Kari Maaren: Weave a Circle Round

Now that there is a not-a-Hugo award for YA fiction, I will likely be reading more of it. I am not, you must understand, opposed to YA fiction or particularly disinclined to read it. It’s more that, having no actual young adults in my life, I don’t hear much about new YA fiction unless it gets a huge buzz and they sound interesting, as the Hunger Games novels did (and the Twilight novels most emphatically did not), or it’s written by an author whose work I enjoy under any circumstances, like Diane Duane or Nnedi Okorafor.

But I figure one place to begin this year is with the Nebula awards short list. And the first book from that list I picked to read is Kari Maaren’s Weave a Circle Round.

I found it very difficult to get into at first. Oh, it’s very well written. In fact, it’s the quality of the prose that kept me going, because initially the protagonist, a very self-centred and self-pitying teenager named Freddie, kept getting on my nerves. She still resents her parents for getting divorced, after four years. Her mother’s new partner has moved into the household with his deaf son, Roland, and not only is she obnoxious about it, she steadfastly refuses to learn sign language and snipes at him constantly. She is constantly angry with her younger sister, Mel, who seems to have adapted somewhat more gracefully to the changes in circumstances.

Admittedly, she has some valid reasons to be unhappy. Her mother seems quite feckless, and, along with her new husband, is almost never home - all three kids suffer from benign neglect in this sense, their physical needs taken care of, but no parental care or presence worth mentioning. Mel and Roland have bonded over a shared love of RPGs, leaving Freddie out. Her only friends at school have matured over the summer in ways she has not, and seem more interested in boys and being attractive than anything else. She’s quite alone. And she wants nothing more than to fit in, to be average and normal.

Then there are the new neighbours, Cuerva Lachance, a woman apparently in her mid-to-late 30s who says she’s a private investigator, and Josiah, apparently a teenaged boy, who is, he insists vehemently, not Cuerva’s son. Indeed, their relationship seems more collegial than familial, and both are decidedly strange in many ways.

Adding to Freddie’s woes, Josiah, who seems compelled to loudly and insultingly criticise everyone and everything around him, is in all of Freddie’s classes at school, and because he talks to her, all the others begin to associate her with him, adding to her inability to just quietly blend in and draw no attention. Between Josiah’s strangeness and Roland’s disability, Freddie feels tainted beyond saving within the social order of her school. We are treated to many examples of how viciously and violently children can treat those who are different, and how completely ineffective adults are at seeing and stopping the bullying. This wasn’t much fun to read if you were a victim of this sort of thing as a kid yourself.

It’s the growing mystery surrounding Josiah and Cuerva that finally engaged me. Who - or what - are they, why are they so very strange indeed, and why are they interested in Freddie and her family?

And then Freddie and Josiah start slipping through time. And Josiah begins to reveal parts of the mystery. This is when the story gets interesting and Freddie begins to become a character I felt more strongly about. By the end, I was quite completely involved with the mystery and the roles that all three teenagers - Freddie, Mel, and Roland - play in making things right again.

Anthony Boucher: The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories

I acquired Anthony Boucher’s collection, The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories because I was reading novellas recommended by various folks about the Internet as possible nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos, and The Compleat Werewolf was one of them. I don’t remember reading much of Boucher’s work back in my early years of sf reading, but I enjoyed The Compleat Werewolf enough to go on and read the other stories in the collection.

Boucher tends to write with a light, even comical touch, incorporating elements of the ridiculous into his fiction, but in such a way as to make them seem quite appropriate at the time. Not that all of his stories are comedies. Several of the ones in this collection deal with very serious matters, from German spy rings in WWII, to murder. But Boucher unfolds even these dark plots with wit and just the right amount of detachment.

In the title novella, The Compleat Werewolf, a man rejected by the woman he loves because he isn’t someone special like an actor or a G-man discovers he’s a werewolf. He gets a gig as a dog in a major motion picture, and is then hired by the FBI when he exposes a major spy ring. He also discovers that the girl of his dreams isn’t worth it. But he makes friends with a talking cat.

The Pink Caterpillar, Mr. Lupescu and They Bite are all about the lengths someone will go to, to get rid of someone in their way. And how their actions carry the seeds of their own destruction.

Boucher tried his hand at some stories about a company that made robots, much as Asimov did. Two of them, Q.U.R and Robinc, are included in the collection. I actually found them more interesting and funnier than Asimov’ early robot stories. And Dugg Quimby is much more intriguing a character than Susan Calvin.

The novelette We Print the Truth is a thoughtful modern-day variation on the fairy tale of the fateful wish - the wish granted by a magical being that ultimately dies far more harm than good - that examines issues of free will, consent, a d the value of something earned over something taken.

Many of the stories in this collection depend on the unexpected plot twist - The Ghost of Me being one if the clearest examples. A steady diet of Boucher might make this structural preference feel a bit overused, but it’s generally well handled.

One thing I quite enjoyed about these stories was the way that Boucher works philosophical considerations into so many of them. Fate, karma, the meaning of free will the theological problem of the existence of evil - there’s generally something to reflect on after reading.

Boucher also tends to toss in casual notes of social criticism. In one story, he has a character comment that once it would have been unthinkable for the head of the government to be a black person. In another, during a discussion of horror tales about ogres from around the world in reference to an abandoned pioneer home in the Arizona desert, a character mentions an Indian tribe that vanished after the pioneers arrived, and adds “That’s not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway.”

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of classic sf recently, and I must report that finding Boucher’s works has been an unexpected plus.

Short Fiction: February 23, 2018

Bogi Takács, “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”; Clarkesworld, April 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/takacs_04_17/

This is a story within a story, with one sentient being - a genetically enhanced octopus - telling another sentient being - a human - what is remembered in the group memory of the octopi about a great wrong committed by humans. The details unfold slowly, through filters of memory, time and difference, but the issues are familiar, the arrogance and assumption of human exceptionalism, the unthinking use of other living beings, the carelessness of the species. It’s not dramatic in its accusation, but it lingers nonetheless.


“Sun, Moon, Dust,” Ursula Vernon; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/sun-moon-dust/

A sweet story of the “swords into ploughshares” variety; a farmer inherits a magical sword from his grandmother, a famous warrior in her day, but has no need or desire for war.


“Goddess, Worm,” by Cassandra Khaw; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/goddess-worm/

Khaw deconstructs a Chinese legend about the discovery of silk weaving, revealing the acceptance of gendered violence that underlie it.


“Monster Girls Don’t Cry,” A. Merc Rustad; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/monster-girls-dont-cry/

A powerful story about making room for difference. A young girl grows up hating and trying to erase the things that make her a monster in the eyes of the world finally learns to accept herself and demand acceptance from those around her.


“Carnival Nine,” Caroline Yoachim; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 11, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/carnival-nine/

Yoachim’s short story places us inside a world of conscious wind-up dolls, living in miniature cities around a model train layout. Each day the maker winds up the dolls, and they live their lives, ever watchful of the number of turns they have - a figure that varies with the conditions of their mainspring and possibly the whim, or degree of attention, of the maker. It’s an extended metaphor for human life, with not a great deal to add to the conversation about life, death, and fate, but does get points for including a situation that parallels the way family dynamics can change with the addition of a disabled child. A touching story.


“The Last Novelist (Or a Dead Lizard in the Yard),” Matthew Kressel; Tor.com, March 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/15/the-last-novelist-or-a-dead-lizard-in-the-yard/

Reuth Bryan Diaso is perhaps the last novelist in a galaxy in which no one reads books anymore. He has come to the planet Ardabaab to finish his last novel before he dies, but he has lost his inspiration. A chance encounter with a young girl whose enthusiasm for knowledge and raw artistic talent gives him the energy to renew his writing, and to share with her his love of books, of the physicality of reading, of the crafts of creating not just the sequence if words that make up a novel, but the actual process of printing a book. This is a story about loss and creation, endings and perhaps beginnings, death and renewal. I found it quite compelling.


“Utopia, LOL?,” Jamie Wahls; Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/

It’s millions of years in the future, and human beings exist solely as uploaded intelligences in a vast artificial environment controlled by an AI known as Allocator. Almost all the usable mass of the solar system has been converted into the physical substrate that supports the set of virtual realities in which the human race spends its time, playing with simulations of millions of scenarios. But Allocator has limitations. It cannot interfere with human choices, which means that even as virtual beings, they continue to reproduce, requiring ever more substrate material. Allocator cannot extend its influence beyond the solar system - another programmed limitation - but humans can. Allocator’s dilemma - where can it find humans willing to inhabit space probes that will take them to other solar systems and find more space for the multitude of human minds? It’s a very well thought-out story, which touches on a number of issues related to artificial intelligence and informed consent.


“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych,” Kathleen Kayembe; Nightmare Magazine, March, 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-always-family-triptych/

Kayembe’s novelette is powerful, terrifying, triumphant, laying bare the worst and best of the binds between family. In the midst of grief over the loss of his wife, a man does the unthinkable, destroys the son he believes caused her death, takes the other son away with him to America. Years later, he is truly haunted by his actions, and pays the price. Yet in the midst of a tale about supernatural revenge, there is also fierce love of brother for brother, mother for child and finally the discovery of self-love for the young woman who survives the toll exacted by the dead.


“Mother of Invention,” Nnedi Okorafor; Slate.com, February 21, 2018
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/mother-of-invention-a-new-short-story-by-nnedi-okorafor.html

Anwuli is pregnant, almost ready to give birth. She is alone, deserted by her lover, a married man who deceived her about his status, then left her when she got pregnant. Shunned by her family and friends. All she has left is the smart house her lover built for her, an intelligent, self-repairing, self-improving home. But Anwuli has an even mire serious problem - she’s become severely allergic to the pollen of the genetically modified flowers that grow everywhere in New Delta City, and there’s a massive pollen storm brewing, one severe enough to put her into anaphylactic shock. When she goes into labour just as the pollen storm hits, help comes from a most unexpected source.