The original plan was to review the first of the Hugo-nominated novels this week. However, I’ve been enjoying the book so much that I want to take another few days to read it (check back later week for a review of that). Therefore I’m changing course and reviewing three of the Hugo-nominated novelettes instead. This week it’s stories by Caroline M. Joachim, Sarah Gailey, and Sarah Pinsker.
“I will hold on as long as I can, my lifelove, but the plague is accelerating. Don’t come to the surface, use the Chronicle. Whatever this is, it has to be alien.”
We begin Caroline M. Yoachim’s novelette “The Archronology of Love” shortly after the heartbreak that will influence our protagonist Dr. Saki Jones for the rest of the story. Saki was supposed to be joining the love of her life M.J. on the colony of New Mars. But at some point while Saki was in stasis for the interstellar trip, M.J. died from an unnamed disease, along with his entire team. And the rest of the colony. And every living creature they’d brought with them, right down down to the plants.
So the story is about trying to solve the mystery of the doomed colony. But the real star of the show is the Chronicle.
The Chronicle is something that was discovered by humanity rather than created, so the science of it is left purposely vague. In the simplest terms the Chronicle is an archive of time, one that lets people step into an image of a moment in the past and then explore.
It’s an undeniably cool system; the inside of the Chronicle is zero-G, so the explorers can move weightlessly in order to look very closely at a very small portion of the moment they’ve traveled to (they can’t move outside the space of the Projection Capsule that they use to travel there, or they run the risk of blinking back to the present day inside a concrete wall). The main problem with archronology, just like archeology, is that digging out a piece of history destroys its surroundings, permanently, for anyone else who might come along later to study it. You can collect all the data you can, but once you’ve moved through it the image in the Chronicle becomes a trail of white static. So you need to be damn sure that whatever you’re looking for is worth the price of never seeing it again.
It’s a very bittersweet tale about saying goodbye, but it’s also Yoachim’s musings about forgiveness for the fact that part of the process of learning is finding out just how terrible some of our mistakes have been.
Wolf-Suss isn’t in pain. Not the same way. Wolf-Suss can get hurt, can bleed, can feel pain—but while I’m Away, I don’t hurt just because I’m alive. I can run without worrying that my body will punish me for it.
In Sarah Gailey’s story “Away With the Wolves”, Suss has a problem. She’s a werewolf…but that’s not actually her problem, or not the main one anyway. She has some unnamed chronic condition, one that she’s been dealing with for years. I think it might be a kind of early-onset rheumatoid arthritis, because it involves a constant (and constantly shifting) chorus of pain; pain in the knees, pain in the hips, pain that makes her hands too stiff to do embroidery anymore. Turning into a wolf is the only way she can escape the pain, when she can run and hunt and sleep all day and not worry about which body part is going to be in agony when she wakes up.
She also tends to dig up gardens and kill chickens (and sometimes larger things) when she’s in wolf-form, and she’s terrified that the townspeople are eventually going to lose all patience with her because of it.
This feels like a very personal story for Gailey. She spends a lot of time on all the ways that a chronic condition is just exhausting; not just the pain, but having to budget your time carefully and figure out exactly how much you’ll be able to do in a day before everything hurts too much to continue. And there’s also the whole issue with certain people – like Suss’s late mother – telling her that she’s lazy, or worse, selfish for anything she does to try to take care of herself.
But rather than a depressing story, this feels very much like a daydream. The solution that Suss and her best friend Yana come up with is elegantly simple, and it fixes literally everything. I could see someone who’s coping with an overwhelming problem just sitting back and fantasizing about a way to not just escape the pain, but to become useful, to rediscover friendship and society and reclaim their life in a way that doesn’t require them to sacrifice any part of themselves.
It was a nice enough cabin, if Zanna ignored the dead wasps…
So we’ve had one sci-fi story this week and one fantasy. Just to round things out, let’s finish up with horror. The main character of Sarah Pinsker’s entry “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” is Suzanna Gregory (Zanna to her friends), a successful mystery writer. Her assistant and best friend Shar has found her an isolated cabin for her to stay in for a few days to finish the first draft of her next novel. Sure it has some problems; a few dead wasps in the bedroom, possible mouse infestation, oversensitive fuse box. Dead landlord down the hill. But otherwise it’s perfect.
What? Oh right, the dead landlord. After having written so many mystery novels, it’s not surprising that Zanna can instantly spot some details that the police missed. What is surprising is the fact that pretty much everything Zanna comes up with to explain the situation is completely wrong.