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.