If you liked this year’s short stories, you will love the novelettes. I know I did.
“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair”
When I first saw the title, I thought to myself “this sounds like a challenge.”
The story is exactly what it says on the tin – we open with the chair first achieving consciousness, under the craftwork touch of a master carpenter producing a magnum opus. The chair spends some time in a dusty warehouse, unseen by the sun, until an old man named Eduardo Amarim purchases it for his spacious dining room.
Eduardo reminds me of a Latin patriarch straight out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He has his dignity and he has his fragile hopes for his family. His daughter Joana is returning from abroad after six years, and he wants to mend fences with her. Joana will have none of it – the terrible unspoken tragedy is too wide a gulf between them.
Eduardo recognizes a masterpiece of carpentry when he sees it. Because, as slowly becomes apparent, this is not his first conscious piece of furniture, and the first one is inextricably tied to that tragedy that separates him from his beloved daughter.
As the years wear on, it’s easy to see Eduardo and the chair following the same track. The chair’s fine details get filled with dust, despite Eduardo’s best efforts to oil and clean it every morning. They wear away, become scuffed, fade in the beloved sunlight. The seat mildews. Our chair gets passed down to Eduardo’s son, Leandro, and onto others, who do not waste time with such things. And, in the end, consciousness fading, dying, the chair returns to the warehouse, to become just another dumb piece of wood, that was once wrought so finely as to become conscious and aware.
It’s trite to call a Latin author like Bernardo a “magical realist,” but I can think of no better descriptor. This biography is by turns wistful, strange, melancholy, and dignified. There is something grand in this old man and his chair, in the chair’s helpless yet loving observation of the family saga, in the way there is no real explanation except masterwork for the chair’s consciousness, because no explanation is really needed. The chair is conscious and, in some ways, more conscious and more conscientious than the human beings in the house.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
“I Am AI”
My feelings about Ai Jiang are well established by this point. This novelette, though not as experimental as Linghun or “Give Me English,” “I Am AI” is still very recognizably part of her ouvre. The narrator, Ai, lives under the bridge outside the shining city of Emit in a ramshackle community Ai Jiang always compares to a honeycomb. Ai lives from charge to charge, and Ai Jiang evokes that quiet mounting dread of a 1% charge on your phone…only extrapolating it, in the best science fiction tradition, since what Ai needs to charge are the electronics and implants that form most of their body, and without which Ai will die. Ai works out of a scummy wangba (Chinese-style internet café) on the edge of Emit, running the app “I Am AI” in a perpetual hustle/grind delivering non-AI writing and saving up to replace their heart with another implant.
“My hands shake at the prospect of finally getting rid of the one thing outside of my brain that hinders my productivity. To think my emotions will soon become a muted thing, I can’t tell if I’m afraid or eager. But I’ll be able to work faster. Joy and pain won’t affect me in the same way.”
Hey, it beats working for the monopoly that owns Emit.
“I Am AI” takes place in a different universe from “Give Me English,” but it’s still the same oppressive and omnipotent capitalism that we recognize from Ai Jiang’s short story. Like the narrator of “Give Me English,” Ai is always bargaining to try and get ahead, or at least to get nowhere fast, and what Ai ultimately bargains is their ability to connect with other people.
Because, ultimately, this is a story about art, and about how art makes us connect. Ai connects to their endless demanding clients through their writing, because it has heart and the uniqueness only a human writer can offer (at least, until Ai gets what they want). It’s about the painter who sits next to Ai at the wangba and how Ai connects, or fails to connect, with her work. And it’s about how that connection, the ability to respond to art, to create art, is worth being human for.
There have been times in my life that I’ve sat down to rewatch Cowboy Bebop or listen to Pink Floyd to see if I can still cry, if art still moves me, if I still escape the emotional numbness that Ai craves so much. Emotional numbing is a theme in this year’s novelettes – I found myself thinking of Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” as I reread “I Am AI,” as I thought of “I Am AI” when I first read Triantafyllou’s story – and in both cases, the narrators discover the game is not worth the candle. Because “I Am AI” is a triumph, not a tragedy.
This is a work of art that moves you. If it doesn’t, check what your heart is made of.
“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge”
It starts with an ostentation.
You know what I mean – the creepy culvert all the kids tell stories about. Going with your friends. Seeing who’s brave enough to go farthest inside. The devil lives in the culvert, in the drainpipe, under the bridge. This time, it happens to be true. He’s there to make you a deal.
Olga, our protagonist, has already been there. She collected one brother already. The story opens when she collects the second.
She stuffs each one in her room, because they aren’t really her brother. Her brother is long dead, and each version is a faint memory of him in a particular mood – joyous, sad, afraid – that she stuffs in her room and hopes her parents don’t notice. Each brother is stuck in a loop, like an endless GIF, exhibiting that peculiar emotion, to the point of nightmare. Worse, each brother takes away that emotion from Olga’s life, leaving her feelings muted and numb – Ai from “I Am AI” would give his heart to pay the cost that Olga, despite knowing better, keeps paying.
And the parallels with Ai Jiang don’t stop there.
More than anything, the story’s setup reminds me of Linghun – the living sister, the dead brother’s memory who hangs over the family like a shroud, the father whose body is here but whose soul is absent, the mother cooking the brother’s favorite food (and even mistaking it for the sister’s). But Olga is much, much more straightforward than the protagonist of Linghun, and Triantafyllou openly states what Ai Jiang only lightly alludes to.
And they wind up going in wildly separate, dark directions. I won’t spoil it, but it wasn’t Olga’s deal with the Devil that brings her brother (or brothers?) back. It’s much, much worse than that. And yet…somewhere on the other side of the bridge, there is hope. There is light.
But after finishing this story, I still went upstairs, crept into Lyra’s room, and stroked my sleeping daughter’s cheek. Just to be sure. Just to know she’s still there. And my heart jumped when she stirred, all the mixed feelings that make her human, that make her her, even in sleep.
“Imagine: A Purple Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon”
This is cyberpunk, as cyberpunk is meant to be.
It has the neon.
It has the rain.
It has the fringes of society.
Most importantly, it has the punk.
By day, the narrator and her childhood friend Mina work at The Warehouse, painting NC Orbs with artistic new memories.
“Everyone’s eager to be somebody else, and who can blame them when the real world is a collage of worst-case-scenarios come true.”
By night, they are prostitutes at the Love Manor, and it’s as thoroughly, unremittingly grim as any bordello open today in your country. She’s saving up money for more NC Orbs to help Mina forget the traumas this world inflicts almost (but not quite) by accident…but which also wipes Mina of her name and her identity. Mina? Or Hina? Or Tina? Or Trina?
And when she runs out, she’s willing to take on a little extra work, no matter the risks…
“Thoroughly, unremittingly grim” describes the entire story well. There is no brightness here except buzzing neon, no happiness except tragic memories as they’re erased, removed, or painted over. It’s a world with no escapes and no innocence.
It’s cyberpunk, as cyberpunk is meant to be.
I didn’t necessarily enjoy this story – but that’s okay, because I feel like “enjoying” this story is missing the point. It’s unsettling and dark and claustrophobic and tragic. It’s there to disturb, not to be enjoyed. And it will disturb you.
“Saturday’s Song”
On the one hand, this is a song about Saura, the lesbian daughter of a witch in Nigeria.
On the other hand, this is a tale about the tellers of tales, as they weave Saura’s story together.
“Saturday’s Song” opens with seven siblings, who exist out of time and out of space and who remind me of nothing so much as the Endless. Each has their place in telling, dissecting, and retelling the story. Wednesday is chained in painful, unreal ways for the crime of stepping out of place, of trying to change the story. But this isn’t about Wednesday. It’s about Saturday.
Monday opens with the story of Saura, in the middle, when her girlfriend dies from the god of Nightmares, Shigidi. As the siblings tell their part of the tale, each in turn, we leap back to Saura’s childhood, where her mother tried to twist her into a straight magajiya of the local bori cult, like herself, until Saura ran away to the city, to the conference where she first met Mobola, to Saura’s thirst for revenge and dark pact with her mother to let the god of vengeance ride her.
Then comes Saturday’s song, the climax where all is revealed and Saura dispenses her due and dispassionate revenge. Sunday concludes the story, as he invited his siblings to start anew, with “the end.”
And yet, it’s about the seven’s ability to forgive, just as it’s about Saura’s refusal to. Saturday implores her siblings to remove Wednesday’s chains (for this is also a story about chains, those that bind us, those that link us, those that pass from one to another). The twist in Saura’s story is less the identity of the one who sent Shigidi to kill her lover (you’ve probably already guessed), and more that Shigidi is able to feel compassion and empathy, to want to help Saura to make things right. To err is human, to forgive is clearly divine.
I’m still not sure what I think of this story. But I expect to go on wondering for a long time, as “Saturday’s Song” wafts through my head at stray moments.
And I look forward to Wole Talabi telling us all, as Sunday asks, another story.
“The Year Without Sunshine”
Kritzer is having a good year. First “Better Living Through Algorithms,” and now “The Year Without Sunshine.” In a Minnesota that hasn’t seen an apocalypse, exactly, but the skies are black from the burning of the Midwest and power is on less often than it is in modern-day Sierra Leone, the neighbors band together. It starts by building a little booth with a bulletin board in it in Tanesha’s yard, with “WHATSAPP” painted on the side. Folks can post notes – what they have to offer, what they need – and soon, Tanesha and narrator Alexis are running an emergency commune, building windmills, organizing work-hours, rationing gas. They, and the community, work hard to save Susan, whose emphysema requires an electric oxygen concentrator at all times, setting up bikes and teenagers to ride them in their garage to pedal for Susan’s life when the electricity gets cut off and their basement generator runs low. In exchange, Susan …teaches the children to crochet while her husband serves coffee.
And this is important. Because eventually, a couple of teenage boys wander in from a totally different post-apocalyptic story, from the suffering suburbs where looters are hung from lamp poles, and they can’t understand why the neighborhood would go to such lengths and work so hard to keep Susan alive for the time she has left.
““Is she your doctor or something?” Kyle asked. This question was met with baffled silence. “An engineer? What makes her so important?”
“She teaches crochet,” someone from one of the bikes called. “Those little guys up there.” The décor included a shelf of amigurumi.”
A story like this – the community coming together in the face of emergency and adversity, building something new out of the barely-functional remains of our lifestyle – traditionally ends with some kind of raider attack. I’m proud to report that Kritzer upholds this tradition…in her own sweet uplifting way. You will not see the ending coming.
More than anything, this novelette reminds me of the obscure 1934 King Vidor film Our Daily Bread, where a couple from the city and an Okie with a broke-down car turn an abandoned Midwestern farm into a commune, “where money ain’t so important.” The film portrays the exchange of skills (a stonemason and a carpenter helping each other) and the planting of crops and the work-gang digging of an irrigation canal with the same spirit that Kritzer portrays the cannibalizing of the bikes and the trading of propane and the cooperation to help Susan. Both are (slightly idealized) stories of an emergent cooperative way of life in the face of, not an apocalypse that stops the world, but a series of disasters that leaves it chugging along hoarse and limping.
Much like her “Better Living Through Algorithms,” I find myself inspired to do something, little as it may be, to make things better.
I love te idea of a conscious chair! Brilliant review
I am Ai sounds intriguing but so sad.