Two of the remaining three novelettes this year could be considered dystopian (depending on how negatively you view the universe of Martha Wells’s Murderbot series), and the third takes place in America in what could be called the Golden Age, just not for everyone.
“Never Eaten Vegetables” – H.H. Pak
She glides through the night swollen with ten thousand human lives.
She arrives with five hundred screaming human souls.
Travel between the stars is a dangerous endeavor, the pinnacle of human achievement. Businesses are about profit, getting the most out of the least amount of money spent. So when something goes very wrong on the ship carrying ten thousand human embryos to the new colony on the planet Philemon, the reaction from the board of directors in charge of the transport is less about the potential loss of innocent life and more “Shit, our shareholders are going to be pissed.”
Voices are raised, tempers fray, everyone is screaming about PR disasters and lawsuits and the potential funding cuts. No one is actually deciding anything, and the ship NEV-476 who at this point is very overwhelmed and grieving for a perfect future that will now never happen finally decides to just cut everyone else out of the equation and make a decision alone.
I’m sure some folks will see a science fiction story about loss of life and embryos and think that an agenda of some kind is being pushed here, but I think it would be a mistake to read this at that kind of surface level. This isn’t about Pro or Con, it’s a story about a universe that’s messy and dangerous and unbelievably unfair; there aren’t good or evil decisions, just decisions made between equally horrible options. And the whole entire point is that the people making these decisions care. It’s not about following rules, or waving a flag for one side or another. This story is about having the universe’s worst Trolley Problem you can imagine and deciding, even though it makes no sense, to do everything you can to protect and care for the ones who are in front of you and to pour every bit of of your empathy into them, even when it hurts.
The story switches viewpoints from a young senator on a much too small colony refusing to walk away from the machine that saved her, to the efforts of NEV-476 twenty-six years earlier to salvage something from the disaster. It’s an epic, fifteen-month trial by fire, helped only by the jury-rigged innards of the ship itself, and a schoolchildren’s teaching AI that probably shouldn’t have been talking to a starship but who virtually rolled up its sleeves and said, okay, let’s do this. No easy answers here, but it made me wonder how things could be if everyone in charge actually saw their fellow humans as people instead of symbols or items on a budget.
“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” – Martha Wells
The first thing Iris always told new mission team members was, “Don’t let it intimidate you. Because it will try.”
Fans of Martha Wells’s Murderbot series will enjoy this snippet of an adventure featuring Perihelion (known to its loyal human crew as Peri, known to Murderbot as ART, or Asshole Research Transport). The crew of the Perihelion have to take several scientists on a dangerous mission to sneak aboard a space station that’s undergoing a hostile corporate takeover. And “hostile” in this case includes things like forced displacement of the human residents, and fire.
This felt like an oddly truncated adventure since we go into it not knowing exactly what they’re looking for, and we end the story before the mission is done. But the Murderbot series has always focused heavily on the relationships, and since the entire crew – including Peri – is also family, we get a lot of sibling bickering, in-jokes, and outsiders having to stand around awkwardly while everyone carries on about five different virtual conversations and the family members try to get a certain transport to be nice and not scare the guests. Peri.
Peri is being even more of a jerk than usual, but the reason becomes clear in an “omg, really?” conversation that wouldn’t be out of place at a pre-teen slumber party. It’s all very cute, and I do have to wonder if Murderbot should just start running now and save time later.
“The Millay Illusion” – Sarah Pinkser
Some children are lucky enough to believe in magic; others are lucky enough to learn early how magic is made.
Sarah Pinkser’s story takes us all the way back to turn-of-the-century America, in the days of illusionists, mentalists, and traveling variety shows. Susanna and Lottie both grew up with performing fathers who taught them the tricks of the trade. And both of them were lucky enough to score a place in Albertini’s Astonishing Traveling Show, not as magician’s assistants, but under their own billing as actual performers.
But, there’s a catch. Lottie performs her mentalist act as a pre-teen boy, reading minds and astounding the audience as the talented little Johnny Chess. Susanna meanwhile has to present her feats of magic in comedic form, performing as an awkward, scatterbrained young lady who stumbles prettily through her act and pretends to be as surprised as the audience when amazing things happen. Because while both of them can occupy physical space on the stage as women, they are absolutely not allowed to be taken seriously.
Fortunately Lottie and Susanna aren’t in any physical danger from being two women traveling with unsavory people like performers. Unfortunately there are other ways that women are treated as lesser, and both Lottie and Susanna run into the same brick wall with Lottie’s Uncle Albert, with Susanna’s father, with every prominent illusionist and reviewer. No, we can’t let women be star performers, women can’t be star performers. Have you ever seen a star performer who’s a woman? No? Well there you go, proves my point. It’s the condescending attitude and circular reasoning that’s depressingly familiar, with the powers that be throwing up every kind of roadblock they can. And if a woman does manage to climb the ranks anyway? She must have cheated.
Pinkser throws in a surprising amount of friendship and bonding and childlike wonder in the brief year that Lottie and Susanna travel together. And it’s bittersweet, because it’s never destined to last. Lottie is fine with doing whatever she needs to, put on whatever face is required in order to keep her place in her Uncle Albert’s variety show. But Susanna needs to be seen, and every moment she has to spend pretending to be weaker to avoid threatening fragile male egos just makes her angrier. A friendship can’t survive something like that.
Or can it?
Lottie explains some of the ways that mentalism is about shaping what people think and do, rather than predicting it. But Susanna operates the same techniques on a completely different level. She was never going to fade quietly away, and Pinkser plays out the story of her revenge like the best kind of sleight of hand. We may not know how she did it, we may not even be sure what she did. But we and her luckless final audience know she did something.