Category: short fiction

Tokyo Cancelled

Tokyo Cancelled cover“Listen closely”, one of Tokyo Cancelled‘s nameless narrators urges us, “for there are some moments when another’s life breaks the rules of what is familiar” (227). They go on to describe, in great detail, the moment when one character, Natalia, a merchant, falls in love at first sight with another character, Riad, a sailor. The setting is a coffee shop in contemporary Istanbul. Later in the story, when Natalia and Riad have been separated by circumstance — the ship on which Riad travels has been impounded in Marseille due to “financial irregularities”, and he has no way of getting a message to Natalia to let her know why he has not returned — there comes “another moment to which we must devote an unnatural degree of attention” (243). In the middle of the night, without waking up, Riad is wracked by great heaving coughs; and gradually, still without waking up, he expels a live sea-bird onto the pillow beside him. The linking of the two scenes is telling: they are alike, is the implication, in that both are impossible magics, devices of stories, not features of real-life. It’s a self-critical association that makes the introduction of that bird one of the more striking deployments of the fantastic in Tokyo Cancelled; but in other ways, it is typical. In particular, it is described with calm authority, and integrated into the narrative with confidence — leading, in this case, to the tantalizing possibility of a happy-ever-after for the star-crossed lovers.

Oh, but I enjoyed this book, picked up on a whim earlier this year. The most obvious comparison to draw is probably with David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) – another sparklingly multifaceted debut collection, with just enough connective tissue to be disguised as a novel; another book that sets itself a globe-encapsulating mandate, carried through with clarity and readability – with the difference that Rana Dasgupta’s book is rather more full-throated in its use of the fantastic. So I was a little surprised, digging around, to find that it has been little discussed within the sf field; indeed, the only review I’m aware of is that by John Clute in Interzone 198 (May 2005). But put it this way: Tokyo Cancelled is not short of moments that break the rules of what is familiar. And, the narrator of “The Rendezvous in Istanbul” insists, such moments “cannot be followed with the humdrum attention we usually grant to the world” (227); although what really makes Dasgupta’s stories remarkable is not that they demand our attention so directly, but that they make us willing to give it so freely.

A brief prologue, designated “Arrivals”, sets the stage: unable to reach its destination due to a snowstorm, a 747 is diverted to an airport in “the Middle of Nowhere” (1), from where most of the passengers are shuttled off to hotels for the night. Thirteen are left behind, all nameless and described in the barest of sketches. To pass the time they decide to tell each other stories. “Everyone knows stories!” one says. Simple geography, it seems, is another way of breaking the rules of what is familiar: one traveller enthuses that “You just have to tell me how you travel to work every morning in the place where you live and for me it’s a fable! it’s a legend!” Followed by: “Sorry I am tired and a little stressed and this is not how I usually talk but I think when you are together like this then stories are what is required” (7). If “fable”, and the style and tone that word conjures, is more relevant to the rest of the book than more naturalistic, if excitable, run-on sentences, then that, we understand, is part of the conceit.

It quickly becomes clear that Dasgupta knows what he’s doing: the first story, “The Tailor”, plays with expectations of fables in a productive fashion. Much in the manner of Daniel Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron”, it is a non-fantastic tale told within a structure familiar from fantasy. A playboy prince, “Not so long ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found” (9; that “alas” is ironic, I think), goes for a drive in the country, and commissions a fine coat from a village tailor. The tailor works on the coat for several months, going heavily into debt to complete it, but when he travels to the prince’s palace to deliver the completed product, he is rebuffed: he has no paperwork, no purchase order to prove his legitimacy. Bankrupt, unable to find an alternate buyer rich enough to afford the coat, he is forced to become a beggar. There are several more twists from here, adroitly done, but the ultimate outcome is never in doubt: the tailor proves his character and his honesty by telling a story for the king, a story that, we are told, possesses “all the thirteen levels of meaning prized in the greatest of our writings” (20). At the end of the tale, a style and a tone have been established that will, with some variation — though not, of course, as much as you’d expect if thirteen real people were really telling stories — see us through the rest of the book, and around the world from London to Delhi to Buenos Aires to New York. And a marker has been put down: stories are not weightless.

That frame unavoidably colours the other stories. “The Billionaire’s Sleep”, for example, told in much the same voice as “The Tailor”, feels chaotically organic in the best sense: the story of a rich Delhi businessman who has everything but sleep, which before you quite realise what’s happening becomes a story about time and music and Rapunzel, it is imbued with an invigorating thinking-out-loud, never-look-back creativity. It presents as the most extravagant story in the book. Yet step back, and it is very much of a piece with its counterparts. There is a deliberate (I think) mismatch between the seemingly innocent style, which implicitly (and in “The Tailor”, explicitly) harks backs to times and places that no longer exist (and may never have done), and the content, which is often thrustingly contemporary. “The Billionaire’s Sleep” features cloning, ruminations on the dislocating effect of jet-lag, and the economics of telephone call centers; many of the other stories play on the same tension, and the net result, which the various eruptions of the fantastic into the book reinforce, is a kind of flattening of distinctiveness. To be clear, “The Billionaire’s Sleep” is set in Delhi, there are markers of Delhi-ness — place names, details of cuisine or custom — scattered through the text; but this Delhi feels much the same as many, perhaps most, of the other locations in the book. I take this muted polyphony to be deliberate, a comment on contemporary global experience (as perceived by those, like our narrators, who can afford at least semi-frequent air travel, at any rate). It flirts with blandness, if you like, as a way of provoking a reader to think about what is similar and different about any given pair of stories; a contrasting strategy could be found in Nam Le’s The Boat (2008), which attempts to reassure its readers that different people in different cultures are always distinct, and in doing so (ironically) flirts with cliche.

The most obvious sort of difference on display in Tokyo Cancelled is geographic: Dasgupta’s stories range over Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, though with a slight bias to the first of those. One kind of similarity can be seen as a deliberate counterpoint to the spread of settings: the protagonists are predominantly traders, or entrepreneurs — individuals for whom engagement with the machinery of commerce is a part of self-identification, in other words — who tend to be in some sense displaced from their home. Another kind of similarity is harder to rationalize — these stories are overwhelmingly about heterosexual men – and somewhat limits Tokyo Cancelled‘s claim to capture contemporary experience in any complete fashion, except insofar as the class of person it depicts is perhaps still more often male than female. It is nevertheless depressing to recognise how often womens’ role in these stories is shaped by sex; when Natalia meets Riad in Istanbul, for instance, times are hard and she’s allowing herself to be kept as a mistress. In “The Bargain in the Dungeon”, Katya, an unwanted child dumped on a train by her rural Polish parents, finds success in Warsaw working as a seamstress whose products, particularly bedcovers, have psychic and physiological healing powers. After a time, she is challenged by a mysterious woman to put her power to greater use. “It is time to leave behind your bedspreads,” she is told, “and apply yourself more deeply to the drama of the human soul […] You must wake people up, with new pain and uncanny pleasure, with a world they do not know, though it is all around them” (307). This means going to work in the titular dungeon, a sort of magical S&M brothel in which Katya uses her powers to tap into the fantasies of her clients, and develops a fascination with one of them that leads, as you might expect, to nothing good.

The story is one of the less impressive of Tokyo Cancelled‘s offerings; it feels perfunctory. But at least Katya is nominally in control of her destiny. In “The Doll”, a Tokyo salaryman, Yukio, persuades his partner’s wealthy father to finance his business plan — he wants to own something that generates wealth. The stress involved in getting his company off the ground leads Yukio to neglect his partner; and as a way of coping with that stress, he constructs a female doll from creepily authentic artificial limbs, and gives her a computer for a brain, at which point she promptly becomes self aware. The doll is blind and immobile, but online, and becomes an object of uncanny attraction both for Yukio and for any other man who comes into contact with her, exerting a succubus-like level of control over their thoughts. There are certainly aspects of the story that are well done — the slow slide from Yukio’s initial, straightforward, honest goodness to dangerous and distasteful obsession, for a start — and it is, arguably, Tokyo Cancelled‘s central story. It’s the one that takes place in Tokyo, after all; the one that most cleanly conflates the technological and the fantastical; the one that most explicitly showcases the distorting effect of work on modern life. (And trivially, it’s located pretty much half-way through the book.) But its one-sidedness, the uncomfortable sense that it’s deploying a cliche about Japan (fetishization of technology) to no particularly original effect, and an ending that unconvincingly gestures towards consolation, means that it is, in the end, a failure.

I need now, I think, to give a sense of why I found the book as a whole so intoxicatingly distinctive, in spite of the above flaws. Two stories in particular stand out. The themes of “The Memory Editor” — that predictions never come true in the way that you want or try to anticipate; that it is worth striving to be content inside your own skin, and mind — are familiar, but the execution is mesmerizing. Set in London, the story’s protagonist is Thomas, the third and youngest son of a wealthy banker. Early in the story, he meets an old woman who claims to have been born with all her memories and, thus, to be able to remember the future; and she tells him that she knows that Thomas’ wealth will one day make his father seem poor. This makes Thomas cocky, and leads him into a disagreement with his father, as the result of which he is banished from the family home. Shortly thereafter he is recruited to work as a researcher for Memory Mine, the owners of which are convinced that “average memory horizons” are on the verge of shrinking to zero and who, as both a precaution against such mass amnesia and a calculated cornering of a new market opportunity, are collating citizens’ personal information — from the public domain, from other corporations, and from government surveillance projects — into packages, narratives, that can be sold back to those who forget. And lo, it does come to pass, first in a dream:

Suddenly he looked up; and through the window he saw a beautiful thing floating slowly down to the ground. It was magical and rare and he felt a deep desire to own it. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden, and there it was floating above him: a delicate thing, spiralling exquisitely and glinting in the sun. He stood under it and reached out his hands. Spinning like a slow-motion sycamore seed, it fell softly and weightlessly into his palms. It looked as if it was of silver, beaten till it was a few atoms thick and sculpted into the most intricate form: a kind of never-ending staircase that wound round on itself into a snail shell of coils within coils. He looked at it in rapture. How could such a beautiful object have fallen from the sky! He was full of joy at this thing that had chosen him and fallen so tamely into his hand. (43)

And then more prosaically. Memory Mine makes a killing. All of this is told with emotional directness, and an irresistable clear certitude that comes in part from a constant expansion, a raising of the stakes of the story until — for example — we can be told, offhand, that the coming of mass amnesia triggers an economic collapse, and that “the two blights swept entire continents hand in hand” (45). And yet Dasgupta is able to bring his story back to Thomas, his father, that old woman, and a satisfying resolution, without seeming to strain at all.

“The Changeling” similarly marries sweep and intimacy, to perhaps even more penetrating effect. “Parisians,” we are told, early in the story, “have traditionally treated their changeling population with resentment” (257); and we’re off to the races, in an immersive alternate history in which changelings — immortal creatures who adopt human form for a short period of time, and are mortal while they do — are indeed an accepted fact of life, although not a welcome one. A little while ago, it was determined that “neither liberty, equality, nor fraternity could be extended to creatures that had no long-term loyalty to the nation or even to the species” (259); changelings in high places are driven out, and the rest live in secret. The protagonist, Bernard, is one such, working as an investment banker, and happily married until the day his wife discovers the truth of him. Cast out, he wanders the city, and ends up helping an injured Moroccan man, Fareed, to a room in a hotel. The scenes that follow — a changeling afraid of mortality confronted with a dying mortal man — are extremely well-judged, but they are just the start. As in “The Memory Editor” and “The Billionaire’s Sleep”, the story contorts and ultimately opens out in exhilarating fashion, transmuting and, it seems, subsuming the story of a Parisian changeling without ever losing sight of the fact that it is, at heart, a meaningful story about learning how to die well.

Stories like these are all the more satisfying because, in this book, they retain the element of surprise: Dasgupta never loses sight of the distinction between the fantastic and the merely extraordinary, and indeed plays with that distinction quite effectively. In a story like “The Lucky Ear Cleaner”, for example, which could begin and end with its title, it’s hard to believe that there is no charm hanging over the protagonist, hard to realise that sometimes luck is just in the eye of the observer; while at the other end of the scale, it’s hard to believe that a story like “The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker” has become as untethered from reality as it has, that it’s not going to come in to land in the way that its predecessors have, but will instead head off for the deepest part of the woods, further up and further in. (It’s a story about making sense of the world that becomes a story about a world that refuses to make sense.) The story-night frame helps with this project, adding an immediate level of dislocation, separating us from home and preparing us for something different. Similarly, the displacements experienced by the book’s protagonists — from their past, as in “the Memory Editor”, or from other people in “The Doll” and “The Rendezvous in Istanbul”, or from home in many of the stories, such as “The Tailor” and “The Bargain in the Dungeon” and “The Lucky Ear Cleaner” — are not just story-generating devices, but are also used to generate a baseline of estrangement from which the fantastic can readily emerge (or not). The end result is a vision of the world in which wonder and modernity are intimately coupled, and fully incorporated into the texture of (an incomplete selection of) human experience. Familiar truths are newly revealed. It’s worth listening to.

Hugo Nominee: “The Erdmann Nexus”

The story is here; so, on with the commentary.

Rich Horton:

“The Erdmann Nexus” seems a bit old-fashioned: almost explicitly channeling Theodore Sturgeon. Indeed elsewhere I called it, a bit meanly, “warmed-over Sturgeon”. But mean or not, read “To Marry Medusa” and “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff”, let’s say, then read “The Erdmann Nexus”. For all that both Sturgeon stories marry moments, whole sequences, of utter brilliance with some real disappointing elements, there’s just something special about them that isn’t present here. Anyway, Henry Erdmann is an aging physicist living in a nursing home, who is scared by brief strokelike incidents — but no brain damage is involved, and eventually there are apparent links to the memories of other residents of the home. And soon he learns that many of his fellow residents are indeed having similar episodes. The resolution — signaled from the beginning — is not surprising: elderly people are evolving into a higher consciousness. Kress does take this familiar idea in a slightly unexpected direction at the end — and there is a subplot involving a young attendant and her abusive husband that I found involving — but there’s no denying that not much really new is going on here.

So: what’s good: slightly unexpected ending. (But even so, one that didn’t thrill me.) And an interesting subplot that alas wasn’t enough of the story. What’s bad — not enough here new. A certain inevitability of the working out of things.

Ian Sales:

Unfortunately, hiding the extraordinary’s explanation, and only revealing it at the end, doesn’t work because it makes for an uninvolving narrative. And, for all its many viewpoints, ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ is pretty dull. […]

Kress throws in a framing narrative, describing a sentient spaceship approaching Earth, but it seems entirely gratuitous. The plot certainly doesn’t require it. And the mentions of split photons, quantum entanglement and emergent complexity just obfuscate. When an author holds the explanation close to their chest, it has to be a damned impressive explanation to redeem the story. Kress’s isn’t. We’ve seen it before, in both science fiction and fantasy. […]

The single-note characterisation in ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ doesn’t help either – gossipy granny, bible-basher, ex-ballerina who pines for her past, blue-collar retiree out of his depth…. And detective Geraci – Kress might as well have named him Goren since he’s plainly based on Vince D’Onofrio’s character in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Val Grimm, at The Fix:

I haven’t seen Cocoon or anything else most folks would probably compare Nancy Kress’s “The Erdmann Nexus” to, so bear with my cultural illiteracy. Although I haven’t seen this specific plot before, it feels familiar and a bit predictable (I can’t reveal quite why without spoilers, so bear with me). That said, I didn’t particularly care because the characterization was so strong. I don’t usually get attached to characters in novellas the way Kress managed to get my empathy engaged here; there usually isn’t enough room. But what she tells us about Henry and Carrie and some of the other central characters makes them solid and interesting, and the interactions between her dramatis personae are ultimately what make the story. In a way, and not just because it is a mystery, it feels like The Westing Game, with each character or group of characters getting their own moment in the spotlight, each vignette fitting into the whole neatly.

Russ Allbery:

Kress isn’t a writer I particularly look for, but she’s a competent writer and rarely writes a bad story. This is one of her better ones, mostly because of the detailed and varied characterization of the residents of a nursing home. The focus is Henry Erdmann, a retired physicist, who takes the role of detective in figuring out mysterious ailments linked with visions and apparent mental powers that the residents begin to experience. It’s a Nancy Kress story, so unsurprisingly there’s a theme of human evolution and transcendence, but there are also moments of character conflict that reminded me of Connie Willis. That’s a rather good mix. I found the ending a bit unsatisfying, but the story was solid entertainment. (7)

SF Gospel:

In the story’s final pages, our third-person omnipotent grants us some glimpses inside several characters’ minds as they are given the choice to join the group mind or continue their . For Erin Bass, the experience is defined within the terms of her spirituality. It is “satori… oneness with all reality.” Similarly, a nameless woman in Shanghai interprets the experience of joining the transcendent mind as “the gods entering her soul.” What, then, does Gina Martinelli experience? Unlike Bass, she does not see the experience through the lens of her faith. She experiences transcendence, but does not see Jesus there. She concludes: “If Christ was not there, then this wasn’t Heaven. It was a trick of the Cunning One, of Satan who knows a million disguises and sends his demons to mislead the faithful.” She rejects the group mind, opting to wait for the Second Coming outside of the collective intelligence.

What does this say about faith and religious experience? If two non-Christian characters are allowed to interpret their experiences in the vocabulary of their faith, why isn’t the Christian character allowed the same leeway? My guess is that Kress’s intention was to show that non-Western religions have provided a vocabulary that is better suited to describing transcendent experiences than Christianity has. But that simply isn’t true—from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart to Philip K. Dick, Christianity is chock full of mysticism that would allow for the kind of collective experience this story describes to be described quite well. Of course, Gina is presented as having a particularly narrow kind of faith. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here—after all, I complain about the close-mindedness of conservative Christianity pretty frequently, and ignorance of the history of mysticism is certainly part of that close-mindedness. But even I will allow that conservative Christians have their own strands of mysticism, as the growing popularity of Pentecostalism shows. I would expect that even as stereotypical a Bible-thumper as Gina Martinelli would be able to see her faith reflected in the totality of all existence. To describe a transcendent experience with culturally-specific terms—”satori,” “the gods”—and to refuse to allow a character from a different faith-tradition to have the same kind of culturally-specific interpretation strikes me as a double-standard. It’s a quibble, really: Martinelli is a pretty minor character, and Kress’s story is characteristically good. Nevertheless, that kind of detail does tends to rankle.

Elsewhere, Colin Harvey liked it and Nicholas Whyte was unconvinced. Your thoughts?

Hugo Nominee: “Shoggoths in Bloom”

The story. The comment:

Rich Horton:

“Shoggoths in Bloom” [is] a thoughtful (and quite straight-faced, despite the title) piece about a black scientist in the late ‘30s, investigating the reproductive habits of shoggoths off the coast of Maine. He learns a bit more than be expected — about shoggoths, their nature, their temptations — all of which is nicely put in the context of the times — his own heritage, as a black man; and the state of the world as Hitler threatens. I thought this quite intriguing in its speculations about shoggoths — for all they are obviously rather silly creations in the original, Bear does not betray Lovecraft’s vision (as far as I can tell) but riffs nicely on it. And then she constructs a morally serious character piece around the central idea, with some historical heft. A very strong story, surely one of the best of the year.

Karen Burnham:

… by firmly grounding this story in a time when almost unthinkable horrors were about to be unleashed, Bear seems to be dismissing Lovecraft’s “horrors” altogether. If you want horror, she seems to say, skip the stories and go straight to the documentaries.

Once more, like all the best stories with a point, in this tale the polemics never dominate the story itself. Bear is a great story-teller, and this one has some good humor and some in-jokes for the Lovecraft fans. Even on its own, without any background in Lovecraftian fiction, I think this story would stand up well. The message and the critique are embedded nicely within an enjoyable tale, just the way they should be.

Russ Allbery:

I think the best part about this story is how it gives you the impression it’s about one thing and then shifts to another, and then another. As advertised in the title, it’s clearly aimed at H.P. Lovecraft territory; it follows a black naturalist in the days just before World War II who is investigating shoggoths on the New England coast. Shoggoths, in this universe, are known creatures, blobs of living jelly, although no one really knows what they are or how they work. He’s trying to find out. From there, the story moves into a bit of the horror and revelation angle that one might expect, but not before race also enters the story mingled with the politics of World War II. And then the horror turns out to not be that horrific after all, just very weird, and the conclusion of the story turns to ethics. The flow from topic to topic is very well-done and kept me engrossed the whole way, and while the ending is reasonably obvious, I still liked it a great deal. Recommended.

Ian Sales:

I wanted to dislike this story. There seemed to be too much in it – 1930s race relations, Nazi persecution of Jews, WWI, and a sudden swerve towards slavery at the end – and I couldn’t decide if the central conceit, the shoggoths, was cleverly done or mishandled. I’m still not sure. But the story grew on me, and by the end of it I did think it was quite good. Not as good as the Kessel or the Bacigalupi, but better than the Gardner.

The Fix:

Bear depicts her setting with authenticity, tackling issues of race and social class in addition to Harding’s quest to understand the shoggoth lifecycle. The histories of Harding and of the shoggoth race meld together in a short, powerful climax that wraps this novelette up perfectly.

Abigail Nussbaum:

It’s a nicely atmospheric piece, and does a good job tying together the protagonist’s investigation of the shoggoths and his dark musings about racial prejudice–which is expressed genteelly in the behavior of the local fishermen and violently in the Kristallnacht riots, which take place shortly after the story’s beginning–most particularly in the choice the protagonist faces in the story’s end, between the freedom of one persecuted minority and another. I liked “Shoggoths in Bloom,” but unlike other Lovecraft pastiches such as Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” or Charles Stross’s “A Colder War,” I also can’t help but feel that my never having read Lovecraft is a barrier to fully appreciating it. For example, I assume that the story’s emphasis on racism is supposed to be intensified by knowledge of Lovecraft’s own well-document racism, and I’m wondering if there are other nuances that have gone over my head because I lack the proper grounding. I’m not sure how fair a criticism this is–and maybe the distance I feel from the story has nothing to do with Lovecraft and everything to do with the story itself–but the bottom line is that “Shoggoths in Bloom” leaves me somewhat cold, impressed by Bear’s technical achievement in creating her pastiche and grafting it to the real world, but not genuinely moved.

And now … over to you.

Reminder: “Shoggoths in Bloom” discussion, and future schedule

Last of the novelettes, this Sunday. Read it here.

We now hit a slight snag, in that the Hugo voting deadline is 3rd July, which on a weekly discussion pattern would get us through only seven of the remaining nine (having already discussed “Exhalation“) short fiction nominees. My proposal, therefore, is to do the novellas like this:

17 May: “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress
24 May: “The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay
31 May: “The Tear” by Ian McDonald
7 June: “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow
14 June: “Truth” by Robert Reed

And then the short stories on Wednesdays and Sundays, like this:

17 June: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson
21 June: “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick
24 June: “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal
28 June: “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick

Sound OK?

Hugo Nominee: “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story”

OK, I suck. But better late than never, eh? Here is the story; and here is the commentary:
Rich Horton:

James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” is just what it says. A boy finds an alien ray-gun in the woods. He is convinced it means his is special, and he works to make himself worthy of it — but at the same time his relationships with other people, particularly women, are poisoned. The story reflects on the dangers of the power such a gun might confer — as it notes internally, not entirely in a new way: “he realized he was not Spiderman, he was Frodo”. I enjoyed this story quite a bit, and I am reprinting. I acknowledge one weakness — as Science Fiction, it’s a bit lacking, in that (as Gardner announces at the opening) the central Maguffin is not explained at all, and is really not that SFnally interesting — it is just a device (no pun intended) for stringing a character story on. Fair enough … and reason enough for me to decide to vote Bear’s story ahead of this one on my final ballot. But the story does what it intends to do very well, I think.

SF Gospel:

James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” (Asimov’s, February 2008) is my kind of SF story. It takes a simple premise—a young boy discovers the eponymous alien artifact—and explores it with strong characters and a healthy does of philosophy. Jack, the boy who finds the weapon, becomes obsessed with his discovery, and as he grows into adulthood this obsession comes to define him. His interest in the gun leads him to a career in science; his fears about its discovery lead him to push away those whom he loves. Before long both he and the reader begin to wonder if the ray-gun is intelligently guiding its owner to predetermined ends. This sort of high-tech teleology is a common trope in SF—among other things, it’s the foundation of Asimov’s Foundation. The idea that there is a way things are supposed to be, a conclusion to which everything is moving, is essential to any satisfying story, but SF allows a greater degree of transparency about the intelligence(s) that determine that end. The whys of Gardner’s story remain sketchy; the ray-gun is, after all, wholly alien, and its design is as ineffable as its tech. Nevertheless, it’s a moving exploration of the concept of the happy ending. The real strength of the story is its characters. Jack seems to be painted in broad strokes—we learn few concrete details about him, and he doesn’t even have a last name. But Gardner tells his story confidently, and as a result he feels more real by the story’s end than if he were granted more exposition.

Aliette de Bodard, for The Fix:

“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner is the other standout. About a mysterious alien ray gun which falls to Earth, it follows the life of Jack, the boy who finds it and keeps it, and the various ways in which the gun affects his life. As the narrator warns us, this isn’t a story about how ray guns work, but rather a very intelligent look at how having a mysterious artifact can change lives. Both Jack and his girlfriends are profoundly affected by the ray gun’s secret in utterly believable ways. The last paragraph did feel a tad superfluous, but don’t let that deter you from reading this fine story.

Russ Allbery:

Gardner has a matter-of-fact story-telling voice with a hint of wry wit under the surface that, when he’s on, is oddly compelling. I found myself thoroughly enjoying this story without being able to put a finger on why. I think it’s because the story is so confident in itself; it doesn’t spend time explaining or justifying. A boy finds a ray-gun. The ray-gun changes his life, for both good and bad. As he matures, he realizes what a responsibility it is, and the problems it causes. And by the end of the story, it’s the spark for a touching love story. The whole story is in the title, really, but Gardner writes it with such confidence and gentle emotion that it’s the highlight of the issue. (7)

“bestsciencefictionstories.com“:

  • The good:
    • I loved all the references to Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings, and how they worked so well with this story. Very cool!
    • Like the title implies this really is a love story. I don’t think I’ve ever read a romantic science fiction story and enjoyed it as much as this one. Really well done!
    • The ending of “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” was really quite nifty – it was totally fun to see how things all came together.
  • The bad:
    • The story telling style was a little bit different with its “simplistic narrator” point of view. But after the first part of the story I eventually got used to it and it didn’t really bother me any more.
    • Even though “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” starts out with young teenagers, it isn’t really a story for kids.

Abigail Nussbaum:

The result is pleasant but not very exciting. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s the appeal to so many readers’ own experiences as young science fiction fans, convinced that any minute their life was going to transform into something out of their favorite stories, that is at the root of “The Ray-Gun”‘s appeal (though by the same token it’s not much of a stretch to view the ray gun as a metaphor for being an SF fan, and the story’s ending, in which Jack and his new girlfriend send the gun to the bottom of the ocean, as saying that if you want to get a girl, you’ll have to give up that creepy science fiction habit). I can’t say that I think nostalgia and sentimentality are, on their own, good enough reasons to give a story a Hugo nomination, or indeed to lavish it with all the praise that “The Ray-Gun” has received.

Hugo Nominee: “Pride and Prometheus”

The story, and the comment:

Nick Gevers, in Locus:

The closing story in this collection, ‘‘Pride and Prometheus’’, recently published in F&SF, is a splendid exercise in Jane Austen pastiche, a younger Bennet sister meeting Victor Frankenstein and striving to reconcile his cruel Gothicism with scientific ideals. Enlightenment scientism is beautifully burlesqued here, both Austen and Mary Shelley coming in for gentle mockery, the worldliness of the one interweaving mischievously with the emotional extravagance of the other. Each satirizes its counterpart, and the result is a spirit of wry realism. In short, a perfect summary of the complementary contraries within John Kessel, who in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence has produced one of the best collections of the year.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, at The Fix:

“Pride and Prometheus” is a technically dazzling Jane Austen pastiche which brings Miss Mary Bennett in contact with Victor Frankenstein. There is much to admire here: the language, both Victorian and Gothic, the philosophical discussions around naturalism and the limits of what empirical research ought to concern itself with, as well as the search for redemption through companionship from opposing and contrasting points of view. And yet, for me, some dramatic tension was diffused through the forced juxtaposition of thematic concerns and reverberations. The impeccable narrative style already places us at one remove from contemporary sensibilities; rather than spontaneously generating from this construct, the inclusion of Frankenstein’s world seemed more like a nifty exercise in literary mutagenesis that further constrained the dramatic potential. This story has already proven popular, though, and despite my reservations on these grounds, readers will find plenty to savor here.

Abigail Nussbaum:

If I have any complaints against “Pride and Prometheus” they are first that Kessel hasn’t really got the Austen-ish voice right. His pastiche rings hollow, emulating Austen’s grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure but lacking the spark that imbued her writing with so much humor. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the plain fact that “Pride and Prometheus” is barely even a genre story. That’s not always a problem–Kessel’s story is a hell of a lot more SFnal than Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See,” which quite rightly won the Nebula in 2004–and if nothing else “Pride and Prometheus” has once again reminded me to be grateful for the broadness and inclusiveness of the genre short fiction scene, since I can’t for the life of me imagine what mainstream short fiction magazine would publish this story. But with a shortlist already stacked to the rafters with metafictional games, literary pastiches, and appeals to the reader’s nostalgia and fannish affection, Kessel’s story, which unlike “Shoggoths in Bloom” doesn’t do much besides be metafictional, is somewhat devalued. Finally, given my chilly response to Bear’s story, I can’t help but wonder how much of my positive response to “Pride and Prometheus” has to do with my previous familiarity with the novels Kessel is drawing on.

Paul Kincaid, at SF Site:

Other than the hard-riding heroines of “The Invisible Empire” or the rather fearsome autocrats of the lunar stories, the strongest character is probably Miss Mary Bennet in “Pride and Prometheus,” in which the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice encounter Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creature. It is becoming impossible to keep count of the number of novels and short stories that revisit Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though this is certainly one of the better examples. This is at least in part because of the novelty of including Jane Austen in the mix, and even more because of the consistent way in which Kessel views the action from the point of view of Mary Bennet. Rather than the horror of monstrosity, therefore, this becomes a story about the constrictions of society. Kessel’s women are as trapped by perceptions of what they should be and how they should live their lives as his men.

Best SF:

What I believe the younger generation call a “mash-up”. Kessel puts the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice together with Victor Frankenstein. Kessel does a more than passable rendition of the writing style of Miss Austen, which will doubtless please those who like their fiction written in a style now two centuries old, although it can at times err on the pastiche, and I for one was reminded of the classic French & Saunders pisstake on such costume dramas on TV (“You suppose? You suppose? Madam, I find you very suppository!”)

The two unmarried Bennet daughters, Mary and Kitty, are in London, the younger, prettier, out to catch herself a man, like Mr Darcy, of some six thousands pounds per year. However, it is Mary who is smitten – by Mr Frankenstein. The creature also lurks, and the story leads a leisurely pace until a dreadful denoument, when young Kitty dies of a fever, and her body is resurrected by Frankenstein, to furnish the creature with a mate.

Actually, this is a false denouement, as we find through means of a newspaper clipping a year hence, of the likely fate of several of the characters, although this rather wraps up the story post-haste and with less satisfaction than one would like.

Colin Harvey, at The Fix:

But where Kessel scores is in fusing two seemingly disparate genres together so beautifully; it’s a wonderful Austen pastiche, and only rarely does he ever let control of his material slip. Once the initial bemusement at such an unlikely juxtaposition has passed, it’s a well-written story in its own right, with Mary [Bennet] at times quoting contemporary beliefs in such a way that they feel as if they could as easily have come from the mouth of Mary Shelley, who was, after all, a feminist almost two centuries before the term was popularized.

While the first half of the story is as light a soufflé as any Austen created, the mood gradually darkens with the second half to bring it emotionally closer to Shelley’s Gothic denouement—although in the end, Kessel reins in the story to steer a middle course which, unlike many genre romances, avoids both a contrived resolution and some of the histrionics that characterized his source material, and he manages to wring fresh pathos from what could, in a lesser writer’s hands, simply be a reworking of familiar materials. In all, “Pride and Prometheus” is highly recommended.

Broadly positive, then — and, of course, it’s just won a Nebula award. There’s also a short interview with Kessel about the story here.

And now, over to you …

Hugo Nominee: “The Gambler”

Here’s the story. Here’s the comment:

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, at Strange Horizons:

“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi explores one character’s sense of responsibility to honest news-reporting in a world that dictates content by popularity (pings, clicks, links, social pokes, etc.). The narrator’s distinctive first-person voice and observations on culture (“Americans are very direct”) weave a fascinating tapestry, though I personally found some of his uninformed perspective unlikely, and bordering on irrational righteousness. Search for identity is always compelling, though, when handled adeptly, and that is certainly the case in this piece. “True Names,” “Molly’s Kids” and “The Gambler” all make comments of varying seriousness on generational succession. “The Gambler” does so most eloquently by having the protagonist explicitly recognize how he is following in his father’s ideological footsteps.

Paul Raven, at Futurismic:

With “The Gambler“, Paolo Bacigalupi steps out of the niche that has been built around him on two counts – first by writing something so near-future it could be set before the close of the current decade, and second by writing something with a glimmer of hope to it. A plausible enough vision of the future of web-based new media to provoke io9 to cite it as accurate (albeit slightly ironically, considering their recent broadening of remit), “The Gambler” is actually a classic story re-told – the journalist who, despite the disapproval of his superiors, wants to write the news stories that really matter as opposed to puff-pieces.

David Soyka, at Black Gate:

However, the story here that I’d pick for the “hit single” […] is “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi. The narrator is a web journalist in a near future in which readership – and the news feed’s stock price – is measured instantly. Reporters who file stories that get the most clicks directly contribute to company profitability. What kind of stories get the clicked on most frequently? Well, if you’re guessing that it might be the tabloid celebrity stuff as opposed to detailed analyses of government reports, you’d be making a reasonable extrapolation based on the current state of media “news” coverage.

The “gamble” is that there might be an audience for something more substantive than the usual fluff. That the gamble might have a chance of winning is why it is a science fiction story.

Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker:

Another undeniable favorite is Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler” due to its focus on its Vietnamese protagonist. The strength of the piece is Bagicalupi’s focus on character and this is evident as we get flashbacks of the narrator’s father who is a martyr of sorts. There’s a lot of details packed into the story that gives it a rich flavor and makes it believable. Where Bacigalupi triumphs is that while the story could easily have taken place in the modern era, what makes it science fiction is the exaggerated qualities of our culture. By the time we reach the end, the story’s fairly predictable, but it nonetheless hits your gut and even I’m forced to evaluate my reasons for writing.

My original comments:

There’s an unavoidable element of meta about “The Gambler”, never more prominent than when Kulaap tells Ong, with a sigh, that “No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once”, and Ong responds by insisting (quite rightly) that his stories are real news. Thus (the suspicion is unavoidable) does Bacigalupi deal with his reputation for miserablism. But the reader is never nudged into noticing this parallel — you need information external to the story to see it — and the story instead wisely spends its time deepening Ong’s quiet but firm sincerity. The end of the “The Gambler” is probably the most touching thing Bacigalupi has yet written: what Ong gambles on is human nature, and Bacigalupi makes us want him to win.

So generally positive, then, but with some reservations — the plausibility of the central character, and I’d like to know what others make of Abigail’s observation in the comments to my original post that the ending felt truncated to her. I’m also slightly surprised not to have found more comment about this story out there; have I missed any significant write-ups?