My life in books

One of the many contradictions in my life is that I am somewhat of a pacifist (short version: only violence as a last-option self-defense response) who sometimes enjoys reading milsff - both the fantasy/historical fantasy type and the harder science fiction type.

Most of my favourite milsff has been written by women, and some of it has been milsff that is deeply critical of war and its consequences. One such author is Karin Lowachee, whose military sf trilogy (Warchild, Cagebird, Burndive) is a powerful examination of the phenomenon of the child soldier.

In fact, it was Lowachee's name in the ToC of the milsff anthology War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, that made me decide to read it. And I am glad I did, because this is a collection of very good war stories, told with an awareness of the costs and consequences of war.

War Stories is a crowd-funded anthology, published by Apex. Part of the project description from the Kickstarter page says:

War Stories isn't an anthology of bug hunts and unabashed jingoism. It's a look at the people ordered into impossible situations, asked to do the unthinkable, and those unable to escape from hell. It's stories of courage under fire, and about the difficulties in making decisions that we normally would never make. It's about what happens when the shooting stops, and before any trigger is ever pulled.

The anthology opens with the award-winning story Graves by Joe Haldeman, which serves as a kind of theme piece for the remainder of the book. Haldeman, himself a veteran of the American military involvement in Vietnam, tells a story about an American Vietnam vet whose job was to collect and process the bodies of fallen American soldiers for return to the U.S., and the circumstances of one particular incident that has lived on in his nightmares for 20 years.

The other stories are divided into four themed sections - Wartime Systems, Combat, Armored Force and Aftermath. What binds them all together is a focus on the characters, their motivations for and reactions to those impossible, unthinkable, inescapable situations. The stories are told from varied perspectives - front-line warriors and support personnel, officers and grunts and solitary specialists, victors and vanquished, participants and civilians, the occupied and the occupiers, those who came home and those who did not (and those who, having come hone, could not stay), those who went to war and those who waited behind. And all written with clarity and power.

Unwelcome Bodies, Jennifer Pelland

I thought this was a great first-time collection of short stories from an up-and-coming writer of speculative fiction who has a truly unique way of looking at the world as it is and as it could be.

It’s also the first published book from a friend whose evolution as a writer I’ve been privileged to follow almost from the beginning. So yeah, I’m biased.

It’s also true that I have an abiding fondness for reading about the darkness in the human mind and soul, which explains a lot of things, including my interest in dystopic fiction and narratives about serial killers, and this is a collection representative of Pelland’s darker writing.

Because she’s good*, and she hits a lot of my buttons, I would have enjoyed these stories even if someone else had written them. They are for the most part dark, often uncomfortably so, and whether they are horror with an SFnal base or science fiction with a serious dose of what human beings find horrifying, they are original and thought-provoking, each and every one of them.

I can’t really pick out a couple of favourites to talk about. Many of the stories in this collection place the protagonist in a profoundly difficult, even nightmarish situation and then follow the story through to what H. P. Lovecraft might have called unspeakable ends – except that Pelland dares to speak them. Among the purist examples of this are the stories “Big Sister/Little Sister” and “The Call.”

There are dystopic visions galore, from the despair of “For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great”, a story about a future in which a new air-borne variety of AIDS comes to be seen as a gift that frees people from devastating isolation to the ecologically-based nightmares of “Flood” and “Songs of Lament” – visions given a profound reality by Pelland’s ability to distil all the horror of these damaged worlds into their singular expression in the lives of her protagonists. I’ll give a very special nod in this general category to the previously unpublished story “Brushstrokes,” dealing with forbidden love, forbidden thoughts and forbidden knowledge in a society that enforces its rigid class and caste laws with police state methods.

Then there are the – for me, at least – profoundly moving explorations of disability, both as a lived and as an observed state of existence in “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man” and “Captive Girl.”

There are stories that explore the ways in which even the highest and purest of ideals and philosophies can, under the right combination of pressures and personalities, drive the descent into terrible acts – “Immortal Sin” and “Firebird.”

I feel that I must point out that Pelland’s work is not all dark – in fact, one of the stories in this collection, “Last Bus,” is to my mind a very optimistic story in its own poignant way – although it’s also true that even her funniest work can contain some elements that some might consider disturbing (you’ll definitely know what I mean if you’ve read “Clone Barbecue” or “The Burning Bush”**). This collection was published by Apex, a publisher that specialises in dark speculative fiction, so naturally the short stories selected for this volume showcase that side of her writing. I hope her next collection will have some room for all the other shades of Pelland’s distinct vision.


*She’s already been a Nebula Award nominee for her short story “Captive Girl,” and I see many more nominations and awards in her future.

**Links to a number of stories available online can be found at the author’s website.