The Hugo finalists are out, and while quite a few of the short fiction pieces were ones I’d nominated, there are a few I hadn’t read. So, I’ve gotten my hands on those (much thanks to Sarah Pinsker for making a pdf of her novelette available on her website) and corrected those gaps in my reading.
Short Story
“The Martian Obelisk,” Linda Nagata; tor.com, July 19, 2017.
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-martian-obelisk/The Earth is dying. Slowly, from ecological breakdown and climate change and loss of infrastructure and antibiotic resistant diseases and natural disasters and sporadic violence and all the things we’ve been fearing in recent years. A series of slow apocalypses. Susannah is an architect, and with the backing of one of the world’s remaining millionaires, she has spent the last 17 years building a soaring monument to the memory of humanity - on Mars, remotely accessing the technology of a Mars colony that was prepped but never settled. And then the unthinkable happens. A message from a survivor of the last functioning Mars colony, previously thought lost, is received. A woman and her children, the only ones left alive on Mars, have battled halfway across Mars and are asking for the resources of the monument to build a place where they can survive just a little longer. Susannah must decide, what will be the final shape of the Martian monument - the obelisk she’s spent years building, or a few more years of life for a doomed family. Powerful story, both in its depiction of the end of the world - not with a bang, but a long slow series of whimpers - and in its examination of the irrational, irrepressible, persistence of hope.
Novelettes
“Wind Will Rove,” Sarah Pinsker
(Originally published in Asimov’s September/October 2017, available for download as pdf on Pinsker’s website:
http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove)
In this novelette, Pinsker explores the tension between preservation of the past and creation of the future through the situation of a generation ship that, through an act of sabotage, has lost its cultural and historical databases. This results in a concerted decision by the passengers to restore and preserve as much of the lost material as possible, not just through the creation of new databases, but through continued repetition and accurate reproduction of the restored material - music, plays, art, and Earth’s history. The narrator, Rosie Clay, is a history teacher and traditional fiddle player, challenged by one of her students who rejects the emphasis on the history and creations of the past, of an Earth that means nothing to them. Forced to look beyond the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it - questionable in a world that is entirely different from the Earth where that history took place - Rosie finds herself examining her own assumptions. Quiet but very thought-provoking.
“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” Aliette de Bodard; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/children-thorns-children-water/This novelette is set in the world of de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, and requires some familiarity with that world to be fully understood. It’s a world where Fallen angels wield magic and rule Houses, life for the houseless is bleak and often violent. The novels are set in an alternate late 19th century Paris and deal largely with relationships, politics and power - within houses, between houses, and in the larger postcolonial society. In this story, Thuan, a dragon in human form and member of the Dragon kingdom based in the waters of the Seine - the dragons, being drawn from Annamese (Vietnamese) tradition, are water beings) seeks to enter one of the Houses, House Hawthorn, as a spy, to gain information on what the tensions between houses might mean for the dragon kingdom. The day of testing, when new house dependents are chosen, is interrupted by a magical assault by creatures made of thorns, manifestations of House Hawthorne itself. Thuan proves useful to the Fallen in charge of the the tests in dealing with the crisis, and thus wins his place in the House. It’s a well-written piece, but I’m not all that fond of this secondary world. I read and enjoyed the first novel in the series and found it interesting - but not compelling enough to have pushed me to read the second volume. Good story, not quite my cup of tea.
Novellas
River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey
In her foreword, Gailey says: “In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.” It was this unfulfilled notion that spurred Gailey to imagine the alternate history of this novella, though she places the introduction of hippos into the American ecology and economy some decades earlier. In Gailey’s version of the American South, marshes have been encouraged to allow for the development of hippo farming. Hippos serve instead of horses for cartage and personal transport, and there are canals and pools for the animals to use as rest stops, and instead of stables. Part of the Mississippi has been dammed up, forming a marshy lake area called the Harriet where feral hippos range, interfering with water trade along the river. This lake region is controlled by a shady - and very wealthy - man named Travers, who operated gambling riverboats on the lake, and is known to feed people he dislikes to the feral hippos. The story begins when adventurer Winslow Remington Houndstooth is hired by a government agency to clean out the feral hippos. The general plan is to get them through the barrier at the downstream end of the Harriet by any means necessary, and encourage them to migrate south into the gulf, freeing the river for trade, and not quite incidentally interfering with Travers’ business. In addition to the large payment offered to him and any members if the tram he pits together, Houndstooth has a strong personal motivation for injuring Travers, who burned out his hippo farm sone years ago, leaving him penniless.
The first part of the novella is devoted to assembling the team, which could not be comprised of a more diverse group of characters: Regina “Archie” Archambault, a cross-dressing conwoman; Hero Shackleby, a nonbinary demolitions expert; Cal Hotchkiss, fast gun, card shark, and former employee if Houndstooth who may or may not have betrayed him to Travers; Adelia Reyes, a pregnant lesbian assassin; and Houndstooth himself, a mixed race Immigrant from England whose dream and passion is to rebuild his hippo farm. Gailey also spends time letting us get to know, not only the characters, but their hippos, their personalities and distinguishing traits. It’s clear in this society that people form bonds with their hippos not unlike those with other working or companion animals like dogs, cats or horses. As for the plot - everything goes wrong, of course, and there are double-crosses and hidden motivations and a tangle of cross purposes, and this is not a light-hearted caper, not everyone survives. But it is very entertaining, and I hear there’s a sequel.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire
McGuire uses a delightfully arch and ironic tone in beginning this story - the backstory of Jaqueline and Jillian, Jack and Jill, two of the distinctly different children from the first of the Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway - by introducing Chester and Serena Wolcott, two self-absorbed people who chose to have children to complete the image of their perfect nuclear family. Things go wrong, of course, from the beginning. As soon as they knew they were having twins, they assumed they would have a boy and a girl, thus efficiently creating the ideal family in one swoop. They never considered the possibility of two girls.
Parenthood does not suit the Wolcotts, being too disorderly and entirely too loud and messy. Chester’s mother is almost immediately recruited to actually raise the girls. At least until it becomes inconvenient to have her around, so at age five the twins lose the only person in their lives who saw them as people to be encouraged to grow, rather than accessories to be programmed for the benefit of their parents.
Those who have read Every Heart a Doorway already know a little of what happens to Jack and Jill. One day, they find a doorway where no doorway should have been and it takes them to a strange land where nightmares are real, but at least here they have some choice over which nightmare they will live in, where their parents gave them no choices at all. It is a strange place, a cruel place, and each child is changed in ways that do not bear much thinking about.
This is part of why, while I appreciate McGuire’s skill and invention in writing these stories, I don’t like them. I am not good with reading about abused children who don’t get to really escape their abuse - because we know that while Jack and Jill will someday find their way home, they will be damaged, perhaps permanently, perhaps beyond any hope of being ... normal, happy, able to function in a world of ordinary people. Of course, you can say that of many traumatised children, because the scars of some hurts never heal. So there is a fundamental truth underneath the fantasy here. As it happens, it’s a truth I live with, and reading about it requires accommodations that McGuire doesn’t offer, like the possibility of grace and hope.
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