Something is happening on Jax’ space station. Strange sounds. Blood-stained rags. Shadows in the corner of the eye.
Worst of all, people are trying to talk to her. Especially her colleague, Saunders.
It wasn’t that Jax was in love with her Space Station. It was more that she felt connected with it on a deeply personal, emotional level.
“Malfunction detected, Level 1.”
This is A.Z. Roskillis’ Space Station X: a lesbian romance on a deep, deep space station, with psychos and bugs and everything!
Despite the horror trappings, Space Station X really is a romance story at heart. Jax, the station engineer, is a misanthrope’s misanthrope, using her station as the next best thing to becoming a hermit. The only other living thing she even tolerates is the single houseplant she keeps in her quarters. She treats the station as her love in ways that Captain James T. Kirk would find a little obsessive. Something in her past has driven her to these extremes, something she’s been running from for a long time.
And then, there’s Saunders. Saunders is the station’s security officer (and the only other crew besides Jax herself), a well-muscled blonde who took up her position straight out of the Space Marines. She’s cheerful, genuine with people, and not a little lonely. Friends have described me as “the world’s most cheerful battering ram” and that’s exactly what Saunders is to Jax, trying bit by bit to find out what’s under that thick shell. But she came out to the station for her own good reasons, reasons that hide behind that easy smile.
What I liked best about Space Station X is how human it is. Even when the horror is ratcheted up to delirious levels, Jax and Saunders remain very plain and very real. Either of them could be someone you meet on the street, or have to try to reach at the office, and they retain that humanity in the face of the worst the station has to throw at them. And, almost in contrast to the rising terror, they become more real and more well-rounded as we slowly find out more and more about the station’s two crewmates.
I’ve been developing a taste for queer romance lately, and I loved how easy it was to join Jax and Saunders, walk besides them on their station. I was taken aback when the book finished. If there’s more out there like Space Station X, I’m going to be a happy reader. And if there’s more Roskillis to be had, I’m going to be a very happy reader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When I saw that one of the eligible pieces for this year’s Nebula Awards was a short story, originally in French, I had to check it out. And double when I found it was published in Solaris, and even won the Prix Solaris when it was first published in 2022. It found print in English this last year in Year’s Best Canadian Science Fiction.
Best Canadian science fiction? In French? Sacré ouais!
And I am so glad I did.
This story is so wonderfully, enchantingly weird.
Geneviève Blouin (Fr.) weaves a weird little story a bit like so: The shellwomen are a kind of molluscoid mermaid – normal women (as near as I can tell) from the waist up, built like snails from the waist down. They are proud of their expansive shells, where their men and children shelter, of their warm, fleshy folds, and the milk of their breasts. Their community has a kind of fragile traditional communality – the guides of the clans are obsessed with whether they’re group-oriented enough, baskets are filled by friends and neighbors if there isn’t quite enough, they even regulate their population by trading men, shellwomen, or the poor unfortunate “slugs” (grown women with legs) with neighboring tribes. But things are afoot, and the shellwomen may have a very different future before them than the one they’ve known, caring for the children, sunning on the beach, and sheltering their clans.
Despite the title, the focus isn’t really on the shellwomen themselves, but on one of their men (or harvestmen, as they are called), Manuto. Manuto is, I don’t have another word for it, hapless – he’s a terrible leader (or “guide”) of his clan (always picking the worst assignments, because he’s too honest to maneuver for the good ones) and hidebound in his ways. He loves his shellwoman, Hina, and his children – why, his eldest daughter’s thighs are already becoming stiff and enlarged, she’ll soon form a cocoon as her foot forms! So it’s with a great deal of shock that he hears the chief advocating the rights of “harvestwomen” over the shellwomen.
Honestly, my only complaint is that the extended focus on Manuto as the main character kind of gives the shellwomen, and their secret lives, the shrift. The ending feels abrupt, and although, yes, logically all the pieces were there, it still feels like it came out of left field. This is a minor quibble, though – Geneviève Blouin is no Neal Stephenson, and the ending is still, mostly, satisfying.
The theme that emerges, on rereading the story, is this is a story about power – the power between the shellwomen and the harvestmen, the powerlessness of the “harvestwomen” (whom Manuto thinks of as “slugs,” an older and harsher word), the power of chiefs over clan guides, even the power of politicking and horse-trading, of charisma. The chief exerts charismatic power over Manuto to compromise him, and when this doesn’t work, effortlessly replaces him as guide with his brother. It only occurred to me after that the brother’s desire for a second shellwoman (because of course a new man like him thinks of collecting ‘em all, unlike his old-fashioned brother) is not long for this world. The shellwomen appear to have power over the harvestmen – after all, the harvestmen work to collect greens for their herbivorous mates, and, as the chief puts it, “all they do is watch the children and laze around all day in the sun.” – but the other side of that coin is the power to deny them their food. And the shellwomen have their own power, a real power, to counter that threat the harvestmen can hold over them. Plans within plans within plans, and all sewn up in under 8,000 words.
It feels like a strange new story that still tastes of all those Silver Age Best Ofs and paperback anthologies that I grew up. I could see this story in Dangerous Visions or something edited by Lin Carter. It gives me some hope for my own more grounded, earthy, and earnest science fiction, the stuff like “Glâcehouse,” “No More Final Frontiers,” and “The Voluntolds of America.” And yet, I could not have written anything so wonderfully, enchantingly strange as all this. Like “Rabbit Test,” this was a story that could only be written, or translated, by women.
For the folks at home, pick up Year’s Best Canadian Science Fiction, Vol. 1. If Margaret Sankey’s translation of “The Secret Lives of Shellwomen” is any indication, it really is the year’s best. And for any voting SFWA members reading this – nominate “Secret Lives of a Shellwoman.”
Been a Hell of a year, hasn’t it? Then again, so was the entire Trump administration.
My year opened with a double-embolism and ended with a gout attack. In between came the slow-motion loss of my day job and the resulting chaos bringing my rhythm of writing, editing, mailing, remailing, updating, hustling crashing down around my ears.
I got two Quaker articles published, “A Quaker Rosary” in Western Friend and “A Friend with Taoist Notions” in Friends’ Journal. Western Friend called me back for an interview on their podcast even. One reader reached out about my thoughts on martial arts in the meeting-house, and that article will be coming out in 2024. And that wasn’t the only one – no less than Matt Selznick interviewed me for Sonitotum.
Speaking of podcasts – I launched Solidarity Forever: The History of American Labor, with notes right here on R. Jean’s Mathieu’s Innerspace. This is the soup-to-nuts labor history in this country, the bloodiest labor history in the developed world, from 1619 to 2024 and beyond. And if you don’t like that labor history, go out and make some of your own!
I have Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future! out under review by agents, I have stories in the mail, and I have a new novel, The Thirty-Sixth Name, a YA Jewish fantasy swashbuckler, open in Word. I have stories to tell, and a voice to be heard.
And, oddly enough, I feel like 2024 will be a pretty good year.
Eligibility: The Voluntolds of America
“Voluntolds of America”
Eligible for: Hugo Award, Nebula Award Genre: Science Fiction Subgenre: Solarpunk as fuck Publication: Reclaiming Joy Publisher: Inked in Gray LLC Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Uncomfortably Relevant” by the people I read it to!
Eligibility: Cambermann’s Painter
“Cambermann’s Painter”
Eligibility: Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award Genre: Steampunk Subgenre: Satire Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Flash Voted “Most Too-Clever-By-Half” by a small collection of randos!
Eligibility: The Man Who Shot Lü Dongbin
“The Man Who Shot Lü Dongbin”
Eligibility: World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, Hugo Award Genre: Fantasy Subgenre: Urban Fantasy Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Mathieuvian” by my wife!
Eligibility: Fire Marengo
Fire Marengo
Eligibility: Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award Genre: Science Fiction Subgenre: Sea Story/Solarpulp Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: the Innerspace Newsletter (free with signup) Category: Novelette Voted “Most Entertaining to Listen To” by several local writers!
Eligibility: Lost Signal
“Lost Signal”
Eligible For: Shirley Jackson Award, Bram Stoker Award Genre: Horror Subgenre: Psychological Horror Publisher: FedoraArts Press Link: Amazon.com, Goodreads Category: Short Story Voted “Most Likely to Make People Listen for Darkness” by one beta-reader!
This is a guest post from Melissa Mathieu on our second date in just over a year.
The Barbie movie affected me more than I imagined — I cried a lot during the movie. Margot Robbie’s Barbie showing empathy far beyond what I expected from a movie in the Marvel era. There’s a togetherness that all women and femmes do share, in our pain, and in our shared experience of oppression. The oppression is often structural, often relational, but it also limits us at to possibilities.
Barbie came from a world where Kens are superfluous. As a child, I played with Barbies, not baby dolls, which made me feel somewhat less feminine than I should have been, and yet fashion and the form of an adult women (however anatomically incorrect) held my interest whereas baby dolls didn’t make any sense to me. Ken was truly superfluous in this context (unlike my husband, who is very much needed).
Husband in his suit; wife in her extreme femme look
What are you supposed to do with him? And Barbies kissing other Barbies was very common among all the children I played with. Ken just didn’t make sense in that context. It wasn’t playing house, which I also enjoyed, it was very much an exercise in self-identity, in vanity, and in the female image. This is pre-male gaze. It’s the female gaze, and that is one of the things I loved most about the Barbie movie.
My jaw literally dropped for the first 15 minutes of the movie. My eyes bathed in colors and sparkles. It truly moved me to see spaces, even fake ones, where it was all about the girl’s point of view. Restraint? Not needed. Accommodations for men? Unwarranted. The visuals were beautiful to me, and as an adult, I realized how deprived I feel of extreme femininity (trans femininity included). There is something so delicious to me about extreme femme spaces. In our town there’s a place called the Madonna Inn which is pink, pink, pink.
Pictured: PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHNK
I love the surreality of the space. How much more did I relish the idea of being cute, of no restraint, of pure love of color and sparkles, of the adorable outfits Barbie wore, especially the white and blue ones.
There is something missing in me. The embodied vanity, the pure joy of being femme without the baggage of being a new mother, a tough woman in a man’s world, of just allowing my form to be totally embodied as a work of art, but also as an ego wrapped in a supremely beautiful body. Barbie in the real world sits at a bus stop with an elderly woman, and says to her “You are so beautiful.’ The elderly woman replies, ‘I know it.’ It’s not just about vanity or beauty. It’s a way of fully embodying my form. Something I haven’t had the freedom of experiencing since I was 13.
I remember that rich summer. I was largely alone, and felt amazing. It was the 90s and the 70s were in. I spent that summer both being in my body, and seeing myself as a very glamorous — being in my vintage clothes, listening to Jimi Hendrix, and The Carpenters (why? I can’t tell you), and a bit of Hole and Nirvana. I took time doing my makeup, and being creative with my hairstyles, spending 45 minutes bathing and shaving my legs. You might say that is childish, but I don’t think so. The creativity, the self-adoration, the freedom were intoxicating. I crave that kind of love and embodiment.
Cut to 2023, My worries about survival, my complete focus on my baby, and the demands she places on my body— the deprivation and the disconnection from having to wait on my own needs to care for her, they block “the me that feels” a lot of the time, the part that has my own thoughts. I want to see that freedom again, and truly, fully enjoy how beautiful I look in a dress (however I look).
Someday I will have a bathroom or a boudoir that is totally femme. Ballet pink and gold. Just for me. A pre-male gaze space. When I was a young child, I hated pink. It felt forced on me, when what i[I can change this, but I sense this part is very much stream of consciousness, and would leave it like this if you prefer] really wanted to wear was purple and red and yellow. But today I can honestly say I love pink. I spent 30ish years hating the color, and now you can see I love it. It’s actually a darker shade of purple to some extent.
Pink dress is looooong…
There are many more things I could say about the movie. I think it’s a good reminder of how little progress we’ve truly made as femmes/women. The double standards are ridiculous. I’ve carefully cultivated friendships with people who love others regardless of gender, and don’t tear them down. I’ve gained power as a femme, but what crushes me isn’t the systemic oppression, it’s the way I’ve dulled myself down, the way I’ve lost my sparkle (literally, there is nothing sparkly in my whole wardrobe) to fit into a man’s world.
Also just an aside, they should’ve had Barbie eat, at least when she became human. It’s a small thing, but I think it’s important that girls and women see beautiful women eating. We deserve to enjoy food! I also really enjoyed seeing the Jewish creator of Barbie so lovingly portrayed by Rhea Perlman, and how loving and nurturing she was to Barbie. No feminism is complete without including older women, and no feminism is complete without being intersectional. (Where were the queer and non-binary Barbies?)
I’d like to see a world where all people are free to gender how they want. I want to stop having to be tough, I want to stop having to be feminine. I want to be this messy, sexy human that is me. We all deserve free expression.
Wife wears flowers, earrings, lipstick and has drink with coveted pink umbrella
If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.
Well, I kind of had to, didn’t I? Look at my author photos. Look at my major in college. Look at what I named my company. Look at my years in China. Indiana Jones left a deep and permanent stamp on me, and I’d be remiss not to send him off in style.
This week, my childhood best friend Kane Lynch invited us all out to the Sunset Drive-In. We piled into our tiny Prius, all four of us together, for my belated birthday celebrations and for Lyra’s first theater experience. It seemed only just – her first movie experience (her first anything on a screen) was Raiders of the Lost Ark for my birthday last year, why not Dial of Destiny this year?
In 1999, I wrote to the President of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union to urge them towards peace, friendship, and space travel. I did so because they had a Chain Letter for Peace printed on page 136 of this book.
On page 51, there’s pictures of Skylab and an advert for a book called See Inside A Space Station if you send $9.02, postpaid, to Warwick Press at 730 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10019.
On page 106, they discuss “EXPLORING INNER SPACE” and the frontiers of the human mind. On the facing page is an “imaging exercise” or guided meditation.
On page 183, we learn about various cooperatives and sharing that may exist in the future: childcare sharing, worker-owned businesses, food co-ops, family businesses, job sharing.
On page 75, there’s a recipe for earthworm cookies that actually taste really good! And a comparison chart of various protein sources, with insects topping the list.
On page 36, living houses. Page 37, how to plant your own model “tree house.” Page 168, cooperative games. Page 170, computers as personal trainers. Page 140, bicycles breaking the speed limit. Page 206, gasohol. Page 156, the Space Shuttle. Page 129, a dead-on description of l33tsp34k.
PICTURED: Google Translate, beta version, 1982
Page 115 – the Education of a Lifelong Learner. Born, March 23, 1985. By now, she’s spent a year on a cooperative farm in China (sic), worked at a local TV station (sic) to produce a puppet show, learned advanced math, spelling and reading at home by computer, and completed her combined PhD-apprenticeship in architecture.
This book was written before I was born, but at age thirteen, I believed. From the settled, solid adobe house where we composted and sucked honeysuckle and brought government to the people through the wonder of television, this future wasn’t just probable – it was right around the corner.
This is a future that never was, never will be, turned out true, and should have been, all at once. It’s a hippie future, as evidenced by the green-spaced cities, the macrobiotic food, the absurd digressions into ESP, world citizenship, and wholism. It’s a dated future, by the focus on space travel, robots and computers without the glimmer of a doubt as to their ubiquity.
But it’s a sweet future.
In the page “All Kinds of Families,” we see divorcees, singles, and Heather Has Two Mommies. Some embrace a simple life and some move to space colonies. People play cooperative games, garden together, and do not study war any more. They ride their bikes through Bucky Fuller’s floating cities. There is not a trace of sarcasm, irony, or cynicism to be found anywhere in these pages. A lot of things are contradictory. And anything’s possible. Let’s find out what really happens!
And we, the readers, are encouraged to participate. Almost every page has a project, something to make or do, more books to read, whether it’s a recipe for worm cookies or a chain letter to Gorbachev, we’re supposed to use the book as a springboard. As a starting point.
God damn, did I ever.
From the vantage points of 2016, plenty of it is painful to read. Uri Geller was a fraud and the Space Shuttle’s long since been shunted off. There’s no Premier to write to, and the spectre of war is more diffuse and somehow darker. “Food for Everyone” talks about how one day, we might grow enough so no one is hungry.
But I cannot condemn this book, or any part of it. A lot of that is nostalgia, and happy memories of the book that opened my mind to the possibilities of the future. But a lot of it…well, anyone who believes that sweetly, and that sincerely, in a future for everybody can’t be all bad. I mostly just want to give this book a hug, and tell it that we’re still working on a lot of stuff – but there’s no reason we can’t have Gerard O’Neill’s space colonies and lifelong learning and family co-ops…and even world citizens.
It’s worth the read – if only to remember what the future looked like when we knew wonder.
(Special treat: for fans of “Fire Marengo,” the Sophie is pictured in blazing glory on page 149.)
I picked up Sarena Ulibarri’s Another Life with great interest. Not only did she edit the Glass & Gardens anthologies (including debuting “Glâcehouse” by yours truly), but the description seemed to be marked ATTN: Roscoe.
Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past.
Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs. When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Planet B movement, who eschewed fixing climate change in favor of colonizing another planet.
Learning her reincarnation result shakes the foundations of Galacia’s identity and her position as Mediator, threatening to undermine the good she’s done in this lifetime.
Fearing a backlash, she keeps the results secret while dealing with her political rival for Mediator, and outsiders who blame Otra Vida for bombings that Galacia is sure they had nothing to do with. But under the unforgiving sun of Death Valley, secrets have a way of coming to light.
The back cover of Another Life
Greening deserts! Rebuilding human society, better after the worst! Past life regression! Experimental social forms, vertical gardens, and rediverted waters! It’s pretty clear that Sarena and I both grew up reading the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog. And the sparse worldbuilding she does in this lean little novella is enough to clearly draw this solarpunk “ambiguous utopia” in stark lines.
Unlike LeGuin’s Anarres, though, the community is still small enough and Ulibarri focused enough to try and solve (some of) the structural issues in utopia. Over the course of the story, we touch on the emergence of class in the Founders and Inheritors, hero worship, bias (in the form of genetic fallacies like Galacia’s past life, and more broadly the community’s reliance on charlatanism), and even replicating old world systems while rejecting its values (something I notice in every counterculture and subculture).
And Galacia struggles with all of them on the side. “Cozy” became a dirty word, and solarpunk is supposed to be the coziest thing in science fiction, but I can’t think of a better word for the main conflict of Another Life. The bomb threats, massing polic- pardon, Protectors, and dramatic direct actions happen secondarily to the past-life regressions and election to a position with as little power as possible. At first, I struggled with the low stakes, but as I progressed, I realized it was on purpose, and that, bombs and police raids aside, these were the stakes of an ambiguous utopia. Legends and Lattes did nothing for me, but if that’s your speed, you’ll get into Another Life faster than I did.
But, whatever quibbles I have with the stakes or the plot, I do love the world. I’d love to sit down with Galacia and her old friends around the balcony feasts that bookend the story, toss some fishes Seattle-style in the tower, or just walk around the shore of the lake that was once Death Valley, watching the water come in because a few people said to themselves that the world could be better. The desert could be green.
Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend my assistance to all who need it. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and of my associates in everything I say or do. Let me do right to all, and harm no one.
The Doc Savage Oath
So what does it all mean?
For the historians of pop culture (both professional fan and the kind that gets paid), there’s a mild interest in Doc Savage for all the bastards he’s ever spawned. Every cape
of screen and page is linearly descended from Doc, the “proto-superhero,” via Superman. Every globe-trotting adventurer, like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and especially Johnny Quest, owes his far-flung trips and exotic locales to Doc’s pre-jetsetting prop-wing adventures. Scooby Doo learned to unmask villains at his feet, the Venture Brothers comment on him in their grandfather’s image, even Yankee WWII movies (and all of their spawn) developed out of the squaddie camaderie of the Fabulous Five – right down to the sickly-looking radio man and the rough-and-smooth banter. Paul Atreides is Doc Savage’s son, by way of the Lady Jessica.
But, in this day and age, even Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino are vaguely aware of Doc, but don’t really care.
Pulp aficionados pay respect to the Man of Bronze, though not so much these days as they do The Shadow. The Eighty-Sixth Floor collected curiosities, and a few dozen old men collect Bama-covered reprints. But Doc’s poor showing in the post-pulp world means that the temporary reflag in interest in the 1960s has faded ever since – the more because of the terrible movie adaptation.
no, I’m not posting a picture here. We do not talk about the Doc Savage movie in this house.
Even readers grew tired of him. Doc is very much a product of the Thirties and early Forties. Later adventures such as The Terrible Stork are strange, eerie, pantomime Doc Savage with mechanical characters clanking through uncharacteristic and nonsensical actions. In Stork, Doc does parlor tricks for Renny, yells at him, and suddenly goes into his laboratory to demand “why did I do that?” He struggled during the War, and had no place in the new world born of nuclear ashes and economic superpowers.
But it’s his very Thirties-ness that makes him what he is.
If Superman is a timeless “truth, justice, and the American way,” then Doc veers closer to Captain America – a paragon, a very specific paragon, for a certain era to look up to.
Like Steve Rogers, Doc’s prison of zeitgeist, how closely he’s bound to the era he was created, is what makes him timeless. No one’s successfully taken Doc, his wonderful toys, or the Fabulous Five out of the ice yet – though some have tried. Taking Steve Rogers out of the ice into …well, whatever present day the writers feel like pulling him out in, to comment on the vast difference between their present day and the virtues of “just a kid from Brooklyn”… in fiction is easy. Confronting Doc, hardwired to the Thirties with all its bright mad possibility and looming terrors and misery and heroism, as a modern reader is hard.
That is, after all, what the world looks like now, and it can be hard to look it in the eye like that.
And what of the Thirties? This, to start with: Doc is a scientific marvel, made not from favorable genetics but from training and upbringing, touching the very limits of human physical and mental ability. You can self-help yourself in Doc’s footsteps! Doc is equipped with money and power, and uses it to cross the world “righting wrongs and punishing the wicked” because he and his friends are so addicted to adrenaline they can’t imagine a life without flying bullets. Later generations can snicker at the PTSD victims and laugh at the corny oaths and simplistic villains – Dent laid them out as he, personally, saw them.
Dent’s incredibly personal touch is an aspect of his timelessness, too. Here are masked or disguised villains, motivated by greed or pride, and here is a Man of Bronze and his closest friends to stop them. Here are the terrors of his age – economic depression, rising fascism, wars and rumors of wars, rapacious landlords and greedy bankers – and here is a face under a hood, ready for Doc to punch in and hoist by his own petard. Here are the exercises you, too, can do at home to become “better and better, to the best of my ability, that all my profit by it.” Here’s the oath that sounds a little too earnest to be a cynical marketing gimmick. Here’s increasingly-elaborate Wonderful Toys, handheld superfirers that shoot bullets that don’t kill and have tracer rounds, cars with miniaturized televisions in them, soundproofed airplanes. Wouldn’t those be nice? Here’s a delicate brain operation that makes criminals Better. And here’s Lester Dent, holding his heart on his sleeve, making exactly the paragon of virtue he wanted to see in the world…for good and for ill.
It’s a peculiar thing, but the more you write your own foibles, your own obsessions, your own quirks — from being raised in a hundred-year-old adobe by two loving hippie parents who shout too much, and from reading books that are always twenty years out of date because you got them at the library book sale and from chasing homeschool dreams of da Vinci and Doc Savage and orangutans and Asian philosophy and printing ‘zines and memorizing The Simpsons and Mystery Science Theater — the more timeless and “relatable” (oh that word!) your work becomes. My best stories are the ones where I wear my heart on my sleeve.
And the only author I’ve ever read who puts quite as many fingerprints as Lester Dent on every word of prose was Robert Heinlein.
And finally, Doc’s earnestness shines from everything. As a Millennial, I lived through the hipster era. I asked some friends of mine if they thought I was a hipster, as I was into homebrewing beer, foreign folk songs, swing dance, and retro fashion. “No,” was the immediate answer, “you enjoy everything too earnestly to be a hipster.” Which is why they hung out with me. In an age defined by cynicism, “fake news,” scoffing, affect, and sneers, the earnestness of Dent and of Doc stands out by way of contrast. Stands out? Bestrides like a colossus, more like. There is much every modern reader needs to take Doc to task for, to criticize and doubt him for – the Crime College, the blackface, the casual stereotyping, telling Pat to stay in the kitchen, the whole raft of Dent’s vintage Thirties values as expressed through his heroic paragon who has suddenly become a plaster saint.
And after all the criticisms are rightly levelled and Doc’s superlative goodness is cut down to a more appropriate fit…there is still that earnestness that Doc is a paragon, is what we all could be and could strive for, is ultimately on the side of justice. And it really does stand out by way of contrast from every word written, uttered, moaned, tweeted, or screamed that one imbibes from 2023.
This might be the twilight of Doc Savage. I might be the last one alive to call myself a fan of the Man of Bronze, who has ever tried to copy Doc’s Method of Self-Improvement at home, who can recite the history of how Ham got his name, and Monk’s role in it. Even if the remake gets made (with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or whoever follows him), I doubt it will raise much interest in the books. They’re too much of their time, too idiosyncratic, too influential, and, not in the least, super objectionable to any decent human being living after the Civil Rights movement. There’s a lot of artistic, ethical, and historical distance to overcome.
But it is worth overcoming. For all his myriad bastards, no one is aggressively hopeful, deeply personal, and, in Dwayne Johnson’s words, “FUCKING WEIRDO” as Doc Savage. No globe-trotting spy or kindly alien or superscientist comes with an earnest promise of self-improvement or a sincere belief you can replicate his heroism as home. No other paragon, with the possible exception of Captain America, so completely embodies his zeitgeist or the stamp of his creator, and in embracing them so completely, transcends them. Superman stopped being a New Deal superhero before Doc did.
We have rising fascisms. We have wars and rumors of wars. We have economic depressions, bright mad possibility, and wild-eyed philosophies struggling to break free, no matter who it hurts when they escape. The Thirties came back ninety years later.
We need Doc Savage. His time comes around again, but we need a Doc Savage to fit our times. We need him to be a Doc Savage who’s striven to be better and better these last ninety years, and rights the wrongs he did then and all the wrongs we know are wrong in 2023.
We need Lester Dent to put a face behind the wicked mask, and send Doc, Monk, Renny, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny, and Pat down there to bust trouble, gum up the works, feed the hungry, smash the munitions, right wrongs, and punish evildoers. Just to show it can be done.
We need to remember it can be done – even if only on pulp paper for 10c a copy.
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