Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Liverpool

  • 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.

  • “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.