Author: Jason W. Ellis

Frederik Pohl’s short story, “Day Million,” is a mix between Jeffrey Eugenidies’ Middlesex, Greg Egan’s Diaspora, and the Wachowski Brother’s The Matrix. Actually, you can get a feel for this from the story’s hilarious opening paragraph:

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

Now although I haven’t said much so far, none of it is true. The boy was not what you and I would normally think of as a boy, because he was a hundred and eighty-seven years old. Nor was the girl a girl, for other reasons; and the love story did not entail that sublimation of the urge to rape and concurrent postponement of the instinct to submit which we at present understand in such matters. You won’t care much for this story if you don’t grasp these facts at once. If, however, you will make the effort, you’ll likely enough find it jampacked, chockfull and tiptop-crammed with laughter, tears and poignant sentiment which may, or may not, be worth while. The reason the girl was not a girl was that she was a boy.

Pohl’s 1966 story is about far future designer sex assignment in utero, recording one’s self digitally, and interaction with virtual identities. It’s a fun, tiny story that I highly recommend for it’s forward thinking ideas that puts not only his imagined future cultural norms on display, but also our own, which is evidenced by the final paragraph:

Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you–with your after-shave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night–tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?

I found Pohl’s story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

Angela Carter’s 1974 short story, “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” continues on the “daughter” theme of the previous Alastair Reynolds post, but Carter’s story is significantly different. It was originally published in Fireworks, and I found it in Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 8.

It’s a story about an ambiguous time and place on Earth. It’s like she’s focusing a telescope down on the story’s small community and watching them from afar, but she can see through walls and see the dirty side of a filthy existence. In fact, there is no dialog in the story. It’s all descriptive, and is primarily about the executioner and his daughter. It’s a gruesome tale that’s about incest by siblings as well as fathers. There’s no mention of mothers in the story, only the coveting of the singularly “beautiful daughter.” It’s a powerfully wicked story that concerns things that families in the past often didn’t or wouldn’t talk about. This story isn’t for everyone, but it reminds me of the importance of organizations such as the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

Another theme in the story has to do with the problem of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who guards the guards). The executioner enforces his society’s one law, which is no one is to commit incest. The story begins with the executioner publicly killing his own son for his involvement with his sister. However, he indulges himself on his daughter without concern of punishment.

Also, it’s reminiscent of Avram Davidson’s “The House the Blakeneys Built,” which is also about an incestuous primitive community that’s on another planet in the far-future.

A great website with lots of information about Carter and her works can be found here.

Alastair Reynolds’ “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” is a magnificent post-apocalyptic tale about a teenage girl following the Campbellian hero myth that illustrates Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The story is fresh and fascinating, because Reynolds skillfully usurps the typically male gendered hero myth to establish a female hero/ine.

The story takes place in the far future as the “Great Winter” is waning and after a long forgotten, yet on-going war between humanity and the “jangling men,” which are an army of rebellious robots. The Earth bound characters equate past technology and recovered artifacts as magical or wonderful. They exist in a pre-industrial society that is occasionally encroached upon by fallen “angels” from both sides of the unseen war. The scrap and wreckage of these fallen bodies is referred to as “skydrift,” i.e., strange matter that falls from the sky.

The title character and heroine is Kathrin, a sixteen year old girl on an errand to deliver two hog heads and twenty candles to Widow Grayling, an old woman that is sometimes called a witch, but she’s someone that Kathrin trusts and does not fear. Kathrin rises above her station as “the sledge-maker’s daughter” by challenging the explicit and undesirable advances of a privileged male. This episode steels Widow Grayling to pass on two gifts to Kathrin. These gifts are male tools/symbols of masculine authority and power, because they originate from a fallen human male soldier in the future war. Grayling obtains these tools after showing compassion to the fallen “angel.” Additionally, the soldier gives her an understanding and knowledge above the male power hegemony of her community as embodied in the “sheriffs.” Grayling choses to pass on the technological artifacts as well as the power of knowledge to Kathrin, which imbibes her with power both in might and understanding. As the story closes, the reader sees that she also has wisdom to control her new found power, and it signals the beginning of her new life as the heroine setting out on the path of her own choice.

As an example of feminist SF, it is effective and intelligently written. However, it’s not as reactive as works by authors such as Joanna Russ or Marge Piercy. Though, I can see its alignment with Piercy’s later work, He, She and It, and Reynolds’ story has a more active female character than Tenar in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan.

I definitely recommend everyone check out this story. You may find it in Interzone #209, April 2007.

Hal Duncan’s latest short story, “The Whenever at the City’s Heart,” is a veritable textual comic book about the unraveling of time held constant within a city at “the end of time” populated with bitmites, humans, and unkin. It’s comprised of sections that follow the actions of one character within a particular context, and these sections are further divided into subsections that remind me of comic panels. Duncan’s style and descriptive word choice add to the feel of the story as a visual work rather than a descriptive one. His layering of multiple narratives are all tied to the “DOOM” sound of the bells in the Watch Tower.

Some interesting aspects of the story include the autonomous floating machines: the bitmites. They sound larger than nanotechnology, and they maintain the city. Additionally, they, as a collective, serve as an omniscient narrator for the action of the story, often referring to themselves as “we.” The unkin, such as the craftsmith and the lawscribe are not exactly human, and are operating in ways to control humanity within the city. Then there is the “Houri’s Eye” within the Mechanism at the heart of the Watch Tower. Through this, the watchman is able to peer through time.

The story is slightly confusing on a first read, because it’s heavily engaged with Duncan’s The Book of All Hours duology comprised of Vellum and Ink. The story is packed with fascinating imagery and ideas, which suggests there may be more to the series than this one short story.

This is the first story that I’ve read by Duncan. Also, he sounds like an interesting fellow according to an interview with him in the pages preceding his story. You can read both in Interzone (Issue 209, April 2007).