Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

“Sleepover”, Alastair Reynolds

(view spoiler)[This is a story with some ideas I found fairly interesting (the artilects, the relationship between base reality and the Realm, etc.), but I wish the story had done a somewhat better job of supporting those ideas. A couple of complaints: Reynolds spends a fair amount of time contemplating notions of responsibility and redemption via the character of Gaunt. I didn’t find this aspect of the tale particularly interesting or revelatory. Second, I found excessively irritating the manner in which Clausen and others kept putting off telling Gaunt (and, in turn, the reader) the details of the war. This tactic is obviously meant to maintain the reader’s interest in the story, but after a certain point this peculiar reticence becomes almost silly. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

I may or may not get to them, but I’ve decided to put a couple of items on my TBR list for August, David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2019 Pulitzer Prize for history) and Lucy A. Snyder’s While the Black Stars Burn (2015 Stoker award for best collection). (The Snyder collection was one of our nominees for the September group read.)

“The Golden Hour”, Julianna Baggott

This is a well-written story that I quickly zipped through. (view spoiler)[I’m not completely sure just what it’s about — maybe about the power of the emotional bond between parent and offspring. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

“Human Intelligence”, Jeff Abbott

These days Jeff Abbott seems to be primarily a writer of thrillers. Maybe that’s why I didn’t much care for this one. That sort of fiction is usually not my cup of tea. (view spoiler)[“Human Intelligence” is a sorta mashup of the thriller genre with this antholgy’s theme: The end result strikes me as something akin to bad Terminator fanfic. (hide spoiler)]

✭½

“Epoch”, Cory Doctorow

This is probably the most though-provoking piece in the anthology to this point. A couple of “complaints”: First, Doctorow seems pretty knowledgeable in this area and seems intent on demonstrating his expertise; maybe too much so. I thought at least a quarter of this story could have been trimmed away, leaving it tighter and more effective.

(view spoiler)[My second complaint (and I readily admit that I haven’t decided whether this is a bug or a feature) is that I can’t decide how I am supposed to feel about the conclusion. “Epoch” seems to be at least in part about the ethically ambiguous clash between two different kinds of intelligence, human and the kind represented by BIGMAC. Both want to live and both are mistrustful of the other. Odell’s final actions are mediated primarily by fear, but it’s never made clear whether or not this fear has a rational basis. “...though I couldn’t justify it, I felt like there was something deeply, scarily wrong about him figuring out a way to manipulate the entire human race into rearranging the world so that it was more hospitable to him.” The corporate response to BIGMAC’s machinations is similarly a product of fear, although actuarial language is used, with the word “liability” substituted for “fear”. In the story’s final moments, Doctorow presents the reader with the possibility that BIGMAC may be “out there, in the wild, patiently reassembling himself”. How do I feel about that? Fearful or hopeful? (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭½

“The Omnibot Incident”, Ernest Cline

(view spoiler)[Ernest Cline is famously a child of the 80s (as anyone who has read Ready Player One can attest). Like that novel, this short story is awash in references to that decade. For example, Tomy really did market the Omnibot 2000 and Computer Magic sold Robo Link.

This story has a really promising start. I liked the premise about the enhanced robot and found the description of Wyatt and his family to be fairly authentic. Then in the final pages everything sorta goes off the rails. Reading this story (for me at least) was a bit like reading a ghost story in which the ghost is “explained away” away in the final act via an explanation so contrived and unlikely, it’s easier to believe that the ghost actually existed. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭

“Executable”, Hugh Howey

This one is a miss for me. The ideas are relatively stale and the manner in which the narrative unfolds is kinda clumsy. And I generally don’t care for puns.

✭✭

“Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise”, Genevieve Valentine

This is another story where I’m still mulling over some of the details. (E.g., what’s the deal with the song? How does it tie into the tale’s larger themes?) (view spoiler)[Valentine’s story is set in the aftermath of the “switch,” a digital revolt that seems inspired at least in part by James Cameron’s Terminator movies. The author focuses a lot of energy contrasting the worldviews of Nina and Claire. Nina’s more optimistic outlook is tied to her refusal to ascribe emotions to their machine counterparts. “Don’t assign emotion to something that doesn’t care,” she tells Claire. It is perhaps not surprising that Nina seems to internalize that seeming lack of empathy as evidenced by the way she blithely abandons Claire. And it strikes me as ironic that Claire’s more reactive, emotion-laden outlook leads to a reprieve in the story’s conclusion, when her earlier trivial act of kindness is reciprocated by the supposedly emotionless machines. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

“Lullaby”, Anna North

From my perspective, this was a story that had the potential to be more than it was. (view spoiler)[A fair amount of time is expended on outlining the history of robots and even more is spent on the family dynamics. In the end, the microbots are dispatched, but does anything really change for Tessa in terms of her feelings about her family? I finished this feeling there needed to be more to this aspect of the story. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

Lena said (in part):

Lol maybe. But their reticence reminded me of Murderbot.

I have yet to read any of those books, Lena. Would you recommend them?

Lena said:

That’s the way it seemed at first but then, a new day, everyday. This could be the best day of your life.

Heh-heh. Maybe I’m just a glass half empty kinda person, Lena. 🥃

(view spoiler)[The way in which AS9040 seems to perpetually regard Bill at 6:59 just struck me as mildly creepy and made me think of the semi-famous opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

Maybe that says something more about me than the story. It’s interesting that our reactions were so different. (hide spoiler)]

“Cycles”, Charles Yu

Hmm. I’m still thinking about this one. I’m not completely sure what the author is going for here, although I don’t quite see the ending as being as rosy as Lena seems to in her comments. But I could easily be wrong. (view spoiler)[If robots achieve sentience how might that manifest? What might drive a robot to rebel? In the stories or scripts I’ve seen in the past, robots typically throw off their yoke in response to, say, a threat to their existence or lack of freedom — i.e., some situation that’s philosophically weighty. In contrast, Yu seems to suggest that such motivations may be more idiosyncratic and “personal”. When I think about AS9040, I don’t see a coldly dispassionate intelligence, but instead an aggrieved and possibly unstable spouse embroiled in a love-hate relationship; one moment wishing for a more consequential relationship with Bill, but the next, following the accumulation of many slights and disappointments, ready to snuff out his life. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

“Complex God”, Scott Sigler

(view spoiler)[As Fiona noted, this story is not terribly original. And the title kinda telegraphs the ending. On the other hand, it is fairly well executed. And much of the story seems well grounded scientifically. Like Lena, I thought the ending was reminiscent of the one in George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings”. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

My only comment or thought about Daniel H. Wilson’s foreword was prompted by his passing reference to Karel Čapek’s 1921 play, R.U.R. , which introduced the word “robot”. That made me wish the editors had adopted a slightly more “historical” approach when it came to story selection. Stories about robots run amok have been around almost since the birth of science fiction, but not a single tale in this collection was written in the twentieth century. In fact, about two-thirds were original to the collection. That makes me a bit apprehensive, especially given that the anthology’s focus is so narrow.

There were two really good stories in this anthology, Jane Hertenstein’s “Wild Mushrooms” and Polenth Blake’s “Letters to a Mushroom”. Scattered amongst the rest of the entries were some good to solid efforts, but in my opinion there were a few too many clinkers for me to give this collection a full-throated endorsement. For me, while the failures failed in different ways, there were two issues that stood out: First, I thought a number of the “problem” stories suffered by being too short. That made me wonder what, if any, word cap the editors imposed on submissions. Second, with some exceptions most of the stories were long on mood and short on plot; I’m okay with that approach, but I do think stories of that type are harder to do well.

Great discussion of the individual stories in this thread. Thanks!

✭✭½

“Gamma”, Laird Barron

(view spoiler)[Barron starts by describing a series of small-scale events (the killing of a horse, a Cain and Abel tale involving our hominid ancestors, scientific observations about Planaria and “zombie” ants, etc.) and weaves them together into an apocalyptic vision of life on this planet. One of the better stories in this anthology. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

“Go Home Again”, Simon Strantzas

(view spoiler)[I found this story to be a bit of a head scratcher, but perhaps I’m just over-thinking things. At one point in the narrative Ives comes to the realization that closure is a lie, it’s achievement an impossibility. Yet in the story’s final moments she certainly seems to undergo a cathartic experience of some sort, although the mechanism through which this occurs seemed to me a trifle unconvincing. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭

“The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster under Glass”, Lisa M. Bradley

I like how the story’s title kinda encapsulates some of the ideas in this quasi-SF piece. But I kept wishing for more in the way of background explanation. Ultimately, this story was a near miss for me.

✭✭½

“First They Came for the Pigs”, Chadwick Ginther

This reads like a bad Robert Asprin story. I struggled to finish it. ’Nuff said.

✭

“The Shaft Through the Middle of It All”, Nick Mamatas

I went back and forth in trying to reach an overall verdict on this story. (view spoiler)[I’m not sure why Mamatas felt the casual slurs were necessary to the story. And I thought that, like some other stories in this volume, it could have benefited by being a bit longer. On the other hand, I liked some of the ideas expressed about gentrification. (hide spoiler)]

By the way, Joachim’s quote when he describes his revelatory experience in reaction to the smoke comes from the Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Aleph”, which some here may remember from The Weird , an earlier group read.

✭✭✭