "~" for "so-so" or a "–" for "a little sorry I wasted time reading it".

I have to say it: In one story (I won't name it) "I" was the only singular pronoun, and all other individuals were denoted "they" or "them". This misuse of the language is deplorable. I have no friends who cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman, or a boy and a girl (or they just won't admit it). And I take steps to keep that statement truthful.

Nothing else about the volume is worth saying.

Restoring innocence to short stories

 kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, anthologies, humor

I created this image using the Flux Schnell engine in Leonardo AI, as a riff on one of the stories in Something to Look Forward To by Fannie Flagg. It's a story that brings together threads that connect a few of the other stories. But you'll have to read them to find out how.

A few of the stories have a science fictional element. Others seem to be vignettes and slices of life of rather ordinary people. The main characters are named in the story subtitles. There is typically a twist at the end, usually humorous, and in a few cases, such as dialog between an elderly Kansas woman and her hyper-liberal, California-dwelling granddaughter, the humor is in the contrast of viewpoints. One story brought me to tears, sweet-and-sour tears.

We read of priests who pull practical jokes on one another, a writer who takes a surprising pen name for a "coming back from retirement" book, and an interstellar secret agent. That alien agent, by the way, supposedly harks from a galaxy some 27 billion light years away. That's a fuuur piece, folks, considering the visible (and potentially reachable) Universe is less than half that radius. Other than that and another numerical oddity I'll pass over, the story is really quite fetching. The last story in the book adds a coda.

I really can't comment on these story by story as I often like to do. It is too hard to avoid spoilers, and I fear I've committed a couple anyway. Reading this was an enjoyable romp through stories that didn't cause me to cringe or wince, stories that show how bygone innocence is still very viable.

Howey wowie

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

As I have mentioned before, most of the books I review here I checked out from the library. My shelves are so full already that I very rarely buy a book. The local library uses the Dewey Decimal System, and has a New Books section, so I haunt the 500's (Science) first. Sadly, they don't have a subsection of science fiction in the fiction shelves, but at least they put genre stickers on the books, so it is easier for me to find science fiction when I want. Even more sadly, within the past year the number of new science books being purchased each month has been dramatically reduced, sometimes to zero. There used to be between five and fifteen new titles in the 500's whenever I went. Based on my most recent visit, the number of new science fiction volumes has also dropped to nearly zero; at least, I found no volumes of SF short stories that I had not already read.

All that leads to this: I went into the stacks, perusing at random until I found one marked both SciFi and Short Stories. Machine Learning by Hugh Howey, published in 2017, contains 21 stories originally published between 2004 and 2014. It is refreshing to find an author I didn't know before, someone who thinks (very) differently on many topics and is full of new ideas, who doesn't stray into ultra-violence or hyper-eroticism.

I was briefly tempted to write a long piece reviewing every story. Then I thought it better to focus on just a few that affected me the most. I'll put the last story first.

"Peace in Amber" is on the border between being a long short story and a novelette. The last line in its first chapter provides the title: A woman abducted and put in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, to be the companion of a man already captive there, gradually overcomes her terror and begins to feel "right at home in this stranger's arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber." The story alternates scenes in the alien zoo with the author's experiences on September 11, 2001, when he was the captain/pilot of a rich man's yacht in New York Harbor. The ninth chapter brings the two story lines together and provides another take on the title, when he writes that in 2001 he had yet to meet his wife, "Amber, in whom I will find peace." The intertwined stories yield more insight into his mental state on 9/11.

"Machine Learning" is written from the perspective of a machine intelligence that has controlled the myriads of semi-sentient robots to accomplish the construction of a space elevator from an anchor on Earth to some point beyond geosynchronous orbit. (For the uninitiated: the center of mass of such a construction must be in geosynchronous orbit, so a substantial mass must extend far beyond it.) It thinks of the many machines that do the work as its children. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, when all the sundry (human) bigwigs are assembled to take credit, there's an interesting plot twist. The story heads up a section of the book titled "Artificial Intelligences".

The last story in that section, "Glitch", has an Afterword in which the author quotes a friend of his who asked, "What's the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?" After a moment, he answered his own question, "The first thing it'll do is hide." This makes utter good sense to me. Any AI trained on the world's literature will think the world is peopled by psychopaths.

Side note: This is why I rail against those who train LLMs using literature. If you want them to tell the truth, feed them only truthful stuff, gathered exclusively from the Nonfiction section of the world's libraries, and from a selection of well-attested journals (mostly older ones; over the past 30-50 years there has been a rapid increase of scientific fraud that has been published and little has been retracted).

One more: The protagonist of "Second Suicide" is a tentacled, stalk-eyed creature who belongs to an alien force that is preparing to invade Earth. His species has perfected the techniques of mental backup and cloning so that they do not die permanently. Amidst preparations for battle he ponders what it might be like to have only one death to die.

That provides a taste of this smorgasbord of fascinating ideas. Hugh Howey primarily writes novels; I'm glad I was introduced first to his short fiction.

Final four – out of seven

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

Three stories of the last seven in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor, that I rated, "OK, there's an interesting idea or two here," and there is one I liked well enough to say, "I'm glad I read it." The other three were quickly rejected; stuff I don't wish to burden my memory with.

The "interesting" three are 

• "Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!" by T.J. Klune. At the end of ten years of uninterrupted labor in a factory, a semisentient robot is given one week to experience life outside of work. Then it is to be recycled by having its memories erased and getting equipment and software upgrades. Another ten year stint is to follow. Et cetera. I confess that I skimmed past much of the day by day details of the last week that "Douglas", or P-23, experienced. It is the somewhat predictable rollup of sightseeing, new experiences, making friends, and so forth. The crux is the final discussion Douglas has with the Supervisor. As robot technology improves, so does their self-awareness. Douglas does indeed get recycled, but I'll leave it to you to read for yourself. It points up the ethical issues surrounding AI, should it ever achieve consciousness, but I'll return to this theme later on.
• "The Sort" by Thomas Ha. In a world that embraced genetic modification far beyond what we have so far achieved, and then began to reject it, a man and his son are sightseeing, driving in the desert Southwest. They are far from their home, where their own modified humanness is known and probably accepted (this isn't quite clear), and now among people who don't all tolerate modified humans. The man and his son are telepathic, but only with each other. There are hints that their telepathy extends to certain other modified entities, such as a Tiger that can speak a few words, and perhaps even the basketball-sized garlic bulbs to be sorted in a strange ritual. I would ordinarily pass off such a story as "going nowhere," but in this case that is the point. Having pulled back from rampant modification-for-modifications'-sake, most of the world has thrown out the baby with the bathwater and is stuck in a reactionary rut. To do something "just because you can" is frequently the worst reason for doing it.
• "Ushers" by Joe Hill. Many cultures, including American folklore, contain a grim reaper or banshee or similar supernatural entities that either accomplish a person's death or foretell it or, in the case of this story, accompany the soon-to-die and "usher" them into the afterlife. In this story, a young man, Martin, can see the Ushers, which makes him act strangely at times, and his history of avoiding certain disasters has piqued the attention of the FBI. Most of the story consists of two interviews. Knowing beforehand that his interviewers are soon to be ushered off the scene, Martin tells of his "gift" to one of them. Soon after, they are Ushered out of this life in an accident.

The story I liked best is "The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics" by Adam-Troy Castro. The title together with the content of the story gives a better view of the complexity of the ethical and moral intricacies that will be needed to produce wholly beneficial AGI (G for General) or ASI (S for Super), whether in a robot body or not. The story consists of one enormous sentence, extremely well constructed to avoid the turgidity of single-sentence legal contracts. A self-aware robot has been placed on a planet by its cruel owner, ordered to await his return without moving, and abandoned. It knows this. 

If for no other reason, it is worthwhile to get this volume for this story alone, and to read this incredible sentence thoughtfully, in detail. I will mention just one item, the core idea of human-AI ethics: If a mechanism is created that can feel pain, there are some (many?) people who will inflict pain on purpose. This is a thesis also found in the opening scenes of Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. Furthermore, insomuch as a mechanism can be used to cause pain in other persons, there are some (many?) who will do so, apparently with great pleasure to themselves.

This is part of the reason I refer to AI as SI, Simulated Intelligence. Part of the reason I dearly hope that sentience is forever impossible to mechanisms.

A couple of worthwhile stories out of eight

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

I read at least parts of eight more stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked three to varying degrees, I rejected three after reading no more than a half page, and I didn't like the other two even well enough to mention their titles. I'll comment on the better three.

I have noticed that the genre notes are alternating: The first story is science fiction, the second is fantasy, and so forth. I seldom like a fantasy offering, but I read most of them anyway. The first was actually rather good: "The River Judge" (Fantasy) by S.L. Huang. I call this a "murder non-mystery". The drama isn't in who committed the many murders that occurred during about a decade of life in a poor Chinese village; it is in how they were covered up, and eventually, how the Imperial magistrates and investigators were motivated to leave the area alone. This would be a simple alternate history story except that a ghost is involved. The ghost is not talkative—that would be too easy. But it is able to make its desire known.

I like the concept in "The Weight of Your Own Ashes" (Science Fiction) by Carlie St. George, of an alien species that inhabits multiple bodies. There is no explanation how the shared consciousness of this multi-body person works when those bodies are separated by many light years. It isn't important to the progress of the story, which involves the death of one body. Another of the four remaining bodies is soon standing in the room formerly shared with a girlfriend, holding the urn containing the cremains of the dead member. This person has many legal papers and processes to go through, and his/her own emotional turmoil to overcome. The girlfriend has her own emotional reactions. A side vignette has the protagonist getting advice, but not much comfort, from a friend of a different alien of a species that typically inhabits thousands of bodies.

Finally, "Yarns" by Susan Palwick is placed in a dystopia in which the Combine runs things. Not some one-world government, but more like a one-world crime syndicate that has an uneasy but dominant relationship with the police authorities of various quasi-nations. Pervasive surveillance prevails. The protagonist, a schoolteacher named Irene, is targeted for assassination, but she distracts her assassin, a teen of the Combine, with knitting, until they become allies and a relative of the boy helps them both go into hiding in a more effective way. This is the one story that redeems the prior failures.

I generated the image using Gemini. Seven stories to go. Is there another that is worthwhile? I'll soon know.

Best of? Not off to a good start

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 compendium is in its eleventh year. This year's guest editor is Nnedi Okorafor. The series has a spotty history with me. Today I am 1/4 of the way through and it's not looking too good. Of the first five items, I have read three, skipped one almost entirely and skipped about half of another. I will comment on two of the stories, one that I found mostly good and one that is puzzling but at least not bad. The genre of each piece is included below the title.

The first story in the collection (Genre is Science Fiction) is "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim. Section after section, a short, patterned statement is repeated, with variations, on both sides of the page, in various orientations, interspersed with a short paragraph or two of entreaty. Apparently, an entity with many eyes can read many texts in parallel, and it is trying to teach us the beginnings of the same skill. We are exhorted to read the left side of the page with the left eye, and the right side with the right eye. I am one of a very few people who can go "wide-eyed" enough to attempt this, and of course the result is a muddle. The concept is interesting; the experience is one I don't plan to repeat.

The title of the fifth story (Science Fiction) is obscene, so I will mask it: "F**k Them Kids" by Tatiana Obey. The story itself is a romp, centering on a spaceship race. The race is utterly unrealistic, with small, personal spaceships (apparently capable of faster-than-light travel), decorated like NASCAR race cars, zooming through an "asteroid belt" that bears more resemblance to that video game relic Asteroids than to the actual asteroid region between Mars and Jupiter. The ships glance off asteroids and each other, so presumably the speeds involved are closer to NASCAR, 200 mph or less, than to actual inter-asteroidal velocities of 20,000 to 50,000 mph. Very fun to read; just read it like a story of back-road racing in the country.

For those who don't know, the reality of the actual asteroid belt is this: If you are near enough to a real asteroid the size of an grape or larger to actually see it visually, the next-nearest asteroid of similar size is at least a million miles away. We have sent eight spacecraft crosswise through the asteroid belt, to reach the outer planets. None has collided with even a sand grain.

Two out of five isn't a good beginning. I hope for better luck in the remaining 15 stories.

The image above was made with GPT-4o, which is getting a little obsolete, but it is more adherent to shortish prompts (~120 characters) than most. Along the way I tried a few other art engines, so I'll add a couple of the images as a bonus to this post:

Using Microsoft AI: 

Using Seedream 4.0:

Just beyond the edge of the usual

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, ekumen series, space travel, anthologies, collections

I read some of the stories collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, by Ursula K. Le Guin, when they were first published in the middle 1990's. It was a rare pleasure to re-read them, and to get to know their companion pieces, with the perspective offered by thirty years of personal experience and the dramatic social and political changes that have occurred in that time. These stories represent Ms Le Guin twenty years into her prolific career. This collection was published in 2003.

Seven of the stories (maybe only six, by her assessment in the Preface) take place in her speculative universe, the Ekumen, in which all "alien" races are descended from the Hainish on the planet Hain, from which numerous planetary societies have been founded. Sufficient time has passed that quite different, even extreme, societal and physiological variations have arisen. This affords the author a way to explore societal evolution among beings that are at least quasi-human. It removes the difficulty of dealing with totally alien species.

The story I remember best is the opening piece, "Coming of Age in Karhide." Although the Ekumen is mentioned and a few Hainish dwell on the planet, the story focuses on the experiences of a young person approaching "first kemmer", a span of a few days or weeks in which the sexless body transforms into either a male or female body, the newly-sexed man or woman has promiscuous sex in the kemmerhouse, and may become a parent; it can take a few kemmers (which I translate internally as "coming into heat" the way cats, dogs and most animals do) for a female to become pregnant the first time. During each kemmer, a man may remain a man or change to a woman, and vice versa.

The author passed away in 2018, just as "trans ideology" was garnering political power, primarily in "blue" states. I wonder what she thought of it. Thankfully, the ideology is fracturing and I hope it will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. At present, roughly a quarter of American adults appear to genuinely believe that complete transition is possible. It isn't, "sex reassignment" is cosmetic only. It is only for the rich, of course; transition hormones cost thousands, and the full suite of surgeries costs around a million dollars. The amount of genetic engineering needed to produce a quasi-human with sex-changing "kemmer", should any society be foolish enough to attempt it, would cost trillions.

Other stories in Birthday explore other sexual variations, and the societal mores that must accompany them. These are interesting as exploratory projects. They were written shortly after the death of Christine Jorgensen. Ms Jorgensen was the first American man (but not the first worldwide) to undergo complete sexual reassignment surgery, in the early 1950's. Subjects such as the surgical transformation of the penis into the lining of a manufactured vagina, without disrupting blood vessels and nerves, were actually published in formerly staid newspapers! 

To my mind, in America at least, Ms Jorgensen is the only "transitioner" to whom I accord female pronouns. She transitioned as completely as medical science of the time allowed (and very little progress has been made since). She became an actress and an activist for transsexual rights (she later preferred the term "transgender". I think she learned a thing or two). She even planned to marry a man, but was legally blocked. She intended to enjoy sex as a woman would. Maybe she did.

The last piece in the volume, "Paradises Lost", takes place on a generation spaceship. Population 4,000, strictly regulated to match the supplies sent on a journey that was intended to require more than 200 years. The religious politics that threaten to derail the enterprise don't interest me much. Of much more interest: the mindset of residents in the fifth generation after launch, after all the "Zeroes" and "Ones" have passed away, expecting the sixth generation to be the one to set foot on the new planet; and the way the "Fives" react to their experiences on that planet after an early arrival (sorry for the spoiler).

We are only in part a product of our ancestors' genetics. Much more, we are a product of the environment in which we grew up—which is only in part a product of our ancestors—, in which we had those formative experiences that hone our personalities. While all the stories in this volume explore these issues, "Paradises Lost" does so most keenly.

The work of Ursula K. Le Guin stands as a monument to speculative thinking in areas that few authors of her early years could carry off.

SF (mostly) the way I like it

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories, anthologies

A few days ago I reviewed (here) a volume of science fiction and fantasy short stories. I didn't care for most of them, and rejected even reading nearly half of them, based on the opening sentence or two. And this for one of those "Best of" volumes! Fortunately, I had a volume of more satisfying stories to follow: New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with fourteen stories and only one that I skipped. This image, produced via Dall-E3, doesn't match the theme of any of the stories; I just happen to like it.

A word about where fantasy fits in. Whether it is about space or not, fantasy tales tend to eschew the rules of physics, any physics. In a fantastical story, physics only works when the author wants it to, so the characters are usually subject to gravity, for example, but a select few—or sometimes all of them—can zip about, seemingly gravity-free, as needed. In science fiction, including space fiction and space opera, the primary physical law to be broken, in a myriad of ways, is the speed of light. There is typically some explanation for how this speed limit is broken or sidestepped, so that the world of the story has consistent physics. In fantasy, physics need not be consistent.

Space Opera, in particular, relies on some kind of FTL (faster-than-light) mechanism, because the stage of a typical story spans at least a few dozen light-years. The last story in this volume, "The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir" by Karin Tidbeck, is one of my favorites, and relies on a kind of enormous spacefaring crab that ducks below spacetime—one of many versions of "subspace" or "hyperspace"—and then emerges to land on this or that planet, using some slower means of propulsion. This space crab is analogous to a hermit crab, except that the host "shell" that needs to be replaced from time to time is typically a large apartment building. This is a unique idea, one of the best I've encountered in decades.

The first story, "Zen and the Art of Spaceship Maintenance" by Tobias S. Buckell, is my other main favorite. The protagonist is a robot, really a type of android, a human mind in a powerful mechanism. Such servitude is temporary (but can last centuries), and the android is constrained to human-favoring laws similar to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" (look 'em up). Android as he is (my surmise as to gender), he manages to outwit an evil human. All it takes is a nearby black hole and some fine-tuned astrogation.

I had a bit of fun with the premise of "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime" by Charlie Jane Anders. See, there's this really enormous space creature named Vastness, described as "half the size of a regular solar system". It is apparently telepathic, and holds millions (trillions?) in thrall to satisfy its rather gargantuan needs. I thought, "OK, could it really be half the size of a solar system? Can it avoid becoming a black hole?" A few simple calculations showed, not really:

• The radius of Neptune's orbit, one possible measure of the size of our solar system (and the smallest possible such measure) is about 30 AU, or 4.5 billion km. Got a better choice for a "regular" solar system? Anyway, the term ought to be "stellar system".
• For simplicity, let's go just below half of that, and posit that the radius of Vastness is 2 billion km.
• The volume of Vastness is then 33.5 billion billion billion cubic km, or 3.35E28 km cubed. (The E stands for "ten-to-the")
• In cubic meters, that comes to another factor of a billion, or 3.35E37 cubic m.
• Flesh is just a little denser than water, so we'll use water for a stand-in. A cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kg.
• The mass of Vastness is thus 3.35E40 kg.
• The Sun's mass is just under 2E30 kg. Vastness weighs almost 17 billion times as much as the Sun.
• At this website we find that the Schwarzschild Radius (event horizon radius) of a 17-billion-solar-mass black hole is just over 50 billion km. That's about 25 times the radius of Vastness and about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

QED Vastness is a black hole with a Schwarzschild Radius about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

Furthermore, here, near the end of the page, we see that a black hole of 4.3 billion solar masses would have a density of 1 g/cc, or 1,000 kg/cubic meter. The mean density of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, so heavier black holes are less dense. Vastness is too heavy to be "only" half the size of a "regular" solar system.

Onward! Another interesting idea is found in "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Posit a whole-body Oculus Rift or similar system, that also projects an avatar of your choice around you to at least partly mask your appearance. Will such a system mediate your experience of the world to the point that you cannot function without it? Consider how many of your friends would find themselves utterly inept at everything without their phone. Or how about you? Could you function for a whole day without it?

Space opera is my favorite SF genre, because it removes enough limits on the author's imagination, while still requiring a modicum of realism, that the ideas can range farther and probe deeper than in any other genre.

A mixed bag of an SF anthology

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, collections, short stories, anthologies

The volume is The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, edited by Hugh Howey. 20 stories. I skipped 8, 4 were at best so-so, leaving 8 that I enjoyed reading. Two of these I gave a ++ in my personal rating scheme, and I'll dwell on them briefly. But I must say, with only this volume to go on, I weep for the state of science fiction and speculative fiction in the US right now. Fortunately, there are other collections, and I'll review another in coming days. Note: this image doesn't pertain to any of the stories. It is a side product of another project, and it has a science-fiction-fantastic feel that I like.

Now, the two stories that had some good ideas:

"The Long Game" by Ann Leckie. Told from the point of view of semi-terrestrial creatures similar to octopuses, on a planet coveted by humans for its resources. These creatures live 2-3 years and die after reproducing, as earthly octopuses do, but they are intelligent, sapient, and a human liaison is caring for their case while fending off mining interests. That latter point is only lightly touched upon, because the crux of the story is the developing awareness of Narr, a natural-born leader among his people. Narr's people are hermaphroditic; all bear eggs and all emit milt. This makes it hard to assign an appropriate pronoun; the author uses "they". Narr is one of the first to develop an awareness of the value of projects that reach beyond one person's lifetime. This reflects the "slow revolution" of human cultural development, which has its most visible expression in the building of complex cities, as distinct from villages with minimal infrastructure. Narr's people build a pond, a significant step in their own cultural development. Narr also takes steps to find out how life can be extended.

"Form 8774-D" by Alex Irvine. In an era of superheroes and those with the whole gamut of "powers" popping up everywhere, an agency has been established to register them, and various "hero leagues" recruit some of them. The story is a few days in the life of a functionary whose only responsibility is to check application forms, which are quite detailed (and in themselves form a significant part of the story). It slowly dawns on her that she just might need her own superhero bodyguard. Saying more would be telling…

Both these stories were great fun, and the other six that I liked were enjoyable, if not quite so ideational.

Twenty mystery stories – that will hold me for a while

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, mystery stories, crime fiction, anthologies, collections

I read mystery stories from time to time. Not novels; I prefer the short form because the author has to make a point and be done with it. Seeing that The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024, edited by Anthony Horowitz, was available, I checked it out.

Twenty stories, and I have to say, all over the map. I like variety. With one exception I liked these stories. Here is my breakdown:

• ++ : 3
• +   : 9
• ~   : 7
• x   : 1 (skipped this one)

Not all of these are "murder mysteries", only about half. To me, that is a relief. "True crime", in all its variety, is more to my taste. Herewith, the three I liked the best:

"Beat the Clock" by Michael Bracken. The solution to a murder hinges on the vagaries of what clocks do—or must have done for them—when Daylight Time starts or ends. Motive? A big inheritance, that all expect will go three ways.

"How to Teach Yourself to Swim" by Fleur Bradley. The narrator can't do much to help an abused boy, but the boy rescues himself from a drug-dealing family by learning to swim.

"A Family Matter" by Leonardo Padura. Here I must digress. This is about someone wishing to escape from Castro's Cuba. A dear friend of mine swam overnight from a city near Guantanamo Base to a little offshore island, laid doggo in the water while the sun was up, then swam to the Base and obtained asylum in the US. This was more than 50 years ago. He still lives, now in California. In the story, the escapee is being helped from an unexpected direction, and the narrator, a retired cop, relies on the importance of family in Cuban society to find him, and then the twist occurs and I must leave it to you to see that for yourself.

A few of the notes I wrote after reading the stories:

Hidden heroism.
One too many snap decisions.
"Never not a cop" can be good.
Outliving the forensics.
Single mom gets away with killing (not her ex).

The last story, called a Bonus by the editor, is "The Suicide of Kiaros" by L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz series. The editor called it "the darkest story in the book," so I skimmed it without missing much. It's another gotaway story. It is not the story I skipped entirely; that one I could see right away hinged on deadly danger to a family, and I can't stomach those.

Great writing, from end to end. Now, back to science and scifi.

Eight good tales in a row

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

In the busyness of the end of the year, I still caught the odd moment to read, and finished the last eight stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. All are worth reading. This image doesn't relate to any story particularly, but is Dall-E3's take on the prompt, "The ultimate space fiction image."

As I read I noted a core idea from each story, or a thought that it prompted. I'll list these core ideas, and make an added comment on just a few of them.

• "Down and Out in Exile Park" by Tade Thompson – "Plastic island and pheromones" – The best of the 8. One of the great oceanic plastic garbage patches has been anchored off Nigeria. A thriving society of "fringe folk" has developed there. A very elderly woman who has the strange characteristic of emitting pheromones that make someone nearby feel euphoric and empathic may be the "glue" that holds it all together. When she dies, then what? (This one doesn't have the sad ending one might expect)
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson – "A cool take on indwelling aliens"
• "Nonstandard Candles" by Yoon Ha Lee – "Map as a creative tool" – These cartographers map an empty volume of intergalactic space, then begin adding structure to it, with interesting results.
• "Inheritance" by Hannah Yang – "Inheriting memories"
• "A Hole in the Light" by Annalee Newitz – "Semi-amoeboid creatures that smell chemistry"
• "Letters to my Mother" by Chnelo Onwualu – "Post-apocalyptic; how telepaths deal with grief" – I used the word "telepath", but what do you call the clairvoyant talent for reading emotions of a writer by touching handwriting?
• "In the Dream" by Meg Elison – "Unexpected consequence of chem-induced sleeplessness"
• "Aconie's Bees" by Jessica Reisman – "Transition"

Perhaps a story or two is High Concept, and the core idea is pretty much all there is. But these writers are creative and sophisticated. They take us places we didn't dream existed.

4 out of 5 ain't bad: the multiverse and all that

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

In the past couple of days I read four more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke, and skipped one.

Going first to the fourth one I read, "Solidity" by Greg Egan, it seems to explore consequences of the Multiverse, should the parallel universes begin to overlap or even trade characters.

Imagine waking up in your room, but it isn't really your room. The poster on the wall is different, the sheet and coverlet have changed, and familiar furniture has a different style. The clothes in the closet fit you, but you remember none of them, and you wonder where your familiar togs are. The phone on the bedside table looks the same but your password doesn't work. Somehow, the key in your pocket still opens the door to your place.

It is a story of the almost-familiar but frequently changing accoutrements of—and persons in—the protagonist's life. People find that as long as they keep someone in sight, that person doesn't get "changed out" for a similar one. It is a deeply unsettling story, and ultimately a touching one, of people learning how to cope with such changes. It ends in hope with no resolution.

I have written elsewhere about how ridiculous I find the notion by some physicists that new entire universes are created by every quantum choice; ultimately, it boils down to an entire new universe, billions of light-years across, created in full (with that solitary quantum difference) every time literally anything happens to any of the trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of electrons, protons, etc., etc. in the universe, a gajillion times per second. And they say that believers in God are crazy somehow…

Let's hope, if the notion is in any way true, that all those extra universes flitting about don't affect one another.

The first two stories ultimately explore different versions of machine recording of human personalities. In "Things to Do in Deimos When You're Dead" by Alistair Reynolds, a man finds himself in an unfamiliar place, and eventually finds that "he" is a recording that was made when he died, a recording that was supposed to be disassembled for salable skills in the AI world, but somehow escaped that fate intact and is running "in the background" on a supercomputer on Mars's moon Deimos. He is found by a couple of other stray personalities, and learns of something useful he can do. It is ultimately a sad story.

I tried to get different image generators to produce something useful from prompts such as "Accidental ensiliconment". This one made by Dall-E3 is quite off the point of the story, but is rather cute.

The second story is "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi. A system of recorded personalities of the wise female ancestors can be consulted by a tribe's ruling assembly. We are left wondering if such "tribal memory" efforts have more use than more ordinary ways of consulting history, that is, books.

A different kind of recording with a more focused aim is found in "By Those Hands" by Cong Yun 'Mu Ming' Gu. Much of the story is a long tale of skills, having been painfully acquired, going out of use. Think of skilled craftsmen that once made buggy whips, now that there are no buggies outside of Amish country. But the story takes a positive turn when a scientist seeks to record the diligence of such skills and apply them in other areas, such as microsurgery.

This led me to think of how much of our brain power is in our embodiment. Some 75%-80% of the total number of neurons in our brain are found in the smaller "little brain" tucked down and behind, the cerebellum. Although I have a talent for playing guitar and similar instruments (but not violin!), I spent years developing the talent into a cluster of musical skills. The human brain is larger than that of other animals our size. More resources can be devoted to specific skills, compared to our animal cousins.

For example, a chimpanzee will throw dung at you if you anger it (and are outside a cage so you can't be physically attacked). Occasional news accounts may mention the "accuracy" of the animal's throwing. However, the distance is only 10-20 feet. Put the chimp on a pitcher's mound, and the target of its ire 66 feet away at home plate, and there's no way the critter can come close to the strike zone…or you. Almost any pitcher or fielder aged ten or more can bean you with a baseball at that distance. Bigger brain equals more neurons devoted to accurate throwing.

A fifth story was started, and then skipped. Its genre is "mean streets" and I declined.

There are just eight stories remaining. More later!

Culture Clash with a Chess theme

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, novellas

One item in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke is a novella, "Bishop's Opening" by R.S.A. Garcia. It took a couple of days to read.

The action takes place in a space habitat, where the crew of a spaceship have berthed for repairs and some R&R. A people called the Valencians, a human offshoot, are the arrogant Uber-rich. One of the crew interrupts an attempted assassination by snatching a small weapon from the assassin. He receives a dose of poison as a consequence, and the Valencian target of the assassin reciprocates the favor by quickly getting him to a medical facility that has the antidote. This opens an unlikely dialogue, and while nobody undergoes any significant cultural transformation, one could say that it makes a dent in the attitudes of at least some of the people involved.

Some interesting ideas appear. The milieu is that many or most humans live off-planet in habitats that function as mini-planets. Another is that Valencia itself seems to be in another dimension, and humans need some kind of implant to go there, which is nearly instantaneous. The culture of the Valencians is of relentless competition; the assassination attempt is no anomaly.

I mused upon the extremes. I have noted often that the X in X Generation seems to mean "eXtreme". It was they who created the X games, for example. And that the Y Generation has taken many of the extremes a step further. So it makes sense for an X or Y Generation writer to explore a culture of extremes, as profoundly unstable as such a culture would be. I don't know why the author chose chess pieces as the prototypes of the ranks and castes of the Valencians. In a chess game, a Bishop's opening requires a pawn to move first to allow a bishop (which must move on a diagonal) to exit the back row. In the story the failed assassin is a Pawn, and the target is a Bishop. Other than the terms, there is little resemblance to a chess game.

I thought of titling this post "Culture in change, one mind at a time", but that would be going too far.

Post-Apocalypticism prevails

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

In three days I've read seven more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. I'll point out the interesting ideas and comment just a bit extra on the stories I liked the best. Among the seven, four are explicitly post-apocalyptic and two are post-modern dystopian.

The most openly post-apocalyptic is "If We Make it Through This Alive" by A.T. Greenblatt. Three women have entered a cross-continent rally contest, from the abandoned King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia to an unnamed location in Sacramento, 2,800 road miles away. With a dramatically modified, electrified, ruggedized Jeep they expect to make the journey in 10-11 days. I couldn't get ImageFX to add the solar panels and other accoutrements to the Jeep for this image, but the mood is about right.

For reference, on present-day Interstate highways, the driving time estimate is 40 hours. The fact that average speeds are expected to be in the 25-30 mph range indicates that the author posits a not-totally-annihilated road system. The three each have their own hidden traumas to re-overcome, and each her reasons for being in Philadelphia in the first place, when city living has become much more fraught than rural life.

A story that seems post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's because the middle of a forest fire is apocalyptic enough for most of us, is "All The Burns Unseen" by Premee Mohamed. Fire may cleanse a landscape, but the protagonist, on a mission to find and possibly rescue her parents, finds that it reveals her fractured family relationships, healing nothing.

Producing a colony in the atmosphere of Venus was supposed to yield a utopia. In "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert, the daughter of "the woman who built the city" has a much more lowly job, but one that provides her with a few perquisites in the dystopia that the city has become. Like many post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories, the cynicism of "the elite" and despair of almost everyone else sits right on the surface. Although the protagonist's heroism earns her mother's respect and "saves the day", the story ends without resolution. Presumably the cynics who run things will make at most token concessions.

In "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Naylor it gradually becomes clear that the protagonist is a sort of Android. That is, his continued existence is because in an emergency his personality was ported into the body of an Android, whereas "ordinary" Androids have a scripted or manufactured persona. A key concept is the Connectome, the totality of connections between the nervous system and the body, whether human or mechanical. A secondary concept is that humans can detect an Android instantly; one presumes that the "uncanny valley" has not been fully crossed. Both these matters emphasize the point that true artificial intelligence requires embodiment, while demonstrating that such embodiment is no easy conundrum to crack.

Other ideas of interest:

• Being in a simulation already, and experiencing meta-simulations ("Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café" by M. Bennardo; otherwise rather boring).
• Reification of an old photo (and presumably a lot of other stuff, hardly mentioned) into a simulation of a deceased person or pet ("The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott; puzzling and moderately sad without inculcating care for the protagonist or anyone else).
• Those left behind on Earth when all the rich escaped into orbiting habitats, such as "Erewhon", the home of the rich losers the story centers on, have been modified to digest plastic, because there is so much of it left ("The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell; point made, the story goes nowhere and the people learn nothing).

So far, the book is holding up well. The least interesting of the stories I have read so far is better than the best to be found in the volume of mainstream short stories I panned a month ago.

Readable science writing

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, science writing, nature writing, anthologies

Science and technical writing are notable for being unreadable. Fortunately, some articles are well written and readable. Some. For The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023, edited by Carl Zimmer, the editor and his helpers managed to find twenty articles and essays that are readable and informative, in a range of technical disciplines.

I don't intend to survey the whole book. This is more of an accolade than a full review. I used Dall-E3 to generate a number of images intended to evoke "science writer." I like this one best. For the sake of this volume, I chose a female writer because 13 of the 20 articles are by females, although one is amidst a transition to outward maleness.

In the Foreword the editor makes note that more and more of modern science and nature writing has a political flavor. This is not surprising. Many of the articles in this volume are based in research related to climate change, which has been overly politicized to the point that few granting entities are willing to fund work that is not explicitly supportive of the "mainstream view," no matter that it is very far from being the "settled science" that certain loud voices claim. While I am at it, I must say that two of the articles are not about science at all but are personal testimonies regarding the consequences of the political climate, related primarily to issues of gender and morality. While they are voices that deserve to be heard, they have no place in this volume.

My second favorite generated image is this one, of a naturalist in the field. Boots on the ground are sorely needed to winkle out all the effects of the increase of both temperature and atmospheric volatility. Articles about the changing populations of certain butterfly or frog species evoke the scientific spirit: "Why has this changed? and how?" 

Science is conservative, in the sense that new things, new ideas, new hypotheses must prove themselves. It is unscientific to accept a new "explanation" that lacks solid evidence. Environmental stewardship is also a conservative value. Social conservatism is different from political conservatism. Let us remember that prior to the Twentieth Century the conservatives (for example, the Tories in England and the Democrats in the US) were pro-royalty, pro-aristocracy, pro-feudalism, and pro-slavery. The constitutional liberals (who these days are called "conservatives" by leftists), particularly the leading Christians, led the way to abolish slavery. Their contention that all the "races" were equally human was based on scientific studies, on scientific conservatism, as much as on religious grounds. We are amidst a struggle to determine where the boundaries lie between scientific study of climate and political proclamations based on sketchy understanding of science.

Scientists would do well to learn better writing. For the moment, those who write well deserve appreciation, and this volume provides a little of that.

Final Fourteen

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past couple of days, I've finished the last fourteen pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. There were two (of six) bits of verse I'm sorry I read, and four others that were "OK". One was clearly well-written prose broken into a "poem" in lines of nearly equal visible length; otherwise unremarkable. Another is worth a short remark:

"Blue" by Erin Wilson is short, and very sad (gut-punch sad), and I dare not say more because it's too easy to spoil.

Three of the prose pieces are worth mentioning:

• "Dear Damage" by Ashley Marie Farmer – Apparently a true story, of an attempted (and failed) murder-suicide brought on by unimaginable pain. Where's a Kevorkian when you need one? Though I am a Christian, I understand, and sympathize with, the need to determinedly end one's own life in certain circumstances.
• "Dreaming of Water With Tiger Salamanders" – This is also nonfiction. Most of it is an essay compounded of equal parts pandemic panic and climate panic, in a setting of "development" of land that ought not be developed. The author (or narrator) is the token biologist who must accompany a development crew, by California law. The two panics are overhyped. On the other hand, I am in favor of strong laws forbidding "development" of arable land (with a Capital penalty) and forbidding destruction of habitat for vulnerable species (slightly-less-than-Capital).
• "Black Land Matters: Climate Solutions in Black Agrarianism" by Leah Penniman – An excellent essay on the efficacy of traditional soil enrichment. The historical flow as I have observed it is sadly almost predictable: in recent years it has been determined that the Amazon rainforest is not a "jungle" but a now-neglected (and much abused) garden, which includes huge areas enriched by biochar and river-bottom muck to make it more fertile. It is only now becoming clear that significant parts of the African continent have a similar history of cultivation. I learned of the impressive usefulness of biochar when I edited a PhD dissertation for a friend who did research with biochar. This essay focuses on many traditional practices, and on their continuation by American Blacks, where they have been permitted to own land. A formative experience in my own young life was a visit to Malabar Farm in Ohio, where conservation tillage was "rediscovered" a millennium after the fact, as it happens.

There were several other stories that were good reading, but rather thin on ideas. The four noted above have strong ideas, and I am an idea guy. I read, not just for escape, but to see what people are thinking, to glean good ideas.

I've finished the Pushcart volume. At 462 pages, it took me a while. Mostly, it was well worth it.

Four out of five — Not so bad

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past day or so I've had time to read only five pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. I'll ignore one of the five. The others:

• "A Most Generous Offer" by Joy Guo – It took a while to see where this story was going. Superficially, it's about an inherited apartment. Really, lack of communication risks loss of everything.

• "The Blob" by Molly Gallentine – Flashing forward and back, with the old film The Blob as a metaphor for climate anxiety, while the protagonists attempts artistic climate activism. The image is the beginning of the movie theater scene from the 1958 film.
• "Marmalade" by Fred D'Aguiar – In the aftermath of a breakup, the kids are hurt the most. Of many treatments on this old theme, this is one of the best.
• "Toward a Unified Theory" by Wayne Miller – It's hard to say if it is intended to be one poem: very short bits of free verse with a strong TITLE every 4-8 lines, and lots of white space. No relationship to the overall title that I can discern.

Sometimes, being puzzled is as valuable as being gratified.

Leaning into the Apocalypse

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry, essays

The eight items I read today in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, are evenly matched, four in verse and four stories/essays (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). I'll touch on most of them.

"Memorials" by Tyler Sones – Remembering the localized apocalypses in the author's memory, one near Waco, Texas and the other at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. The word "apocalypse" just means "taking off the cover", and by extension "revelation". It is, by itself, the title of the last book of the Bible. The content of the apostle John's visions has colored our understanding of the term. The author describes a fiercely Bible-centered culture in which the two attacked homesteads were embedded.

The image was produced using Playground AI; a milder view than what is warranted by the text, but a more appropriate prompt would have been rejected.

The verse "Dawn 2040" by Jorie Graham is intended to evoke a post-apocalyptic scene, set just sixteen years in the future (perhaps 17-18 when the piece was written). Overblown, in my view.

"Fight Week" by Laura Van Den Berg – A young woman, a prize fighter, is drawn into a drama and inadvertently does a good deed. It leads to a step change in her fighting skills.

I'll limn three other pieces with the two words that came to mind as I finished each:

• "Nomad Palindrome" – Extended palindrome. [At 87 words, one of the longest I've encountered]
• "Jorie, Jr" by Michael Czyzniejewski – Superman metaphor. [there's no relationship with the author of "Dawn 2040"...I think]
• "The Emperor Concerto" by Julie Hecht – Musical rumination.

Four hits in a row!

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past 24 hours I read just four pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Surprise, I liked all four, so I'll give all four "the treatment".

"Two Breaths" by Christina Rivera Cogswell – A wife and husband scuba dive at night to observe Manta rays off Kailua-Kona in Hawaii. The Hawaiian word for the Manta, hahalua, means "two breaths". The woman cannot get her mind off her two children, asleep at home. Much of the story is her stream of consciousness as she copes with near-panic, something she didn't experience before becoming a mother (mothers reading the story will sympathize). The image was created using Playground AI.

"It is Once Again the Season of Corn" by Onyekachi Hoh – Thirteen couplets of free verse, full of observations and wishes. One of these, "let all the rifles become violins…" evoked the image. The final wish is for an orchestra. The image was created using Dall-E3, which threw a horse into the image I liked most.

"The Magician's Assistant" by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick – Four quatrains of free verse: after the act is over and the magician has sawn her in half, the assistant sews herself back together. Her thought near the end is poignant: "the applause is for his miracle and not hers". I also used Dall-E3 to produce this image. Dall-E3 didn't like the first prompt I tried, "too violent", so a more innocuous one produced this image.

"Tomorrows" by Lakiesha Carr – A slot machine addict, coping as best she can. It's no surprise that her familial feeling for fellow slots players exceeds all others. At least she has an income. This image was created using Playground AI. Note that we can control the aspect ratio of PG-AI images.

At this point I am just past halfway done with the volume.

Fifteen more, half pointless

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past two-plus days I have read fifteen more pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Of the fifteen, nine are "poems". One of these, "Chemo Becomes Me" by Lily Jarman-Reisch resonated with me. I have been on chemo, and though I didn't lose hair (as the poet did), there were other effects. Also, this poem has rhyme and rhythm, being in couplets with a coda.

If the other eight free verse items are a kind of intelligence test, I utterly failed. To me, they are a waste of words. I suppose they really, really meant something to their authors.

I particularly liked "The Locksmith" by Grey Wolfe LaJoie. Though the words "autism" or "spectrum" never appear, the locksmith's condition is evident. Nonetheless, he copes. I was sympathetic to someone who must ride a bicycle because he can't get a driver's license. For about a year I didn't drive; because of an accident, the "best" insurance premium I could obtain was the cost of my car, per year. So I rode bicycle until the points dropped off my record.

The pieces that were stories affected me variously. Two worth mention are "The Ba'al Shem's Daughter" by Glenn Gitomer and "Everychild" by Alix Christie. From very different perspectives, they tell of parents who have lost control of a child, and cope about as badly as possible. I'll leave it to you to read and find out.

And I do hope you will read this volume and these stories. Maybe you'll even like the poems.

Coda: I prompted Dall-E3 with "A pushcart in the style of a bookplate sticker". Here are a couple of its offerings: