Melissa Yuan-Innes sets her story “Iron Monk” on a spaceship traveling to the asteroid belt. Appearing in the May-June 2010 issue of Interzone. The crew of the spaceship seems an odd lot and it is eventually explained that they were selected by the Chinese government to go on what may very well be a suicide mission to make contact with aliens who have been discovered in Earth’s asteroid belt.

Told from the point of view of a monk who is on the trip, it is clear that unity among the crew of six was not an important concern for the people who put the mission together. The monk quietly lusts for the ship’s physician, thinks the etymologist is crazy, has little to do with one of the other crew members and actively avoids Hunan, who he believes is an agent of the government. The only crew member who he interacts with is a young boy named Little Tiger, who he trains in martial arts.

 

When Little Tiger begins to develop a rash, the monk is concerned, but not enough to reach out to Moon, the physician, for fear that if word got out about the rash, the government’s mole would kill Little Tiger to stop the spread of the disease.  Of course, the monk also develops the rash, which mutates in strange ways. Others have also developed the rash and kept it secret for their own reasons.  Once those secrets are revealed, the crew must begin to act together.

Unfortunately, since the crew was not picked with cooperation in mind, there is a strong sense of distrust between all of them and when they determine that the best course of action includes extra vehicular activity, The crew must learn to act as a team and trust each other, although even that doesn’t go as smoothly as desired as people attempt to do what is needed themselves rather than rely on the other members of the crew.

The distrust between the crew members also gives Yuan-Innes the opportunity to reveal what the situation back in China is, as well as what might be happening in the asteroid belt that caused the Chinese government to send a group of malcontents off to investigate, along with the explanation that they aren’t the first group to be sent.

What brings the crew (loosely) together is not any sense of trust, but rather enlightened self-preservation and the possibility that despite their seemingly one way trip to deep space, they realize they have an opportunity to embarrass, and perhaps even gain a bit of vengeance against the government that exiled them and sentenced them to death.

Yuan-Innes took a relatively standard trope, a spaceship crew being sent to explore a potential alien artifact in their solar system, and breathed fresh life into it by the simple expedient of making her characters a crew that inherently distrusted each other. While this gives the story a fresh aspect, the decision to tell the story from one of those crew member’s points of view means that the characters have a distance to them that means few of them, aside from the narrator and Little Tiger, are particularly sympathetic or completely realized.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.