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Miscellaneous Musings

Miscellaneous Musings

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Reading The New York Times on-line (something I used to read about people doing in science fiction novels; I still prefer the actual paper version, though my resistance to eventually getting an e-book reader of some kind is slowly crumbling), I came across these two divergent items of interest to those who ponder the stability of our immediate universe:

elliot2-obit-popupAstronomer James Elliot gets a featured obit because he discovered the rings of Uranus (okay, wipe that smirk off your face). What’s also noteworthy is that he apparently did so in a kind of jury-rigged  fashion.  According to the Times obituary:

In 1977, using a telescope in an airplane, Dr. Elliot led a team of Cornell University scientists to observe the planet Uranus when it passed between Earth and a star. Flying at night over a patch of the Indian Ocean where Uranus’s shadow was to be cast, he had the foresight to turn on his equipment more than a half-hour early. This allowed him to record a series of slight dimmings that provided the first evidence of Uranus’s rings…“In the current culture of giant spacecraft missions and multibillion-dollar experiments,” Dr. [Michael] Person said, “he showed that someone dedicated to science with relatively small resources could still make very exciting discoveries.”

12japan-cnd-span4-articlelargeAlso in the news is the tsunami and the largest earthquake in a century or more that hit Japan. Whatever our global technological progress (even while world politics continues to destabilize), we tend to forget just how fragile we are as a species even without our efforts to do ourselves in.  During the Cold War, the end of the world was nuclear.  Then it was terrorism and religious fanatacism.  But, maybe it will end up just being good old Mother Nature.  Time to go reread J.G. Ballard.

These Just In…

These Just In…

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feb-2011-cover-web2 The first Realms of Fantasy resurrected under new publishers, Damnation Books, for February 2011 features the fiction of Desirina Bokovich, Richard Parks, Mark Rigney, Pauline J. Alms and Scott William Carter.  The last has a story entitled “The Time of His Life” which is described as:

It’s so difficult to find time for yourself amid the demands of family and work.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just carve some out?  Maybe, maybe not.

Realms of Fantasy tends to favor a wee bit too much of fairy land for my tastes  (an unfair criticism, since that is, after all, a large part of its niche), but this sounded different and intriguing enough to get my immediate attention. Who after, all, hasn’t fantasized about having some private place to get away from it all?

In this case, the narrator discovers a room in which he can spend as much time as he wants on creative pursuits, but only minutes have gone by when he returns to the real life of kids and bitchy wife and work.  A Twilight Zone kind of tale that’s ultimately about resisting the allures of temptation and self-gratification.  The wife’s transformation from bitch to loving partner isn’t quite believable, though perhaps Williams is suggesting this has less to do with the wife’s actual attitude than the husband’s perception. And he does get right the marital tension between two equally tired (but for different reasons) partners with young children.  

black-static-291However, I have to wonder what the editors do here at this magazine.  Okay, maybe you can make an argument that intense cold could actually scorch, though I tend to associate it with extreme heat. But racing minds, chills going up a spine, the mere mention of a shudder should send off alarm bells to break out the red pencils and clean up clumsy phrasing that mars an otherwise decent story.

Horror magazine Black Static for February-March 2011 has new tales from V. H. Leslie, Ray Cluley, Maura McHugh, Ed Grabianowski and James Cooper.  In the “first lines that hook you into the story” department, here’s the opening to McHugh’s “Water”:

“The pot lids hopped and fizzed when Mark’s mother laid the wooden spoon down calmly, opened the back door of the kitchen, disappeared into the overgrown garden, and drowned herself in the river that flowed past their house.”

True horror lies not in the stuff of sexy vampires or ghost stories or chainsaw massacres, but within the mundane context of ordinary existence.

Short Fiction Review 34c: Interzone #232 Et Al…

Short Fiction Review 34c: Interzone #232 Et Al…

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The last couple of weeks I looked at Douglas Lain’s “Noam Chomsky & the Time Box” and “Intellectual Property” by Michael R. Fletcher from the January/February Interzone.  Rounding out the issue’s fiction are stories by Sue Burke, Sarah L. Edwards and James Bloomer.  All share to one extent or another the time honored science fictional Frankenstein theme that ponders the relationship between technology and personal responsibility.

interzone-289_largeThe Edwards tale, “By Plucking Her Petals” is the one out right fantasy among the science fiction, though, for those who care about making such distinctions, arguably alchemy could be considered a “science” and the ethical implications of manipulating human appearance purely for cosmetic reasons is a longstanding SF trope.

Monticello Dabney makes potions that, while painful, can improve the looks of his mostly female clients. Typically, the alchemical applications are brewed from plants and animals, but on rare occasion a human donor can provide a particularly valuable elixir.

Dabney becomes fixated on the motivations of one such mysterious donor.  A “beauty and the beast” riff that has a few creaky plot points, but aims to place humanity over mere technology.

interzone-291-2Burke’s “Healthy, Wealthy and Wise” is a bit more ambiguous on that subject.  The narrator is a “Friend,” an Artificial Intelligence that belongs (though who exactly who or what belongs to whom is part of the point) to a U.S.  college student, Brianna, seking to escape her dreary midwestern existence through an exchange program trip to Madrid. One requirements, however, is for Brianna to be the caretaker of Letitia, an unmarried, non-professional middle aged woman in cancer treatment. Letitia doesn’t much care for Brianna for reasons partially related her health, but also her age and social standing.  The Friend works to try to patch things up between the two.  However, even such a seemingly altruistic gesture to improve human relations carries with it a subtle hint of perilous prospects.

Bloomer’s “Flock, Shoal, Herd” is the 2010 James White Award winning story. This is a “going native” story in which the consciousness of military operatives can are somehow or another embedded in the animals and fauna of the title. The war is over, and the narrator’s lover has decided she much prefers her expanded  consciousness somewhere other than in human form.  The narrator wants her back to resume the pleasures of human existence as does the government (represented by a character named Humphrey that I have to think is a nod to Bogart) for other reasons than reuniting the lovelorn.  Love doesn’t win out, because you can never go home again, but you can escape it.

For my money, overall a particularly strong issue.

Short Fiction Review 34b: Intellectual Property

Short Fiction Review 34b: Intellectual Property

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2881Dhaka, the capital of Gano Projatontri Bangladesh.  With a  population of thirteen million the city was a madhouse. Buses and plastic Tata Kei Cars spewed thick smoke from their struggling two cylinder aluminum engines. The heat and pollution were stifling and the cacphony of car horns relentless.  This place was more than enough to drive you mad. It was dirty. It was overcrowded. It was dangerous.

I loved it

p. 16

We’re in cyber noir territory, and this kind of thing just hooks me in.  As I work my way through the January-February Interzone, I’m reminded of why this is one of my favorite SF magazines — I’m just an old cyberpunk at heart.  Having spent a good part of my working life with high-tech companies, the amoral shenanigans of near future corporations in the relentless pursuit of profit where human casualty is not a bottom line consideration is fascinatingly all too familiar. To bad it’s not outright fantasy rather than speculative fiction that hits close to the bone.

Case in point is Michael R. Fletcher’s “Intellectual Property” set in a third world country in which it is easier for a multinational to exploit human resources because, as Richard Blaine once put it, “Life is cheap.”  There are two alternating first person narrators.  The first is  a “deep cover agent for a Corporate Espionage Black Ops unit” whose world weary cynicism provides the opening lines above.  The second, Anomie, is a young woman bioengineered with a neural socket that allows a complete takeover of her consciousness by her research employer; a significant drawback is that once unplugged, she has no recollection of what her employers are using her for.

While you should be able to figure out the connection between these two characters before the story’s end, it is nice to have the good guys — or, at least, maybe not the good guys but the victims of the bad guys — win out.  Which is why it is fiction.

Short Fiction Review #34a: Noam Chomsky and the Timebox

Short Fiction Review #34a: Noam Chomsky and the Timebox

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287“Noam Chomsky and the Time Box,” Douglas Lain’s lead story in the January-February Interzone, is a time travel yarn that  re-visits the time-honored trope of is it possible to change the past and, in attempting to do so,  how do you avoid inadvertently screwing it up worse than it already is (see Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” for the classic take on this “butterfly effect”)?  Or, is it the case that time is an immutable continuum in which the very fact that you’ve traveled back in time (and thus has already happened in the past relative to your present timeline) something that has already occurred in determining the “future”?  Another way of putting this is, if you were given the chance to go back in time to kill Hitler, could you?  And, if you could, as bad as evil as Hitler was, might it cause something even worse?

These days, with physicists with straight faces contemplating notions of a multiverse, there’s speculation that rather than a linear topology, any particular point in time is a potential branch portal to potentially infinite outcomes in co-existing alternative universes.

Lain puts a nice spin on this, with a narrator who is a geeky tech reviewer blogging about his experiences with the “Time Box 3.0” personal time travel machine that warns “plainly and in 36 point Helvetica: TIME BOX IS PARADOX FREE. DO NOT ALTER FACTORY SETTINGS.”   Needless to say, that’s the same as an open invitation to any hacker to do exactly that.

The story, however, is less concerned with the philosophical and moral conundrums of  time travel and attempts to change the future (i.e., the present we live in) than it is a satire of both the 1970s (“…I could hear Carole King’s every breath as she crooned about how it was too late and how we should just stop trying. Listening to music from the 1970s was probably a mistake.”) and the second decade of the 21st century (“I’m nearly forty and yet I was dressed like a teenager from 2012. I was wearing loose blue jeans that hung down below my wast exposing tartan boxer shorts…[eyeglasses] made of transparent plastic, and filled with red ink. Cool, not?”).  Our hero acknowledges as axiomatic that  “you can’t kill Hitler,” but thinks perhaps very small alterations at the “seams of time” (i.e., where dimensions of multiple branching possibilities might meet) could avoid an ecological catastrophe in 2012. Consequently, he decides to try to connect the paths of Noam Chomsky, the linguist who conceived the notion of a “universal grammar” inherent in human consciousness and radical left wing philosopher (who, by  the way, also makes a fictional appearance in Lydia Millet’s “Chomsky, Rodents”) and psychedelic mystic Terrence McKenna back in 1971 when both are taking the same flight from Chicago O’Hare Airport as a means to enlist this unlikely pair towards subtly reshaping the future.  Speaking to McKenna and his girlfriend while they are smoking hash in the airport parking lot, the narrator relates:

I said that I’d come back to save the world…I wanted them to see how far away they were from the root of their problems.  They could trip out as much as they wanted, but the multicolored chaos they brought back would either be bleached out with Clorox or slapped on the Clorox bottle as part of a rebranding campaign.

p. 9

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Short Fiction Roundup: This Just In

Short Fiction Roundup: This Just In

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interzone-286a1The new Interzone has a refreshing look after last year’s garish series of yellow and redish installments. Haven’t had a chance to more than glance at the contents, but any story called “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box” sounds like my sort of fare.  Here’s a synopsis:

If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire is now completely dead, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should suffice as proof. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while last year it seemed impossible that the product might suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, a year later it’s becoming obvious that people without a history or a future are uninterested in the kind of time travel the Box offers. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.

apex-21a1In addition to this Douglas Lain penned tale, there are stories by Michael R. Fletcher, Sue Burke and Sarah L. Edwards, as well as the 2010 James White Award winning “Flock, Shoal, Herd” by James Bloomer.

The latest issue of Apex Magazine features fiction from Cat Rambo, Forrest Aguirre and Nalo Hopkinson.  According to the publisher,

“This issue marks the second issue following our new distribution model. In short, we wanted to give a premium to those who subscribe digitally and/or purchase each issue by making the content available to them one month prior to its release on our website. This means that full text of the stories and poetry will be available the first Monday of March right here, along with sneak peeks of this issue’s contents.”

Mythpunk

Mythpunk

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inthenightgarden1Back at around the turn of the century when I first started writing reviews for various SF/F on line publications, there was a lot of heated discussion about something called “The New Weird.”  Some of it got a little silly, but, recovering English majors tend to like to categorize things as some kind of shorthand for what you might expect from a literary work.  In the academy, that means things like gothic,  romance and  post-modernism, among other designations. In genre, riffing off the rock music punk rebellion — a reaction to pretentious art-rock and boring corporate rock (see, you can’t get away from categorizing) — came a series of “punk” movements, starting with cyberpunk and then steampunk and splatterpunk and whatever you could stick “punk” onto similar to the way political scandals have become a “gate” ever since  Watergate.

The latest such entry appears to by “mythpunk,” more about which you can read in this interview with Catherynne M. Valente, who is credited with coining the term in 2006 (which goes to show how clueless I am, as this is the first I’ve heard of it).  For further discussion, visit the Strange Horizons blog.

Better Late Than Never…

Better Late Than Never…

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71056_199372154485_5464068_nWell, with only about a week left to go in January, today I just received a copy of the December Realms of Fantasy.  You remember, the last one that Warren Lapine could afford to publish, originally available only as a download, but I guess he decided to have a last hurrah.  A February 2011 edition is due out soon from new publisher Damnation Books.

Though I recognize that media tie-ins have always been part of the magazine’s business plan, the less said about a Harry Potter cover, the better.  Four stories: “Queen of the Kanguellas” by Scott Dalrymple, “Maiden, Mother, Crone” by Anne Leckie & Rachel Swirsky, “The Banjo Singer” by Dennis Danvers and “Tools of the Devil” by Jerry Oltion.

I was never a big fan of the magazine, though I was sorry to hear it was going, and glad to hear that it is coming back.  Here’s hoping the third incarnation does the trick.

Short Fiction Review #33: Oxford American Future Issue

Short Fiction Review #33: Oxford American Future Issue

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oxford-americanOxford American Issue 70 contemplates life in 2050 with 11 stories that share a pessimistic view of America’s future beset by natural and man-made disaster, human folly and avarice.  In other words, just like it is today, only worse.

While dystopia has always been a fundamental science fictional trope (indeed, the one that has historically been most likely to gain literary credence, e.g., Brave New World and 1984), there was a time, particularly during the Golden Age of the 1930s to 1950s but still continuing on in counterpoint to the New Wave movement during the 1960s/1970s, when writers portrayed a future improved by technology, not devastated by it. Even the cyberpunks, despite their bleak industrial noir settings, arguably depicted technology as a “force for good” when their renegade heroes turn the technological tables to upend the corporate masters.

Part of the bleakness here might be because Oxford American terms itself  “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing,” and the American South certainly has a collective consciousness of disasters dating back to the Civil War, but most recently with Katrina and the BP oil spill in the Gulf.  “The Vicinity of the Sick” by M.O. Walsh depicts a Louisiana where people have to wear bio-hazard suits to go in the water; a woman dying of cancer is driven by her reluctant husband to a restricted biohazard in hope of escaping the soul-sapping hazards of technological illusions that pervade “normal” existence in Connie May Fowler’s “Do Not Enter the Memory”; and a strange pair from opposite socio-economic backgrounds try to survive (and discover some basic bond of humanity) in the Bayou following ecological and technological collapse in “Maroon” by Susan Straight.  Along the same lines, in a non-fction piece, Kevin Brockmeier lists his “Ten Great Novels of the Apocolypse.”

In addition to ecological disaster, the stories share to varying degrees the usual suspects for end-of-the-world scenarios: the amoral corporate focus on the bottom-line and self-interest, the numbness of media and advertising that leads to unhealthful lifestyles, medical advances that keep people biologically alive in bodies long past expected mileage.

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New Year Short Fiction Roundup

New Year Short Fiction Roundup

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2011-snI’ve contributed book reviews to the SF Site since 1998 (wow, that’s a long time); in fact, it was the first on-line “publication” I wrote for (and, yes, you can end a sentence with a proposition, though, technically, I haven’t).  That’s where I “met” John O’Neill, which explains how I wound up here (for those of you wondering how that could possibly have happened).  You can see a list of all my SF Site reviews here.

My latest review in the January 2010 issue is about a short story collection entitled “She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror. ” Worth checking out for the title alone.

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In other short fiction news,  Strange Horizons now has a regular blog, as well as a slight shift in editorial scheduling, as outlined by new editor-in-chief Niall Harrison.