Today on Philosophy (in a Teacup), we’re sitting down with Fiona Moore, author of Human Resources. She is a BSFA-winning Canadian author and academic, living and writing in southwest London, UK.
Fiona Moore
Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.
My latest book is Human Resources, which, despite the name and the fact that I work in a business school, isn’t a HR management textbook! It’s a collection of short fiction from NewCon Press. It includes some of my best-known stories (like “Jolene”, the one about the cowboy whose wife, dog and sentient truck all leave him), but also a lot of stories which are currently out of print or hard to access, as well as the previously-unpublished title story, which is about what happens when a human computer, trained all his life as a living memory system, develops dementia. So I hope there’ll be something for everyone.
Having just published my own short story collection, that’s the ideal, isn’t it? Having something for everyone.
Human Resources, by Fiona Moore
Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?
Speculative fiction has been my favourite genre as a reader since I was a teenager, so when I started writing seriously it felt natural to me as a place to write from. I like the freedom that being able to write at one remove from lived reality gives me.
As for what is speculative, that’s a hard one to answer. I once said that Sharpe is SF because it’s about an alternate Napoleonic wars where Sharpe existed, and I was only partly joking. More seriously, I think I’d say it’s that slight removal from reality, one that allows us to explore the things we take for granted. I’m an anthropologist in my day job, and an anthropologist, in their ethnographic research, needs to always try and make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. SF allows us to do that through fiction rather than ethnographic writing.
Anthropology was my first love in academia. I majored in Sociology in order to write better characters. I’m not going to lie – I envy that you get to do anthropology in your day job and in your fiction.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
A lot of them are inspired by things I find out about at work: if I hear about a new technology, my mind often goes down imaginative rabbit-holes thinking of what the consequences might be. Others come from more random places: the Morag and Seamus stories, “The Spoil Heap”, “Morag’s Boy” and “The Portmeirion Road,” came indirectly from a week at the Milford Writers’ Conference, which at the time was run out of a lodge in North Wales, and the location got me thinking about the people who try to escape social collapse through buying remote properties, and what that might mean for the people (human or otherwise) already living in those remote locations.
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?
My favourite SF trope is the sentient machine, or biological construct. I like speculating about what an intelligent thing that was deliberately built by humans would be like in terms of its psychology and culture. After all, even if we model them on ourselves (deliberately or accidentally), they’ll take on developments of their own, and I like to explore what that could be like.
And the psychology and culture of completely non-human forms are something else again – difficult, but worth it. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is a masterpiece of that kind of worldbuilding.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?
There’s quite a lot, but I’d like to particularly mention “Fool To Believe” by Pat Cadigan. It’s a novella that I read as a teenager and found that initially, I didn’t understand it, but the story intrigued me enough that I kept on reading over and over until I did. I thought if I could eventually write something like that, I would be very happy.
What is your speculative short story? / What is the best story you’ve written?
I’m not sure if it counts as the “best”, but there are only a couple of stories of mine that I find I will just re-read because I want to: one is “The Island of Misfit Toys” and the other is “The Spoil Heap.” Both are available in Clarkesworld. A lot of people who read my work say that “Jolene” is their favourite, and, while I think I’ve improved as a writer since, I do like it– it’s a sentient car story that leaves it ambivalent as to who’s the victim.
What is the world you long to see?
I’d say it’s the one I use as background for my self-driving car mystery stories and novel, Driving Ambition. It’s a bit utopian in that there’s universal basic income, most people work in the arts or in innovative sciences, there’s a big social welfare ethos and queerness is generally accepted. Not everyone is happy there, because human beings are human beings, but I think I could be.
You described your series as “Captain Scarlet but they’re lesbians.” How did you get here from there?
That’s the Captain Artemis series– currently just published as stories, but there should be a novel available soon! I am a huge fan of retro SF television, I’ve written and cowritten a lot of guidebooks as well as more serious academic articles. But I often find that, much as I love those series, I don’t really see myself or my friends in there. So Captain Artemis, about an alternate 1960s with rockets, moon colonies, archaeology digs on Mars, and undersea bases, is a way of writing my own version of those retro series, but also with the added twist of asking how queer people, mixed-race people, women and other marginalised groups really might get on in that sort of world.
I love it! Very Lady Astronaut or For All Mankind.
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Both, in answer to both questions! I usually have a couple of novels and short story magazines on my ebook reader, alternating between them as I feel the need. Similarly with writing I tend to write novels and novellas in the summer months, and then switch to short stories in the autumn and winter when my day job gets busy.
Thank you for talking with us today.Good luck with Human Resources!
You can find Fiona Moore at Fiona-Moore.com, on Amazon,and wherever better books are sold.
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.
This is the [first draft] opening of my new novella, a queer space pirate romance I’m worktitling Persephone’s Gate. Along with the title, it will probably undergo changes before publication, but until then…enjoy!
Zara Krauss-Kusnadi, station-born and -bred, awoke with the first realization anyone station-born and -bred would notice.
There was gravity. And it hurt.
“Ugh…” She groaned, laying one olive hand to her brow.
There was gravity. She was at the bottom of a gravity well – so a planet or a moon, not a ship or station.
There was heat. She was soaked in sweat, great drops of it sliding toward the gravity well that held her fast to the ground.
There was ground, and the earthy clay smell joined the scent of rancid sweat and pickled spacer that Zara herself exuded.
There was a pain in her head, over and above the weight of gravity over every inch of her body, something that throbbed.
“Ugh…” Zara repeated.
She dared open her eyes. Overhead, beyond the purple sky, a blue-brown planet with delicate cumulous curls in its atmosphere hung ominously, as if it would fall on her.
That…that’s Kopol… She thought.
Which meant she was on Kachhuapur, Kopol’s second moon. Still on Kachhuapur. But what was she doing sleeping outside, in the tall grass of Kachhuapur’s steppes?
What did I do last night?
She’d been…Ellis was there, Ellis Nnamdi-Divekar, and Louis and Sarai and Martian Mei and some of the others from the Fujiwara-maru…Ellis had looked amazing in Centauri silks, so daring…they drank toasts…God, how many?…they were celebrating…celebrating what?…
In front of her eyes, a streak formed across the sky. From her point of view, it looked like a light that sliced Kopol in two. She winced, closing her eyes again, trying to remember.
…they were celebrating a new enlistment…yeah…they’d signed articles yesterday afternoon on a Southern Cross interstellar…their last night on Kachhuapur before…
Zara’s eyes snapped open, big and brown and stone-cold sober.
That light. The one streaking across the sky. Big star bound, away from Kachhuapur, out of Kopol’s orbit, heading for the hyperspace barrier to catch the outbound startide.
Zara scrambled to her feet, as if her 1.8m could bring her meaningfully closer to the spaceship racing overhead.
Somehow, Zara knew that that very light, that very ship, was the Revenge, that Louis and Sarai and Martian Mei…and Ellis…were passing before her eyes right at that moment.
She watched it break free of Kachhuapur’s atmo, a shooting star in reverse, and sail off behind Kopol’s massive planetary bulk.
Leaving her.
Alone.
In the tall grasses of the Kachhuapur steppe.
She stared into the sky for a long time, throbbing head and dragging gravity forgotten, breathing rattling little breaths. As if by staring, she could still see her shipmates and the promise of plunder and adventure.
Well, the Nebulas are over. The winners announced, the new board of SFWA sworn in, and everything. I may not have pictures, but I have some thoughts.
First, I want to congratulate all the winners and finalists. Félicitations! You’ve all earned it, and especially in short stories and novelettes, the stories were really strong this year. Choosing a winner must have been a trial.
But I’d especially like to congratulate Naomi Kritzer and our oldfriend, Ai Jiang. Naomi’s two finalists were a joy to read and a breath of fresh air – hope for the future. In her acceptance speech for the winning novelette, “The Year Without Sunshine,” she spoke of its inspiration – of wanting to kick against the idea that there could be no handicapped people in the apocalypse, and how a community comes together around their neighbor in need. That’s the kind of message, and the kind of science fiction, we need today.
But it wasn’t all awards and speeches. There were many, many great panels this year – just of the ones I attended, Novellas and Novelettes, Setting as Character, and the LGBTQ+ meetup were standouts. The ones I missed, I’ll be watching the videos and taking notes.
I even sat on a panel (again!) this year. Last year, it was “Unusual Short Story Formats.” This year, “Religion in Worldbuilding.” With Rachel Gutin, Sue Burke, Shvarta Thakar, and Natalie Wright, (a Quaker, a Jewish woman, a Unitarian Universalist, a Hindu, and an atheist, respectively), we ranged from why religion might be important (even in science fiction) to practical polytheism. The audience’s questions were great, too. Afterward, we adjourned to the Cooper Suite to continue the conversation, where a Friend from Ville Québec interrogated me about how hard it is for me to write Quakers.
Seriously. Hindu characters, Jewish characters, Catholics, atheists and Episcopals? Fine. No problem. Writing Quakers? Haven’t succeeded yet. …well, maybe once.
Speaking of my own writing…
I had an office hour with an editor who really understood Doña Ana Lucía. That’s right, To the Future! is out in the mail. Win, lose, or draw, I’m glad there’s someone in the industry who smiles when I say “it’s everything I thought was cool when I was 14” and understand the importance of nice, long names. Hold me in the Light while she considers To the Future!.
Which brings me to my last point. After office hours and some instructive panels, I’m making some changes to my independent writing career. I’m approaching the dirty thirty short stories, where each new title gently boosts sales on all the old titles. That’s fine, especially since they all sell rather modestly. But I’m going to move away from short stories.
Instead of one short story a month, I’m going to focus on (a) getting Doña Ana LucíaSerrano…to the Future! traditionally published, and (b) releasing a novella every three to six months. They’ll be 25,000-40,000 words – short enough to finish in an evening, long enough to sink your teeth into. And I’m going to start experimenting with series again, something I haven’t really done in a decade (aside from Doña Ana Lucía herself). Series, shared worlds…my stories are going to get bigger, in every way. I’m already gathering ideas, from swashbuckling lesbian space pirates to fantasy Quakers (because, hey, what’s the point of writing if you don’t challenge yourself?).
The diversity of voices, depth of characterization, and lived-in worlds that you’ve all praised for the stories in The Night Meeting will still be there. They’ll just be full meals every three months, instead of snacks every month. Trust me, they’ll be worth the wait.
This also means pivoting away from some of the intense marketing I’ve been sucked up into. Marketing is a gas – it will expand to fill the available space. I’m scaling back to blog updates every other Friday, and one update per month on the Innerspace newsletter and Patreon. But they’ll be richer for it – I’m incorporating more of the new prose I’m writing into the newsletter and into Patreon, so there’ll be more of the fiction you love coming to you.
That’s all the news that is news at the top of the hour. See you in two weeks!
That’s right, this week is this year’s Nebulas. You know I’ll be on the Religion in Worldbuilding panel (Friday, 7 June, starting at 3:00pm), but here’s my (planned) schedule for the weekend.
June 6, 1:30 – Novellas and Novelettes June 6, 4:30 – Love Beyond the Romantic
June 7, 9-12 – Party Suite hosting June 7, 1:30 – Setting as Character June 7, 3:00 – Religion as Worldbuilding June 7, 4:30 – Time Management OR Building Your Crew
June 8, 9:00 – Smaller is Better June 8 12-3 – Party Suite hosting June 8, 6-8 – Party Suite hosting
June 9, 10:30 – Planning Publicity
As you can see, my volunteer hours have me in the Party Suite. If you’re attending the Nebulas, drop on by!
The Night Meeting is now available, in ebook and print formats!
“Brilliant and beautifully written, Mathieu’s stories span the ages and blur the lines between past and present, alien and mundane.” – Anthony W. Eichenlaub, author of Not Done Yet: Sci-Fi Stories of Wisdom and Fury
“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 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
—
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 is 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 humanity’s last message to the stars to Buddhist beatnik vampires of 1955 San Francisco. These fifteen tales, including five 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.
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?”
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?
Not your traditional sports story, “Earthball” (and Earthball) are all about teamwork and togetherness in a future you might even want to see.
Cover by Melissa Weiss Mathieu.
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.
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