The last three of the 2024 Hugo-nominated novelettes go from dystopian to near-utopian (with a lot of work from devoted neighbors), to a fantasy set in the outskirts of the jazz area.
I AM AI – Ai Jiang
My hands shake at the prospect of finally getting rid of the one thing outside of my brain that hinders productivity.
The subject of AI-produced writing and artwork has been in the news a lot lately, as corporations repeatedly miss the entire point of artistic creation by trying to skip the human element. Ai Jiang’s novelette takes that concept even further by setting it in a dystopian city hundreds of years in the future, with a main character – also named Ai – who is trying to work off crushing debt while gradually turning herself into a machine in order to do that more efficiently.
Jiang’s version of the future is bleak, and not just because of human artists being driven out of the workplace by AI. A single corporation runs the nearby city, and residents will put themselves under a lifetime of debt just to get by. And if someone dies still owing, well then that debt gets passed on to the person’s children. Or nieces and nephews. Or anyone who’s been caught on a security camera associating with the debtor, because when one company owns all the wealth they also make all the rules.
AI has found a surprising niche in order to make a living as a writer and pay off her parents’ and aunt’s debt: pretending to be an AI herself. Working anonymously in an internet cafe on the outskirts of the city, she scrapes together paying jobs by undercutting the fees that actual AI’s charge and churning out content that has the “surprisingly human for an AI” feel that AI subscribers are looking for.
Ai has to keep up a relentless pace, and she’s been gradually replacing parts of herself with tech so she can work a little faster, keep writing for a little longer into the night. Sure, her power-levels draining faster and faster means every day is a literal countdown to death unless she can get to a charge station. But it’s worth it, if she can use some of her battery power to help her neighbors every evening, if she can scrape together enough credit for another modification, replace her heart with a battery and her brain with a computer that won’t worry or need to sleep or actually have to care about all of it.
Yes, some of this does feel like a riff on the Gift of the Magi story: upgrading herself to be more machine-like in order to write more, thus losing the “human” element that made her writing better than a machine in the first place. But Jiang takes it a little further than that. Having to work two, three jobs while falling further and further into debt is the reality for an increasing number of people on this planet. But it’s also the fact that people are being told they’re supposed to sacrifice any kind of happiness now in order to meet some kind of pre-determined goal years in the future. If I pay off my student debts I can relax. I just need to hang on until the kids are grown and things will get easier. Only fifteen years until retirement, so I’ll just put my shoulder to the wheel without stop until I’m 67 and then I can finally deserve to be happy. Ai takes on an impossible job of writing a novel-sized research paper in one day, half-killing herself to try to get it done and telling herself the entire time that this is the job that will finally make things better. Especially if it means she can then afford to remove her heart and all the other parts of herself that actually want to make things better.
Don’t look for a message about needing to let things go and put your feet up. The heart (har) of this story is how human connections and joys aren’t a liability, they’re literally the only thing that matters. And we can still acknowledge that even with everything else that can and does go wrong in the world. It may feel like one tiny light, in the middle of a dark landfill, going “I’m here! I’m human! I matter!”, but if that one light goes out, then really, what would be the point?
Ivy, Angelica, Bay – C.L. Polk
“What price?” Livia asks. “Tell me.”
Oh, this girl wants so bad. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care; she can’t see the danger lurking all around her. A drop of pity splashes on my heart as I make my terrible words gentle.
“Your firstborn child.”
I haven’t read the first story in this series (“St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid”), but C.L. Polk is one of those authors that can drop you into a setting and gradually unfold the setting and the background in a way that doesn’t feel like exposition. The first story was about Theresa Anne growing up as the adopted child of the witch protector of Hurston Hill. Theresa Anne was actually traded to Miss l’Abielle by her birth mother, with the understanding that the child would grow up to be the new guardian of the neighborhood.
It’s the 1980’s now, and Theresa Anne is all grown up and just coming back from her mother’s funeral. A woman in threadbare clothes is waiting at her door, and Theresa Anne tries to discourage her from a wish that’s outside of her means by setting a price too high for a mother to pay. It isn’t until a bone-thin little girl in rags shows up on her front stoop that Theresa Anne realizes that she’s started her career as the new Miss l’Abielle by adopting her eventual replacement.
I named the price and Livia gave it up, her wanting so strong it made fate bend.
Theresa Anne bonds almost instantly with the abandoned little girl, Jael Brown, and almost as quicky finds out that she has a natural aptitude for the witchcraft she uses to protect her house and her neighborhood. And that’s good, because they can both tell that something’s coming, an attacker looking to kill the neighborhood with weapons like dark magic, but also higher utility prices, punishing fines, and urban development that has plans to bulldoze a community garden and the surrounding houses to make room for a freeway.
This is a little too urban to be considered cottagecore fantasy, but there’s still that same kind of kitchen-witch magic of herbs and charms and a close friendship with the bees from the hives on top of the building. It’s a cozy, heartwarming little tale about loyalty and coming-of-age, and an entire neighborhood banding together to protect their homes and each other.
On the Fox Roads – Nghi Vo
The fox roads take you through October, before they cut down the corn and before the trees undress for winter, and they can take you anywhere.
All you need, she told me, is a reason to get out.
And now for my favorite of the novelettes. I’ve really enjoyed Nghi Vo’s tales from a fantasy version of ancient China; this one is quite a departure but it’s exactly as enjoyable, and it begins with another accidental adoption.
Our nameless narrator is a scrawny teenager with a threadbare dress, a Colt pistol, and a lot of rage. She stows away in the car of a couple of famous bank robbers (stows away as they’re in the middle of their latest heist in fact) because the newspapers say they stole something from the bank that the bank stole from her parents and she wants it back. Chinese Jack is inclined to drop their little interloper off at the next stop, but Tonkin Jill (known as Lai to her friends), sees something she wants, and what Lai wants Lai gets.
What follows is a series of vignettes as the trio make their way across the Great Plains, robbing banks and running from the cops with the help of something called the Fox Roads: an in-between kind of place that’s accessible to people who’s only goal at the moment is escape.
This is a delightful little jazz-era fairy tale. Jack and Lai are robbers partly because it’s one of the only ways available to make money in the Depression, partly as a big middle finger to everyone who thinks people like them need to stay in Chinatowns and not make trouble, but mostly because it’s just fun. Our first meeting with the two of them has Jack driving and swearing up a storm at the gall of police officers who were waiting to shoot them, and Lai can’t help navigate because she can’t stop laughing.
Lai is impossibly cheerful, irreverent, fearless, and actually a little terrifying. She and Jack teach their new partner in crime how to run from danger, but also how epic it is to run towards something: a new life and a new identity. Nghi Vo works in subtle hints of Chinese mythology, and there’s a moment in the bittersweet ending that I would love to see as a panel in a book of fairy tales.