Category: short fiction

“Monetized” by Jason Stoddard

IZ220 coverHmm. This strikes me as a rough start, in several senses:

My Saturday started with Antonio Moreno, screaming at me through my eyeset.

“Mike! Where’d the money go!” he yelled.

I groaned. I sat up. Full sun streamed through the grimy windows of my Silver Lake crackerbox, slashing the bedsheets white and hitting one absinthe-soaked retina like a billion photonic bullets.

(We already know he’s screaming. Do we really need that “he yelled”? Either way, shouldn’t that exclamation be a question? And isn’t that “Full sun…” sentence just trying a bit too hard? I quite like “slashing the bedsheets white”, and I don’t mind the basic image behind “like a billion photonic bullets”, but the construction feels off; I start wondering what a photon-like bullet would be like, rather than wincing at the bullet-pain caused by a billion photons.)

We lay our scene in a near-future “de facto post-scarcity” California from the hyperactive Doctorow/Stross mould, with narration by a petulantly plugged-in young man (teenager?), so the story couldn’t really be said to calm down at any point, but it does become engaging enough that I stopped stumbling over the rough patches. Manufacturing is so cheap that most people can achieve a decent standard of living by “monetizing” their everyday interactions; a cross between Google Ad Sense and the Microsoft Paperclip whispers “revenue opportunities” in the narrator’s ear. We are intended to take this seriously, both economically and in its potential to deform human relations. I haven’t thought about it too hard. Some of it is decently chilling: casual mention of “the anonymity of people who suck at social networking”, for instance. Some of it feels glib, as the story barrels towards its paradigm-shifting conclusion. Little of it feels distinctive.

Interzone 2009

I have been assiduously buying Interzone all year, and not finding the time to read it. It’s not a complete lie to say I bought the last couple of issues in part because I’m impressed that they finally got their act together on the cover art front, and I wanted a complete set. Still, now that I’ve got them, it seems silly to just have them sitting there. Since Interzone published just over thirty stories this year, I should be able to get through them in a month: time for a December reading project. Taking a leaf out of Martin’s book, I will be posting about each story individually. I’m unlikely to manage a strict regime of one a day — I forsee fallow periods during the week, and catch-up at the weekends — but we’ll see how it goes. And I’ll update this post with links to the posts on each story.

Interzone 220

Interzone 221

Interzone 222

Interzone 223

Interzone 224

Interzone 225

Short Story Club: “Eros, Philia, Agape”

The story, by Rachel Swirsky, can be found here, where comments are very appreciative. Elsewhere comment starts with a brief mention at Not if you were the last short story on Earth:

An epic post-mortem of the relationship between a woman, her robot lover and their daughter, after he abandons the family, in distressingly mortal fashion (and yet not), to “find himself.” One of Swirsky’s finest stories to date, and an excellent contribution to the ‘potential humanity of robots’ canon.

Another mention from the same community here:

As the title suggests, it concerns itself with love in its various forms, and asks those questions musicians have been trying to answer for us for decades – and does it with style, and panache, and heart-wrenchingly wonderful prose. Characters who are all too real and three-dimensional – even when they’re a bird; scenarios that are all too believable. I’ll be watching out for more of Swirsky’s work, even though I know she’ll probably put my heart through the wringer.

Jonathan Strahan says:

The highlight of the day’s reading was “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky. Swirsky is a terrific writer who’s been making a name for herself with a string of intelligent, perceptive stories that have appeared in Weird Tales, Subterranean and elsewhere.

“Eros, Philia, Agape” is a robot story. A rich, lonely and beautiful young woman, looking for a change in her life after the death of her abusive father decides to have a lover made, a robot to fill the personal void in her life. That decision leads to love, family and a search for awareness that is created beautifully and sensitively be Swirksy.

While Swirksy’s robot tale with a heart and soul runs perhaps a little long and undoubtedly won’t be the best thing she writes – she’s growing too much as a writer for that to be true – it’s definitely a highlight of the year.

Fantastic reviews:

It is no surprise that things don’t turn out quite as Adriana intends, yet the flow of the story is subtle. Swirsky is not using her science fictional set-up to hammer home any particular message; rather, she is giving us a new framework to consider universal issues about identity and love and marriage and family and parenting.

This is a story Isaac Asimov might have written, if only he had been an amazing prose stylist. “Eros, Philia, Agape” is beautifully written throughout (once you’re past the slightly pretentious title anyway) and I strongly recommend it.

And Joel’s Scattered Thoughts:

Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky is a story that’s about as different from Isaac Asimov’s classic Robot stories as any story could be. At the same time, it has some striking thing in common with those stories. The biggest difference is that Eros, Philia, Agape is all about emotions and has the scientific parts of the story as backdrop. Robots in the Eros, Philia, Agape universe don’t have anything like Asimov’s Three Laws built in. At the same time, robots in both stories are not Pinocchio longing to be human. The exploration of what it means to have free robots living alongside free humans with neither dominating is key to the two stories.

I very much enjoyed this story and I hope to read more of the author’s work.

Over to the rest of you!

Short Story Club: “Unrest”

Little beyond basic reactions for this week’s story; Rich Horton thought it “an excellent dark tale of the ravages of war, told effectively from sequential points of view of the participants/victims”; Lois Tilton says it is “An intriguing series of glimpses into a world we can not see quite clearly enough to fully understand”; James wasn’t convinced:

Each story is bleak and grim, and the overall tone is depressing. Presumably that’s intentional to show the horrors of war, but the result is a rather dark read which I didn’t really enjoy. The fragment of hope thrown out to the reader at the end of the story wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more hope; from somewhere.

And Paul Jenkins, reviewing the audio version for The Fix, said:

… a curious folk tale with serial narrators, each telling of the demise of the one before—or that’s how the plot seemed to progress. But with any fantasy setting the author needs to establish the world of the story in a transparent and subtle manner, to avoid resorting to the dreaded infodump. If in addition there are multiple characters who are dispatched in turn, the reader/listener is likely to have trouble identifying with them before they’re no longer around, while at the same time trying to make sense of the setting with its magic, trolls and spirits. For those familiar with the conventions of the genre, or better still with that particular world of this particular author, it isn’t likely to be a problem. For others, it can be a bit hard-going. Nevertheless the story is well-produced and would probably reward repeated listening.

Your thoughts?

Short Story Club: “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon”

I’m not going to type the whole title out again, but the story is here. Not much pre-comment; it wasn’t James’ cup of tea, and Martin thinks it doesn’t hang together:

‘A Weeping Czar’ is another one from the Torque Control short story club. It was published online by Tor who also published his first novel, Lamentations, which appears to be set it the same universe. I had been interested in that novel. I am less so now. As I was reading the story I passed through several different understandings of its genre, each of which affected my enjoyment of it.

However, to judge by the comments on the story itself this may be a minority view. Or not … what did you think?

Short Story Club: “The Shangri-La Affair”

Pretty much praise all around for this one. Let’s start with Rich Horton, in the March Locus:

[at Strange Horizons] In January, my favourite story is sf: “The Shangri-La Affair” by Lavie Tidhar. Sometime in the near future a man comes to Laos on a mysterious mission, as war continues to sweep through Asia. The familiar routines are enacted: the flight in on Nuevo Air Amerika; the rendezvous with an enchanting woman; the journey to a hidden city. Slowly we learn the man’s mission. He is trying to find and destroy the only samples of a dangerous plague, but is it dangerous? That turns out to be a good question, one Tidhar leaves the reader to answer, making this a fine, thought-provoking story.

Lois Tilton at IROSF:

Very edgy and unsettling stuff, best read to the Ride of the Valkyries and evoking a cynical world of spooks and black ops as well as a skiffy side of robotic and cyborg warriors and designer bioweapons, as well as the obligatory sexy Asian girl.

RECOMMENDED

Jason Sanford declares it a story of the week, and writes:

Tidhar’s story reads like a drug-infused John Le Carré novel, if Le Carré wrote science fiction and dropped LSD as he pounded on the typewriter. The narrative is tense and action-based, pulling the reader through a story with flat-out beautiful prose. The result is a tale which is both fun to read, and a fascinating glimpse into the madness of future wars. All in all, an amazing accomplishment, and highly recommended.

It’s James’ favourite of the short story club:

I loved the style of the writing, it had a great sense of place, with some really groovy description: funky, cool and foreign. It has plenty of background tech scenery, the sort of layers that give the future a good sense of believability, combined with some striking descriptive images.

The POV is a bit slippery in places, along with the nameless protagonist, and I liked both, producing a tale-of-the-past feel combined with a kind of Ludlum-esque Bourne style espionage.

It doesn’t skimp on ideas either, leaving a rather large question for discussion at the end: is peace enforced by biological means something we should use? Peace or slavery?

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Probably my favourite of the entire story club so far. Highly recommended.

And it sent Evan on a Tidhar binge:

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the confidence of the narrative voice. The story follows an unnamed protagonist from a quite close third-person perspective through a future war in South-East Asia, concerning a particular MacGuffin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-La of the title), virally transmissable fellow-feeling that stops hostilities in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before everything is blown to atoms by the unseen backers of our nameless viewpoint character. The story’s prime emotional conflict is his struggle between destroying the peace plague and letting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This struggle would have more resonance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another viewpoint on whether or not the plague nullifies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t perfect, of course. There are only token female characters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Consequence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in warzones far away from the home front, without any real engagement with the consequences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the cleverness of its synthesis of these elements, and I think that it succeeds very well (that said, I tend towards synthesis in my tastes, perhaps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick being favorites of mine).

Since reading it, I’ve gone on something of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as quality stuff, some of it better, I think, than this particular piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opinion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought HebrewPunk and ordered The Bookman, so I may be in the throes of an irrational enthusiasm. Looking forward to what he produces in the future.

With an explanation of how he’s using synthesis here (useful perspective, I think). But what did everyone else think?