The date of the Hugo Awards (August 15th in Dublin, Ireland) is coming up fast, time to get moving on these reviews. Click the jump for a review of two candidates for Best Novella.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach – Kelly Robson
Kelly Robson’s novella is hard sci-fi (with the science involved being climate science with a hefty dose of bio-tech) and I felt almost 100% lost when reading the first quarter of the story. Most of the action is told from the point of view of Minh, and while she’s a fascinating character (over eighty-years old, with a take-no-prisoners attitude and six thick prosthetic tentacles in place of legs), Robson drops you into the center of this future version of Earth with very little explanation. The heck are “plague babies” and “fat babies”? What is TERN, and why is Minh so angry with it? Why are she and this new character Kiki trying to hard to win a contract with…hang on, did Kiki just…DAMN.
Okay, story, you’ve got my attention.
After that startling development, I re-read the first sixty or so pages and things made a lot more sense. Minh is one of the scientists trying to restore Earth’s surface. They’re making progress at a glacial pace (literally; one of the methods is to “seed” glaciers so that they’ll eventually be big enough that the spring snowmelt will provide a water source), and funding has dried up lately because all the banks have jumped at the latest fad technology: time travel.
Banks were not patient. When they saw a shortcut, they lunged for it. No matter if the shortcut was an illusion. No matter that time travel couldn’t be used to change anything.
(Side note: this story uses the time-travel theory that you can go back in time and make all the changes you want, because everything resets as soon as all the time-travelers go back to the present.)
The Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN) is the company that’s seduced away all investment, and Minh hates them for all the ecological projects that have been starved out because of them. She still jumps at the chance to be the lead scientist on their expedition to the Mesopotamian River thousands of years in the past, partly for the chance to collect data from a pristine environment (the better to duplicate it in the present) and partly for all the money she’ll earn that will keep her Calgary Habitat from drying up and blowing away.
Robson’s future is a complicated mix of body modifications, personal avatars you can use to to get out of actually talking to people, ecological disaster, and every possible holographic display you can imagine, making a conversation between two characters look like something out of Tony Stark’s laboratory.
And keeping all of this technological wizardry grounded is the fact that the real story is about the humans, with their selfish goals, misunderstandings, bad decisions (Minh in particular has some health problems from overusing a modern convenience), and complicated relationships. Each chapter begins from the point of view of a character in the far past, at a point where you don’t know what’s going on, just that the expedition has gone very wrong. The two storylines are on a collision course, and while I thought the ending was satisfying, I can guarantee that it will hit you like running full-speed into a wall.
The Tea Master and the Detective – Aliette de Bodard
Meanwhile, Aliette de Bodard’s novella is more of a murder mystery. Suffering from PTSD after a military operation that went really, really wrong, the main character is now trying to eek out a living by making mind-altering substances for sale. A new customer turns out to be a skilled (although super abrasive and not very well-liked) detective who’s trying to solve a murder that no one else cares about enough to investigate.
Sound familiar? Well it’s not what you think, because in this story the detective is a beautiful and elegant woman of Chinese descent (part of a huge population of exiles colonizing space in this alternate-world version of our universe), the mind-altering substances are a perfectly legal way to help travelers deal with the “unreality” of deep-space travel and are served in the form of tea, and the tea-master main character is actually a spaceship.
I need to read a lot more of Bodard’s stories set in this world (collectively referred to as the Xuya series), not just because they’re up for a Hugo award this year for Best Series. There’s a lot I wasn’t familiar with before starting this story, and I’d love to clear up some of the harder to understand concepts (“shadow-skins” being one, although I could have used a lot more background on the effects of the weird between-world known as “deep space” that ships travel through in order to go faster than light).
Around her, the corridors shifted and changed. A faint, trembling sheen like spilled oil spread across the walls, always in the corner of one’s eyes.
The author is very good about dropping in the information you need, so mostly I just want to dive further into this world where space-travel is a hallucinogenic nightmare, and shipminds are grown and raised by human families.
Everything here has a lovely Asian cast, from the handmade calligraphy decorations and poetic ship’s names like The Shadow’s Child and Sharpening Steel Into Needles, to the elegant tea houses where the holographic avatars of the shipminds can meet and enjoy holographic tea that consists mostly of pleasant memories. (Having part of a story involve food is a weird fixation for me, so I loved the fact that entities who’s physical bodies are permanently installed in a spaceship still have the ability to enjoy dinner with someone.)
The Shadow’s Child is dealing with some traumatic memories that are keeping her from taking on real spaceship jobs (transport, or possibly working for the military again), but she’s got a grim determination to make her career as a brewer work. She also has a taste for for trashy science-fiction romance epics, so add that to the sparks that fly when her difficult customer drags her into a quest to find out the cause of death for a corpse that was found floating in deep-space, and you’ve got a very interesting character study in a very interesting universe.