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  • 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.

  • David Ira Cleary’s “Dr. Abernathy’s Dream Theater”

    David Ira Cleary’s “Dr. Abernathy’s Dream Theater” is a fun short story that borrows stylistically from the proto-SF of Wells and other nineteenth century authors, and thematically from steampunk SF.

    The story’s narrator is a drug addicted former professor by the name of Dr. Jaromir Stavan who lives in an alternate world reminiscent of the late nineteenth century with a dash of early twentieth century automobiles. Stavan, through chance, is introduced to the title’s Dr. Abernathy and his Dream Theater, where a special apparatus allows for the improvisational reproduction of one’s dreams by actors. In the background of the story, there is a rivalry between a Dr. Orestel and Dr. Abernathy. These competitors in the realm of psychology and dream interpretation make me think of later comparisons of Freud and Jung (including exile from their homeland and the oppressive “Revolutionary Council,” which sounds a lot like Nazi German in the context of the story). Dr. Abernathy shares an fascinating insight into his line of work:

    We are cartographers, Stavan. We explore the world of dreams, find its landmarks, boundaries, its cities and its empty spaces (48).

    Stavan reports that:

    The Dream Theater brings to center stage our internal dramas, where they can be recorded by independent observers and then scrutinized beneath the arc-lamps of objectivity (51).

    The Dream Theater is a fascinating technological invention for the story. Like Ted Chiang, Cleary constructs a logical explanation for the way the invention works in his alternate world despite its conflict with our world. The author’s invoking the language of science is necessary to bridge the story to our understanding of the universe as well as report on the continual breaking down of objectivity in a post-quantum theory reality. Clearly, the world of the story is disconnected from ours. Therefore, the rules and universal laws may be different.

    This is an enjoyable story with a twist or two that makes it a joy to read. I recommend you check it out in Interzone #210.

  • Paul Di Filippo’s Introduction to the Monstrous Bodies Chapbook

    Paul Di Filippo was the guest of honor at Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium two years ago (where I presented a paper on autonomous technology in the Cold War and I got to hang out with Di Filippo).  One result of the conference was a chapbook featuring original stories by students at Georgia Tech with an introduction supplied by Di Filippo.  The author recently posted the text of his introduction here on theinferior4+1 blog.  It’s worth checking out!

    It’s funny how I came across that post, because it began by a link from Farah Mendlesohn’s blog that led me to theinferior4+1 where I snooped around and saw the recent post above on the MBS.

    The Internet–a wonderful web of tangential connections.