Dynamic Subspace

Category: Review

  • Michael Swanwick’s “The Very Pulse of the Machine”

    “The Very Pulse of the Machine” is the second story that I’ve read by Michael Swanwick. The first was his novella, Griffin’s Egg, which is a very fine story about an engineered pathogen that transforms people’s minds on a moon base. It’s a very intense and fascinating story. “The Very Pulse of the Machine” is no less a story, and very good in its own right!

    Taking its title from William Wordsworth’s “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” it’s about Martha Kivelsen, one member of a two woman team exploring the surface of Io. Her lander companion, Juliet Burton, dies in an accident, but “she” continues to talk to Martha as she trudges along the dangerous surface of the moon back to the lander, hoping to reunite with Jacob Hols and the orbiter. Apparently, Io is an intelligent “machine” that was artificially created by “Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life.” (328). It accesses Burton’s memories of poetry and experience, and uses this in its attempts to communicate with Kivelsen.

    I wonder if his choice to make the two planetary explorers female was done deliberately and if so, for what purpose? Kivelsen describes herself as also shooting for second place. She’s always on the crew, but never the commander. However, she misses her many accomplishments like being a space explorer and competing in the Olympics. Though, she could represent women in general as always falling short of first place in the male hegemony. This is made more poignant by her female commander’s death even before the story begins. Her choice at the end of the story is foolhardy, but it gives her power over her destiny as well as that of Burton’s.

    Other themes explored in the story include the nature of identity and the encoding of self in a machine thereby becoming the “deus ex machina.” Also, Swanwick’s creative use of electrical charge and the surfur dioxide composition of the surface is particularly inventive.

    I found the story in The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 12, but it can also be found in Swanwick’s Tales of Old Earth. Rush out and read this story!

  • Cory Doctorow’s “Craphound”

    First published in 1998 in Science Fiction Age, Cory Doctorow’s short story “Craphound” is about nostalgia for the past and childhood memories in a future where aliens walk among us and trade fantastic technology for trinkets and do-dads. This story struck a chord for me, because I’m a craphound at heart. I enjoy browsing junk stores and particularly vintage toy shops (for original Star Wars toys of course).

    When the narrator, Jerry is talking about finding treasures like Ace Doubles or old pawn receipts, he puts it into words:

    It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them out in the living room in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that could take my breath away (74).

    The pieces do form a kind of poem about people’s lives, their loves and passions, their mistakes and triumphs. He goes on to say:

    Over the years, I’ve found the steel desk and the wall sconces and carousel animals and tin Coca-Cola signs galore. Finding them feels right, like I’ve checked off an item on a checklist…it’s touching them again, just once, having them pass through my possession that makes it good (75).

    I feel this way when it comes to finding something that I’m looking for, but don’t really need. Just knowing that it’s out there somewhere and I got to see it energizes me.

    If you want to relive the past, if only for a bit, you should read “Craphound.” I found it in Gardner Dozois’ The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 12, and it’s also collected in Cory Doctorow’s A Place So Foreign and Eight More, but Cory has been very kind to release it online under a Creative Commons license here. The story has also been read on the Escape Pod podcast, so you can download and listen to the story here.

  • Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”

    I read Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-nominated short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” last night before going to bed. It’s an entertaining Bradbury-esque SF story about two London teenage boys who stumble into one party while looking for another one. It gets interesting when Enn tries talking to the girls populating the soiree, but he doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about. This makes for good laughs, because on the one hand, the reader will figure these girls for aliens, but on the other, girls seem very alien to teenage boys. However, Enn’s friend, Vic, who is a smooth talker and popular with the party’s host, discovers the truth and has to extract Enn from something he unknowingly is unprepared to meet.

    Gaiman’s choice to name the narrator, Enn, is appropriate, because he is telling the story from middle age, thirty years after it’s happened. Similarly, Vic’s name could come from victory, Viking, or vic, the Norse word for “where land meets water” [more here], because he’s successful with girls, he’s an invader, and he’s the one that figures out the boundaries and crossroad nature of the party.

    The more I read by Gaiman, the more I believe he can do no wrong. I recommend this story wholeheartedly! You can read it online or download an mp3 of Gaiman reading it here. You should definitely check out Gaiman reading his own work–he knows how to tell a story.

    Also, if you’re attending Nippon 2007 Worldcon, consider voting for “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” for best short story. More info here.

  • Ian R. MacLeod’s “New Light on the Drake Equation”

    I’m currently working on a review of Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback for the journal Foundation. I’ve been looking for stories that relate to the two main elements of Rollback: 1) radio communication with a distant alien world, and 2) the disconnect between artificially created generation gaps (two old people, one made to look young, the other not).

    I had forgotten about Ian R. MacLeod’s “New Light on the Drake Equation” (2001). As I wrote in my review of Gardner Dozois’ Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (which includes MacLeod’s story) in SFRA Review:

    “New Light on the Drake Equation” is the warmest piece of the nanotech stories. It features a scientist listening to the sky for signs of alien intelligence who lives in a world impacted by commercial nanotech used for altering the mind and body for such ends as bird-like flight and overcoming alcohol addiction. The story is about the transformation of humanity into the aliens sought by the scientist, and breaching the gulf between those most alien to us–lovers, friends, and other cultures.

    Of course, I’ll also talk about Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. If you can think of other stories that engage either or both of the two themes above that I should look at, please post them in the comments.

  • Tim Aker’s “Toke”

    Tim Aker’s short story, “Toke” is about what appears to be a post-apocalyptic world set in the city of Veridon. A group of teenagers decide to chase down a “scarecrow,” a plant lifeform that shares a humanoid appearance. One of the kids, Barber, wants to kill the scarecrow so that they can smoke its leafy body and get high. However, after the kill, they learn the true nature of these “scarecrow” creatures that leads to a new awareness for some of the kids, but not the murderous Barber.

    One key passage regarding the kids’ objectification of the scarecrow has to do with the physical appearance and difference the scarecrow has with humanity:

    ‘Oh? Uh, so we don’t have to kill him, then?’…Paul asked.

    Barber fixed him in his eyes, scratched the scar on his cheek, then turned away and spit. ‘It, Paul. We’re killing it’ (56).

    and:

    Paul, Matsy, and me, we don’t do any killing…But never murder. It was hard for us to think of scarecrows as people though, you know. They just didn’t. Well. They didn’t seem like people. It didn’t seem bad to kill them. To us, at least (58).

    Later on in the story, after they kill the scarecrow they are following through the streets of Veridon, they learn the foolishness of smoking the scarecrow’s remains and they also find out that “it” was an important individual.

    Besides the theme of objectification of the alien other, and the unique reproductive cycle of the scarecrows (which I won’t go into here), I enjoyed Aker’s description of the scarecrow:

    It was tall, thin in the chest but thick in the arms and legs. Naked except for a leather belt and harness for carrying stuff. Its skin looked like bundled hay. It glanced back at us. Its eyes were clustered flowers (58).

    The clustered flowers for eyes is a particularly interesting image to employ in describing the creature’s eyes. Since the eyes are the windows to the soul, flowers make the act the kids perpetrate that much tragic. Since the type of flowers aren’t identified, the reader is left to assume what they look like. Sunflowers or a similar kind are what I thought of, because they resemble the eyes of insects with their multiple lens structure. Also, flowers are nice, pretty, and generally smell pleasant. All qualities that are transfered to the apparently victimized scarecrow.

    This is another recommended story. You can find it in Interzone #210.