Dynamic Subspace

Category: Science Fiction

  • 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.

  • “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” as Emblematic of Identity Anxieties

    I’m beginning to write my MA thesis by analyzing the first season episode of BSG titled “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.” This is the only comedic episode of the series, which I think adds to the ways in which identity construction and fear of enemy infiltration is approached in general by BSG. As Patricia Mellencamp writes in her book, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy, “The similarity between comedy and catastrophe is a fascinating one, suggesting a relationship between laughter and shock” (84). This episode of BSG engages both of these issues by presenting a comedy on top of the catastrophic backdrop of the near-annihilation of humanity.

  • Rachel Swirsky’s “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind”

    Rachel Swirsky’s “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” is a short story about the end of the world. She remixes several SF cataclysmic tropes into this one gut punching story that unveils how it happened and how it ends up for humanity through the last two survivors separated by the Earth itself.

    The story brings together asteroids, engineered plagues, and nuclear fallout in such a way that I was immediately reminded of Deep Impact, James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach. Coincidences, madness, despair, and lies conspire to compound humanity’s problem of survival.

    Her choice to cast a man as “the last man” builds on the past history of such stories such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.  However, his helplessness to protect his dead son, and ultimately his own body, from preying ravens points to Frederick Nietzsche’s concept of the “last man,” which is the antithesis of the Ubermensch, or superman.  Swirsky isn’t allowing humanity a chance to attain greater being in physicality, but she alludes to something after when she writes, “The last two humans are simply the final pair to march hand in hand into an unexplored realm.”  Whether that realm is absolute death or transcendence of the body is left up to the reader.

    The last man’s opposite is the “light-eyed child,” who literally lives on the other side of the world.  This child is first identified as a child and then as a girl.  Her sex is problematized in this apocalyptic world, because all the men have been killed by engineered bioweapons.  The women in her community hope that she will transform into a boy thanks to providence granting her the gift of “water eyes.”  She even tries to catalyze the change through her own volition.

    Swirsky’s story is powerful and carefully written to excise the most impact from its modest length.  I definitely recommend this story!  Luckily, you can read it online here.

    Thanks to John Scalzi for posting a link to the story on his blog.

  • 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.