“Sublimation Angels” by Jason Sanford

IZ224 cover A nugget of New all swaddled in Old, that’s what this story is [pdf link]. Much of the pleasure in “Sublimation Angels” — as in Sanford’s two previous Interzone tales [more pdfs] — comes from the gentle unwinding of a satisfyingly odd setting, in thise case constructed in explicit homage to Leiber’s “A Pail of Air” (1951). Like that story, the narration is straightforward, more transparent even than Leiber (it lacks his folksiness); and, as in that story, the characters live, with very basic technology, on a wandering planet whose atmosphere has frozen. Unlike in that story, a repressive hierarchical society has arisen, based around access to oxygen.

Omare and I were born in the highest level of the cave in as much heat and good air as our expedition could give. While low kids raised their children in the lower cave’s cold, Omare and I never knew this deprivation when we were young. We only knew that our mother and father loved us, and if we climbed down the cave’s spiral tunnels we wore clumsy pails of frozen oxymix around our neck. The insulated pails contained a tiny tick-tock heater, and you cranked them every few minutes to smoke out the extra air needed to live.

What follows is about learning the world, rebelling against it, and becoming master of your own destiny. Heartwarmingly conventional stuff, if perhaps a bit stretched beyond its ideal length. But wait! There’s an ironic twist (arguably revealed very early on). It’s not just Sanford who has (like Karl Schroeder with his Virga) engineered his setting to allow its retro feel, protecting his colonists from the raw tech-dream that is the twenty-first century space opera future: one of the agents in his story has done the same thing.

So much for freedom.

Deborah Biancotti stories available to BSFA members

Deborah Biancotti has spotted that two of her stories have been nominated in the Best Short Story category, and has this offer:

If you are a kind British person &/or a member of BSFA & you’d like to read these stories, feel free to drop me a line (~~deborahb AT livejournal DOT com~~ rous AT deborahbiancotti DOT net) & I will cheerfully — very cheerfully — forward you an electronic copy of said stories. I may get a bit carried away & send you more than those two, but you’ll at least get those two stories & you can read ‘em or use ‘em for your electronic bird cages as is your wont.

So why don’t you?

BSFA Award Nominations So Far — Best Short Story

Once more, with feeling: this is a list of all works that have so far received at least one nomination for this year’s BSFA Award for Best Short Story. Why not read a couple? I’m going to try to get through as many of the ones I haven’t yet read as I can by next weekend. Send additional nominations with your membership number and/or postcode, by January 16th. After that, the five with the most nominations go forward to the final ballot.

“The Best Monkey” by Daniel Abraham (The Solaris Book of New SF, Volume Three, ed. George Mann, Solaris)
“After the Revolution” by Pauline J Alama (Abyss & Apex, first quarter 2009)
“Microcosmos” by Nina Allan (Interzone 222)
Genesis by Bernard Beckett (Quercus Publishing)
“Atomic Truth” by Chris Beckett (Asimov’s, April/May 2009)
“Diamond Shell” by Deborah Biancotti (request; from A Book of Endings, Twelfth Planet Press)
“Problems of Light and Dark” by Deborah Biancotti (request; from A Book of Endings, Twelfth Planet Press)
“Ys” by Aliette de Bodard (Interzone 222)
“An Education of Scars” by Philip Brewer (Futurismic, March 2009)
Starship Fall by Eric Brown (PS Publishing)
“After the Change” by Stephanie Burgess (Future Bristol, ed Colin Harvey, Swimming Kangaroo Press)
“The Festival of Tethselem” by Chris Butler (Interzone 224)
“The Branding of Shu Mei Feng” by Amanda Clark (Daybreak, 29 November 2009)
“Re-Creations” by David L Clements (Footprints)
“Erosion” by Ian Creasey (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2009)
“The Certainty Principle” by Colin Davies (Asimov’s, Feb 2009)
“Tyrannia” by Alan DeNiro (Strange Horizons, 30/11/09)
“The Other Side of Life” by Ian R Faulkner (Murky Depths 10)
“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster (Interzone 220)
“It Takes Two” by Nicola Griffith (Eclipse 3, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
“The Slows” by Gail Hareven (New Yorker, May)
“Fembot” by Carlos Hernandez (Daybreak, 25/12/09)
“Homeostasis” by Carlos Hernandez (Futurismic, July)
“The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santiera” by Carlos Hernandez (Interfictions 2, ed. Chris Barzak and Delia Sherman)
“All the Anne Franks” by Erik Hoel (Strange Horizons, 23/11/09)
The Push by Dave Hutchinson (Newcon Press)
“Seventh Fall” by Alex Irvine (Subterranean, Summer 2009)
“Spar” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, October 2009)
“Trembling Blue Stars” by Richard Kadrey (Flurb 7)
“A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby” by Helen Keeble (Strange Horizons, 1/06/09 and 8/06/09)
“Galatea’s Stepchildren” by Sam S Kepfield (The Future Fire 16)
“Johnnie and Emmie-Lou Get Married” by Kim Lakin-Smith (Interzone 222)
“horrorhouse” by David D Levine (Daybreak, 30 October 2009)
“Where the Time Goes” by Heather Lindsley (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2009)
“Death Knocks” by Ken MacLeod (When it Changed, ed. Geoff Ryman)
“Moss Witch” by Sara Maitland (When it Changed, ed. Geoff Ryman)
“Vishnu at the Cat Circus” by Ian McDonald (in Cyberabad Days)
“A Clown Escapes from Clown-Town” by Will McIntosh (Interzone 221)
“Mother of Champions” by Sean McMullen (Interzone 224)
“Love in Another Language” by Eugene Mirabelli (Not One of Us 42)
“On the Road” b Nnedi Okorafor (Eclipse 3, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
“Silence and Roses” by Suzanne Palmer (Interzone 223)
“By Starlight” by Rebecca Payne (Interzone 225)
“Minya’s Astral Angels” by Jennifer Pelland (The Solaris Book of New SF, Volume Three, ed George Mann, Solaris)
The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough (PS Publishing)
“Troublesolving” by Tim Pratt (Subterranean, Fall 2009)
“Unexpected Outcomes” by Tim Pratt (Interzone 222)
“The Beloved Time of their Lives” by Roberto Quaglia and Ian Watson (The Beloved of my Beloved, Newcon Press; pdf link)
“The Receivers” by Alastair Reynolds (Other Earths, ed. Nick Gevers and Jay Lake)
“The Fixation” by Alastair Reynolds (The Solaris Book of New SF 3, ed. George Mann)
“Hair” by Adam Roberts (When it Changed, ed. Geoff Ryman)
“After Everything Woke Up” by Rudy Rucker (Interzone 220)
“Sublimation Angels” by Jason Sanford (Interzone 224)
“Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” by Jason Sanford (Interzone 225)
“Lily Glass” by Veronica Schanoes (Strange Horizons, 27/04/09)
“Unrest” by Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 12/03/09)
“Dog-Eared Paperback of Our Lives” by Lucius Shepard (Other Earths, ed. Nick Gevers and Jay Lake)
“The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” by Jeff Soesbe (Daybreak, 13 October 2009)
“Black Swan” by Bruce Sterling (Interzone 221)
“Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (in Wireless)
“Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com, March 2009)
“The Shangri-La Affair” by Lavie Tidhar (Strange Horizons, 19/01/09 and 26/01/09)
“Spiders Moon” by Lavie Tidhar (Futurismic, November 2009)
“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” by Catherynne M Valente (Clarkesworld, August)
“The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos; read online [select “chapter two”])
“Out of Time” by Jack Westlake (Murky Depths 8)
“Glitch in the System” by Ian Whates (The Gift of Joy, Newcon Press)
“Ghosts in the Machine” by Ian Whates (The Gift of Joy, Newcon Press)
"The Assistant" by Ian Whates (The Solaris Book of New SF Volume 3, ed. George Mann, Solaris)
“Infected” by Lilah Ward (Not One of Us 41)

Well, the short story club selections seem to be doing pretty well; be interesting to see if any of them make the final ballot. Surprised not to see “Vishnu at the Cat Circus” nominated yet. And I think I’ve managed to link all the stories that are online, but if I’ve missed any, let me know.

“The Festival of Tethselem” by Chris Butler

IZ224 cover My problem with this story — in which travellers visit a distant city, at the heart of which is a mysterious artefact called The Figure of Frozen Time, which is reputed to have the power to change history; and which wants to be an elegy for time, memory, and loss, told in a formal English voice; and which looks a bit like fantasy, but is really sf — is that I keep thinking, this would be much better if Ian R MacLeod had written it. Unfair of me, I know.

“Shucked” by Adrian Joyce

IZ224 cover An office, at three in the morning, somewhere in the UK (probably the City); an IT guy, testing some updates to the the company email system, half-asleep; spam messages spilling out into other systems, scrolling across the coffee machine display, corrupting security camera captions, unnoticed; and then spreading, somehow, out into the world; a dark doglike thing breaking into the office, absorbing or changing the man that gets in his way, hunting down the source. It has the sense of a nightmare: a brief, enigmatic, effective slice of techno-horror. Not bad for a first outing.

“No Longer You” by Katherine Sparrow and Rachel Swirsky

IZ224 cover A novella is a job for the weekend, so we start issue 224 with story two. I don’t think I’ve read anything else by Katherine Sparrow, but this is up to Rachel Swirsky’s usual standards. Like “Eros, Philia, Agape”, it takes a familiar sfnal conceit — in this case, absorption of an individual into a hive mind, here called Aviva — and ferrets out its implications for normal human relationships. It’s narrated by an absorb-ee, Simon, looking back at the circumstances that lead to his absorption: a painful breakup, and a rebound with Aviva.

“Relationships between people with lone bodies and lone minds are always unequal.” That’s what Aviva says. “Power springs up between them like a weed, and tangles everything.”

As Lois Tilton notes, the story is filled with contradictions: Aviva seeks out Simon because she is entranced by his dancing, but he ends the story having given up physical existence entirely; Aviva is the creation of a group of Orthodox Jewish geneticists looking for a way to preserve their culture, and does she what she’s doing as preservation, yet it’s clear there is at least some loss of individuality: personalities can be closer to or further from the surface of Aviva. But it seems to me the story is entirely aware of this, that it grows from the central contradiction of any relationship — two (or more) people trying to be one entity (also a particularly apt theme for a collaborative story, of course) — and that absorption into Aviva is far from being “too good to be true”. For Simon, at least, it’s a capitulation, an acknowledgement that he cannot — does not want to — carry on alone. “You can’t preserve things without changing them”, says Aviva, as if in explanation of the doped-up nature of existence inside her; but at some point, the title’s prediction comes true.

“Glister” by Dominic Green

IZ223 cover This is a good one, too. Sturdy. Clear narrative voice (Scotsman seeking his fortune among the stars), interesting setting (two settings, actually, but the main one is Atlas B, a heavy-metal-rich planet with a suitably adapted ecosystem), well-paced (including a couple of good action sequences), knowing (planet called Midas, group called the Robinsonade Guaranteed Lashup Company), cold-eyed about where its premises lead (brutal colonialism). It would feel wrong to ask for anything more.

“Coat of Many Colours” by Dominic Green

IZ223 cover Better. “Coat of Many Colours” is pretty much a pure old-fashioned idea story, nicely done. In an ecologically devastated South America, Jurassic Park-like tech is being used to engineer “a better, cheaper burger machine” — a food animal that can thrive in the desertified Amazon basin. But, in Experiment 2308, they appear to have accidentally created an intelligent creature. The Australian protagonist, Mullen, is ostensibly brought in to prove that Experiment 2308 is not intelligent, so that she can be killed and eaten without qualm; and there follows much Egan-ish discussion of the nature of intelligence, but in a pleasingly sardonic key:

Mullen bent down close to the bars, looking into the unfathomable eyes.
“I hope you don’t imagine,” she said, “that I am any sort of white knight. I am a cognitive psychologist, and it is my job to torture animals that are on the wrong side of mankind’s current designated threshold of nervous complexity by cutting their nervous systems apart and watching what parts twitch. I’m not allowed to do it to monkeys any more in most countries, but sea slugs and squid are still fair game.”

“Butterfly Bomb” by Dominic Green

IZ223 cover A “story-sized set of reasons” why our universe might be a space opera universe, according to the introductory notes. Sadly, neither the story nor the set of reasons is particularly exciting. An elderly man, living alone on an alien world, hitches a ride on a passing slave ship (by selling himself into slavery) in order to track down his granddaughter: the main things we learn along the way are that (a) AIs tend to think themselves into logical-philosophical blind alleys, which puts a crimp in civilization’s style but creates jobs for those who, like the protagonist, can mediate such quandries; and (b) ancient races left behind AI-based weapons that can mimic, infiltrate and destroy any societies they encounter. It’s not as perfunctory as proof-of-concept tales can be, and Green’s playfulness mostly carries it —

The superintendent scratched his forty-year service tattoo thoughtfully. “In that case, you might be of help to us. Our own mediator had arranged a system of non-overlapping magisteria between the nihilist and empiricist factions in our ship’s flight systems, but we were infected with a solipsistic virus several days ago. The accord has now broken down into open sulking. Wehave been becalmed insystem for two days while our vessel argues with itself. Our astrogator is muttering cray talk about learning to use a slide rule.”

— but I’m still somewhat surprised to see it showing up in the table of contents for a best-of-the-year volume. (And “the bunks clearly built for Svastikas, a radially symmetrical race previously conquered by the Proprietors” was pushing it a bit.)

“Silence & Roses” by Suzanne Palmer

IZ223 cover “Silence & Roses” has the misfortune to be the third robots-outliving-humans story I’ve read in the last year. All three are driven by sentiment, and on that scale Palmer’s tale sits somewhere below Ken Scholes’ cloying “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk”, and somewhere above Deborah Biancotti’s superior “King of All and the Metal Sentinel”. As in those stories, robots designed for routine are challenged by novelty (which reveals backstory, in this case that we’re in a care home walled off from the ruins of civilization outside), and their naive incomprehension drives a plot, with sentiment generated by the gap between what they understand (the residents are falling silent) and what we understand (the residents are dying). Confronted with the pointlessness of their existence, many of Palmer’s robots go a little mad; only our hero, Button-4-Circle-Peach, survives for long enough to fall into a situation where the rules he understands can apply again. It’s competently done (and the initial reveal is quite well done), but seems somewhat rule-bound itself. And that the robots’ programming recognises silence as a problem, but not strips of rotting flesh hanging off a resident’s face, is surely unlikely.