Torque Control

“Spy vs Spy” by Neil Williamson

IZ220 coverAn unremarkable short-short, which means to review it is pretty much to kill it. Well, never mind: paranoid stay-at-home Edinburghian, locked in ACME-propelled rivalry with the man who lives across the street, blames the internet. “These websites – Mybook, Faceplace, all that – they encourage you to lay out all your likes and your dislikes […] Even things you’ve never really thought about before you have to be for or against nowadays”. The toonishness of all this is enough to raise a few wan smiles; the inevitable bite doesn’t draw blood.

Short Story Club: “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”

So, here we are, for the last time this run. Here’s the story. I can’t find much comment on this one — I’m sure we’ll rectify that! — but Lois really liked it:

Steampunk is generally regarded as an alternate genre, usually alternate history. This, I believe, must be an alternate steampunk, one further step removed from the mundane reality with which we are familiar. Strange—wondrous strange—poetic, fantastic, mythic, visionary cosmology.

For those of you who enjoy such things, Valente also made a post about writing sf. (This may be of particular interest to James…)

Anyway. The floor is open; what did you think?

“After Everything Woke Up” by Rudy Rucker

IZ220 coverA trailer for Hylozoic, with all the colour and vim and almost complete lack of plot and character that suggests. You can read a version of it here, which has been tinkered with at the sentence level (or the Interzone version has), and goes on a bit longer than “After Everything Work Up” (stop at “The mortar set up as hard as stone”, which in Interzone is “The mortar set up nice and hard, as strong as stone”), but covers the same ground. Two mouthpieces are on a mission to explain the world to each other (i.e., to us):

“You really think we can teleport a whole house this far?” asked Thuy.

“Sure,” said JayJay. “Working alone, you and I can’t teek much more than a couple of hundred kilograms at a time. But with a dozen of our friends pitching in, for sure we can move our little house here from San Francisco. We’ll build the foundation today, and this evening – alley-oop! – we drop our cozy nest into place. Housewarming party!”

They can discuss such things because the title means what it says: after some sort of singularity or singularity-like event, everything – birds called Kwaawk, streams called Gloob, rocks called Bonk and Clack and Harvey – is conscious, thanks to “emergent intelligences based upon chaotic natural computations as enhanced by the ubiquitous memory storage available via the recently unfurled eighth dimension”. It is all completely daffy, nothing resembling a story (OK, there’s a spat with Gloob), and I am helpless before it.

Consciousness goes all the way down to the atoms in your body, and all the way up to Gaia, but the teleportation is a human thing:

“I don’t think it’s Gaia’s doing,” said JayJay. He’d been one of the first to figure out teleportation, and he liked to hold forth about it. [And everything else!] “The ability to teleport is peculiar to the human mind. Rats and roaches are too carefree to fuzz out and teleport. Over the millennia, we humans have evolved towards thinking ourselves into spots where we’re not. It’s all about remorse, doubt and fear. As for intelligent objects – sure the silps can talk, but they don’t have our rich heritage of hang-ups: our regrets about the past, our unease about the present, our anxiety about the future. Humans are used to spreading themselves across a zillion worlds of downer what-if. That’s why we can teleport.”

Heavy, dude! And did you know that communing with Gaia gets you high? Oh Rudy Rucker, never change.

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster

IZ220 coverA more polished offering, about masks and made of masks, all the way down. How much to unmask here? Let’s say that structure – numbered sections, from one point of view – masks the real story, and trappings – Queen and court, available trades – mask the real setting. Masks themselves define the narrator each day, job and personality and gender. Every aspect of identity. They’re elaborate things, painted dressed-up colours: sable or ebony black, saffron yellow, jasper red, sapphire blue. Fun! Except when your job is to be tortured to death, perhaps.

One by one the masks are stripped away. “Imprint” isn’t the first clue, but may be the moment the story fully reconfigures itself in the mind. It’s a criminal offence to be in a position to hear that meaning of that word, of course, an illicit thrill: learning who’s running this dollhouse and how is forbidden. Suffice to say that there isn’t necessarily salvation in taking off the mask, in the certainty of “I”. That would be too easy. I liked the story for that, and for toying with me. It’s also available online, here.

“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!

London Meeting: Michael Marshall Smith

The guest at tonight’s BSFA London meeting is Michael Marshall Smith, author of Only Forward, Spares, Bad Things, The Servants and other novels. He will be interviewed by Kate Bodley.

The venue is the upstairs room of The Antelope, 22 Eaton Terrace, London, SW1W 8EZ. The closest tube station is Sloane Square, and a map is here.

As usual, there will be people in the bar from 6-ish, with the interview starting at 7. The meeting is free, and open to any and all, though there will be a raffle with a selection of sf books as prizes.

Future meetings (no meeting in December:

27th January 2010 – Jim Burns interviewed by Pete Young
24th February 2010 – David Edgerton interviewed by Shana Worthen
24th March 2010 – BSFA Awards discussion meeting