My life in books

“The Secret Life of Bots,” Suzanne Palmer; Clarkesworld, September 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_09_17/

Palmer’s suspenseful yet very funny novellette takes place on a nearly derelict space ship on a suicide mission to stop an enemy worldkiller from reaching Earth. So much of the ship is falling apart, all the available standard bots are working nonstop to keep the ship going just long enough to deliver its payload. When there are reports of an infestation, the Ship AI pulls an outdated bot with dangerous instabilities out of storage to deal with the problems. It turns out, the dangerous instability is creative thinking, and the ship needs some of that badly if it’s going to fulfil its mission.

“Cake Baby,” Charlie Jane Anders; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cake-baby-kango-sharon-adventure/

“Cake Baby” may not be the funniest science fiction romp I’ve ever read, but it comes awfully close. Sharon and Kango are two surreal characters with a real talent for fucking things up royally, which is why they may not be the best pair of interstellar adventurers to hire for your dirty work. But they manage to survive, thanks to their far more practical crewmate, ex-cultist stowaway Jara, and their ship’s computer Noreen. Very funny stuff. Really. Read it.


“The Dark Birds,” Ursula Vernon; Apex Magazine, January 9, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/the-dark-birds/

Vernon often tells dark tales. This is one of them. In the forest lives a family. There’s a Father, of curse. And there is always a Mother, a Ruth , a Susan, and a Baby. When Mother has a new daughter, Ruth disappears, Susan becomes Ruth, Baby becomes Susan. That’s how it always is. Until it isn’t.


“The Fall of the Mundaneum,” Rebecca Campbell; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 28, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-fall-of-the-mundaneum/

In 1914, in a building in Belgium that houses a vast collection of books and artefacts, a man is waiting for the German army to arrive. He imagines that this great building, an establishment of knowledge and history, will be handed over honourably, to those who, while conquerors, will respect its importance. Right up to the end, he answers letters sent in by those seeking answers from the great collection, cataloguing the strange contents of a valise sent from his colleagues in Köhn, with a hasty message he understands only too late.


“Queen of Dirt,” Nisi Shawl; Apex Magazine, February 7, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/queen-of-dirt/

A young martial arts instruction with the gift of seeing things most people don’t must find a way to save herself from a hive of otherworldly things seeking a new queen, and her students from the potentially dangerous consequences of contact.


“Remnant,” Jordan L. Hawk and K. J. Charles; Smashwords
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/404000

Historical m/m romance, of the explicit sort, about two pairs of occult detectives. Apparently each of the authors is known for writing a series based on one of the pairs in this story, which is well-written, and lots of fun, both in terms of adventure and eroticism. The setting is London. A long dead Egyptian spirit is killing people, and ghost hunter Simon Feximal, with his companion Robert Caldwell, is investigating. Arriving from America just in time to lend assistance is American philologist Percival Endicott Whyborne and his companion, Griffin Flaherty. A nice blend of mystery, adventure and erotica.


“These Deathless Bones,” Cassandra Khaw; Tor.com, July 26, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/26/these-deathless-bones/

Khaw has excellently inverted the trope of the evil stepmother here, with a story of a queen married to provide a new mother for a prince whose own mother has died. But in this dark fantasy, the queen is a just avenger, and the young prince a cruel budding psychopath whose years of torturing small animals and throwing tantrums to punish the servants have led step by step to the unforgivable.

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.

Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.