Tideline, by Elizabeth Bear

I have been rapidly making my way through '21st Century Science Fiction', and find it delightful. It is an interesting exercise to ask yourself why these stories could only have been written today, and not fifty years ago. There is no one answer to that question, but there is no doubt that all of the writers take their science fiction and its metaphors very very seriously: their style and tone indicate a fearless and respectful internalization of the conventions of science fiction which, in malicious hands, can be made out to be twee and at best, charming. There is, indeed, a lot of charm in all of these stories, but only the best kind of charm, that comes of not having to apologize for what you're doing to the world. 'Tideline' encapsulates all of these qualities, and is a magnificent exercise in brevity and restraint. 

Coming Attraction, by Fritz Leiber

A staple in most SF anthologies, this is a very cool look at a beaten, run-down and paranoid America teetering under insecurities and complexes which have, among other ways, manifested in how women dress: specifically, they have taken to concealing their faces. Misogyny is rampant too, perhaps, as is suggested by Leiber, having been aggravated by such a stance towards women. However, I'm at odds with myself regarding how the story ends. It's written in a way so as to deliberately invoke the kind of ready thrills you would find in a pulp, hard boiled detective yarn, but what might lead you to believe is Leiber's brand of feminism suddenly falls apart and reveals an aspect to the story you didn't see coming. Curious. More on 'What did Leiber mean?!' soon.

Even the Queen, by Connie Willis

I think I am finally getting around to realizing why Willis is important, or has been important to the field. She is very much a disciple of Heinlein, but thankfully her politics don't make me cringe, and she is far less confrontational. In fact, a story like this is a winner because of the very many viewpoints it shows, and while Willis's stance is very clear, she does not shove it down your throat. It's also one of the most witty science fiction stories I have read. If I were to come up with a list of 'feminist' SF stories, it would most definitely include this one. 

The Island, by Peter Watts

Suppose you're on a ship. This ship is travelling towards the horizon, hoping that it's the edge of the world, and that it drops off. It also hopes against hope that it lands on the ocean of some other world, and do the same on that world. And so on. The ship needs no destination. It's sole purpose is to seek out horizons and drop off edges.

Now suppose there's something very large blocking the way. A giant, gorgeous whale, for that's what it must be. It belches out large, beautiful groans which take your world weary ear by surprise. You have seen many worlds, you have dropped off many edges, jagged and otherwise. You have passed by countless races and waved at a few, but seldom stayed for a drink or a conversation. There is no time. And all of a sudden, this beautiful creature calls to you. And makes you stay a while and wonder.

You realize, too, that it is bang in the middle of your ship's trajectory. You can obviously change your route, but you have received word that the world you had planned to visit is right underneath this particular route, and changing your road now would mean not getting there at all, or for at least a few million years. There's no compulsion to change your route. If you slam into this magnificent thing, (you call it a thing because something inside your world weary self will not let you call it anything reminding you of human beings), you will kill it. And no one would blame you. No one would feel good about it, but no one would particularly care. How many anthills have been crushed to pave giant roads? You'd thought you'd become cold to the world, and now this happens.

The cabin boy, the only other person on the ship, your only other friend whom you don't much care for, calls upon you to tell you that the Captain has telephoned. He wants you to stick to your course. You quietly tell the cabin boy to inform the Captain that not only will you not do that, but, if you are forced to, you will kill the cabin boy, and thus have him risk turning you insane. For he's the only company you have. And you'll do it too. You're certain.

The Captain, after a long while of deliberation, gives in, setting your mind at ease. Would you really have killed the boy? You don't want to go there. Not yet. You change course, turning the ship around to a route along which the whale would not lie. The cries die down. You're at peace again.

And after a few hours, you're awakened by the cabin boy. He looks frantic, desperate. He tells you that there's a giant, beautiful beast in the way. He remembers, in his panic, to mention 'beautiful'. You've never seen him this way. You wonder to yourself as you grab your telescope, how could your calculations have been wrong? And then, when you see it through the lens, you realize it must have been a conspiracy of some sort. Someone had wanted that beast killed. Someone had transmitted that noise from the route opposite to the one you took, knowing you'd turn and drive straight into this other beast. Who was it? Some other consciousness who wanted it dead. It seems too ludicrous to be true. Who would benefit from this?

But it's too late. There is very little to be done. You watch helplessly as the ship continues on its fated path. The cabin boy puts a hand on your shoulder. You let him rest it there. You need human touch now, human proximity, above everything. You realize something you had run away from all your life.

The Winter Market, by William Gibson

Probably my favourite Gibson short story, I rank this higher than Johny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome, but when it comes to the latter, only just. Largely because there's not much action happening in this one. It's more an elaborate examination of what the cyber era can do to us, taking its sweet time filling you in on everything. I like it when Gibson takes his time. I wish more cyberpunk dealt with the why rather than the what and the how. This is a nuanced look at the genre. Loved it.

A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber

A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber uses a child narrator. I am reminded instantly of two other stories which use a child narrator brilliantly: The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe, and The Comet, by Bruno Schulz. The former is a tale of slow reveal: the things the child sees in a colony world and comments upon casually enough opening up the world for the reader too. The Comet, by Schulz, while more surrealist fiction than SF, does the same but in a lush, heightened, exaggerated way. Much like a child sees the world, one could argue.

A Pail of Air feels remarkably fresh for a story written so long ago. And this freshness can be largely attributed to the child narrator. Earth has been captured by a dead star which has ensnared it in its orbit. Now the atmosphere is almost non-existent and the air has condensed into ice. The apparently sole surviving members of the human race, composed of the narrator and his family, make do by scooping up air by the bucketful and heating it to generate oxygen. They don't live in an air tight compartment, but somehow make do.

The science, I'm sure, is very patchy. But who reads Fritz Leiber for the science? One of Leiber's pet themes had been the dichotomy of magic and science, and when he isn't writing about such a dichotomy explicitly, you can still see it coloring his view of science fiction 'proper'. The key to understanding the genius behind A Pail of Air is by allowing yourself to visualize the 'science' in it as a (dare I say it) mood.

How could it be interpreted as a mood? Well, this is a story that very conveniently sidesteps all the social and moral ambiguities that SF of the New Wave would churn up by the truckload. The calamity is a non-human one, and the human race is not to blame. This opens up a mental space that needs to be interpreted as a kind of conceptual playground for the working out of certain human impulses, all seen through the eyes of a chid.

This is difficult, for to take this story seriously is to ask the reader to inhabit the head of a child, fresh and equipped to be gosh-wowed at the mysteries of Nature. That is the first hurdle. The next is to channelize that enthusiasm to make sense of the strong sense of loneliness that Leiber invokes, when the family turns down the offer by the other survivors to come join them. They're very much human, but somewhat typically, they have grown used to a life they are proud of, because they have survived. Leiber calls for a definition of life free from distraction: in survival, in the most basic necessities lie a joy that just might be enough. Or so he suggests. 

Suicide Coast, by M John Harrison

Suicide Coast is written in the same sharp, cold prose style that Harrison is now (in)famous for. It is then a very strange conjunction, because the story itself deals with human passion, specifically pursuits like extreme sports, one of the few pursuits which can be said to be free from any utilitarian motive. What motive could be there for something like mountain climbing, except for the thrill of the exertion and the sound of all your muscles screaming out loud against you, in your head? Where a single wrong move could mean the end of your life, Harrison's short story silently, and in an apparently dispassionate manner, champions one of the last vestiges of human temerity and spirit, in the face of world given to seeking these pleasures vicariously, at the expense of skill. I read it in a Gardner Dozois collection, and it seemed like an odd one out amidst stories which were explicitly estranging. Harrison here is practicing Mundane SF (to use Geoff Ryman's term): SF with the slightest hint of speculation, SF that won't seem out of place with our present reality. In its very ordinariness lies a satisfaction that is as rewarding as Harrison's crystal clear, and cool, prose.

The Wedding Album, by David Marusek

The Wedding Album proves a personal theory of mine regarding one of the ulterior motives of all kinds of fantastic fiction: to provide a platform for the proper and sometimes veiled examination of human madness. For what is this story about if not madness? It is about a time when the need to archive your emotions and your days is taken to an extreme, and when technology, once it has already seen to the basic, and advanced needs of a sufficiently luxurious life, is left in the lurch. With no where to go and nothing more to do, it becomes just another fail safe, but also acts as a mirror for human madness and anxiety. Almost everything can be this, to some extent: animals, for instance, occupy that grey space where human desires, anxieties and exaggerated bouts of emotion play themselves out. So too it is with technology, especially the kind that specializes in deception and illusion. A wedding 'sim', forever stuck on the day of the wedding, grows out of fashion, having heralded an era of technological saturation, which becomes sickening and downright Carroll-ish after a point. The Alice of this tale is Anne, who goes mad shortly after, and her cyber-sim escapes into a wonderland stuck in time, as it were, doomed, or blessed, to repeat the same happy day and emotion day in and out. However, change catches up with the sim too, who realizes before long that even pure unadulterated happiness can repulse after a point. We are merely a string of repetitions in different contexts. The fact that we can stand this fact is thanks to the mind which constantly seeks to smooth over gaps, and rectify a lack of imagination. In hindsight moments and situations feel full of import, when they perhaps really hadn't been. Marusek's fascinating, rewarding novella is, in my reading, a paean to the necessity of memory as it is, without technology as a prop: indefinite, sometimes inconsequential, inaccurate but always aware (as if it was a separate creature) that humans cannot handle reality for very long.

Good News From the Vatican, by Robert Silverberg

"Science Fiction is the internal (intracultural) literary form taken by syncretism in the west. It adopts as it's subject matter that occult area where science in decay, elaborately decorated with technology, overlaps the second religiousness."  So said the late, great James Blish.

The religious aspect of SF owes as much to the act of reading SF, as from the imagery associated with it. You can look at SF in two ways, none of which is exclusive of one another: it is both intensely visual, and at its best, encourages contemplation on everything under the sun. That it can achieve this from within the confines of a short story as well as a novel bears testimony to its often densely fabular nature, where anything that does not directly address the theme of the story in it's barest, most essential form is left out. This might also be why SF has often falsely been classified as children's literature.

Then there are stories, like this one, which are overtly about the intersection of religion and technology. But unlike SF protagonists in tales such as A Case of Conscience, The Quest for St. Aquin or The Way of Cross and Dragon, Silverberg's isn't actively involved in the proceedings. Nor is the treatment didactic, or fabular. He posits a future where a robot is in the running for the position of a Pope. This has caused quite an uproar throughout the world, among both humans and robots alike. But the story is told not by someone in the know, but by a man sitting outside at a cafe with his colourful group of friends, some of whom are of a religious bent of mind, some who aren't, and speculating, through the course of a conversation, on the outcome. His tone is enthusiastic, and the times he does find it all very funny, and has a good laugh at the expense of the hysteria spreading across the globe at the possibility of a robot Pope. However, one senses an interest in Catholicism in what he says, and how he says it, implying that perhaps the incursion of science into something this sacrosanct can only be a good thing for a change, especially if it gets people who are otherwise oblivious to such matters interested.

In a medium such as SF, this is a very interesting approach, especially since more often than not,  protagonists go and do things, and don't just sit around talking about what may happen. (Note to self: Tom Shippey's distinction could be relevant in this regard, on how SF has no heroes). In this, it is very similar to Gene Wolfe's How the Whip Came Back, which also uses a conversation to slowly unveil what seems to be going on, and Ballard's Billenium, which uses a seemingly ineffectual protagonist to make a statement regarding a larger whole.

The ending to the story, where the Pope rises above the crowds and flies away into the air, hovering above them, is quietly sublime.

The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey

The use of the fantastic, regardless of whether it is in science fiction or 'fantasy', is often a high-wire balancing act. Almost everything depends on style, in conveying the right attitude. So, for instance, in Driftglass by Delany, the overarching mood is one of solemnity, acceptance and resignation. It is not a 'traditional' science fiction story in the sense that a paradigm shift occurs by the end. Indeed, the paradigm shift has already occured in the very beginning of the story, and the consequences don't leave much in the way of a sense of wonder. However, the lurking image of a man with gills is a strong and vivid one, and it colours, inasmuch as you want it to, every other aspect of the story. It hovers in the background, leaving it completely upto the reader to lend it importance, or not, by lending the characters more importance than the science fiction conceit.

Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang feels like a story very much in the vein of Campbell, only it isn't able to make the stylistic jump necessary to lend the strong sense of pathos that runs throughout the story the gravity it deserves. The trope of the human who has the body of a ship has since been used in multiple instances, more recently in the multiple award winning novel by Ann Leckie called 'Ancillary Justice', as well as M John Harrison's rightly celebrated return to science fiction 'Light'. But McCaffrey's story is melodramatic, emotional in a way that is a little disappointing and interesting at the same time: interesting because, seen in one light, it reads very much like an old fashioned tale of knights and damsels. It is however memorable because of the lurking image of the woman who is also machine, who is also woman. Because the locus of our attention undergoes a rapid shift as and when the story dictates it, it leads to an intellectual hesitation that strengthens this particular science fiction convention. However, one wishes the overarching plot of the story to not have hinged on such a typical coming of age sequence, reliant solely on the emotional catharsis through death. It is an interesting exercise to read this story very soon after Delany's Driftglass, since both use what is essentially human transience as a pathetic trope, and use the more-than-human to balance it, at that. If only McCaffrey was more subtle, this would have been something exquisite, rather than merely very good.

Edit: I'd like to add that none of this takes away from the flow of the story. Taken in itself, as just a story, it is rewarding, offering the kind of old fashioned joy in a wistful rounding off of a tragedy that has been mastered by, among others, stalwarts such as Theodore Sturgeon. In fact, I wonder how Sturgeon would have approached such a tale. Are there any Sturgeon stories on cyborgs/machine-men/machine-women? Hmm. 

Driftglass, by Samuel R. Delany

My interest in Driftglass stemmed from reading a James Blish short story called Surface Tension. In that story, humans have to adapt to a ocean planet by becoming something more than human, but (if I remember correctly) certain basic human drives remain consistent, such as the need to know what lies beyond the world of comprehension. It features an exotic locale and plenty of vividly imagined creatures, and the undersea setting and the microscopic nature of the neo-humans make it a memorable science fiction story, intended to invoke the sacred sense of wonder.

Driftglass is exotic as well, although in a quite different way. In the near future of this world, men and women are transformed by their government into modified amphibious human beings with gills, who traverse undersea depths at ease trying to install oil plants and such like structures deep down in the ocean. It is a far more nuanced take on transformation, and transcendence, arguing (as it seems to do) on the one hand that humans deal with change, even radical physical augmentation, in a surprisingly straightforward way, and, on the other hand, that this inability to understand the significance of what such transformation might entail becomes our own undoing.

The central metaphor of the story is the eponymous 'driftglass', which are otherwise ordinary pieces of glass transformed by the ocean into beautiful objects. However, seeing beauty in such things is a tragically human initiative, not conducive to Nature and what Nature might have in store for us. This is emphasized by the ugly covering of black silica on the skin of the aquamen who are brought in after the accident out at sea, by the end of the novel, mirroring the protagonist's fate. Human notions of beauty and transcendence are not necessarily concomitant.

However, during the fishing expedition, there is a hint of an exuberant, joyous thrill of the hunt, wherein the human does so while being an 'equal' to that of fish. This can be seen as one of the advantages of such a transformation, which allows the human being to become in a sense closer to his animal counterpart. The aquamen seem at ease in such a setting, suggesting that such a transformation is not necessarily completely at odds with human behaviour either. On the contrary, it reinforces the joy of the hunt, emphasizing what is very much a human endeavour. The tragic consequences that occur a day later suggest that such a transformation requires a surrender to the vagaries of Nature. Transformation does not entail control.

This might seem to be an obvious enough point, but it is not a laboured one. What is obvious gains a new significance in a science fictional treatment, and the emphasis on 'ordinary' men and women only seeks to heighten such an understanding.