Ben's swan song

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, pluto, grand tour

These days when I read science fiction it is almost always a short story collection or anthology. One author whose work I have read on and off since about 1970 is Ben Bova. His "home base" genre is semi-hard science fiction: realistic fiction without fantastic elements, but certain future developments are of necessity only sketchily described, if at all. Recently I encountered the last of his Grand Tour series of novels and decided to read it: Pluto., AKA The Outer Planets volume 3. Bova died before the novel was finished; his literary heirs chose his friend Les Johnson to finish it. The result is a page-turner worthy of the name.

The time frame is a bit vague; the action takes place about 150-200 years in our future. I presume that earlier novels in the series flesh out the fusion drive that lets spaceships bomb around the solar system as though it were the Atlantic Ocean in the age of steam; a Sino-Russian-American war that resolved itself into the "frenemy" status of these three powers in the recent past (of the novel); the Space Forces of these three powers; and the establishment of outposts and mini-colonies on the moons of Neptune, Uranus and other planets.

A central figure is a professor who has been fused with an AI to save his life, or at least his personality, after a horrific accident. Naturally (as things go in the SciFi realm) he has become a megalomaniac, with some justification for his hubris since he now experiences things a dozen times faster than "ordinary folk". He has found some kind of artifact on Pluto, detected by a faint neutrino signal that seems to be caused by very slow matter-antimatter annihilation (I must note at this point that really, really new physics will be required to be able to engineer a neutrino detector/spectrometer smaller than an auditorium. Neutrinos are called "ghost particles" for excellent reasons). The professor had "gone rogue" on the surface of Pluto in order to track down the artifact, and the research ship Tombaugh had asked for help to rescue/recover him; the Space Force ship that did so is the Aurora.

Once the professor and the artifact have been retrieved and are aboard the Tombaugh, the two ships travel to Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto, to quickly investigate a gravitational anomaly there, before continuing either to Earth or to an outpost on (near?) Uranus to further study the artifact. That's where the story really begins. Where the artifact found on Pluto is about the size of a yard-long piece of drainpipe, what the scientists find on Charon turns out to be some kind of under-the-ice city, also dormant. Dormant, that is, until they try to drill into it. It awakens and the fun begins. The "Charon anomaly" begins sending out minirobots that are apparently reproducing even as they begin to transform Charon in some enigmatic way. Attempts to capture a minirobot by the Americans aboard the Aurora, then by later-arriving Russians and Chinese, are fruitless and fatal. Whatever the big anomaly is, it can disintegrate stuff!

At some point, the artifact from Pluto "awakens" and begins sending out not minirobots but nanobots. The scientists and most of the crew of Tombaugh are evacuated when it become clear that the nanobots have gotten into the ship's computers and begun to drive it toward Charon. It never becomes clear whether the Pluto artifact and the Charon "city" represent the same technology, or even the same alien species.

I've already told too much. I wanted to point out that the ending might have been different had Bova written it. His collaborator points out in an Afterword that Bova was a "seat of the pants" write who didn't pre-plan his work. I can't presume to read his mind, particularly since he passed away six years ago, but I expect he would have made it more clear that the artifact was originally hunting the city and had been sent to destroy it, in an interstellar war that had played out millions of years ago. Or maybe the story would have written itself out in another way. Who knows; the book is great fiction in any case.

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:

Building Kepler's platonic-solid Solar System

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, generation starships, solar system engineering, totalitarianism, culture shock

It takes a lot of backstory to assemble the worldviews in Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter. Rather than drive off readers with 10-plus chapters of stage-setting (in a 37-chapter book), the author wisely metes it out in digestible portions as needed.

Seen from afar—say, half a light-year away in the Oort cloud—two Earth-born cultures, separated by a millennium, are about to collide.

• The generation starship Lightbird has been traveling for a century from Ross 128b, a habitable planet of the red dwarf star Ross 128, eleven light-years from the Solar System. Energy for its propulsion is from lumes, enigmatic creatures of deep space that can apparently convert matter to antimatter, or extract antimatter from vacuum energy. The author doesn't dig too far, a decision I support. Ross 128b was colonized a thousand years earlier.
• The residents of the Solar System spent a good part of that thousand years enveloping a sphere a little larger than the orbit of Uranus in the Mask, a carbon nanotube structure that hides the inner seven planets from the universe, and hides the universe from within. Material for the Mask, and for an inner structure, the Wrap that hides the Sun from view, was derived from partial demolition of Jupiter and the other giant planets, except for Neptune, which was destroyed by lumes, an event that started the whole adventure. The lumes were thought to be weapons of a super-advanced interstellar culture that was preparing to invade. A millennium later, no invasion has yet arisen. An interplanetary "railway" called the Frame was also built to facilitate travel everywhere inside the Mask, but mostly in the orbital plane of the seven surviving planets.

Both cultures are totalitarian in nature. Aboard Lightbird, everything must contribute to the progress of the four-generation mission of reaching the Solar System. That includes decisions about who is allowed to be born, and such a decision is at the core of a neurosis that afflicts a young woman named Muree. She is one of a few who care for the onboard lume tank. The lumes have proven useful, and an ecology that promotes a tank containing about 100 of them is managed such that they create a new lume about each day, even as another lume is consumed in providing energy to drive the constant acceleration of the ship, and power its life support mechanisms. (Note, the amount of antimatter needed for this would be just a few grams per day, so a different consumption rate might be warranted. I don't know how much a lume is supposed to weigh.)

Ruling the many trillions of humans in the Solar System, most of whom live aboard the Frame or in orbital habitats, an oligarchy has totalitarian control of many matters, including a deep secret about the actual disposition of the Sun. The crux of the drama is a quest by Muree, once she has become an ambassador from the starship to the Fortress Sol, as the Mask-bound society is called, to learn what is really going on inside the Wrap. A young man named Rab is Muree's opposite number, and their collaboration is soon seen as a conspiracy by the rulers of Fortress Sol.

My grasp of political science is tenuous at best. Naturally, the unraveling of a thousand-year-old political system is not for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't have a clue how to advise Mr. Baxter about it. So I'll stick with intriguing ideas, and leave it to you to read the book for yourself, and get from it what you are equipped to consume.

The Frame is found to be analogous to the nested-Platonic-Solid model of the Solar System devised by Kepler, before he determined that planetary orbits are (almost) ellipses. I say "almost" because the influence of all the planets upon each other perturbs the orbits a bit. There is a reason the planets are spaced far apart!

In Kepler's model, the five Platonic solids each enclose a sphere that just touches each planar face, and each is enclosed in a sphere that just touches all its corners. From outermost inward, they are a cube (8 faces), tetrahedron (4 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), icosahedron (20 faces), and octahedron (8 faces). The fit is not exact, but the thickness of the spherical shells takes up the slack between the nearest and farthest points in each orbit from the Sun. The outermost sphere contains the orbit of Saturn, and so forth inward.

The Frame is planar, with rings and spokes. It is a rotating structure that has "trolleys" which move along the rings and inward or outward along the spokes. To get from a station on the Frame to a planet, one takes a shuttlecraft. A few numbers were used, and the math is fascinating.

First, the rotation of the outermost ring of the Frame, some distance outside the aphelion of Uranus, is sufficient to produce a centripetal force (rotation-induced artificial gravity) of 1/3 G. In the past, I did calculations to find out the stresses in a large, rotating ring with a centripetal force of 1 G. It turns out, if the radius of the ring is 1 km, we don't have any material that can sustain the stress, except perhaps carbon nanotubes, but only if they are continuous, with no breaks. Thus, a thread of nanotubes with a structure similar to cotton thread (composed of entwined strands a few cm long) is much weaker and would pull apart at much lower stress. I want to know if this Solar-System-spanning rotating Frame is feasible, based on science so far known.

Rough analysis: I don't know where my notebook is from doing that analysis, so we'll indulge in a bit of hand-waving instead. I'll begin with the basis that carbon nanotubes would be barely adequate to hold together a rotating ring of 1 km radius, with 1 G of centripetal force at its periphery. Our basic equation for centripetal force is F = Mv²/r.

• Subproblem 1: How big can r be if the target F is 1/3 G? Since v = αr, where α is angular velocity (degrees per second, perhaps), and we assume M is always 1 (that is, 1 kg), F = α²r. Thus, at constant angular velocity, F is proportional to r, so the radius for 1/3 G is 1/3 the radius for 1 G.
• Subproblem 2: What is the radius of the outer ring? It must be outside the aphelion distance of Uranus, which is 20.073 AU or just over three billion km. I don't know how much the passage of Uranus close to the Frame would perturb it, but let's ignore that for the moment, and posit a radius of 3.1 billion km.
• SP 3: The 1 G rotating, 1-km-radius ring has a peripheral velocity of 99 m/s and rotates one full turn every 63.5 s. We want F to be 9.8/3 = 3.267, and r is now 3.1 billion km (or 3.1 trillion m), which will equal v². The square root of the resulting 10.13 trillion (in units of squared velocity) is 3.182 million m/s or 3,182 km/s. This is about 470 times the orbital speed of Uranus. Uranus completes an orbit of the Sun every 84 years. Any point on this ring must therefore orbit the Sun about every 65 days. 

If you leave a station orbiting above Uranus and want to catch up to a station on the Frame, it takes a bit of a push. If you accelerate at 1 G in your shuttle:  v = at, or t = v/a. 3,182,000/9.8 = almost 325,000 seconds, or 3.75 days. If instead, you can handle 3 G's for thirty hours, that will do it.

I'll leave it to the physics-inclined to figure the hoop stress in the ring. You can be sure it is thousands of times the ultimate breaking stress of a carbon nanotube. 

Anyway, I figured all this after the fact. The "invention" of the lumes and the astonishing Solar-System-scale engineering imagined in Fortress Sol yielded quite an arena for space-cowboy derring-do, as Muree and her allies try to uncover the big lie at the root of the political system. What a fun read!

Getting to know a hive mind

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, mysteries, murder mysteries, space fiction, space aliens, sentient starships, writers, generated images

In the opening scene of Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty, the protagonist, Mallory Viridian, is learning to communicate with a hive mind that consists of a large number of wasplike aliens. As I read, I realized that I would really like to illustrate the book. My "contract artist" for the images in this post is GPT-Image-1.5, accessed via Leonardo AI.

The book is chock full of ideas: multiple kinds of hive minds; aliens ranging from the Gneiss (my favorite; they are living rocks) to the Sundry (one of a few species of waspoids) to the Miu (catlike), and of course, the spaceships themselves; living libraries—both the larger spaceships and the hive minds—; language interpretation via a brain app…and so forth. The setting for most of the action is a mystery writers' convention being held on an enormous spaceship that is quite different from the others nearby at a station cluster. Mallory is a mystery writer. She also has a "talent" for being if not present, then nearby when murders happen. She solves the mystery, then writes a book about it. It's a living. In this case, communion with a hive mind, and the powers that this unlocks, are crucial to catching the murderer.

In the 2040's or so, First Contact occurred a number of years in the past (apparently about 2030), there are lots of loosely confederated alien species, and humans aren't yet trusted enough to be given the secret of space flight. But humans can apparently afford space tourism and even get jobs aboard certain ships, so they get to gallivant around the galaxy with everyone else. In a charming turn, spaceships aren't built, they are grown. Mallory has been given custody of a baby spaceship about the size of a tennis ball. It seems to be able to lift out of her jacket pocket and zip off at times, without burning anything. The drive mechanism is not mentioned. Antigrav, perhaps? By the time things get serious the little ship, named Mobius is bigger, softball sized, and beginning to look more like a rugby ball. Later on he (ships have gender) figures in a rivalry between different wasplike aliens.

It is hard to get too deep into the plot of the story without giving too much away. So let's stick with some ideas and their ramifications. Two of Mallory's allies are seen in this image, along with a catlike alien rather different from a Miu, but this is the best that the program could offer. The Miu is no ally, not quite an enemy, but definitely a player, just in another conceptual direction.

I'll skip to the convention. It doesn't get off to much of a start before there is trouble. First, Mallory's book agent is present, and tries to get her involved in a LARP (Live-Action Role Play) "game" that doesn't go well. I'll leave it to the reader to learn why she storms out. Then, it appears that some of the other authors present who have the same agent aren't all happy with one another, nor with the agent.

The convention itself kicks off with several acts including a performance by a popular Punk-ish band, apparently all human, though this isn't explicitly stated. 

During the musical performance, the first murder occurs, soon followed by a second. Mallory goes into high gear. She is now comfortable communing with, and getting help from, the Sundry hive mind she's been bonding with. This helps a lot, and I'd better leave it there.

I understand that Ms Lafferty has written other books. I plan to track them down. This one is an enjoyable romp.

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.

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.

SF is as SF does

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

I use the term "SF" in the title rather than "SciFi" because Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie includes three categories: science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

The opening novelette and title story, "Lake of Souls" sits on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy, as does Ms Leckie. The story is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, of a crablike creature without a name, who embarks on a quest to find the fabled Lake of Souls, where it may obtain a soul and a name. Until obtaining soul and name, these creatures are called by the generic term Spawn.  This Spawn's quest differs from the usual process, where marks that appear on a being's head upon one's final molt can be read as a name. I don't use "he" or "she" for Spawn because the author studiously avoids genderizing it. The science fiction element enters with a human on the planet, the last survivor of a mass murder on his survey ship. He is on a quest of his own, to find the murderer and the communication device he brought to the planet with him. He and his shipmates had been calling Spawn's fellows "lobster dogs", and having met Spawn, he realizes that these beings are sentient, which he must communicate with "home base", and with others because of the political implications of his discovery. I'll leave it at that; I am perilously close to spoiling too much. I should mention in passing that the author is very skilled at imagining and portraying sundry sorts of non-Earthly beings.

Consider a feudal society, right here on Earth. The lords and ladies lived in splendor in their castles and manor houses, cared for by servants and surrounded by serfs who lived in penury and often misery. Aristocrats lived much longer than serfs, and soldiers typically had notoriously short lives because of the aristocratic hobby of warfare. Move that scenario to a planet on which the aristocrats are called the Justified, and live unlimited lives, though they can die, but never of "natural causes". Everyone else, the short-lived, serve the Justified. I should also mention that they are lionlike, and the Justified become many times stronger than the short-lived. This scenario plays out in "The Justified". An episode in mid-story indicates that short-lived can be promoted to Justified. This has implications for a future situation, back here on Earth again, if aging is defeated but that indefinite life extension is too costly for most to afford. In this and in nearly all of Ms Leckie's stories females are dominant.

These stories are from the first third of the book, where we find all the stories one could term "science fiction". The other two sections are taken from the author's world-building series, termed Imperial Reach and The Raven Tower. Both are based on pantheism: people interact with gods of many "sizes", some that are like feudal lords over a domain, and others that have more narrow realms of influence. Like the Justified discussed above, these gods aren't necessarily eternal, but how a god is done away with isn't made clear. They gain strength from being prayed to and sacrificed to, and the most common sacrifice is an ounce or so of one's own blood, spilled on a makeshift altar.

From all of this I conclude that the author is fascinated (obsessed?) with feudalism, with highly structured societies, and with extreme feminism. Also that she would like to be a god. Then again, who wouldn't?

A big SciFi compendium

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

Androids and AI's and Bots, Oh My! It isn't hard to figure what is on people's minds: just look at what is popular in science fiction.

I see that it has been two weeks since I posted. The current volume contains 31 stories, many of which reward close reading: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 (2022-2023), edited by Neil Clarke. It has been an enjoyable fortnight.

Unlike any other volume of SciFi stories in recent years, this time there were no stories that I actively disliked. I awarded at least one "+" to all but three, and to those I gave a "~", for "ordinary, but not bad." The majority received "++", meaning, "I'm glad I read it", and three of them I marked "+++", for "good and full of great ideas".

Had I had time for more than reading these past two weeks I'd have reviewed a few stories at a time, daily. As it is, what I have time for is to touch on the three "+++" stories, and leave you with this chart of my notes:

As I finished each story I wrote a one-line impression on a copy of the table of contents. Now, on to the stories I liked best:

• "Aptitude" by Cooper Shrivastava – My one-liner is, "Interviewing to be a god—Parable of Gödel's Incompleteness". The woman being tested is one of the last humans, the last denizens of our universe, among a "room" full of singular persons—they appear mostly human to her—who are presumably from other universes. The interview candidates are each tasked to build a model universe, on a much-too-short timeline. Without giving away too much, let us just say that she and another interviewee collaborate to sidestep the process, using recursion to break the system.
• "Jaunt" by Ken Liu – Here I have, "Telepresence robots!! Reaction – Counterreaction". Imagine a very capable, roughly hobbit-sized, robot on a farm in Myanmar through which you can experience much of what it is like to work on that farm. Further, imagine hosting such a robot as it shadows you and your work or leisure activity, conversing with you as though the person "riding" the robot were actually with you. Of course, governments will want to either get involved or control such activities. Imagine the dollars lost by traditional tourism companies! Naturally, an encrypted system is developed to get around the totalitarian restrictions. It resembles TOR, the first incarnation of a hidden Internet.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer – I wrote, "AI vs AI – Artificial Initiative almost as good as the real thing". Like in many of the stories, here Bots are small, ranging down to barely visible, and exist in huge numbers. They can conglomerate to perform more complex functions, even carrying out a human's duties; the word "glom" is coopted for such groupings. But these bots and gloms get a mind of their own, and the superintelligent Ship needs all the help it can get from a small number of more loyal bots to regain control of mutinous gloms.

I note that a recurring theme is subversive activity. It runs throughout this anthology; not in all the stories, but a majority. It makes sense from a societal perspective: those who still trust Government are seen as threatening to a majority who have lost that trust. The feeling is mutual. So, modern "saviors" and "heroes" are those who get the better of the powerful persons and organizations that are seen as dominating our lives, or attempting to do so (Does anybody want to know why Mark Zuckerberg is building a house the size of a football field in the middle of a 4,000-acre self-sufficient farm in Hawaii?).

Get this book, read the stories, write your own one-line summaries. You'll be the better for it.

Finishing on a downstroke

 kw: continuing reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, world science fiction, dystopias, human extinction

Of the four stories remaining in The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar, I skipped one, which happens to be a novella. The other three are not up to the standard of the earlier stories in the volume, but are of moderate interest.

"Between the Firmanents" by Neon Yang (Singapore). I got a page or two into this novella, realized it was going into hellish territory, and skipped out. It is fantasy, with no hint of the "science" of SF. The "gods" portrayed are as wicked and lascivious as the old Greek and Roman deities, or perhaps more so.

"Whale Snows Down" by Kim Bo-Young, translated by Sophie Bowman. Told from the viewpoint of deep-sea dwellers such as anglerfish and siphonophores (as this image, from NOAA), it consists mainly of ruminations and conversations among those dwellers regarding the sudden increase, oceans-wide, of "marine snow" (organic detritus from things that die at the surface or in shallower water). The denizens conclude that the humans have finally done themselves in. It's odd: whales are depicted as having gills. Possibly the translator mistranslated a word for "baleen". This is the best of these three.

"The Gardens of Babylon" by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright. This story and the one that follows circle back on themselves, in different ways. Both are fantasy, although somewhat technological fantasy. This one is slightly better written than the other.

"The Farctory" by K.A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman. "Farctory" is but one of several words that get an inserted letter or two ("cola just to keep the reader off balance. The other imagery follows suit.

The volume ends with a letdown, although there are a couple of interesting ideas here also. Overall, Best, V2 is well worth reading.

Idea stories, a baker's dozen

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

Here I limn another thirteen of the stories in The Best of World SF, Volume 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar. It's something more than a third of the volume. As before, I skipped none, and enjoyed nearly all equally.

"To Set at Twilight in a Land of Reeds" by Natalia Theodoridou (Greece). Maintenance robots need maintenance also. I wonder why SF robots are so frequently emotional? 

"The Beast Has Died" by Bef (Mexico), translated by Brian Price. An alternate history, with TV and other technologies in the 1800's, and also a technology for scanning a brain to produce a simulation of a person.

"Twenty About Robots" by Alberto Chimal (Mexico), translated by Fionn Petch. This story is dedicated to the prior author. Each vignette is preceded by a binary number from 0 to 19 (00000 to 10011), but not in any order I could discern. The author stretches the limits of the robot genre. It's becoming clear that the editor loves robot stories.

"The Regression Test" by Wole Talabi (Nigeria). An advanced version of a Turing Test. An uploaded human mind, as it interacts with others, will naturally learn and evolve (in the non-biological sense). The test, by someone intimately familiar with the original person, is to detect a divergence into delusion. As I expected, there is a betrayal awaiting.

"Kakak" by William Tham Wai Liang (Malaysia). "Kakak" means "sister" in Malay. Another story rooted in emotional robots, but here the levels of emotionality vary more.

"Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik (Pakistan). Caring for an ailing and increasingly demented mother… It's unclear how the protagonist thinks going on a starship (a NAFAL accelerator), with increasing time dilation as the trip proceeds, can help him care for his mother, even though a quantum-entanglement link has been set up between him and a robotic caregiver.

"A Flaw in the Works" by Julie Nováková (Czech Republic), translated by the author. Another story of emotion-laden robots, written for the centennial of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek; those robots had an emotional element also. These robots, in political exile, get the opportunity to make first contact.

"When We Die on Mars" by Cassandra Khaw (Malaysia). The gradual weeding out of more than 100 volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, to a final twelve (see Note 1 below). This initial crew will establish a basis for others to follow. This seems a lot like Elon Musk's plan.

"The Mighty Slinger" by Tobias S. Buckell (Barbados) and Karen Lord (Grenada). Early in the story, the thought emerged, "Music as a political force". By the end: "Music as a weapon". Concepts that were obvious to the protest singers of the 60's, my musical mentors. If you've never heard "There, but for Fortune" sung by Joan Baez, go right now and do so! Oh, and the title...think David.

"Corialis" by T.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe). If you've seen The Andromeda Strain, or read the book, you may recall the extensive decontamination of the people before they can enter the super-clean laboratory. Preparing to adapt to the microbes of a new planet goes far beyond that (see Note 2 below). The protagonist realizes something more is needed for the humans and the life-forms of Corialis to become fully compatible.

"The Substance of Ideas" by Clelia Farris (Italy), translated by Rachel Cordasco. A different kind of alien world. Here, it seems that certain life-forms store ideas and memories in proteins, so that eating them… well, that's the "substance" the author is talking about. As usual, Murphy's Law intervenes.

"Sleeping Beauties" by Agnieszka Hałas (Poland). Suspended animation, we used to call it. Here it's used to exile an increasing range of "undesirables" to a prison planet. You gotta wonder, is it worth the expense? I could have done without the ending, a scene more sadistic than any I've encountered. This makes other dystopias seem tame.

"Waking Nydra" by Samit Basu (India). Another take on the phrase "sleeping beauty". The elaborate defenses of Nydra's "castle" make the story longer than it needed to be. The mindset of the caste system (the protagonist is clearly considered beneath contempt by the "heroine") underlies it all. A not-so-surprising betrayal rounds it out.

There are but four stories to go. Stay tuned.

Note 1: My first two years of college I was a chemistry major. My sophomore year I took Organic Chemistry, a three-quarter series of classes; the school year was in quarters, rather than semesters. The first day of class the professor (a rather recent PhD from Harvard) said the following:

This class will decide which of you will actually major in chemistry. The testing and work in each quarter will reduce your number by half. At the moment there are 150 of you…149…148 (as two students walked out). About fifteen will pass the final exam at the end of the third quarter.

He was right. I was one of those fifteen, finishing with an A-. I loved those courses.

Note 2: You may know the Central Dogma of Genetics, that DNA is copied to RNA, and the RNA is used to construct proteins, according to a standard coding table. There are 20 amino acids that make up all proteins (on Earth), and there are 64 3-unit codes (the units are A, C, G, and T in DNA, and instead of T, RNA has U), called codons. This allows for some redundancy in the translation, and protects against certain kinds of single-nucleotide mutations.

You probably don't know that there are (so far), 24 variations on the "standard" translation table. They can be considered minor variations; all the variations occur in one or more of 18 of the 64 "positions", leaving 46 untouched.

Some bacteria, most mitochondria, a few protozoa, and even a few small metazoans (multicellular animals) have variant coding schemes. That means the ribosomes, the protein-building "machines" that couple the RNA codons to their corresponding amino acids, are tailored to the appropriate table for the creature in question. It also means that the mitochondria in every cell of your body have the "vertebrate mitochondria" coding table, and some of the bacteria and archaea in your intestines have specific variations.

Now, consider, if we find life on another planet, will it be DNA/RNA/Protein based? Perhaps that is inevitable, but it's not certain. Even if so, will that planet's "standard" code translation table be the same as any of the Earthly ones? That is much less certain! Mathematically crossing 64 with 20, we find about 10⁷⁰ possible tables! If multiples are kept together, the number reduces to about 10⁴⁰. These numbers might be much higher; I may not have thought of everything when I did my bonehead permutation math.

The bottom line: I suspect it's impossible for aliens to eat us, or for us to eat them...or their food animals/plants/whatever. If we want to migrate people to an exoplanet, we'd probably do best to find a totally barren one and terraform it.

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.