Tag: 2012

The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar (Eclipse Online, December 2012) is one of his ‘Solar System’ series, and it gets off to an evocative start:

Beyond the dome the ice-storms of Titan rage; inside it is warm, damp, with the smell of sewage seeping through and creepers growing through the walls of the above-ground dwellings. He tries to find her scent in the streets of Polyport and fails.
Hers was the scent of basil, and the night. When cooking, he would sometimes crush basil leaves between his fingers. It would bring her back, for just a moment, bring her back just as she was the first time they’d met.
Polyphemus Port is full of old memories. Whenever he wants, he can recall them, but he never does. Instead he tries to find them in old buildings, in half-familiar signs. There, the old Baha’i temple where they’d sheltered one rainy afternoon, and watched a weather hacker dance in the storm, wreathed in raindrops. There, what had once been a smokes-bar, now a shop selling surface crawlers. There, a doll house, for the sailors off the ships. It had been called Madame Sing’s, now it’s called Florian’s. Dolls peek out of the windows, small naked figures in the semblance of teenage boys and girls, soft and warm and disposable, with their serial numbers etched delicately into the curve of a neck or thigh. His feet know the old way and he walks past the shops, away from the docks and into a row of box-like apartments, the co-op building where they’d first met, creepers overgrowing the walls and peeking into windows—where they’d met, a party in the Year Seventeen of the Narrative of Pym.
He looks up, and as he does he automatically checks the figures that rise up, always, in the air before him. The number of followers hovers around twenty-three million, having risen slightly on this, his second voyage to Titan in so many years. A compilation feed of Year Seventeen is running concurrently, and there are messages from his followers, flashing in the lower right corner, which he ignores.

This last part sets out the story’s stall, which is that the protagonist has, since birth, had his life continually televised to a mass audience of “followers” as the “Narrative of Pym”. Think The Truman Show with an aware central character set in an exotic solar system.
This audience, when he is seventeen, watch him meet his true love and then, when she later leaves him, his continual search for her across various planets and moons until the day he dies. The story jumps about chronologically, so it may very well be a lifetime compilation feed, similar to the one mentioned above.
It is a wonderfully descriptive piece, and it packs a lot into its four thousand-odd words:

But Pym likes Tong Yun. He loves going down in the giant elevators into the lower levels of the city, and he particularly loves the Arcade, with its battle droid arenas and games-worlds shops and particularly the enormous Multifaith Bazaar. Whenever he can he sneaks out of the house—they are living on the surface, under the dome of Tong Yun, in a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Mother’s—and goes down to Arcade, and to the Bazaar.
The Church of Robot is down there, and an enormous Elronite temple, and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist and Baha’i temples and even a Gorean place and he watches the almost-naked slave girls with strange fascination, and they smile at him and reach out and tousle his hair. There are Re-Born Martian warriors with reddish skin and four arms—they believe Mars was once habituated by an ancient empire and that they are its descendants, and they serve the Emperor of Time. He thinks he wants to become a Re-Born warrior when he grows up, and have four arms and tint his skin red, but when he mentions it to Mother once she throws a fit and says Mars never had an atmosphere and there is no emperor and that the Re-Born are—and she uses a very rude word, and there are the usual complaints from some of the followers of the Narrative of Pym.

If I have one minor criticism (spoiler) it is that the slightly abrupt death scene could have been foreshadowed a little before it happens (although I was expecting it from early on in the story).
**** (Very good). 4, 650 words.

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2012) starts with Fry, a female member of a spaceship crew in orbit around Jupiter, breaking her leg.
After this there is a lot of scene setting, most of which is about her being a “two-stepper” (an unmodified human) in a crew of “octos” (I presume these are humans that have transitioned to being octopuses; we find later that others have become Nautiluses, but I can’t remember seeing any particular reason why people would do either).
Arkae (the octo narrator) then visits Fry in hospital, and learns that her sponsors on Earth want her back dirtside. Fry decides to transition (presumably to avoid having to go back) and gets Arkae to contact Dove, a Nautilus lawyer.
Most of the rest of the story is a lot of waffle that includes: how octos live together as a group; Arkae’s team finding that there are missing sensors in the ring (the big job everyone is on are the preparations for observing a comet pass by Jupiter); and the bad feeling that exists between the two-steppers and octos. Eventually (and not soon enough for me) Arkae gets a message from Fry saying she has—surprise!—become a Nautilus instead of an octo, and has joined the Jupiter colony, who are going to hitch a lift on the comet and seed the Oort.
There is very little in way of story here, and most of it seems to be Arkae endlessly talking about everything and nothing:

Fry had worked with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed—two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi—more than will admit to it—have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.

Blah, blah, blah—and this goes on for twenty pages or so. Bafflingly, this won the 2013 Hugo for Best Novelette (and topped the Locus Poll): I don’t know if this was because it was a bad year for short fiction or whether this got the trans and/or minority and/or Fans are Slans vote.1
* (Mediocre). 8,850 words.

1. Fans have, in the past, viewed themselves as a mocked minority, and so have a tendency to identify with persecuted minorities in SF stories (especially when they are supermen in hiding), e.g. the Slans in A. E. van Vogt’s novel of the same name.

Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das (Asimov’s SF, August 2012) opens with a family who live on a tidally locked planet (one side of the planet always faces the sun, the other is always in the dark) on a train from the City of Long Shadows, which is near the boundary of the two halves, to Weep-for-Day, which is on the dark side of the planet. The story is related by the daughter, Valyzia, who states that they are going to stay with one her father’s clients, who has a “Nightmare” in captivity. These savage animals live in the dark areas near the terminator, and Valyzia’s race has long been in conflict with them—more so now that her people are penetrating further and further into the dark zone.
The first part of the story tells of the trip to Weep-for-Day, the advances in steam and electric technology that make feasible the trip into the cold, dark night, and Valyzia and her brother’s terror at the thought of seeing a living Nightmare. When they arrive at the outpost they settle in and then, on the second night of their stay, the family are taken to see the captive creature (spoiler):

It was in the deepest recesses of the manse, which was more an oversized, glorified bunker on the hill of Weep-for-Day than anything else. We went down into a dank, dim corridor in the chilly heart of that mound of crustal rock to see the prisoner.
“I call it Shadow. A little nickname,” Sir Tylvur said with a toothy smile, his huge moustache hanging from his nostrils like the dead wings of some poor misbegotten bird trapped in his head. He proved himself right then to have not only a startling lack of imagination for a man of his intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also a grotesquely inappropriate sense of levity.
It would be dramatic and untruthful to say that my fear of darkness receded the moment I set eyes on the creature. But something changed in me. There, looking at this hunched and shivering thing under the smoky blaze of the flares its armored gaolers held to reveal it to its captor’s guests, I saw that a phantom flayed was just another animal.
Sir Tylvur had made sure that its light-absorbent skin would not hinder our viewing of the captured enemy. There is no doubt that I feared it, even though its skin was stripped from its back to reveal its glistening red muscles, even though it was clearly broken and defeated. But my mutable young mind understood then, looking into its shining black eyes—the only visible feature in the empty dark of its face—that it knew terror just as I or any human did. The Nightmare was scared. It was a heavy epiphany for a child to bear, and I vomited on the glass observation wall of its cramped holding cell.

After a short scene which describes a brief altercation between her and her brother (he violently objects to the suggestion that he was scared of the creature), the story then telescopes forward in time to his graduation from the military. Six months later he is killed in combat, and Valyzia later attends his funeral, where she has doubts about her religious beliefs and wonders what truly comes after death.
The final scene sees Valyzia deep in the dark side, working as an archaeologist after the war against the Nightmares has been won:

My dear Velag, how would you have reacted to see these beautiful caves I sit in now, to see the secret culture of your enemy? I am surrounded by what can only be called their art, the lantern-light making pale tapestries of the rock walls on which Nightmares through the millennia scratched to life the dawn of their time, the history that followed, and its end, heralded by our arrival into their world.
In this history we are the enemy, bringing the terror of blinding fire into Evening, bringing the advanced weapons that caused their genocide. On these walls we are drawn in pale white dyes, bioluminescent in the dark, a swarm of smeared light advancing on the Nightmares’ striking, jagged-angled representations of themselves, drawn in black dyes mixed from blood and minerals.
In this history Nightmares were alive when the last of the sunwyrms flew into Evening to scourge the land for prey. Whether this is truth or myth we don’t know, but it might mean that Nightmares were around long before us. It might explain their adaptation to the darkness of outer Evening—their light-absorbent skin ancient camouflage to hide from sunwyrms under cover of the forests of Evening. We came into Evening with our fire (which they show sunwyrms breathing) and pale skins, our banners showing Dragon and the sun, and we were like a vengeful race of ghosts come to kill on behalf of those disappeared angels of Day, whom they worshipped to the end—perhaps praying for our retreat.

The story ends with Valyzia embarking on an expedition deeper into the darkness, but it is one motivated by curiosity, not fear.
This is a very good, if sad and elegiac, piece. The one minor criticism I have is that the final paragraphs could be briefer and more pointed about the change in attitude that has occurred after the genocide of the Nightmares (and there are also one or two other bits that could do with some polishing, to be honest1).
**** (Very good). 7,900 words.

1. The second last sentence in the section above could do with a “was” where the “ancient” is, and a “to hide from sunwyrms in the ancient forests of Evening” at the end. Or is it just my eyes that trip over “ancient camouflage” and “under cover of the forests”? And in the last sentence why have the sunwyrms suddenly gone from being predators to worshipped angels of Day?
My specific criticisms may be off, but my gut feeling is that there is the odd wonky sentence or paragraph in this tale.