This year, the first two of the Hugo Novelettes I read consisted of cozy and light-hearted ways of looking at how society can treat its vulnerable members versus how it actually does. I followed those up with a story in the form of a scientific treatise that illustrates how one piece of technology can change all of humanity, right down to the tragic and uplifting relationship between one mother and her daughter.
The Year Without Sunshine – Naomi Kritzer
…if the sun were shining, we wouldn’t be in this disaster. We’d be planning summer fun, instead of trying to figure out whether if we tore all the grass out of our yards, we’d be able to grow enough food to get through next winter.
The only science-fiction in Naomi Kritzer’s entry is an unexplained near-apocalyptic weather event that’s filled the skies with ash. And the only fantasy is the heartwarming way an entire neighborhood pitches in with very little thought of payment or reward, all to help each other when the country’s infrastructure starts failing.
It begins with a corkboard in a shed where neighbors can post what they need, or what they have to trade. The message board gradually expands to an entire network of skills and supplies, and a complicated but efficient set-up to generate power for one vulnerable neighbor with COPD who needs supplemental oxygen to survive.
Don’t expect a Mad Max apocalyptic setting, or a running gun-battle with looters. There isn’t even a real antagonist to be the bad-guy here. Sure, there’s the occasional self-centered suburbanite who’s in denial about how bad things have gotten, or the jerk who doesn’t think it’s worth all that effort to help someone who isn’t going to get better. But for the most part this is neighborhood yards turned to vegetable gardens, and homemade generators made from wind turbines and stationary bikes, and people with carpentry skills trading a few hours of work for a Colman cylinder of propane, and all of the surprisingly cozy details of what could happen if regular people actually shared what they had with people who needed it, instead of saying “No, there’s only enough for me.”
It would be lovely if things actually worked like this, but at the very least this story should be an instruction manual for the next supply-chain crisis.
One Man’s Treasure – Sarah Pinsker
“…an armoire with a single chain holding it shut; a box of record albums emitting a faint hum; four tires tied to a lamppost, hovering a foot above the ground; a sofa that had dragged itself into a bush on three good legs to lick a fourth that had been scratched by a cat but looked otherwise fine. Another cauldron.”
This is a fun little story with a fun little story device: an utterly mundane situation mixed in with some ridiculously fantastical elements. In this case it’s the hazards of trash day when the trash doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics.
Pinsker works in some real-life concerns into this tale: the way blue-collar workers can be invisible to the people they serve, how corporations view safety measures as “too expensive” even while their workers are getting injured or worse, and the fact that all too often the rules don’t apply to the wealthy people who can afford to ignore them.
All of that is mixed in with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor like the hilariously non-sequitur lists of expensive magical items that get left on the side of the road on Bulk day, or the unflappable way magico-medical personnel treat things like accidental transformation, or sleeping spells when there’s no True Love nearby. Remember, always make sure to fill out your designated kisser form, and let the first aid team know what your favorite lunch is before getting injured on the job.
INTRODUCTION TO 2181 OVERTURE, SECOND EDITION – BY GU SHI, TRANSLATED BY EMILY JIN
Born human, it is our freedom to choose where to live and which era to live in.
The introduction to the second edition of 2181 Overture starts with the introduction writer waking up from cryosleep to a world altered almost beyond recognition by the earlier eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. And believe it or not, this cataclysmic event is NOT the focus of Gu Shi’s novelette.
Cryosleep – the ability to be put into hibernation for an indefinite amount of time – is a big element in science-fiction stories, but it’s usually just a plot device. Here, the actual technology – and everything it means – is the entire focus. There are just so many fascinating questions about how something like this would work in the real world. What would happen to marriages? Parental responsibilities? Property ownership? How does society deal with the two different populations: the ones who sleep until a different future, and the ones who are left behind?
The motivations of people wanting to take advantage of “time migration” are also studied. Sure, it would be nice for a scientist to go into cryosleep in order to see the results of an experiment that takes decades to finish. But how ethical is it for the wealthy to hibernate away economic downturns, or for parents and children to abandon all their responsibilities and sally off to a golden future that can’t possibly live up to their expectations? And what happens when the efficient plan for society includes cryosleep, which means it has to be enforced?
An added complication here is that cryosleep only slows down aging, it doesn’t stop it. Goodbye to the simple solution to deep space exploration, and hoping for a cure for a fatal illness is still just that: hope.
This is a story of viral hashtags, impossible questions, and people endlessly chasing the promise of the future. Technical and sometimes deliberately infuriating, with all the statistics and what-ifs and computer models of behavior over the course of centuries, it gradually morphs into an all-too-human heartbreak, one that circles all the way around to the beginning. It shows that while we may never be able to outrace our mortality, people keep finding ways to be brilliant when they try.