REVIEW: “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work” by Tina Connolly

Review of Tina Connolly’s, “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 19 (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work” takes place aboard a generation ship where every resource must be carefully hoarded, and recycled, in order to ensure survival. In the midst of this scarcity, one robot caretaker has fought for the importance of art. Her name is Ninah, and you’re going to be heartbroken by the end of her simple, economically told story.

Ninah has gathered together pipecleaners, beads, and other scant resources so that the children she looks after can make sculptures and other artwork. While some on board the ship see these art projects as a trivial luxury she considers it a necessity: ‘Everyone needed work. Humans, children—androids.’ This line reflects the fact that ‘work’ can be defined as the need for a personal purpose as well as a type of production. Ninah has made sure that the children are stimulated and given the chance to be more than just a ship grown generation of colonists or soldiers. And in doing so, she has turned a mandatory care taking assignment into her own purpose.

Although the reader spends a very short time with Ninah, the story quickly builds a vivid sense of her history and her character. So, it is gutting to learn that when the ship lands in three months, Ninah, like the art projects the children make, will be re-purposed. It is even more heart-wrenching because caring, vibrant Ninah will become a military bot, and ‘she would not care. They would still call her Ninah, and she would still love her work.’ Ninah’s fate is an example of what happens when an identity is overridden by the practicalities of the state.

Tina Connolly’s story does soften this devastating blow slightly. In the end, a desire for a legacy, a sense of permanence, however small, wins out. And, while the ending is undeniably tragic, as there is no reprieve for Ninah, there is at least a bittersweet sense of triumph and defiance. Ninah will resonate with anyone caught in the grip of a society that values people for what, and how much, they produce rather than who they are. Or, y’know readers who just love crying about robots. They’ll like this story too. Definitely recommended to everyone who loved “Fandom for Robots“, for example.

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REVIEW: “Nine Lattices of Sargasso” by Jason Sanford

Review of Jason Sanford, “Nine Lattices of Sargasso”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 126-149 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

I now know, my maybe on-day love, that memories aren’t reality. But I still hope the memories I’ve shared hold true. If only for a little while.

I really enjoyed this one. Told in a series of nine ‘Lattices’ – memory experiences that are able to be live-streamed or uploaded to the greater mind web – Sanford tells the story of Amali, her family, and Mareena a girl who washes up on their home Lifeboat Merkosa – a massive floating island for refugees of a technological crash caused by a rogue AI.

This has one tough opening sequence. I struggled with the first two ‘Lattices’ – the world-building, the technology, who my main character was and generally what was going on was all dense difficult to grasp. But Lattice 3 gives the world and characters context and it romps home from there. I went back and re-read the first two Lattices after finishing the piece and they made much more sense after the fact. Readers should stick with this one to at least Lattice 3 to give this novelette a proper chance.

Though it takes a while for all of it to become comprehensible, readers are rewarded with a story that includes issues of refugees and nationless-ness, piracy and exploitation of the vulnerable, and characters who are morally ambiguous at best all tied up into an action story set in a surreal post-apocalypse with smaller, human moments at its heart.

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REVIEW: “A Night Out at a Nice Place” by Nick Mamatas

Review of Nick Mamatas, “A Night Out at a Nice Place”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

An incorporeal intelligence embodies itself for fun (“downlowing into a limbsuit”), and then goes on a blind date with a human being. Fortunately, human beings are space faring at this point, so they do have something to talk about. Mostly, this is a far-future, philosophical dialogue about the nature of reality. It’s short, sharp, and surprisingly light, given the density of the subject matter.

I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this story. Either it was written for somebody much smarter than I am, and it went over my head, or else it was going for a sort of humor that just didn’t hit my personal funny bone. Maybe both. The futuristic slang and mathematical equations made it hard to understand at times and the narrator was a little too alien and superior for my taste (they joked about. destroying the star they were orbiting and wiping out the whole planet after their date made a tedious joke, and refrained because they liked her smile).

All that being said, the ending made me smirk, and I think that the narrator is supposed to be irritating – by the end, it’s clear that they are not as superior to humans as they think they are. The story is short enough that it’s definitely worth checking out, to see if it is to your liking.

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REVIEW: “Love and Dearth and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story” by James Gunn

Review of James Gunn, “Love and Dearth and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 118-125 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This story is part of a series of tie-in pieces for James Gunn’s Transcendental trilogy of novels. Each tells the backstory of one character in the novels and how they came to seek the Transcendental Machine central to the novels.

A nice angle on a first contact story. Kom, a Sirian, encounters a human named Sam floating in an escape capsule near the star that his people hold to be the place where paradise for the dead is located. In learning to communicate with Sam, Kom describes the history, creation myths, culture and procreating practices of his planet and species. These conversations with Sam prompt Kom to think differently about these things and reconsider his life trajectory.

I really liked the mythology of this piece. Kom’s tales of the star that shall not be named and the beliefs attached to it by his people – the Ranians – are beautiful. I also enjoyed Kom and Sam’s conversations and the internal revelations this invoked in Kom. The shifts between recollections, current events, and creation myths are handled well, too.

However, as someone not familiar with the Transcendental novels I found the turn the story takes at the end to tie-in to the novel universe a bit abrupt. Where Kom was being sent to, why this was important, and Kom’s motivations for his quest for transcendence and the Transcendental Machine happened fast – within paragraphs – and weren’t clear to me. This left me unsatisfied with the ending. I suspect this is unlikely to be the case for a reader familiar with Gunn’s novels, but it did detract from this piece’s ability to stand on its own for me.

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REVIEW: “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars” by Tom Purdom

Review of Tom Purdom, “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 106-117 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley. 

You’ve been selecting women with the traits you like, whether you know it or not… Independent legacy women join our branch. Legacy men keep joining the male branch. You belong to a dying species. 

A strange story that considers gender and long-distance space travel. Revali and Kemen are to be the sole human occupants on a voyage outside the galaxy. Along the way they will undertake their own research projects and participate in a long-term research project that seeks to answer one of humanity’s most pressing questions: is the splintering of the human race inevitable with the ability to create companions with genetics and personalities compatible to the other gender? Can men only cohabit successfully with women who have been designed to please them? And vice versa? Will ‘legacy’ humans die out because they are unable to coexist successfully long-term with other genders, or because they keep ‘defecting’ to cohabit with the kind of gender partners designed for them? Will the two legacy genders just give up trying to work out relationships with their legacy counterparts as just too hard?

The trip will take them thirty-six years and involve periods of hibernation and waking, as well as gender swaps for both of them across the journey. At the end Kemen and Revali have committed to undertake a ceremony in one last ditch attempt to show humanity that, from outside the galaxy their differences are minuscule and that unity between the two factions is possible. 

The approach to gender here is an interesting one – essentially considering the question of whether men and women can ever really understand each other or cohabit for long periods of time, or if there are fundamental personality differences and tendencies that both work together and don’t. But I found it a bit binary and limited. While there is gender changing here the gender roles being considered are between ‘legacy’ men who want compliant women and legacy women who are not suitable to work with legacy men long term and have instead also created partners they can work with. In short, I would have liked a more nuanced look at gender and cross-gender relations that the premise could have provided than was covered here. Despite this, the stated conflict has been fully thought through and Purdom explores it well, using the length of the trip and the discussions between Kemen and Revali as they move through their different physical bodies to cover the problem’s intricacies.  

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REVIEW: “Skipped” by Emily Taylor

Review of Emily Taylor, “Skipped”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 100-105 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley. 

“This is awkward,” I said. “But one of us has skipped.” 

Sometimes the transport architects get it wrong and you bounce through a space-time pocket in transit and swap places with another you in the multiverse. You have to sign a waiver to travel accepting the risk. It’s not common, but it’s the situation Taylor’s protagonist finds herself in and one she must live with until she reaches the transport station and is swapped back in to her own life and universe again. 

I really enjoyed this one – it’s a great example of a simple, punchy idea thought all the way through. The real story here is less about how the protagonist gets back and more about her considering the contrasts between her own universe and the life she has left behind, and the one she has found herself in. Children she did and didn’t have, partners and life trajectories, and how the moon she lives on differs to the one she finds herself in. The way the memories of the past and the experience of the present, which isn’t really ‘real’ alternate give the piece a dreamy feel, too. The reveal of the protagonist’s change in perspective and what she’s bringing back to her own universe is developed really well despite the short length of the piece and lands on a satisfying end point. 

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REVIEW: “Aliens and Old Gods” by Kimber Camacho

Review of Kimber Camacho, “Aliens and Old Gods”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 360-374. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I find I enjoy the longer stories in this anthology more than the shorter ones, in part because the length means there’s more meat to the story — and there’s plenty of meat in this one.

The story is constructed out of four different vignettes, of seemingly disparate events, happening in different places and different times to different people, with — at first — no clear connecting thread running through them. But by the time we finish the second one, it is clear that the titular aliens and old gods are the red thread that connects all the different events together.

A second thread that ties each of the scenes together is the narrative voice that tells them all, a voice that is clinical and almost journalistic. These scenes are told by someone who appears to be watching the events at arm’s length, almost always uninvolved and dispassionate (only sometimes turning passionate and interpretative), and who is someone who clearly knows a lot more than anyone experiencing the events. One of the aliens? One of the old gods? We won’t ever know…

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REVIEW: “Timewalking” by Michael Cassutt

Review of Michael Cassutt, “Timewalking”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 86-99 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley. 

He, James this year, this month, this week, is not only signalling 1962 and 1974 and possibly 1988 James… he is signalling James This Week. 

A different take on a time travel story. James has begun to sleepwalk and, in an attempt to figure out what’s going on contacts an experimental company called Ikelos who attempt to cure him. Instead, they tell him that he is not in fact sleepwalking, but walking through time. This allows James to send future information back to his past self and access information in the past that his future self has left for him there. James’ future self is trying to tell him something about the decisions he makes about his start up company May Cay and their ramifications for the future. 

I enjoyed how the two intertwined storylines echoed one another thematically – the timewalking web and the ‘vineware’ plant-machine hybrid product James is creating with his start up – and how both deal with changing up current methods of passing information along. Watching the information pass between the two as the story progressed was compelling and a good use of both ideas. 

I found James’ final decision a little unsatisfying, though, it didn’t quite derive from his previous thinking and experiences enough to follow on logically for me. 

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REVIEW: “To Blight a Fig Tree Before it Bears Fruit” by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

Review of Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, “To Blight a Fig Tree Before it Bears Fruit”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Eight brown, pregnant bodies are restrained on a stage, alive, but deeply uncomfortable. Soon, we find out why. The answer is a brutally honest look at what the wealthy and racially privileged would do to extend their own lives, if they only had the right technology. Everything but the technology itself is painfully plausible.

This is a powerful story. Short (barely longer than flash fiction, at less than 1500 words), but it packs a punch. I was impressed by the tightness of the prose, and the focus of the narrative. We stay in the present moment, with only a single flashback – when Meshee, our point of view character, thinks about what her mother would say about the situation. No mention of the history of the technology, or how she herself got to be in this position. Those answers aren’t relevant. The future is unknown. All that matters is what happens right now, on this stage.

The ending is perfect, and surprisingly hopeful. I highly recommend giving this gem a read!

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REVIEW: “Saturday Night Science” by Michael M. Jones

Review of Michael M. Jones, “Saturday Night Science”, Broadswords and Blasters 1 (2017): 37-52 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Yana Shepard.

This one is humorous and easily my favorite so far. And sapphic relationships! I’m all about f/f relationships! I was so happy to read this.

The main character, Camille, shows some fire when needed and a huge nerd, showcased via locations in the story. There’s also disability rep. Camille has no feeling in her legs so must rely on a wheelchair to get around.

Daphne, the other character, gave me a Doctor Who vibe. I love Doctor Who. Love that show. So it was no surprise to me that I fell in love with Daphne just as much as I fell in love with Camille.

“Saturday Night Science” had so many nice surprises.

I recommend it to any who enjoy SF, multiverse shenanigans, humor, and happy endings.

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