REVIEW: “Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu

Review of S. Qiouyi Lu, “Mother Tongues”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 147-153 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“I bet she bought her Mandarin…”

What if you could buy and sell languages? Excise or implant the knowledge into your brain? Go in for day surgery and wake up fluent in a new language – lifted straight from a native speaker?

Jiawen Liu wants to sell her second language, English, to pay for her daughter’s education at Stanford. But when her English is assessed as less than top quality and she is unable to afford the necessary accent-reduction courses to improve the value of it she has to consider other, more drastic, options.

A beautiful and thought-provoking piece and a highlight of this issue. Lu’s piece does a beautiful job of depicting the bilingual experience and exploring the connection between languages and our sense of self.

There’s a lot going on in this quite short piece. There’s commentary on migrant experiences, assimilation, and how these differ between generations. Consideration of the large and small interactions and use of different languages to get through a day, including code switching.

There’s sly commentary here, too, about authenticity, appropriation and exploitation of minority groups. Is it ok to steal someone else’s authentic voice and use it yourself? Is your learned integration ever going to be as acceptable as everyone else’s and will it forever be worth less? And is something really a choice when other options are not realistically available to you? And is it worth giving up your own voice so that someone else can keep and train theirs?

Lu’s prose on the whole here is tight and lovely. They set up the characters fast and the interactions pack emotional wallops along the way. Their inclusion of multilingual text and other representative prose elements in particular do an excellent job showing the confusion and disorientation of not having the right words to hand – quite literally showing rather than telling the reader the experience.

 

 

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REVIEW: “The Equalizers” by Ian Creasey

Review of Ian Creasey, “The Equalizers”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 66-74 —  Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“If everyone wore the Equalizers, it wouldn’t matter what I looked like, Pamela thought. I could waltz back into the office in yesterday’s outfit, without any makeup, and no one would know.”

Pamela’s workplace is trialing Equalizers – glasses which augment what the wearer sees, hears and smells to remove personal characteristics from whomever they are interacting with. People instead look like humanoid shapes in colours reflective of their work unit, and labelled with their job title. No names. The rationale is that a fair environment improves employee morale… and saves on compensation claims. Pamela finds herself starving for real human contact after spending all day interacting with faceless, inhuman shapes and has been dating hard to get over a bad breakup. Her friend, Vonda, dares her to try the Equalizers as a kind of blind date. Could she be attracted to someone based on their intellect and conversation alone?

This piece hits on some hot-button themes. How far can or should we reasonably take anti-discrimination practices? What would we need to do to overcome our bodies’ natural snap-judgements based on social conditioning and personal, inherent bias? What happens to our interactions and instincts when you take away all of the cues we normally rely on to guide us?

As such, there’s a lot of speculative fodder in this one idea of technologically removing all bias indicators from interactions with others. I liked that the contrast between judgement calls and discriminatory behaviour in the workplace and in online dating, too, showing two different realms of interaction where first impressions matter. There’s an underlying theme here about what you can see of people – in Pamela’s workplace she can’t ‘see’ people at all, and in her dating she doesn’t really see the people beyond their features. It’s polar opposite ends of a spectrum.

However, I didn’t find Pamela’s character development particularly strong – she never really had to confront her own biases and perceptions, or make any particularly big choices. There didn’t seem to be anything at stake for her personally or professionally and I found this weakened the piece, the ending in particular.

Ultimately, a great premise and idea for technology, but I felt it could have had a stronger narrative to meet the concepts and themes it was playing with.

 

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REVIEW: “Das Steingeschöpf” by G. V. Anderson

Review of G. V. Anderson, “Das Steingeschöpf”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 13-28. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

A hundred million things to paint, to write, to carve, to compose, all trapped in a body that’s failing. Awareness of a brother come to save them at last, separated only by Ambroise’s skin.

An unexpected commission, a journey in the dark, a hidden treasure in an attic, a stone man already alive and ready to be loved…so begins a sort of Pygmalion-in-reverse story.

The best of stories are the ones you read and wish they were real. Everything about this story was perfect — the level of detail to set the scene, the historical references to set the time, the way in which the creation of the Steingeschöpf’s seems so perfectly natural — every aspect of their construction and composition is exactly what you’d expect it to be, so that even though this should be utterly unfamiliar and new, it is not, it feels familiar and already known.

Part of me wishes the story had a happy ending, but even for that I cannot wish this story other than it is.

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REVIEW: “Adjuva” by Arkady Martine

Review of Arkady Martine, “Adjuva”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Since starting SFFReviews, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to first lines of short stories. The first line of this one is excellent:

Michel dreams the dead at Antioch again.

Every single part of this makes me want to know more — who is Michel? What does it mean to “dream the dead”? Is Michel at Antioch, or the dead? And why is Antioch important? And what does it mean, he is doing this again? Has he done it before? What happened then?

A very good way to start a story.

The rest of the story continues good: Is it a time-travel story? Is it a ghost story? It is both, and neither, but in the end what I find mattered most to me was the relationship between Michel and Thomas. Their life clearly hasn’t been either easy or straightforward. But that they are still together after all that they have been through, the sheer amount of time that they have lived through together, I found sweet, and heartwarming. There is a depth of history underpinning the story, a sense of the vastness of time. It is a story that made me glad to have read it.

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REVIEW: “The Astrologer on the Fifth Floor” by Karl Dandenell

Review of Karl Dandenell, “The Astrologer on the Fifth Floor”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 101-116 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I remember reading a few months ago a review of an Asian #ownvoices novel where the reviewer complained that when the MC looked in the mirror, the words they used to describe themself didn’t include any of the typical cue words that white people use to describe Asians, and the bafflement that arose from other people at this curious criticism.

As a white woman myself, I’m not in the best place to raise the following reversal of this criticism, but since it was one of the things that impressed upon me the most at the beginning of the story, I think it’s worth mentioning. Dandenell’s MC, Harrison Leong, is “an Asian businessman” — a fair enough description from an omniscient narrator, though I did find it a bit odd to include the description since the surname should’ve been enough of a cue — and he is up on the fifth floor to meet Mr. Norbu, the titular astrologer. It is this sentence that struck me as strange:

Leong saw a short, middle-aged Asian man with a neat beard and sparkling eyes (p. 102)

I can’t help but think, is that really what Leong saw? Or did Leong see someone like himself, see simply “a short, middle-aged man with a neat beard and sparkling eyes”? Would he have seen Mr. Norbu as Asian, or would that have been the working default, just as my own mental narration never tells me when I’m seeing another white person, it only tells me when I’m seeing something that is not my default, not the norm within the cultural context that I live in.

I otherwise enjoyed the story, which flitted from POV to POV in a way that seemed seamless rather than disjointed. I’m not sure how the story fits the theme of “abandoned places”, but I decided not to let slavish adherence to a topic destroy my pleasure in a good tale.

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “Long for This World” by Esther Scherpenisse

Review of Esther Scherpenisse, “Long For This World”, Space and Time #130 Winter 2017 pp. 3-10. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

One thing I like about Space and Time magazine is that they always keep things interesting and this story is no exception. Esther Scherpenisse is a Dutch SFF writer, and in this story she tells of a young man who is about to die, but whose family is lucky enough for Death to answer their call.

The main character gets taken by Death to a realm where his life is extended, though things aren’t necessarily what they seem at first glance. Death in this story is fairly kind, though firm, much like Neil Gaiman’s Death in the Sandman series, though here they are at least presented as male. Some parts of the story may be hard to face, such as the main character getting swept up in his family’s inability to say goodbye to him, despite the fact that chemo has made him more than ready to accept his death when it comes. Or his faimily’s forced ignorance of the fact that their son is wasting away in front of them, their absolute need to act like nothing is wrong.

The story keeps things short and sweet and packs a great punch when it comes to the main character’s choices. Fans of Persona may also enjoy the description of Death’s tower. Highly recommended.

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REVIEW: “Turing Test” by Eric Scheller

Review of Eric Scheller, “Turing Test”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 215-220. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The interior of the case is decorated like a florid setting room, wallpapered, the floor spread with a rug of oriental design. There are three automata and all three are instantly recognizable…

A spec fic story about Alan Turing and automata? Oh, my heart, yes, please! One thing that sometimes frustrates me about science fiction as a genre (painting with very broad brush strokes here), is how narrowly “science” is often interpreted. As a scientist myself, I am often longing to find representation of my kind of science in traditional SF stories. But the laws of logic are desperately hard to play with, almost more so in fiction than in real life, where logicians think nothing of speaking of true contradictions and impossible worlds. So I had high hopes for this story as being “close enough”, not my science but close enough to it.

When one says “automata” in the context of SF, many readers probably think first of dumb robots moving mindlessly — something embodied. The automata that I know and love (and sometimes hate) from my days in grad school are much more abstract: They are (sometimes deterministic, sometimes not) (sometimes finite, sometimes not) state-machines that take as input strings of symbols and after a (possibly unique) computation (or “run”) of the machine either gets into an infinite loop, or accepts or rejects the string (Deterministic finite state-machines will never cycle infinitely, and will always accept or reject the input.) The most general class of automata is the class of Turing machines — and here we circle back to the content of the story as opposed to a mini lesson in computation.

Alan, who “loves permutations and crossword puzzles” (p. 215), enters the Ashmolean Museum and asks to see the automata the curator has in storage. But the automata that he is shown are not Turing machines but the embodied type, three versions of Oscar Wilde each in a different guise and a different pose. I am disappointed that the automata are not the ones I wanted them to be, but this lessens my enjoyment of the story only in passing. Scheller takes us through a story that is both history and fantasy, and captures all of the aching sadness that surrounds Turing and his life. For all that so much of him differs from me, there is so much of him that I can see in myself, and for that, I am satisfied.

(Originally published in Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, Undertow Publications, 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Wilde Stories 2017 edited by Steve Berman

Review of Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, (Lethe Press, 2017) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

As a cis woman who is in a happily monogamous het relationship, I am probably the least qualified person to review this collection of stories. But, oh, it has a story about Turing in it, and as a logician who sometimes flirts with computer science and AI, I feel eminently qualified to read about Turing, and for that story alone I bought the book.

As a “best of” collection, it draws upon stories published the previous year, so all of these first came out — in various venues — in 2016. Many are thus things I would not have otherwise come across, which is one of the advantages that collected volumes have — they provide a different type of exposure for the stories and the authors that wrote them. And this particular volume is a physically lovely one — beautiful cover art by Dmitry Vorsin, attractive typesetting, and a suppleness to the pages which reminds me, as if I needed a reminder, of why I love print books so much more than electronic ones.

Each story is prefaced by a short quote from the story, bound to spark the reader’s interest. The tales included are the following:

Each of the stories will be reviewed individually, and linked back to this post when the review is posted.

Overall, the collection is powerful, beautiful, and sad. Every single story is steeped in emotion, and lovingly crafted.

Sara L. Uckelman18 Comments

REVIEW: “The Sphinx” by Petter Skult

Review of Petter Skult, “The Sphinx”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 334-336. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Classical myths and stories provide such ripe fruit for the contemporary western author because so many of the characters and the details are already known, and the author can therefore depend upon many of the readers filling in the gaps for themselves. That’s certainly the case with this story, which starts from the assumption that the reader knows who Oedipus is, who the sphinx is, what riddle it is that she is said to have told. While I think that this story would still work even if you didn’t know any of these, the pacing of the story certainly benefits from knowing how it will end.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Her Beautiful Body” by Adrienne Celt

Review of Adrienne Celt, “Her Beautiful Body”, Strange Horizons 5 Feb. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

This is one of those stories that makes you go “hmmm.”

The premise is simple enough. A woman’s body is being featured as a museum exhibit, and you are invited to experience the exhibit. The narrator is your tour guide, pointing out interesting features of her body, as well as commenting on the “activists” who are angry about the exhibit.

On the one hand, wow. What a metaphor for the objectification of women. This is literally a woman reduced only to the value of her body; the guide summarily dismisses the mind, saying that the body “could [not] possibly be improved by something so intangible and distant as consciousness.” The activists who focus on her life, on the things less physical that made her a person, are also dismissed by the narrator. Instead, we are left only with her body as an object to study and worship.

On the other hand, there’s something oddly beautiful and accepting in the description of the woman’s body. She is not perfect, but rather perfect in her imperfection. She has blemishes. And, as the guide states, “there are stories in her beautiful body.” This is true of anyone’s body, and there’s an almost empowering message there for women, who are so often judged by how closely their body meets society’s standard for perfection.

I’m really not sure how to feel about “Her Beautiful Body,” but perhaps that’s the point. It made me think and feel, and that’s some of the highest praise I can give to a story.

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