Category: Yoon Ha Lee

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee (The Sunday Morning Transport, 5th February 2023) starts with this:

It is not true that space is silent.
The darkness between stars is full of threnodies and threadbare laments, concertos and cantatas, the names of the dead and the wars that they’ve fed. Few people are unmoved by the strenuous harmonies and the strange hymns. Fewer people still understand their significance, the decayed etymologies and deprecated tongues.
It is your solemn task, as an archivist of the last dreadnought, to preserve its unique ethnomusicology for rising generations.

After this portentous start the rest of the story develops the idea of a space dreadnought as a musical instrument and its battles as performances:

In any case, the plan directed the last dreadnought, with its hypertrophied weapons, to open with a power chord against the more discordant forces of the Diamantines’ enemies. The orchestration manuals of the day called for a ratio of a single dreadnought to one hundred battle cruisers or equivalent. The percussion line alone should have demolished the other side, especially with the chimera missiles deployed as a basso continuo.

An unconvincing idea, and one made worse by the style, which seems to be a weird mix of pretentious academese and instruction manual.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words. Story link.

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, 20th May 2020) opens with Anna, an ex-academic who used to work in AI research, arriving at an orbital fortress after being abducted by the military. After seeing the wreckage of several spaceships she learns from the Marshal commanding the military that the AIs that control these vessels have been committing suicide. He then tells her that he wants her to communicate with them mind to mind to find out why (even though her academic partner Rabia died from this process during their research).
When the Marshall takes her to see one of the surviving ships, Proteus Three, Anna sees how radical the previously discussed modifications have been:

They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
[. . .]
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”

The story ends (spoiler) with Anna communicating with the ship until she starts having convulsions. The Marshal breaks the link and then, after Anna recovers, she tells him the modifications that they have made to the spaceships have left the AIs with suicidal levels of dysphoria.
This story has a colourful setting and some interesting detail (the background war, the fish-dragon pets, the orbital fortresses, etc.), and the amorphous, water-like spaceships are intriguingly strange—but the resolution is too abrupt, and leaves the story feeling like an extract from a longer work. I’d also add that the reason for the AIs’ suicides reduces what is here to a simplistic trans message.
** (Average). 3,900 words. Story link.

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #298, 27th February 2020)1 has a title that pretty much describes the story: a mermaid called Essarala wants to travel among the stars but lives in a planet-bound culture. Then, when an interstellar trading ship arrives in orbit for the first time, Essarala thinks she may have found a way off-planet—until she realises that the ship has no water for a mer to live in. Her sister Kiovasa suggests they should visit the witch beneath the waves for help.
After arriving at the witch’s lair, and discussing the matter with her—during which the witch gives warnings about the dangers and difficulties that will lie ahead—she says that she can give Essarala two legs like the humans. Essarala is determined to go and, even though she doesn’t understand everything the witch has warned her about, asks what the price is. The witch replies that one day Essarala will want to come home and, when she does, she should visit her again. Then the witch gives her a knife that will cleave her tail into two legs.
Later, after Essarala has cut herself and been accepted onto the crew, she is given to an alien called Ssen to be mentored. We see her develop as a crew member, and learn about some of her adventures:

Essarala learned to fly in skysuits in vast and turbulent gas planets, some of which had corrosive atmospheres. She saw twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nighttime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once a millennium. And she kept her promise, too: for every world she visited, she sang her sister’s name.

Someday I will go back and tell her of the things I have seen, Essarala thought again and again. But not yet, not yet.

Then, towards the end of the story (spoiler), Ssen teaches Essarala about special relativity, and she realises that time will be passing much more quickly for her sister on her world. Essarala begs the captain and crew to take her back home, and they generously do so. As soon as they arrive Essarala visits the witch as promised, to be told that the old woman will shortly die and that, given the wisdom she has gained on her travels, Essarala will replace her . Then the witch tells Essarala that her sister is still alive but that she doesn’t have long left. Essarala goes to find her, and the story ends with the two sisters together.2
I thought the idea of telling an SF story as a fantasy tale worked very well here (it’s possible to view the severing of her tail to become two legs, etc., as unexplained superscience), and it is an enjoyable and original piece. I also thought Lee’s elegant and concise writing style added to the story. The ending is perhaps not as strong as the rest of it, but that is a minor quibble.3
***+ (Good to very good.) 5,950 words. [Story]

1. This is a finalist for the Sturgeon and short story Hugo Awards for 2021.

2. There is a dedication at the end of the story to Lee’s sister.

3. Some of the commenters in one of my (private) FB groups (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction) thought that the lack of foreboding at the end of the story was a weakness. I thought that the uncertainty about her sister provided that.