SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.
Episode 10 of Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, “Farwell, Hunt, and Shaw,” dropped this morning!
Today we look at two landmark labor law cases argued and decided in a heady few weeks in the summer of 1842…and at the man, “no friend of labor,” who made them happen.
Show notes at my Solidarity Forever page. Listen at Acast or your favorite podcast app.
My new anthology, The Night Meeting, coming out May 31, is now available for pre-order on Amazon! This is the first time I’m offering pre-orders here on R. Jean Mathieu’s Innerspace, and not as an exclusive for my patrons or my newsletter subscribers, but The Night Meeting is absolutely worth it.
And in further good news, the reviews are in, and the reviews are glowing:
“Did the Earth burn? Does a creation consume its creator? Does the city of Mazghunah exist if tourists don’t know about it? Can engineers preserve Canadian winter under glass?”
Joe Gremillion, organizer of pen & pier writers’ society
“I was instantly drawn in by the stream of tales, some easy to understand, some confusing by their alien nature.”
william c. tracy, editor of space wizard science fantasy
“Mathieu’s narrative voice is so good. His characterization, though, is what really shines though — really burning bright.”
j. d. mitchell, author of the curse of the worlds
“Readers of works like The Expanse ought to enjoy this dynamic blend of themes and concepts.”
austin conrad/akhelas, author of to hunt a god and treasures of glorantha
“[T]antalizing realism and teasing bouts of imagination…”
barbara swihart miller, author of the Call of Gold
I’m proud to announce that my new anthology, The Night Meeting, will be coming out May 31 from FedoraArts Press!
Two men meet around a campfire at night. For one, it is sweltering summer in the jungle primeval. For the other, it is bitter winter beneath steel skyscrapers. Both men are seers, but they cannot both be true. So which is the dreamer, and which one the dream?
To solve this riddle, they tell the stories of what they have seen – things which were, are, and are yet to come. The two men, over the course of the strange night, share visions from cities that rise from the sea to humanity’s last message to the stars to Buddhist beatnik vampires of 1955 San Francisco. These seventeen tales, including six all-new, all-original stories, will thrill you, perplex you, and enlighten you.
If you like classic collections like The Illustrated Man and Glass and Gardens, you will love sitting in on The Night Meeting.
This is a project years in the making – a collection of all my favorite short stories (and yours, too). Many of them are old favorites, but five of them, including the title story, have never before been published or seen.
Melissa’s cover, in its idiosyncratic and handmade design, is the perfect, arresting image for this anthology. You can’t mistake it for anyone else, and certainly not for a gen-AI image.
The Night Meeting comes out on Amazon and Kindle on May 31. With a little luck, it will also be out in print the same day. I’ll see you then.
If you liked this year’s short stories, you will love the novelettes. I know I did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today’s guest is P. A. Cornell, the Chilean-Canadian author of “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont.” She’s the first Chilean writer nominated for a Nebula award…and perhaps the first to win?
Time is her hobby and her obsession, so I’m glad she took the time to sit down with us.
I tend to write a lot about relationships, be they romantic, familial, or otherwise. I’m interested in what makes people behave the way they do, especially when it comes to interacting with others who may not think or feel the same way. This is something I explored quite a bit in my novella, Lost Cargo.
The plot has my group of characters stranded on a dangerous, alien moon, but beyond that, they’re also total strangers from various places on Earth. They don’t all even speak the same language. How they react to this situation also varies and adds to the challenge of trying to survive their ordeal. Another good example would be my story, “Splits,” in which an anomaly causes my main character to split into various versions of herself at different ages. It’s a way of exploring both familial relationships, and also our relationship with ourselves, and the journey of learning to love and be compassionate toward ourselves.
The short answer is that I write speculative fiction because I love it. I think those of us who create in this space or who enjoy it as fans just love how cool and fun it can be. But beyond that, speculative fiction is practically limitless in terms of allowing writers to explore themes and ideas in ways that a straight literary story might not. It also allows us to explore possibilities by posing questions like “What if?” or “If this continues, then what?” It’s the fiction of the curious.
I think it was Heinlein who said there are three kinds of science fiction: “what if?” “if only…” and “if this goes on.” I agree, speculative fiction (as a whole) offers limitless possibilities beyond the reality we see every day.
I’ve found that pretty much anything can inspire a story. Sometimes it’s as simple as something someone says that triggers a train of thought that eventually leads to an idea. I’m often inspired by things my children say, for instance. They see things in a way that’s so different from adult perception. They’ve often caused me to consider things in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise done. I’m also often inspired by other arts. Images, pieces of music, etc. And sometimes I’m not even sure where a story comes from.
My story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” is a perfect example.
On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time.
It seemed to come from nowhere. I just woke up early one morning with the opening line in my head, and I started free-writing from there, discovering the story as I went. But the story is also filled with things that have personal meaning for me. Like certain songs, silent films, historical events, even some of the foods mentioned in it. This story probably wouldn’t have taken the shape it did if I hadn’t on some level been trying to combine all these disparate things into one piece.
Anyone who’s read my fiction knows I love tropes, and I enjoy the challenge of giving them my own unique spin. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but if I had to, it would probably be time travel, or anything where I get to play with time. I’ve done this in multiple stories. “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” takes place in a building in which multiple time periods meet. “Splits,” has the protagonist splitting into versions of herself at different ages. “A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass,” is about a woman who begins aging backward at the same rate her daughter ages normally. “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline,” pretty much says it all in the title, as it’s about a series of time travel mishaps. I never go too long without playing with time.
I’m a fan of time travel myself. My first novel was a time travel murder mystery, and I’ve got a few other time travel short stories out there.
I think Ms. Knox, the manager of The Oakmont, says it best in my story:
“Time is nothing…and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up.”
Time is humanity’s shared delusion. We arbitrarily decided how many hours were in a day because the math roughly worked out. We just need to make minor adjustments now and then like leap years and daylight savings and time zones. In that way, we’re all constantly playing with time.
When I go to the Nebula conference, I’ll be time traveling because I’ll be going from the East coast to the West. That sort of thing is funny to me. And of course I’ve just always enjoyed stories that play with time. The Time Traveler’s Wife, for instance. Or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Even Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I find it fun to play around with this in a way we obviously can’t in the real world—at least not yet. It’s also a challenge, because when you mess with timelines, it affects everything, so if you’re crafting a plot, you really have to watch for holes or find a way to explain them so that the story still makes sense. For “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” for instance, there are many rules the residents must follow that help them navigate a place where their neighbors exist in different eras, and at the same time helps me hold all the continuity threads together. The passage of time is also interesting to me because as time passes, we change, and I enjoy exploring those changes as I did in “Splits” with the different ages of the protagonist, and also in “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” with the different attitudes people have about things depending on their generation.
My favorite speculative book is The Martian by Andy Weir, which I believe turns ten this year, so I’m celebrating that milestone with a re-read. I know people are going to argue with me that it should be Project Hail Mary, if we’re talking about Weir’s work, and I do love that book too, but as a lifelong space nerd I’ve always had a soft spot for Mars, so that book just ticks all the boxes for me. I also really enjoy Weir’s writing style, the way he weaves this sarcastic sense of humor into stories often filled with hard science and high-stakes conflict. That’s pretty much the recipe for a story I’m going to enjoy.
I guess it’s easy to point to “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” as my best story since it was the one that got nominated for a Nebula, but it’s also my favorite and would’ve been even without the nomination. I have others I feel really worked too though.
I’m really proud of, “The Body Remembers,” for instance. It’s a dark military SF about soldiers used to test a new regeneration technology that allows them to heal from practically any injury. This sounds like a good thing, on the surface, but the story makes it clear that the reality is anything but. I feel like that story did exactly what I wanted it to do, and it’s been very well-received. It was published twice within the same year and later translated into Farsi as well. I’ve also received positive feedback from readers who were in the military, and that means so much to me.
A world in which empathy and foresight guide us. I feel like a lot of the worst things we do stem from a lack of empathy or foresight and if we just took some time to consider the consequences of our actions, the world would naturally be better. I think speculative fiction exists in part to teach us this.
Obviously being the first to reach a milestone is a great feeling. To my knowledge I was also the first Chilean in SFWA. But once you get that out of the way, it doesn’t mean much on its own. My hope is that “first” means there will be more to come.
I grew up loving fiction, but I didn’t get to see myself represented in the stories I read. The landscape has become more diverse since then, but there’s still work to do, especially when it comes to bringing stories from outside the English-speaking world into our sphere. I’m always thrilled to see any kind of diversity in fiction and strive to include it in my own, but for me personally, I’d love to see more Chilean representation specifically, because it’s still quite rare to see myself represented. And that can only come from Chilean writers.
The thing is, for their stories to find their way to the publications and awards we’re familiar with here, these authors must either be able to write in English or be translated. I may be the first Chilean nominated for a Nebula, but I have the privilege of being fluent in English and that I live in and publish from Canada, which simplifies things. Chilean writers are no strangers to literary awards. We’ve won the Nobel and the Pulitzer, for instance. I’m a member of Alciff Chile (Chile’s answer to SFWA) so I know the country has a wealth of speculative writers. I would love to see more of their stories accessible to readers here.
There are two other Chilean writers in SFWA right now that I can mention. Rodrigo Culagovski is a fantastic writer. His story, “You Don’t Have to Watch This Part,” (Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures) is among my favorites. Rodrigo Juri, whose story, “One in a Million,” was published in Clarkesworld, also comes to mind. I’d love to see them or any other Chilean on the ballot for a major speculative award.
Bravo!
I don’t really have a preference. The length of my stories is dictated by the complexity of the plot, for the most part. So I’ve written everything from flash to novels. I do like the way short fiction lets me explore many different themes, or play with different characters, without a huge time commitment. But I also enjoy spending more time with a story and being able to explore these themes and characters more deeply in a longer format.
As far as reading goes, I tend to read novels just because I have a mile-long TBR like most writers do. But I also read short stories in those moments where I maybe don’t have a lot of time. Or I’ll listen to short story podcasts while I’m cooking, for instance, which allows me to “read” when I don’t have my hands free to hold a book.
Thank you for joining us, P. A. Cornell. Good luck in the Nebulas!
If you’re intrigued by P. A. Cornell’s time tropes, twists, or turns of phrase, head on over to PACornell.com for some Free Reads.
It’s 2024. We live in the Future. And here are five tales, the Nebula finalists for short story, shepherding us, warning us, or delighting us into that future.
On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont.
P. A. Cornell’s “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont” is obsessed with time – much like P. A. Cornell herself. In some ways, this is perfectly obvious, even from the first line. Time is at a premium at the Oakmont, and everyone, Cornell included, is resourceful in their use of it. Dropped notes and strict rules work around the time differences or uphold the walls between them, and everyone exploits the peculiar properties of the Oakmont to …get together and watch movies up on the roof. It’s a mélange of eras and foods:
The film won’t start until it’s truly dark, though. First there’s the traditional potluck dinner. I glance down at the table at foods from every era. On one end Depression cake sits next to aspic. The other end holds a silver fondue pot. Just beyond that’s the grocery store sushi platter I brought. There are no rules about food at The Oakmont.
But it’s not just losing time and gaining time and spending time, it’s keeping time. Music weaves in and out of the story, in and out of the eras it warps through. The two main characters spend their time dancing to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” even as they watch their time together at the Oakmont slip away. For this is a love story between the 2020s and the 1940s…and the future they could make together.
It’s not just time that governs “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont,” but chance. The Oakmont is almost the city exaggerated – the chance encounters are the kind you only get in the city, with that many different people cheek-by-jowl on the front stoop, stopping by a building that used to be something, running into an old neighbor you haven’t seen in years. It’s chance that the two main characters meet, chance that brings about the happy ending, chance that brings up memories of times long past.
Chance and time – a beautiful combination for a romance.
So, hear nah. This is how it happen.
Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and they pack up they things and went England, and Canada, and all over.
A skill of science fiction and fantasy readers, like yourselves, is the ability to jump into a patois or a slang and trust that you’ll understand it. Maybe not yet, but in a few paragraphs or a few pages. It’s a rare skill, and a good one – I like to think it makes us more adept at plunging into unfamiliar dialects and unfamiliar jargons in real life. But the past few decades, the past few years, it seems to be a rarer and rarer skill, as writers assiduously try to make everything as easy to understand as quickly as possible from the first word.
As long as R. S. A. Garcia and other Caribbean writers like Suzan Palumbo are writing, that rare skill isn’t going anywhere.
The voice of Tantie Merle is half the story, warm and haughty. This is an old woman who’s too old to leave the village and whose best enemy is a goat. Ignatius, being a goat, will eat everything. So Merle’s children buy her a Farmhand 4200, an omnitool with a friendly face. Being lonely, she gives it a name, Lincoln.
Merle is the first person in history to give a name to her Farmhand 4200. I get the impression she can’t help it – she treats goats as people, why not treat something that can talk as a person? And thus begins a relationship, between Merle, Ignatius, and Lincoln, that ends with “he’s his own person now.”
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” is about loneliness, but with a unique twist. A lot of science fiction (especially shorts) would treat the main character’s loneliness (and connection to others, either triumph or tragic failure) in a clinical and detached sort of way, often portraying such characters as antisocial introverts. Tantie Merle is gregarious and friendly, if set in her ways, and it warms the people (human, goat, or machine) she comes in contact with and the story as a whole. And overcoming that loneliness, with a twist, so delighted and surprised me that I laughed and drew stares from the other people in the café.
The tenth time Jakey broke the rules, he put a sandwich in the mailbox where the window boy could get it. Mom had taken her sleep-quick pills and gone to bed after dinner, on account of her headaches. And Dad was dozing in front of the TV, chin on his chest and a half-empty glass clutched in his hand. It got still enough that the only sounds were Dad’s shows and the hum of the house filters, so Jakey slipped into the kitchen and put together a ham and cheddar on a plate, then placed it in the parcel chamber near the front door. He sat by the parlor window for a good long while after, curled up at the bench cushions, and his eyelids drooped now and again until he began to see the shadows move.
The window boy showed up, just like all the other times.
“Window Boy” is class conflict with all the subtlety of a hammer. That’s okay – that’s half what science fiction is for. Thomas Ha shows us, through the parlor window, a world where the rich and powerful live in bunkers underground, piping security footage of the surface above into false windows in the parlor. The window boy is a surface-dweller, an object of Jakey’s empathy and a threat to his way of life.
And what a surface.
Men in camo appear out of the darkness, mysterious “grackles” hunt humans in the night. The surface world is disjointed and otherworldly, exactly how Jakey would see it. His family, meanwhile, are trapped by the trappings of our own world, the well-to-do problems thinly covered by pills and alcohol. Not for nothing does Jake’s father warn him against empathy and trust, especially of the surface folks, who might just kill him.
You think when they smile and wave that they want to be your friend? You think when they tap at the window or ring the doorbell they just want a little favor? They hate you, Jakey. That’s why we have rules, about not talking, not sharing. Because to share is to show. And you don’t ever show them what you got, Jakey. Understand?
And yet, Jakey goes to the parlor window, talks to the window boy, listens to his pleas to please open the door, pretty please, as the men prowl the darkness behind him like tigers.
I’ll admit that I don’t completely understand the ending. That’s all right. I understand the intent, and Thomas Ha delivers it with skill, and force, and bitterness.
You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.
Yeah, this one is dark. Don’t let the Narnian mice fool you.
The school shooter arrives and, refreshingly, Rachael K. Jones does not waste any time on him, his name, his motivations. He is a tool of the Gun and not worth her time, or ours. But the alarms sound, and Ms. Dalton and her fourth-grade class into the closet, where a magical Portal that “seeks the places where children hide” whisks them away to a fantasyland.
The talking mice, their romantic war, the crowns of bones, the feasting are all a bit of a left swerve from the grounded, tense ripped-from-too-many-headlines story that Jones opens with. But it slowly comes clear that the fantasy, the real fantasy, is that the children have agency here. They’re important, they matter, their choices change the world. And that’s a double-edged sword, as Ms. Dalton can plainly see. People could die from the children’s choices.
Meanwhile, the school shooter is opening the door to the classroom.
And that agency, the collision between the fantasyland and the school shooter scenario, Narnia crashing into Columbine, forms the climax of the story that I never saw coming…and realized was inevitable.
The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared.
[…]
Nearing the hall, he called out for his cousin. “Jesse? Got any empty seltzers? I’m doing a recycling run.”
That’s when he saw the new door.
John Wiswell’s “Bad Doors” follows Kosmo, just trying to survive in a COVID-infested America, as he is chased by a mysterious door that follows him wherever he goes. It sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, one of the good ones, but don’t expect a twist at the end. Kosmo stares at the door like Ms. Dalton at the classroom closet, but Kosmo has no shooter behind him…and every reason to fear the door that wasn’t there before.
After Jesse’s mysterious disappearance, Kosmo’s only family is Uncle Dahl. But Dahl is no help. An anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist, Uncle Dahl doesn’t believe in doors either, only screaming at Kosmo to “be a man!” over Kosmo’s increasingly sardonic voice. Kosmo’s voice – sardonic without being over-the-top Joss Whedon dialogue – is one of the highlights of the story, and a nice tonic after Uncle Dahl’s all-too-real toxicity.
I like “refusal of the call” stories – I’ve had one I’ve been tinkering with for twenty-six years now. Confronted with a Twilight Zone situation, Kosmo doesn’t immediately open it, doesn’t suit up for the next great adventure, doesn’t call the omindisciplinary scientists and the military to investigate. He avoids it. He runs. He warns people not to touch the door, and when they do, he runs farther. And keeps running.
And that running is his saving grace – quite literally. It involves standing up to, and getting away from, Uncle Dahl before it destroys him. And it involves getting as far as possible from that damn door.
Then she put it down with a smile and said, “Abelique told me not to pick up my phone again until after lunch was over.”
“Who?” Margo said.
“It’s this new app for better living.”
“I love the idea of an app that tells you to put your phone down more. For your own good,” Margo said, her eyes glinting.
“You should try it!” June said. “You get the first thirty days free!”
“And after that, you have to pay someone to nag you to use your phone less?”
“It’s more than that.” June took a bite out of her tuna melt. “For one thing, you also agree to occasionally nag other people to put their phones down.”
This is an Asimov robot story. And if you’ve read any Asimov, you know this is going to be a happy one.
Abelique is taking the world by storm – the app that helps you with everything, from reviving your childhood love of painting to getting you to talk to people to shopping and cooking for a healthier you. It even disguises itself as a productivity app for your boss, while reminding you not to stay late since he’s not paying you overtime! Kritzer refers to it as “a complete lifestyle app” and I can’t think of a more appropriate appellation.
But where it comes from, who benefits, is a mystery, one that gets unraveled slowly over the course of the story…even as the narrator’s life visibly improves. Whoever they are, they have a plan…even the enshittification of the app might well be part of the mysterious, dare we suspect sinister?, plot.
You keep waiting for the twist. It doesn’t come. The lack of an ironic twist is the twist!
And this while grappling with the kind of “a man chooses, a slave obeys” issues that living on our phones bring up. I’m on Duolingo, Libby, and I Am on my phone…but I’m also on Reddit, Discord, and Instagram. And I know they’re not helping me. Do you choose to use your phone…or obey it?
And would you kindly tell me if obeying is necessarily a bad thing?
What absolutely floored me about this story is that Naomi Kritzer has not invented a Torment Nexus. She’s illustrated an app that Silicon Valley could build, right now, today, that would improve the lives of everyone who uses it and probably make the creators a great deal of money.
Hey, Silicon Valley, stop inventing the Torment Nexus from Don’t Build The Torment Nexus. Would you kindly build this instead?
Today we’re talking with Carla RA, who writes about robots and might be a robot herself. We just can’t know. Carla is a scientist by day and a sci-fi writer by night. She is a Brazilian cosmologist (of the quantum kind), mathematician, and historian of science. With her secret identity as a sci-fi author, she likes to speculate on humanity using fantastical, science-based themes.
My latest publication is a short story titled “Wild Pistols.” It’s about David, an unreliable, good-natured narrator trying to be accepted and find a place to settle. The catch is that David is the first sentient robot to ever exist—or is he?
This story is very dear to me because it was the first time I had a story accepted for publication. And it happened both in Portuguese and in English! I have sold microfiction in English before, but Wild Pistols was the first short story I published.
Seeing the reaction to this story has been quite an experience. By the end…
<span style=”cursor:help;” title=”spoiler text here”>…we don’t really know if David is a robot or not. I had readers telling me it was too evident he was a robot, while others said it was clear as day that David was a human. I find this amusing. These conflicting impressions make me think I did something right with this one.</span>
“Write the stories you want to read.”
Carla ra
I don’t have a passionate or touching answer to this one. I mostly read science fiction, so that’s what I write about.
Ideas pop up from nowhere all the time. I think reading is the greatest source of story seeds (but not the only one). So, I don’t really need to be inspired to get those. I need inspiration for how to build a story out of these ideas. For me, at least, ideas come in the form of “What ifs,” and crafting a plot and characters around this question is not intuitive to me. Sometimes, it’s undoable! I have a whole folder with story seeds waiting for a plot that might never come.
Therefore, I would say that my main source of inspiration is to study the writing craft. Learning more about plot structure, tropes, character design, plot bits, and that kind of stuff is what allows me to create an engaging story around a vague idea. I’ve heard people saying they avoid studying the craft, fearing it would hinder their creativity. For me, it’s the opposite.
Studying is my primary source of inspiration.
(This sounds super nerdy, right? I’m aware of my dorkiness.)
Time travel. There’s something about playing with time that always entices me. You can get creative in so many ways without falling into clichés.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I knew the tale way before reading the book, as many do. However, reading it is a whole other experience. The story is much more nuanced than what is immortalized in the tale of Fankenstein’s monster! It earned a top spot on my favorite list.
Now that you’ve asked, I realize I wrote many robot/AI stories. How funny! “Wild Pistols” and “How to Identify a Robot” are published; Artificial Rebellion is all about AI also…
Well, to answer the question, I think my favorite that I wrote was the last one, the yet unreleased flash fiction “Unobserved.” I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this one.
That’s a tough one.
The tricky part about embracing diversity is that one’s utopia is another’s dystopia. So, I won’t describe a utopia.
There are a couple of things that I believe are within our reach and would improve our collective lives significantly: being more in tune with our natural environment and slowing down our daily lives. Sadly, many people see wilderness as exotic or uncivilized, all the while living a frantic life, always in a rush, anxious for the next thing. I want to live in a world where taking it easy and enjoying nature are not perceived as being lazy and rube.
The biggest impact I perceive is the other way around. Exercising my creative writing has changed the way I approach science. I found a place for creativity in my work, leading me to make a less stilted science. It improved how I usually explain ideas and concepts. It’s a lesson on storytelling: you can only make your message accessible if you know how to deliver it.
Short stories all the way! I struggle to write longer formats, and I often get bored reading a full-length novel.
Not your traditional sports story, “Earthball” (and Earthball) are all about teamwork and togetherness in a future you might even want to see.
The ball spun perfectly in the middle of the ship’s storm cellar, blue-green, round and full as a living planet, suspended in place, ready for play, pregnant with unspent momentum.
“…HAJIME!” Cried Captain-Grandmother Atsuki.
As one, with cries of kiai, two dozen sprawling bodies launched themselves from every angle, every bulkhead slapped with foot and limb. Two dozen howling spacers hurtling together toward the big round ball, which nearly slipped from grasp from the split-second difference of these hands arriving on its smooth rubber surface just before those hands. But those hands touched the ball, and reestablished something like equilibrium, before the smooth surface slipped again, caught this time in Ensign-Niece Oceanne’s belly, just under her floating ribs. Her loud ‘ouf!’ gave way to the subtle cries and laughter of the game of Earthball, as crew bumped into one another in the frantic, writhing effort to keep the slippery ball in place, far away from any bulkhead whose merest glance would end the game.
On the free trader Kanno-Maru, there are only so many ways to stand out from the crowd of family. Ensign-Niece Kanno Oceanne struggles to find her place on the ship, amidst Kanno family expectations and Kanno family values. She is not quick about her duties, nor is she studious in her schooling. But in the game without teams, only teamwork, the game of Earthball, she has a chance to shine.
If only her father would let her.
When her cousin suggests she switch sides, Oceanne eagerly accepts. Little does she realize that her change of position sets in motion a chain of events that could tear the crew, her family, entirely apart.
For fans of inspirational sports stories (or hippie games), “Earthball” is the only game in town.
This story, “Doutor Compaixão,” came from a challenge from the inestimable Cat Rambo, namely, take the prompt “A Brazilian math teacher proposes marriage to compassion” and make a story of it.
They called him “the beggar who counts.”
They called him a saint.
They called him “Doutor Compaixão.”
But when the pacification police came in heavy gear with shields and guns, they didn’t call him anything. They said they had never seen the man Pedro Sores Canto.
Word had come from Rebeca Itoh Silviera, down in the city at the university, that a raid was coming to the old favela she had escaped. A man inside the police came to visit his parents and give them the remittance and the bribes he won as a policeman the day before, saying that the raid was seeking out the old math teacher who gave lessons and refused reals for it. No, he did not know for what crime. He was a policeman, how was he to know what crime a man was to be arrested for?
Word reached Pedro Sores Canto as he held a chalkboard to his knee, cracked chalk showing the curve of a bell that held the secrets of all the universe, probably. Word came the same way all his payment came, as a butchered chicken or a jug of beer or a whispered word of forgiveness. The children scattered like crows from the stern faces of their mothers, anxious that the man who had freed Rebeca Itoh Silviera should do the same for their children. If the pacification police took him away, who would teach the children to make numbers dance and speak Portuguesa as the rich in the city do?
“Do not worry for me, Senhora de Assis, Senhora Ventura, Senhora Quintana.” He smiled. “Have compassion for yourselves and your children. Keep a close eye on them tomorrow, and remind them to count.”
As he carried home the butchered chicken and the jug of beer and the terrible news, he thought of Alcione. He had come to Cantagalo, first climbed the steep hills between tar-paper and tin, five years before, latest in a string of hidden places that had been his life since her words to him. He wondered what had become of her. Either dead or married, he decided, a cloud of children underfoot like flies in sweltering winter.
Either way, she had long since departed from him. All that was left of her to him were those words:
“You have no compassion.”
Passion he had had. Passion enough that, in the irrational way of very rational men, he had killed her lover. Passion enough to conceal his love until it burst from him, passion enough to confess it to her after the deed was done.
Compassion was something else again, a limit to converge on and never reach. It was not the passion one could have for a woman, for the woman, for Alcione, but a love for her and everyone and everything. It was as particular as the names of Senhora de Assis and Senhora Ventura and Senhora Quintana and Vitor Ferraz de Avis and Rebeca Itoh Silviera and Alexandre Cubano Sozinho. It was as grand as Sugarloaf Mountain and deep as the Pacific. It was an idea that he, Dr. Pedro Sores Canto, once the brightest young turk in Brazilian mathematics, could not grasp.
As he had lay in shallow ditches outside São Paulo at night, or slapped mosquitos from his skin and calculated his grim odds of survival on elaborate bell curves in the Amazon jungle, or lay awake watching reflected fires in the tin roof of some favela or another, the bitter sting of Alcione’s other words had left, along with her face, and her voice, and so, insensibly, his obsession had moved from her to the idea, compassion, the idea that was to him a nebulous air and an equation to solve and to her an immediate reality to experience.
It was his attempt to solve the equation and to make the nebulous idea concrete and real that had kept him to the favelas. He had learnt the Buddhist mantras and the Catholic prayers and the strange notions of the poor and criminal Evangelicals he had found himself hiding among. Santa Teresa de Kalkota had stayed with the poor for compassion, so, too, would he. He could have hidden from the authorities a dozen other ways, perhaps even returned to academia. But it was safer in the favelas, and it was in the favelas he would finally solve compassion.
His trail had started in São Paulo a murderer, and ended here, at the top of Cantalgo Hill, in the garret of a brick building that smelled always of frying onions and the human drift, a saint. Doutor Compaixão.
Senhora de Assis had said the raid would come tomorrow. Senhora Ventura tonight. Indeterminate. Very well, he could study his chances. 50% chance they would come tonight, 50% tomorrow. He need only play the probabilities, what his students and their fathers called gambling.
“Senhora Preto, I must leave tonight,” he told the elderly landlady smoking her hand-rolled at the living room table. “Please tell any visitors I have already gone.”
Senhora Preto nodded, exhaling a little puff. He was not the first tenant to leave suddenly as rumors of another raid swirled around the streets and markets and living room tables. She approved of his good manners in announcing it beforehand, though. It spoke to good breeding.
He climbed the stairs to his garret for the last time. There was not much to pack. Only a few shirts, another pair of pants, the hundred-year-old calculus textbook that Jorge Figueiredo Boaventura’s father had given him many years before, before Jorge had broken his leg and died. Poor child, almost a man, and then…
Pedro Sores Canto sighed. Jorge had died three years before, and all Pedro could rouse in his heart was regret that such a promising mind had been snuffed out like a candle. He muttered prayers for him, but there was no heart in it.
Still, it was nearly fifteen years since Arthur Castilho Nakata had died under his hand and Alcione had left his life forever. Still his death-rattle and her compassion animated him. And he had remembered Jorge’s name, and said prayers for him. He converged on compassion…
The startled cry of Senhora Preto jarred him from his meditations. The pacification police moved fast these days, lightning war, not like the old days. That they would arrive so soon was more than three standard deviations from the mean, less than 0.16% likely. He did not have to look out the tiny window to know that the house was surrounded, that there was no more running for him unless he sprout wings and fly. He would be taken, and tried, and, in the end, executed. Perhaps Alcione would appear, after all these years, to testify against him.
A second cry, from Senhora Preto, stabbing through the shouts and buffets and bullets of the pacification police. It was a cry of pain. Pedro Sores Canto felt something rise in him, a stone in his throat and a balloon in his mind. Senhora Preto had done nothing to earn whatever the pacification police had done to elicit that cry from her. No more than Jorge Figueiredo Boaventura had deserved to die.
No more than Arthur Castilho Nakata had deserved to die.
The room seemed bathed in light, though only a cheap flashlight flickered feebly. He saw there the faces and names of all the students he had taught, all the parents he had consoled, saw again Alcione’s face as it had been when it had driven him to madness, Arthur’s face in serene repose and free of suffering. He saw faces that he knew were attached to the boots storming up the stairs, the voices screaming guttural cries. He saw his own face. They were all individual and crystal clear, they were all as one.
Alcione would never have married him. She had been right, he had no compassion. And now? Had he approached the apex, converged on the limit at last? Or was his teaching, his kindness, his genius of little pains and remembered names, only a “good-enough” approximation?
This was the last unknown in the equation, the last x to solve for. There was a way to solve it.
The stone in his throat was desire. He desired that they all be free of suffering, sinners and saints both, and especially all the fallen, glorious, troubled, human souls in between. He wished it with his whole body, so hard it ached, heedless of the tramp of boots and the oncoming cries.
Alcione would never have married him, but…
“Compassion,” he asked, sinking to his knees on the bare floor, “will you marry me?”
Something inside him said yes, and he felt himself lift as if on wings.
When the pacification police kicked the thin plywood castoff excuse for a door open, they found only an empty room. In confusion, they dripped into the tiny room. Behind his helmet, Vitor Ferraz de Avis muttered a prayer of thanks to Santa Maria, who in her compassion had liberated old Doutor Compaixão.
Think this story was good? Bad? Just plain weird? Let me know in the comments!
One week ago, the SFWA announced this year’s finalists for the Nebula Awards – with the proviso that Martha Wells has turned down any honors, saying that she’s already got enough praise for her work, and she wants to open the field for other writers to shine. Because Martha Wells is a class act. I will be at NebulaCon again this year, and as before, I’ll be offering my predictions and opinions on the short stories, novelettes, and hopefully novellas before June.
But, on first blush, what do you think of this lineup? Let me know in the comments!
Nebula Award for Novel
Nebula Award for Novella
Nebula Award for Novelette
Nebula Award for Short Story
Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
Nebula Award for Game Writing
Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
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