When Mackenzie embarked Marie-Pier Corriveau’s ancient Prius after winter finals, the muggy slurry of rain had been falling on Montréal for two weeks. A La Presse headline bubbled up in her Google-vision that it was officially the heaviest since the 2045 tipping point, and recommended some journalistic debate on whether this meant climate change was plateauing. She waved it away as if it were one of the malarial mosquitos that had plagued Quebec since she’d enrolled at McGill. Finals were over, and she didn’t have to worry about risks of the Quebec City dikes failing and flooding the Plains of Abraham, or persistent malaria outbreaks in Three-Rivers, or threats to the wine grapes in what remained of the Gaspé peninsula.
“Bonjour-hi!” she chirped, clapping the passenger door shut. Marie-Pier replied in kind. “What’s with the blue-and-white bumper sticker?”
“Protective camouflage.” Marie-Pier’s French accent was the carefully precise and internationalized sort favored by Quebec’s more cosmopolitan classes. “We are going upriver to the heart of the Republic.”
Come in out of the warm and wet into the bite of the last land that is not land, but winter. Buy “Glâcehouse” today…before winter disappears completely.
In 2014, I returned to America. I flew into Boston to graduate from Northeastern, cum laude, and step foot onto my putative alma mater for the first time. Hanging around in Cambridge the day before, I stopped by an honest-to-God newsstand and picked up next month’s issue of Asimov’s, feeling extremely Benny Russell as I did so.
In a nearby café whose name I long forgot, I opened it up and began to read.
I’ve thought of this story ever since. Through the end of Obama, the madness of 2016, the Trump presidency, hanging beef, selling cell phones, working tech support, through COVID, layoffs, and the coming of Lyra, I’ve thought of this story. It strikes me at odd moments, and I shiver a little.
The prose is workmanlike, but so was Asimov’s. But the idea…
Michael works in wood, in the village where Jim throws pots and Sarah dispenses medicines and Ann weaves cloth. And his is the first cabin, closest to the shore, when the woman from the ocean comes. She helps herself in, warms herself by the fire, and when she can be civilized again after her trials, she introduces herself as Kali. Her bright clothes and strange accent mark her a stranger, but everyone in the village is helpful and hopeful to anyone they meet in the flesh.
Kali’s ship had crashed, and she, ultimately, the only survivor. She and her people had left a world of war, on the brink of self-destruction, and she has found herself in a new world where the people barter for what they need, where they learn from master to apprentice, where no one has ever heard of writing.
And no one has heard of war.
“Wars…” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.
“People killing people, in large numbers.”
Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing…which people?”
“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling the blankets up and closing her eyes.
Kali follows the script everyone suggests to her, goes to apprentice to Michael, gets romanced by Michael. Michael plays her some of his songs on a homemade zither, the folk songs handed down from one voice to another and some of his own compositions. She asks about written music, but he doesn’t understand the concept.
“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”
“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, people in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”
Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But … who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”
An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”
Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems … strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand …” His voice faded.
After muttering some Shakespeare, Kali theorizes what may have happened. A virus (Michael mouths ‘vi-rus?’, another unknown to him), probably man-made, released into the air, changing the DNA and cerebral expression of all the newborn babies. Affecting the expression of social behavior – how we think of social behavior. Michael, and Susan and Jim and Ann and everyone in this brave new world, are unable to think of social structures in the abstract – unable to identify with nation, with distant ancestors, even with “the village” as a thing unto itself, separate from other villages. They only identify with the people in front of them.
Some distant spark eliminated ‘them’ from our consciousness…along with ‘us.’ Oxytocin, after all, is the hormone of family love, and also tribalistic hatred. Kali bitterly calls it “probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible.” As she puts it: “People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war.”
It’s Michael’s incomprehension, Kali’s bitterness, that always comes back to me. This notion of a pacifist people without flags, without place names, without memory and without future, the generations turning over in stagnancy, that haunts me. Surely, someone thought this was a utopia. Surely enough, some people IRL absolutely do. I’d like to see what they make of this little village where the woman from the ocean came to live.
Michael points out that things do change, even without things like war and scholarship and literature and history. Kali came from the ocean. That changed his life. Michael is right.
Kali follows the script, marries Michael, bears him a daughter, Asha. Asha is a bright and beautiful child, beloved of the village…but as Kali tries to teach her letters, she proves Michael’s child. The virus is still in the air, Kali herself is “the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.” She wonders what the hell she was thinking – what difference could one child make? Or a dozen? And to what end? To bring back the world set to annihilate itself? To bring back war?
Kali walks back out into the ocean, in her tattered but still-bright ship’s uniform, and does not come back.
Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.
It’s long past Nebulas season for this little story from 2014. Then, and now, I don’t think it would appeal to enough folks to garner a Hugo. But it’s collected a very select prize indeed – it rattles around in the back of my head, years later, so much so I specifically sought out and bought another copy of Asimov’s just to read it again.
I think of this story every time someone describes a utopia, and in my business, I hear a lot of utopias. Would this utopia be capable of war? Of scholarship? Of memory? Of descent? Or would they be pleasant, bland nothings, generation on generation, like the village by the ocean that Kali found? Would a Kali fallen into this utopia, or that one, or mine, find a place for herself? Or would she have to march back out into the ocean again?
What Bunker describes is no less than the death of the social sciences I had spent four years studying in China when I picked up that newsstand copy in Boston. And it was a dark world, unlit by science and unhallowed by history, and it is a world that many people fervently wish to plunge us into. One small change, and we are placid tribes again.
It’s enough to make you want to take a long walk off the shore.
The honorable mention of the 2006 Tellus Prize, first story I ever sold, here is “Gods of War,” available for free for one week only.
It was about three in the afternoon, at least that’s what it would’ve been on Earth. The sky was an angry purplish, like blood on the inside of your helmet, and it was ripping around, trying to kill us. The worst was behind, but the destruction lay ahead.
Marquez, a Mandarin-speaking Earth boy, and Harris, a grim Martian colonist, are Red Cross volunteers traversing the Martian wastes. They come to the Chinese settlement of Zheng-we, decimated by a dust storm, and hunt for survivors. They thought there would be none. They were wrong.
“Gods of War” was the first of my “Asian philosophical SF,” stories where I explore concepts I’ve read and learned from China and elsewhere, concepts like the difference between do and jutsu, the ineffability of the Dao, or the extent of iron-body techniques. It’s always been one of my favorites, for the multicultural Mars and for the sense of active, muscular hope under pressure. Hope is not something you have, it is something you practice, and nowhere do I say that clearer than in “Gods of War.”
Long-gone MindFlights.com published it, paying me a handsome $25 for it. At the time, I was working in my father’s company, videotaping government meetings. I got the news checking my email surreptitiously some five minutes after a California Coastal Commission meeting had broken for the day, the commissioners still easy in their chairs. I rushed to the public podium, switched it on, and announced to the sitting Commission that I’d just made my first professional sale, and got paid for it. The august politicos broke out in applause for me, and my father grinned from behind the switchboard. This will always be one of my fondest memories.
Some of them even read the story when it came out. I hope you do, too.
For one week, to celebrate the coming of les printemps, “Gods of War” is free on Amazon. Get your copy today, and be swept away to the red sands of Mars, after the storm Guan Yu has passed leaving so much devastation in its wake…
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
This post is now part of a grand conversation in the SFWA about machine learning, AI, and its impact on fiction. For more points of view, click here.
First, it’s not AI. It’s machine learning, aided and abetted by human input from stem to stern. It’s essentially your phone’s text prediction but with more sweat and blood in. Which is an accomplishment, but it’s not Mr. Data.
Second, read this article of Unmitigated Pedantry. Bret Devereux articulated a lot of the half-formed ideas I’ve had about what we’ll call AI for argument’s sake as of last Friday.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
That was where I stood two days ago.
Yesterday, Clarkesworld closed for submissions.
Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why.
Neil Clarke is about the nicest man in science fiction. He’s also dedicated. He didn’t close for submissions during his heart attack. He’s made some dread pact with a dark power to always get his responses out within three days. He’s the best paying regular market for short fiction, and everyone’s first port of call.
Being the first port of call, he got maybe 50 submissions a month. But now…
That staggering difference is AI-written slush, clogging up the works. Neil is one man. He can’t read all that in a month, much less reply in three days.
Taylor Swift had a song about this.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheila Williams at Asimov’s may have a team, but how overwhelmed are they going to be this year compared to last year? And AI detection software is still crude, and, anyway, that just starts another arms race with each trying to outwit the other. You’ll never know if your AI detector will work today or if some bright spark in Russia just came up with something that technically passes. Right now, like Dr. Devereux, there are some stereotypical aspects of machine-generated writing (fake citations, boring but technically perfect plotting) that we can pick up on, but humans are fallible, too, and those visible signals are going to evolve.
The problem isn’t with the machine-learning ‘AI’ as such.
Er, not yet anyway.
It has potential for aiding the handicapped (alt text generators, automatic closed captioning), for assisting writers in the outlining, story-bible-checking, and other “preproduction” phases, and putting Depositphotos book covers out of business.
I mean, look at this crap!
The problem is that it’s being implemented by people who, as Kane Lynch pointed out last night over my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, fundamentally do not understand what art is or what it’s for. A few weeks ago, this tweet made the rounds.
The NFT bored monkey avatar is the icing on the shitcake here.
This is the problem. The people who are developing AI and presently leading the narrative on what it is, does, and means do not understand how real human beings work. I rather enjoy porn, and despite what this fellow thinks, I’ve had access to pictures of naked or nearly-naked men, women, and others for the better part of three decades, some of it even computer-generated. It does not replace my wife’s roast artichoke and vegan pasta, our long meandering conversations, the brightness in her eyes when I show her some new science fiction I’ve known for ages, her incisive wit editing my work, her embrace, the sound of her prayers, or her passion and creativity…for art and leftist politics! *koff*
Now, this guy is easy to mock. In fact…
…but the people back of AI “art” and “fiction” just as fundamentally misunderstand how humans work. Art and fiction aren’t just an extruded mass to consume – even at the bottom barrel-scrapings of porn, romance, and pulp. Even mediocre (written) porn, you’re reading for the artist’s personality – their verbal tics and turns of phrase and weird little obsessions. The sub-mediocre stuff is full of shortcuts – cut/paste, entire stories resold with the names changed – and I have no doubt they’ll turn to this shortcut too. (It’s hard writing a novella a week, and I have immense respect and trepidation for those authors that actually do!) But the moment you say “I like this author” and you even subconsciously notice their nom-de-plume next time you search, you’re out of the stuff that AI can automate.
Because writing and art aren’t about automation. They’re about personality. And personality comes from deutomation.
“What the Hell is deutomation?”
To deutomate something is the opposite of automating it – it renders a process more involved and more conscious. Deutomation makes art (including fiction) better. That’s why we self-edit so many drafts and read and reread our prose until we detest it. Because the time and effort and labor involved makes the writing better. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It grinds our personality, our unconscious obsessions and verbal tics, into the writing, so it bursts off the page.
Automating art gets it fundamentally bass-ackwards. I can see usages of this kind of machine-generated art for sketches, tests, roughs – testing the ideas. But for the actual creation of the work of art you plan to show other people as a finished objet d’art? That’s something that gets better from deutomating it, not automating it.
And yet, people who don’t think they need to pay for writing, or even ask permission, are the people training these “AIs” and proclaiming them THE FUTURE! as loudly as the terrorists in Doña Ana Lucía Serrano…to the Future!. These are people who, as near as I can tell from out here, don’t believe in ethical constraints on their work, nor understand what human beings might want from their work, and when confronted, just verbally bully their interlocutors and crow “well this is the future GET USED TO IT LUDDITE!” These aren’t people I want in charge of my cheese drawer, much less disruptive technology. I have a nice double-crème brie in there, it’d spoil from disruption.
Mathieu’s Law of New Technology – assume bad actors exist, and they will use your technology to harm other people.
I’m not actually afraid of “AI” stealing my job. Like Dr. Devereux, the fundamental misunderstanding of what my job is insulates me from that, and my extensive experience reading porn and seeing where the shortcuts stop gives me some experience in predicting where this shortcut will also stop. But I am worried about clog. We’re going to clog up (if the AI boosters are to be believed) legal services, medical services, movie theaters, Google searches, and, not least, editor’s inboxes, with substandard machine-extruded “content” that drowns out anything useful, because machine learning can’t at present, and may never, understand its content. If I wanted terrible medical advice, WebMD is already right there, telling me I have uterine cancer. It’s the phone tree for tech support all over again.
And what do we scream at the phone tree? “GET ME A REAL PERSON!”
We’re gonna still want a real person – especially a real artist or writer or musician. But this is the phone tree writ large, at amounts that cripple Neil Clarke the way a heart attack never could. I don’t have any solutions to this – though SFWA are fervently discussing possible stopgaps – but asking the right question is the first and most important step toward any solution.
My apologies, this wasn’t a super-tight argument about The Right Way Forward with AI – although a culture shift that maybe ethical constraints like asking permission before training on someone’s blood, sweat, tears, and IP actually apply to how technology is used would be a good start. This is a series of thoughts from one writer who’s been trying to imagine better futures for two and a half decades.
But, seriously, engineers? Assume bad actors exist. And assume they will use your technology. Please.
This is the opening scene of a story I’m shopping around, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box).” Next time someone asks “what is solarpunk?” I’m showing them this, because these dozen paragraphs are pure, distilled solarpulp.
Credit to Kim Schmidt, as always
“I wonder what they hold over you, Doña Ana Lucía.” Said Anni Talavalakar. “Did you ‘retrieve’ a relic from your own museum? Seduce a Senator’s lover? I like to think you killed a man, it’s the romantic in me.”
“It is a little of all three.” Doña Ana Lucía smiled — a feral smile on her imperious, cultivated features.
The two Syndicate goons juddered her a little.
“And you still won’t tell me where my venuswood box is…? A pity.” Anni looked up, out toward her stars, gears ticking beneath her silver streak. “But since you have done me the honor of revealing your unspoken truth, I can freely give you this…with your consent.”
“F-freely given.” Confirmed the stunned archaeologist.
She leaned up, and pressed naked lip to blood-red. Her mouth was rich and full, with the confidence of age and the playfulness of youth. Anni even marked the end with a little flick of her tongue that hit Doña Ana Lucía like the sting at the end of a melody.
Anni lingered there, her dark hand caressing Doña Ana Lucía’s morena cheek, her gaze taking in as much of the archaeologist as she could. The Syndicate goons filling the train car looked on respectfully, without a sound.
Finally, Anni drew back and took a deep, regret-filled sigh.
“Toss her.”
The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.
She knew the fall was not far: two meters, if that. But it went on forever, long enough that Ana Lucía could see the stars overhead all wink out in the harsh, cold light of day before she hit the ground.
I came late because I spent the morning filling out my application to the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association), including proof of income, my union dues, and volunteering however they want me. I’ve been waiting for this day for twenty-five sacré years, since I sent off that first package of manuscript to Sheila Williams over at Asimov’s one fine day in 1998.
Today, I got the news: My application was approved. I am a Union Man.
The SFWA was started in 1965 by Damon Knight as a means of support and even collective action in dealing with publishers, editors, agents, and producers. They’re the ones you turn to when your publisher disappears into the night with your rights and your check. They’ve also evolved into public advocacy for science fiction and fantasy, as well as running workshops, mentorship programs, medical funds, Writer Beware, and, of course, the Nebula Awards.
(as a new voting member, I officially take bribes in children’s equipment and fine alcohols. :P)
The SFWA has been a source of prestige since they fought for Tolkien’s rights to his American royalties. Associate member status (which I now possess) requires at least $100 in lifetime sales, which is a much, much harder number to reach than folks outside SF/F realize. Full membership requires a cool grand in income. It’s a select group, and I am proud to burnish all my future manuscripts and queries with “SFWA member” at the top right front-page header, selon Shunn. Editors don’t mind seeing it either. It won’t get a bad story in…but it might tip the scales against an equally good submission.
Required for all invocations of the union in Science Fiction
And…I’m a union man. I can feel Jack London slapping me on the back and welcoming me to the family, Bayard Rustin grinning that shit-eating grin, George Orwell nodding in sour approval. I am standing with my comrades, as loose as the SFWA is about comradeship (but any organization that had Heinlein in it would have to be). I signed up to mentor, to read, to help other writers, to “give my heart, my soul, to give some friend a hand.”
This morning I am born again. I’m in the promised land.
By the look on her face, I figure she’s stoned, and by her odd clothing, I guess she’s a hipster, so I have to show her something daring. I point to the Morbier. Illustrating the structure with my hands, I tell her, “It’s got two layers: the end of the day’s curds on the bottom and the beginning of the next day’s curds on top, separated by a layer of ash.
It starts with the introduction of Mara, the woman without a past, who until last year had no social security number, no birth certificate, no fingerprints or DNA on file. Trish introduces her, Trish, the smoker sous-chef with some extra pudge around the middle and an eye for the beauty of women like Mara.
In the double-space to a new scene, a new moment, we cross the ash, from today’s curds to yesterday’s, when they met at the farmer’s market, and where Trish pointed out the Morbier. We cross, back and forth, across the ash, from yesterday to today, over the course of the story – and twice across into tomorrow’s curds, once in the middle of the story and at the very end. Today is in the depths of winter, and yet
I’m at the farmer’s market again. It’s springtime, all puddles and pollen. The girl is gone and she’s not coming back.
But our next double-space across the ash, to today, is to describe the other great food metaphor of the story: the chocolate fountain.
A chocolate fountain is a biological weapon disguised as a dessert. Once deployed, the fountain burbles out an invitation to every guest who has just scratched a rash or picked a nose to stick their germy fingers into the brown downpour. For fear of injury lawsuits, the chocolate (which is always of low quality) is not hot enough to kill bacteria – instead, it is diluted with a generic vegetable oil to maintain its runny consistency. By the end of the night, it becomes a sweet, gushing petri dish.
I’ve never eaten of a chocolate fountain, and I never will. Not after these fruits of Benedict’s exhaustive research.
Mara and Trish work at an exclusive Connecticut country club, Trish in the kitchen (but she smokes with the waitstaff) and Mara on the waitstaff. They set up and tear down the chocolate fountain, feed their blue-blooded and well-heeled guests on Costco stuffed grape leaves, steal bottles from the cellar when they can get away with it. It’s all they, and their colleagues, Ivan, Jake, and Peggy, can do. Those well-heeled bastards and blue-blooded heiresses treat them as subhuman. Mara is notable for being the only waitress or waiter who hasn’t barricaded herself in the closet to cry, even after the short litany of personal abuses and degradations Trish off-handedly relates.
Mara saves that for home at the apartment, with Trish, where she checks the fridge five times a night to make sure her leftover spaghetti is still there, where she curls into a ball in the bed for Trish to wrap herself around and hope, where she trembles when two friends of theirs, James and Geoffrey, announce their engagement. “Oh God,” Mara trembles, “the government has you on a list now. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
No one’s sure what to make of Mara, the girl without a past. Her therapist assures her that her memories of time travel, of a terrible future somewhere beyond the ash, are confabulations, but teams of doctors can only wring their hands and wonder if she’s not from some Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt bunker instead. She has a scar on her temple where she says they put in an implant (now, thankfully, finally dead). Once, while high, Trish asks Mara why they would have sent her. Mara just shrugs, “experiments need guinea pigs.”
And, slowly, we piece together where Mara is going, if not where she comes from.
One of the worst of the guests is a tech-lord named Helmut Geier, and his son, Hal. The father cannot meet any eye, speaks in a low monotone mumble, and communicates entirely through his assistant. All he ever communicates is “fire that waiter.” Some, like Jake, have made a game of it, getting fired and showing up again the next day. Helmut does not see the waitstaff as distinct enough people to bother differentiating. All except Mara, who performs with preternatural knowledge of his tastes and preferences.
This time, the assistant’s message is: “he wants you to wait his table from now on.”
And so, when Helmut stays over a week at the club with his son in tow, for his son’s birthday, Mara works breakfast, lunch, and dinner, serving the billionaire’s peculiar needs. Usually before he voices them. Of the son, Hal…well…he’s eleven years old, speaks in grunts instead of his father’s mumbles, spends his every waking hour either on bloodthirsty video games or oversexed anime. Mara serves him as well, at his birthday party:
“Hal Geier has a taste for fried foods, but he doesn’t like to get grease on his device. So every item of food on his plate must have a toothpick in it to keep his fingers clean. He wants chicken tenders and those little French fries shaped like smiley faces. Put broccoli on his plate, too, but only to satisfy his father – the boy will not eat it. And he’ll want a big squeezy bottle of ketchup to go with it.”
“How did you figure all this out?” I ask.
“Research,” she says.
The chocolate fountain burbles on.
And something funny happens at Hal Geier’s birthday party.
It starts with the hypochondriac grandmother, the one who communicates entirely in racist slurs and fatphobic comments, complaining of stomach cramps, whisked away by her personal physician. Then an uncle, the heavy drinker and heavy eater, so no worries. Than a blonde boy who loves to steal food and let his mother emerge from her vodka long enough to laugh at the waitstaff who was too slow for him. Then a little girl named Gertrude – and that’s when it stops being funny, when the kitchen stops making side bets on the next guest to fall.
Now we cross the ash, to the weekend before Christmas, to the loading dock, where Trish is smoking with the waitstaff. Peggy the shift manager pops a question, a hack question for a hack amateur sociologist: “Would you kill baby Hitler?” Only Trish thinks to question the givens, asking if Hitler is predestined, if her attempt was predestined, whether she was doomed to fail. And then Mara answers, pointing to the long history of European anti-Semitism, to the brutality of WWI and the inadequacy of the peace, all the people who willingly participated in the Third Reich. If you killed Hitler, someone else could step into his shoes.
Peggy happily writes up “whether great men make history or history makes great men.” And Mara takes a last pull on her smoke, and gives her real answer, Benedict’s real answer, the heart of the story and the question she set out to ask:
[To prevent the Holocaust,] “You have to kill a lot more people.”
When Trish finally emerges from the kitchen, back across the ash in the present, the bodies have been moved out the back door, the party guests gone, the teardown crews “unaware they’re interfering with a crime scene.” The buffet is cooling in one corner, the stuffed animals deathly still in the centers of the tables, the party streamers hanging limp. The guests who aren’t dead, will be.
And Mara is standing next to the putrid petri dish of wealthy excess: the chocolate fountain, with the red juice of a strawberry and a speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come,” are her last words. Along with “I’m sorry.”
We cross the ash one last time. Into the future, where Trish wakes up every morning in “the wrong life,” hounded by police and reporters, wondering if her girlfriend really was from the future, really had to kill all those people to prevent it, if she was just crazy, if Trish herself is crazy.
It’s a life cut in half by disaster, and the past lies buried beneath a layer of ash.
(If you’re racking your brains trying to remember where you heard of R. S. Benedict before, she was the Main Character of Twitter for about 36 hours, because of a dumbass opinion on fanfic. You may also notice that nowhere in this summary does fanfic come up. Her opinion of fanfic has no bearing whatsoever on this story. A person can have a shitty opinion and still be a good writer, published in F&SF. No matter what Twitter tells you.)
Many reviewers, then and now, compared “Morbier” to 12 Monkeys. The crazed time traveler, the sympathetic love interest here in the present, the unfathomable disaster to come, the brutal things to be done “in the present.”
It is not.
It is La Jetée.
I love that this cover is composed like a slice of Morbier.
Both 12 Monkeys and “Morbier” derive from La Jetée, but “Morbier” hones closer to the disjointed, nightmarish effect of the original. It was only on the third reread that I caught the calls-forward, the rhythm of the temporal displacements, the creeping hints that Mara is not crazy – the hints Trish doesn’t quite pick up on, even as she relates them.
This story creeps. It creeps up your spine and down your gorge, and then stays there.
“You’d have to kill a lot more people” is Benedict’s answer to the hoary old question, and Mara unflinchingly acts on that answer. She tries to save the waitstaff, the class innocents, from her bacteriological guillotine (since no staff member is dumb enough to eat from the fountain) but she can’t save them from the disjoint, from the horror of waking up in the wrong life ever after. She truly loves Trish, but has to keep her at arm’s distance. If you truly believed in killing baby Hitler, and killing a lot more people besides, to prevent a Holocaust, you would have to be Mara.
Ask yourself if you could do it. I still don’t have an answer myself.
Ladli dabbed at her brow with the hem of her sari. It was not Proper, but then, neither was she. A proper auntie would not have wasted what few rupees they had on electricity from the neighbourhood’s jugaar solar install, not have wasted yet more on roadside dhaba meals so she’d have time to work, not have sent Maandhar diving into the deep on mad bright dreams instead of honest cons like the rest of the diver-boys.
The thought had occurred to her, in the shadows of the multinationals, as she queued for water. The ubiquitous cloud of diver-boys swarmed any out-of-towners or people who looked rich.
“Many diamonds, uncle, from the old days!”
“Only two hundred rupees investment!”
“Prizes from the deep!”
Ladli and her family live on the shores of sunken Surat, seeking sustenance from the waters that were once the downtown Diamond District. Her promising nephew Maandhar dives for treasures and tricks gullible tourists, her brother-in-law Guarav from the fish that gather fewer and fewer every year. Ladli looks down into the dirty deep and the bones of the city that once was, and dreams of a garden, a garden of beauty and wealth, that might rise from the waters again…
I read this story when it came out, and got reminded of it again when @AiJiang_ mentioned it was up for Nebula consideration. And I remembered why I had forgotten it.
The narrator, English name Gillian, opens the story thus:
I traded my last coffee for a coffee.
As she embraces the reality of dark bitter liquid in a cup, the word vanishes from her mind. Very Taoist. Gillian lives in a future New York, an immigrant from Fujian like her author, dominated by Langbase. The Langbase, in everyone’s head, is the sum total of their vocabulary in every language and their currency. Little spare ands and thats get dispensed as small change, but other words, more important words, like coffee and tea and 咖啡 and 茶, get bought and sold for real goods, for bus tickets, for rent. And rent in New York is always expensive.
She accepts her c—– and her own Langbase changes from 987 to 986 words.
When Gillian goes to the Language Exchange, she always says the same thing: “Give me English.”
She spends most of the story in the company of Jorry, another Chinese immigrant to America, so thoroughly Westernized he sold his Chinese names long ago on the Exchange, and so thoroughly Chinese he preens and fronts and lords it over his family back home even though his real business is gambling his words in vast language casinos and prefers Gillian
silent, docile, obedient.
Jorry is a piece of work.
But the real meat of the story is in the other people Gillian interacts with. Two New Yorker mothers with their perfect blonde babies in overpriced strollers bragging about the cost and effort of purchasing entire dictionaries’ worth of words, in multiple languages, for their scions, and we know this to be the real wealth of the world. Language. The Silent woman, homeless, mute, having long bargained away her last paltry ands and thes, that Gillian tosses a few ands to, and who bows her head in gratitude, muttering “and” like a mantra, now that she has it again, now that Gillian has loosed her tongue. And Gillian’s mother, back in Fuzhou, who tries to communicate with her daughter but even she, proud as she is of her daughter making it to America, realizes somewhere in the back of her mind how much it cost, how Gillian has had to sell almost everything of her native tongue(s). Everything but “home” and “mama.”
All through the story, we see words like “c—–” and “L—–.” We never find out what they are. And they unsettlingly grow more numerous as the story goes on, leaving us to wonder.
The end of the story scares me. I’m not sure if it’s a choke of the Kindle edition, or if it’s there on the printed page, but after rejecting Jorry and selling his name to gamble on, after meeting the former Silent who got her name back because of Gillian’s kindness, Gillian hits the exchange again, and says “give me English.”
My eyes scrolled through my Langbase and then on home and then on
and
I’ve stood in many gwailo bars, many classrooms, many taxicabs, that were the Language Exchange. English for Mandarin, Mandarin for English. I started a romance with the one woman in the room who would trade her Cantonese for French. I taught English from the Mongolian border to the Shenzhen river, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the streets of Shanghai. It was always additive. Everyone gained by sharing their tongues, sharing liberally like wine at Cana.
What if it wasn’t?
What if language really was a zero-sum game?
What if it is?
Now I remembered. I’d felt the edges of my English wither and die under the onslaught of everyday Mandarin, felt the Mandarin vanish like concrete-shoed bodies in the vast Cantonese sea of the Pearl River Delta. It’s why I defend my French with such zeal and paranoia. It’s the fervent hope I can gift both French and English, and Hebrew and a californio’s smattering of Spanish, to my daughter. It’s the judgement I pass on my forefathers for losing their own French, generation on generation.
Because that is a wealth. An inheritance, une héritage. And it can be won or lost.
In Gillian, I see my father and his father. In the language exchange, I see all those classrooms, gwailo bars, taxicabs, teahouses. In the language casino, I see the predatory creep of English and Spanish, of the mindset that strips them of all character with so much socioeconomic turpentine and renders them “good investments” rather than subjects of their own, home of poets, worthy in their own right.
And callously discards any languages, any vocabulary, that are not “good investments.”
I see the forces that brought me to China, that gave me a job and an apartment there, that allowed me to make my living and go to university.
When I heard about it, I compared this story to Ken Liu’s seminal “Paper Menagerie.” “Paper Menagerie” is a focused story, a clear story, clear as crystal, of the son of immigrants turning toward the all-encompassing American culture and then back again to that of his parents once he realizes its inherent worth. It is ultimately joyful. “Give Me English” is how we sell notrehéritage, our vocabulary and our tongues, in dribs and drabs…even, ultimately, bartering off “home” and “mama” before we cannibalize the first things we sold out for in order to keep the lights on.
That’s what scared me. That’s what I wanted to forget. How terribly real it is, this parceling out of our intellectual souls, our dialects and accents. And how hard it is to get it back.
It can be got back.
The Silent woman’s name is K—–. She knows what it is, thanks to Gillian, but neither we nor Gillian ever do.
Ultimately, “Give Me English” is a joyful story, too. Even in this world, language is not always a zero-sum game, even as in our own, language exchange is not always positive-sum.
I am not certain if it will win the Nebula it deserves. It may be too reliant on the uneasy, unquiet feelings of multilinguals and third-culture kids, the in-between feelings that have no names in any tongue. On the acrid smoke and sweat of the gwailo bar when you hear “hey, we could language exchange, Mandarin/English?” and the mold of New York tenement basements where immigrant stories start. But it damn well deserves the nomination, because it i———– so much cloudy a———– in the same realities that “Paper Menagerie” made so clear.
This time, I will remember. I have to. Je me souviens.
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