2011 books

16) Mike Lancaster, 0.4, 2011
I confess I bought this partly because of its excellent cover, at a time (back in January) when I was in the mood for some fresh SF. I read it immediately yet despite my enthusiasm for it I've no idea why it's taken me so long to write it up. It's a y/a cosy catastrophe of the Wyndham variety, a variation on The Midwich Cuckoos, set in the present day in the fictional Cambridgeshire town of Millgrove (probably a riff on Grover's Mill, giving a hint of the general direction the novel will take). Kyle Straker undergoes his brother's hypnosis experiment and awakes to find a very different world in which almost everyone has been assimilated by something. It's structured retrospectively from the future, Kyle's narrative being transcribed from a series of audio cassettes, with footnotes added speculating on the possible meanings of strange words like 'Coldplay' and 'Teletubbies' – they're written deadpan, but there's much humour and cynicism in them too. The novel has flair with a slightly predictable ending, but thankfully it's creepy cover image does it justice and helped made this a ride worth taking. I'm looking forward to next January's sequel, 1.4.

2011 books

17) Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To..., 1977
I read this last month but needed to get some perspective on it, as it was not the book I was half-expecting. Eight people crash-land on an uninhabited planet, yet as they go about the business of survival only one woman questions what they are doing: instead, shouldn't they be preparing themselves to die? What I was unprepared for was the sheer force with which the story is told entirely from the unnamed narrator's viewpoint, a viewpoint that pushes out the extraneous details of survival or much in the way of scene-setting, and instead focusses on her inner motives and, to put it mildly, unexpected consequent actions. The narrator is far from being an 'attractive' person; while possessing much wit and cynicism she's also chronically self-justifying and insular, although the rest of the survivors have equally unattractive traits (or worse). Again, with Russ, I particularly liked how the book ended, with the narrator drawing her memoir to a close while taking refuge in memories and music. A tough but elegant read, and also one that opens my eyes a little further on the most positive way to view Russ herself.

Friday short fiction #24: the 2011 storySouth Million Writers Award, part 2

Sherry Cooper   Multitudes   2005
The remaining four finalists for the 2011 storySouth Million Writers Award (the shortlist of ten is here), plus one other. Voting is open through 6 July, with the winner presumably announced shortly thereafter.

Nicola Mason, 'Cancer Party'  (BLACKBIRD, FALL 2010)
A guy in his thirties has cancer and is near the end, and he invites a group of doctors round to keep him company in his last days. This was not as uplifting a read as I was expecting because I actually felt it could have been better with fewer emotional ups and downs and more understatement. As it is it's a rollercoaster that reads like a TV soap script, something that packs too much drama into too short a space with little room left for characterisation. By the end I felt lousy because I realised I hadn't really much cared for this guy dying of cancer, so wondered if I'd missed something. A re-read confirmed otherwise. Shame on me.

Hannu Rajaniemi, 'Elegy for a Young Elk'  (SUBTERRANEAN PRESS, SPRING 2010)
A poet living in the woods with a talking bear is visited by an avatar of his ex-wife, who asks him to go on a small quest to a post-human, future city. This story is clean and bright and fresh, and (paraphrasing Clarke) sufficiently advanced science fiction that it's indistinguishable from fantasy (but no, it ain't fantasy). Rajaniemi's Disneyesque playground and the dizzying rides he puts you on here are seamed together by the nano-stuff in the air, the virtual, the quantum glue that lies hidden where the joins meet. This was a re-read, and I've come to like this story despite Rajaniemi's tendency to leave you behind, and it does display a little more of the heart that I felt was missing from The Quantum Thief.

Amber Sparks, 'Most of Them Would Follow Wandering Fires'  (BARRELHOUSE, 14 DECEMBER 2010)
A prose piece that embeds fantasy and myth in the everyday. I've seen this kind of thing done before (but couldn't tell you exactly where) although the bonus here is the diversity of allegories, and there's a poetry to how they all seem to sequence each other. However it's also difficult to know where everything begins and ends or if in fact it could be better understood with the brief chapters in reverse order, as may be implied. I didn't mind it all, but I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed by its scattergun approach to impressing the reader.

Kyle Winkler, 'Teratology'  (CONJUNCTIONS, 28 JUNE 2010)
Not actually a finalist, as I found this small gem filed under Other Stories Worth Noting (ie. nominated stuff that didn't meet the eligibility requirements). It's told as an interview with a near-future Chicago scientist who researched the strange case of a girl who can cause genetic mutations in others, while being ostracised by the scientific community himself. It's the right length (as interviews go) and Winkler packs quite a bit of worldbuilding into the format, but if he ever expands on the idea to fill a novella or novel I'd certainly like to read that too.

Favourite short story of the week: Viet Thanh Nguyen, 'Arthur Arellano'  (NARRATIVE MAGAZINE, SPRING 2010)
Arthur, a bankrupt and hapless Californian of Latin descent, has received a new lease of life from a liver transplant but finds himself indebted to the wrong guy. The dialogue is spot on, the situation very believable while being economically described and the characterisation excellent; I felt engaged with all of the small cast of characters as well as the story itself from start to finish, and you can't reasonably ask for more than that. This get's my #1 vote. (Narrative requires a free subscription to read their stories.)