REVIEW: “Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz

Review of Carter Scholz, “Vanguard 2.0”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 5-21 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

The hero of this story, Sergei Sergeiivitch Ivashchenko, taps in to all sorts of “lone troubled male genius” stereotypes — his parents divorced when he was young; his father died of cancer soon after; his mother didn’t love him; he spent his late teen years in a drunken haze and yet still managed to get a scholarship and then “blazed almost contemptuously through math, compsci, and astrodynamics” (p. 5). Of course, all the genius in the world isn’t going to get you a job in a bad economy, so after graduating Sergei was lucky to be doing menial work off-Earth at Uber’s “Near Space Logistics and Asset Management” division, with the job title “Orbital Supervisor”.

Despite my initial ambivalence to Sergei, the story drew me in. Scholz uses his economy with words to great effect, using only a few phrases here and there to paint detailed pictures, of the earth sprawling below, of the colleagues Sergei shares his space and his life with, of the way the future could be just a few decades from now. There is nothing about the story that seems unrealistic — although I’m not a specialist in astro-mechanics or related fields so maybe to an expert things would look different — even though it is fictional.

Two things did let it down. First, Scholz does not mark direct speech with quotation marks, which along with often not tagging speech with the speaker makes it hard to keep track of what is being spoken, and by whom. I do not think the story benefited from the adoption of these techniques. Second, throughout Scholz uses words like “crazy” quite cavalierly — “Pace was crazy, but that didn’t bother him. Everyone in the world was crazy, no exceptions” or “To Sergei that [Pace’s belief in the Singularity] was bonus crazy” (p. 10). The casualness of this use makes it hard to ascertain whether Scholz is cognisant of this terms use as a slur, and that reinforcing this sort of usage is problematic.

On the whole, though, I found Scholz to be a very competent writer; I’d like to read a novel by him.

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?” by Jim Bell

Review of Jim Bell, “Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): xxiv-xxxi — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

One of the things that I find most fascinating about science fiction is that just as often as the fiction follows the science, so often does the science follow the fiction. What used to be the purview only of fiction — space travel to Mars — may not yet be in the realm of actual fact, but it is creeping closer and closer to it. Bell says that “ironically, science fiction may be at least partly responsible for this recent sea change in science reality” (p. xxiv), but this doesn’t seem to me to be ironic at all: This mutually symbiotic relationship between science and fiction is why sci fi has been such a fruitful genre for so long.

Why are we so fascinated with Mars, and wish to travel so desperately to it? Because we desperately cling to “evidence that Mars once was, or perhaps still is, habitable” (p. xxv). Bell traces the history of our search for such evidence, from interpretations of the channels first viewed through telescopes as artificially rather than naturally made, to Martian asteroids crashing into earth with fossils supposedly embedded inside. Sure, no one now believes that its populated with little green men, but the possibility that Mars was, does, or could again in the future host life is a tantalising promise: It’s a promise to those who desperately wish to not be alone in the universe, and a promise to those who fear the loss of our own home planet and want to plan for the future. The ability to make good on one or both of these promises is what drives our desire to go to Mars, Bell argues.

What then, is the relationship between science, fiction, and the exploration of Mars? Bell points out that “science fiction has created positive feedback loop that is influencing the future of space exploration” (p. xxvi); but what happens when the fiction runs ahead of the science? We are still a long way from light sabers, warp drives and transporters; how does it affect the development of space travel technologies when our fiction stories continue to include them? Bell’s reply is that:

Considering the potential for the exploration of space in the far future (hundreds to thousands of years from now or more), it is easy to suspend the need for accuracy and assume that we can’t possibly predict technological advances or innovations that far into the future (p. xxvi).

On the other hand:

If a story is to have a significant influence on the near-term future of space exploration (within the next few decades, for example), I believe that it needs to be grounded in a defensible pragmatism about what is actually achievable — technologically, scientifically, and politically (p. xxvii).

“To have a significant influence” on the development space travel in is precisely the goal of this anthology, and Bell briefly summarises the fiction pieces to explain how they fit into this goal. His conclusion is ringingly positive: “inspiration can be turned into advocacy and action, and that fiction can indeed presage fact” (p. xxxi). It’s an exciting time to be alive, doing science, and reading fiction.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Spider and the Stars” by D. K. Mok

Review of D. K. Mok, “The Spider and the Stars”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 8-28 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This is a story about telling stories, the stories our parents tell us, the stories we tell others — not the “stories” that are lies, but the stories that provide us with a glimpse of truth that can only be reached through fiction.

Mok’s tale traces Del’s life through snapshots, every few decades or so, from when Del is five and her mother tells her a bedtime story that causes her to decide the course of her destiny, to when she is fifteen and experimenting with a local boy — experimenting with modifying the genes of insects, arachnids, and plants, that is — through her adulthood and all the steps along the way to achieving that destiny.

In concept, the story reminds me of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, a book which impressed me quite a bit. In its essence, though, it stands apart from ordinary tales of space-faring through the inclusion of something that is lacking in so many speculative-fic hero-quest stories: Loving and supportive parents. The story is dotted through with moments where a character was uncertain or apprehensive, and a parent stood by their side and gave them the strength to do what they needed to do. What small moments they were, but what important consequences they had. It made me thoroughly love reading this story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich

Review of Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, eds., Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017) — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When I’m not reading and reviewing speculative fiction, I can be found writing it. But that’s only at night — by day, I am an academic logician, devoting my time to research and teaching. When I took the step a few years ago to start devoting serious time to my fiction writing, I found myself in a bit of a vocabularistic bind: If I distinguish my writing between “fiction” and “not fiction”, that’s as if I’m distinguishing it into “fiction” and “fact”, and if there is one thing any good scientist knows, it’s that today’s “facts” are tomorrow’s “fictions” — and “today’s fictions” are tomorrow’s “facts”. (So instead I try to contrast my fiction writing with my academic writing, which hopefully doesn’t carry the connotation that everything I say in my academic work is true. I try. I regularly fail.)

It is from this position that I find the present anthology, funded by NASA, so fascinating. The spring point of the anthology is Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1992 novel Red Mars, because Robinson’s “visions of the future…have helped to shape our broader cultural imaginary for human endeavors in space, both in science fiction and technical communities” (p. xv). In their editorial, “The Flag and the Garden”, Finn and Eschrich ask “Why should we go to space?” It’s a question whose answers have changed significantly over the past 70 years, as both the methods of space-travel and the means for funding those methods have changed. It would be to quick and facile to say that two generations ago our reaching for the stars was a cultural goal that we reached for collectively and that now, with the fragmentation of space-travel funding devolving from government bodies to private corporations, it is an individualistic pursuit, but this the former is the “flag” and the latter is the “garden” of the editorial’s title. What Finn and Eschrich argue is that we need to incorporate both the public and the private aspects of space travel into a “new collective understanding” (p. xx) of why we should go to space:

Until enough people buy into a public and private narrative of space, commerce can only take place in a very limited way (p. xx).

The goal of the collection is to rise to that challenge of melding the public and the private. As the editors describe it, the anthology is the result of “the act of putting writers, natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists into dialogue around the near future of space”, an act which “has effects on those collaborators themselves, who have grappled with—and we hope, learned something useful from—the exercise of working across disciplinary and creative boundaries” (p. xxi). This is not so much a book of authors trying to imagine future science but of scientists trying to imagine the future. The result integrates narratives and nonfiction, so that science and fiction are so closely blended that it’s hard to see where one begins and the other stops. While ordinarily the focus of this site is on reviewing SFF fiction, we don’t feel we’re going out on too much of a limb when we assume that readers of SFF fiction are also interested in SFF fact. As a result, I will be reviewing all the chapters of this anthology, both the narrative ones and the science ones.

It’s not clear from the editorial introduction how stories were solicited for this collection, but whatever method they used, they ended up with a disappointingly low score on the “non-male author” metric. (At least the collection does better on the “non-white” metric.) The book is divided into six sections: The editorial frontmatter, which includes an editorial as well as a non-fiction piece “Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?” by Jim Bell (which we review in a post of its own), and then stories grouped under the headings of “Low Earth Orbit”, “Mars”, “Asteroids”, “Exoplanets”, and “Concluding Thoughts”, which includes an interview with Robinson. (There is also an 8 page bibliography, and if there is one thing that I love more than an informative footnote, it’s a bibliography.) Each section is prefaced by a brief excerpt from Red Mars, providing a framework for the entire book. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout by Maciej Rebisz.

Below is the table of contents; each chapter will be reviewed individually, with links added to this post as the individual reviews are published.

Sara L. Uckelman20 Comments

REVIEW: “A Field of Sapphires and Sunshine” by Jaymee Goh

Review of Jaymee Goh, “A Field of Sapphires and sunshine”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 105-116 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and I suppose the relevant adage for a short story is that you shouldn’t judge it by its title. But I’m too avid a follower of Your YA Fantasy Series on twitter for the title of this one not to make me smirk (in fact, the day I wrote this review, the most recent tweet suggested the title A Bungalow of Sapphires and Earthquakes).

Snark and smirks aside, parts of the story I really enjoyed, with its eclectic mix of steampunk elements, with their slight sense of antiquation, and rather more traditional futuristic sci fi. On the one hand, there’s almost-entirely-electronically-conducted business, while on the other hand there are airships that take a week to cross the Pacific and are kitted out with suraus for Muslim passengers, and which farm their own fuel so that they never need touch the ground. Parts of the story, I found a bit didactic — there was a lot of “history” being rehearsed in a way that felt rather dry and detached, backstory being added for the sake of backstory rather than for the sake of the actual story, and we are informed rather bluntly that Alina’s mother “knew she was bisexual, of course”. In the end, I felt the story was a little let down by the delivery — and the title ended up not having that much to do with the story itself.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Amber Waves” by Sam S. Kepfield

Review of Sam S. Kepfield, “Amber Waves”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 184-198 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

The stories in this anthology are all set in the future — maybe not in our future, per se, but definitely not in our now. The future of this story feels like it isn’t all that far away from our now; Kansas still grows wheat, global warming is still a problem, there’s still the FAA and Gatorade. In this future, Ryan and Sadie are attempting to grow their wheat green — and keep out the invading corporations who want to take them over.

Unfortunately, there were parts about this story that kept tripping me up — well, nothing about the story per se, but the way in which the characters were presented. The male gaze lies heavily upon Sadie, who ends up being both Mary-Sue and stereotypical. She had “no makeup today, but she didn’t need it” (p. 186), and Ryan has to “swallow some pride” to admit that “she was far better at [finances] than he was” (p. 187). But despite her skills in running the farm, what is it that she’s always ragging Ryan about? Having children — Ryan “knew she was feeling a deadline looming” (p. 188). There isn’t anything about what Ryan does that is problematic, but simply the way that he views Sadie — his “build-in conservatism” (p. 188), perhaps — or rather the way we are encouraged to view her as readers, I found increasingly problematic the longer I read. When we are giving contrasting views of Sadie on the same page — on the one hand, “they’d both grown up on farms in this area” (p. 189), while on the other hand, “Sadie had adjusted to rural life, especially making love under the stars” — it begins to feel like she is not a fully developed characters, but simply a ploy for Ryan, and unfortunately the end does nothing to counteract this.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Women of White Water” by Helen Kenwright

Review of Helen Kenwright, “Women of White Water”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 235-249 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story ticks one of my buttons right from the start: Berta, the heroine, is in her fifties and “she knew a great many things. It was her job, after all” (p. 235). I am constantly looking for stories that give me models for how to be the heroine in my own future life, and Berta from the start shapes up to be a good one. But this is speculative fiction, not autobiography, and what Berta knows is something more than books and facts; her knowledge comes from her gifts, gifts that other people fear.

Kenwright’s story explores head-on a dimension of mind-reading which is often addressed only sideways and slantways: The notion of consent. When you Know everyone’s inner secrets, how do you navigate your life so as to intrude as little as possible? Berta has created a set of rules that she follows, that dictate when she allows herself to act upon the information she has gleaned without permission, and this is part of the craft that she tries to teach her apprentice, Andrea: The difference between knowledge and wisdom.

With that as the focus of the story, everything else fades into the background. It is not clear how Berta and Andrea are able to know things the way they do, whether this is innate or learned; the specifics of place and time are left vague; we are introduced to a whole panoply of people with no more than a name and a detail or two; even the story itself is told in a series of short scenes, which the reader must stitch together herself. In some stories, this might feel irritatingly lacking; in this story, however, I thought it provided an excellent framework for exploring these questions.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Watch Out, Red Crusher!” by Shel Graves

Review of Shel Graves, “Watch Out, Red Crusher!”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 51-66 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

In the world of Aberdonia, citizens have nanites injected beneath their skin. These nanites help power the community, but they also glow in colors reflecting the owner’s moods. I’m not sure if Graves intended this to be a terrifying set-up, but I certainly found it to be so; one of the benefits of being an ordinary human (in my point of view) is that one can use one’s physical body to mask one’s inner turmoil. Certainly Andee, whose nanites glow a “despondent blue” (p. 52), would prefer that her fears and worries not be betrayed so clearly to all who see; in fact, it is precisely so that she can learn to hide her feelings that she is visiting the mind-matriarch, Madame Morell.

Andee isn’t the only one visiting Madame Morell; one of her childhood classmates, Irwin, is there too, seeking to change the shade he glows. But while Andee wallows in blue despondency, Irwin’s shade is the red of anger. As we learn more about Andee and Irwin’s history, the more sinister the notion of our feelings and dispositions being on display for everyone becomes; for it was quite literally an accident that made Irwin red in the first place, and once he gained that shade he has not been able to escape it. Andee’s generation is the first to have had the nanites injected at birth, before consent could be offered, and thus it is the first generation to see the consequences. Andee’s mother only sees the benefits: “Now we can see them coming” (p. 65), the dangerous people. But Andee wonders if maybe there isn’t another way…

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “New Siberia” by Blake Jessop

Review of Blake Jessop, “New Siberia”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 149-158 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

The story opens with the narrator, Nadezhda, falling off a solar collector and needing to be rescued from quicksand. Reading this I was immediately reminded of a recent meme I’ve seen, which is basically that childhood movies and books lead one to believe that quicksand is a far greater danger than it actually is. But it is a real and present danger for Nadezhda, and she is lucky that Amphisbaina is there to rescue her.

What I loved most about this story was Jessop’s use of language, which is truthful, staccato, and beautiful:

There are only so many ways to become sapient. Evolution converges. We killed the Earth, destroyed the Garden of Eden, and have taken up residence with the snakes (p. 150).

Nadezhda is haunted by what her kind has done to their planet, the slow way in which we killed our Earth even knowing that we were doing it. But this story, like the rest in this anthology, is hopeful; in it, humanity has learned that it is not their right to take but their requirement to ask: They share the planet with Amphisbaina and the other Nagans because they asked to share it, not because they conquered it. And Nadezhda and Amphisbaina together share something even more important: Hope, heat, life.

This was a beautiful, touching story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Caught Root” by Julia K. Patt

Review of Julia K. Patt, “Caught Root”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 1-7 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

What took my breath away from the very first paragraphs was the depth of hope in this story. The future that both Hillside and New-Ur occupy is quite a bit different from the present we are currently in, but true to the anthology’s self-description of “optimistic science fiction”, Dr. Orkney of Hillside and Dr. Khadir of New-Ur meet not as antagonists but “for an exchange of ideas”, in hopes that each settlement can benefit the other. Every single thing about how Orkney and Khadir meet, grow to trust each other, and forge a future together is hopeful, and reading this story made me happy.

There was one strange aspect about reading it, though. The story is narrated in the first-person, and I, somewhat surprisingly for my usual reading habits, defaulted to reading the narrator as being a woman. It wasn’t until the second page when Dr. Orkney’s given name is mentioned that I was jarred from this default; and even then, only when his name or some other explicit reference was made was I reminded that he was a man. On the one hand, it sort of felt like a trick might have been missed, that the story could only have been made stronger by the presence of a female scientist as the lead. On the other hand, without Ewan being who he was, the sweet romance that developed would not have been the same. I would like to complain about the fact that I couldn’t have both, but it’s churlish to expect authors to perform contradictions, so I will be satisfied with being contented with how the story was written.

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments