Month: February 2011

feb 2011 asimov’s

This being a review of the February 2011 Asimov's.

  • "Out of the Dream Closet", by David Ira Cleary (novelette) — If this isn't an anime, it needs to be. The themes and images remind me a lot of Haibane Renmei and the works of Hayao Miyazaki. The main character, who calls herself Little Girl, is ~60 years old, but her body has been frozen at about 12 by her father, who believes that that is the ideal age. Her father, whose physical body has become bloated and mutated, has decided to die by uploading himself into the literalized cloud-mind, whose moods make the weather of the world, and Little Girl has to deal with the fallout of that decision while trying to persuade her father to free her to grow up. Definitely the best story of the issue.
  • "Waster Mercy", by Sara Genge (short story) — A monk whose order exists to atone for the excesses of the modern age, looking for salvation, strands himself in the post-apocalyptic wasteland outside Paris and is saved by a local boy. Interesting, but I didn't like it as much as I've liked some of her other stories.
  • "Planet of the Sealies", by Jeff Carlson (short story) — Continuing the unstated "alien archaeology" theme of the issue, a group of clone families mine the landfills of post-apocalyptic California for genetic material to increase the diversity of their genomes. I found the world of the story fascinating, but I wished its resolution was less black-and-white.
  • "Shipbirth", by Aliette de Bodard (short story) — Set in the same Aztec-flavored universe as her other stories, a… transgendered necromancer…? attends the failed birth of a starship. Creepy (as you'd expect from the Aztecs) and good but lacking in some way I can't put my finger on.
  • "Brother Sleep", by Tim McDaniel (short story) — The main character is a wealthy student in a Thailand where he and all his peers have had a medical treatment such that they need to sleep only a few hours each night (shades of Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain). His roommate hasn't had the treatment, and the story deals with their interactions. It has some moments, and it's an interesting choice of setting, but it gets preachy in a Westerners-tell-non-Westerners-what's-wrong-with-them way towards the end. Tangentially, my envy of the non-sleepers knows no bounds.
  • "Eve of Beyond", by Barry Pronzini and Bill N. Malzberg (short story) — A clothing magnate is bought out by his ruthless and amoral competitors. This is science fiction? Mediocre at best.
  • "The Choice", by Paul McAuley (novella) — Unusual for me to read the novella, but the beginning (more alien archaeology) grabbed me. A post-global warming world where benevolent (or are they?) aliens showed up just in time to save us from ourselves. I really like the worldbuilding at the beginning, and a lingering fondness for sailing stories kept me engaged and enjoying the story while the main characters chased the crashed Big Dumb Object, until they found it and ended up taking something they shouldn't have, at which point predictable (and deathly dull) hilarity ensued.

lcrw 26

This being a review of the most recent issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, number 26. (I'm a bit behind on my reviewing and still catching up, I'm afraid; I finished this issue on the plane to San Francisco before Christmas but am only just now getting around to reviewing it.)

I find it harder to pass value judgments about these than the Asimov's stories, so I'm more descriptive, but unless noted otherwise I enjoyed them all. They are also, unless otherwise, all short stories.

  • "The Cruel Ship's Captain", by Harvey Welles and Philip Raines. Set in a trippy world where everyone has a ship which comes to them first in dreams and finally manifests in real life, aboard a sort of pirate vessel which captures people, takes their ships, and incorporates their substance into its own. Really well-done.
  • "Reasoning about the Body", by Ted Chiang. A nonfiction piece originally delivered as the Guest of Honor speech at the 2010 Congrès Boréal in Quebec, Chiang talks about "folk biology" and how it extends into science fiction tropes like thinking the mind is a computer. Fascinating reading.
  • "Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders' Flash Fever", by Patty Houston. A portrait of a pair of welders under study at the titular institute as they slowly go insane. Interesting.
  • "Thirst", by Lindsay Vella; "Two Poems by Lindsay Vella (The Way to the Sea/Spit Out the Seeds)" (poetry). I don't know what to say about the poetry in this issue which wouldn't be longer than it, so I'll just say that it's odd and good.
  • "Sleep", by Carlea Holl-Jensen. Takes "not dead, only sleeping" literally. Good.
  • "The Other Realms Were Built With Trash", by Rahul Kanakia. A more conventional SF story than I usually see in LCRW. Imagines a world where human trash goes, built entirely from our cast-offs, and then what happens when a cataclysm occurs in the human world and the trash stops coming. Not as good as the rest.
  • "Alice: a Fantasia", by Veronica Schanoes. What it says on the tin.
  • "Dueling Trilogies", by Darrel Schweitzer (poetry). Two limericks. At last! Formal structure!
  • "Absence of Water", by Sean Melican. An appropriately creepy story about the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley.
  • "The Seamstress", by Lindsay Vella. ??? Short enough to be a poem.
  • "Three Hats", by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles. The story of a homeless man who, when he was young, lost his sister in a dream and went to find her. Particularly good.
  • "Death's Shed", by J.M. McDermott. A boy, his dead mother, the train set his father is obsessed with, and his twin neighbors.
  • "Dear Aunt Gwenda: Dangers of Hibernation Edition", by Aunt Gwenda. Continues to be the trippiest advice column in the multiverse.

link salad

Or, Five Things Make a Post.

The beginning of the year was fairly quiet, but things are starting to get busier again. Paradoxically, this may mean the frequency of posts here will increase, since I'm actually doing things so I have them to talk about. Or I might get hosed and disappear completely. We'll see.

I've been accumulating links I think other people might be interested in for a week or two. Here's what I've got:

Marian Churchland, who's apparently a comics artist of some note — and does demonstrably create excellent art — here describes The Crossing, an imaginary MMO she designed. It's a neat exercise in concept art, world-building and game design in six (seven?) short parts.

A sweet and beautiful three-page comic by one Emily Carroll which begins "The goddess Anu-Anulan was in love with the bright, silvery hair of Yir's daughter."

…which I found via someone else, but was then amused to discover linked off Robin Sloan's blog after finishing his novella Annabel Scheme, which I read in the Kindle edition on my phone on a couple long T rides, via a friend's recommendation. (You might remember Mr. Sloan as the author of "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store", which I highly recommend.) Scheme is what happens when you cross Snow Crash with The Dresden Files, and though I was hoping for something a bit closer to the former I was still happy with what I got.

And now for something completely different, my friend Ed has an interesting blog post up on checked exceptions and proof obligations. I can't count the number of times where I've written some Java code like:

x.setNotAPrime(4);
try {
  x.factorizeNotAPrime();
}
catch (PrimeNumberException e) {
  throw new RuntimeException("the number is hard-coded non-prime; this code should never be reached", e);
}

Passing the PrimeNumberException to my caller is stupid — my caller likely doesn't care about my implementation details — but the RuntimeException is only useful when I screw up and change the 4 to a 5, and it's all boilerplate code anyway. It would even be tempting to just drop the exception on the floor — not throw a RuntimeException at all — and thereby miss the case where I change the 4 to 5. There should be a better way to express this constraint. I'd love to see Ed propose a syntax for dependent exceptions in Java. (Or I could just go finally learn Haskell. Copious spare time, &c.)

I'll leave you with this other thing I just now saw linked off Robin Sloan's blog, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which Sloan's linked Snarkmarket blog post describes as

The Lost Books of the Odyssey manages a pretty impossible mix; somehow, it’s both mathematically precise and completely wacky. Like, you start reading it and, especially if you know its reputation (a combinatorial exploration/explosion of the classic myth, written by a computer scientist, etc.) you expect this cold, hard Borgesian puzzle-box. And the book does, in face, tickle your brain in that way, and with no word wasted in the process… but then it also surprises you with warmth, and real sadness, and a terrific storyteller’s voice all throughout. It’s one of my absolute favorites of the past few years.

I think I know what I'm reading next. 🙂

asimov’s readers awards nominations 2010

After a lovely, busy almost-a-month hiatus in blogging, perhaps to celebrate the end of Iron Blogger, I'm back.

Here, at very nearly the last moment I can put them in, are my selections for the Asimov's Readers' Awards. The poll is instant-runoff voting, allowing three selections per category, so the numbered selections below are my votes, in order, and following are honorable mentions, in no particular order. All titles link to the month in which I review them, and of course all my current Asimov's reviews can be found under the asimovs tag.

Novella

  1. "The Union of Soil and Sky", by Gregory Normal Bossert

Novelette

  1. "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston
  2. "The Jaguar House, In Shadow", by Aliette de Bodard
  3. "Warning Label", by Alexander Jablokov

Short Story

  1. "Conditional Love," by Felicity Shoulders
  2. "The Other Graces, by Alice Sola Kim
  3. "Sins of the Father", by Sara Genge

Poetry

  1. "Louisa Drifting", by Mark Rich
  2. "Roadside Stand", by Mark Rich

Cover

  1. August 2010, by Michael Whelan
  2. July 2010, by Tomislav Tikulin
  3. March 2010, by Donato Giancola

I was surprised to discover that both of the poems I found notable this year were by the same guy, one Mark Rich. Though he wrote a couple other things which I didn't even notice, so clearly he's not batting 100%, just better than everyone else. Prose poetry is not the be-all, end-all of science fiction poetry, people!

Since this list represents most of the short fiction I've read which was published in 2010, this is also likely to be substantially my Hugo nomination slate, which I'll be figuring out momentarily.

Here's to another good year in science fiction!