Two of this year’s Hugo-nominated stories are only available via short-story collection (the same short story collection. C’mon, Ted Chiang, stop hogging the noms), so this week I’ll be reviewing a tale of an interstellar colony that sends an agent back to the ruined homeworld, a roundabout explanation for why a poet would write an ode to his cat, and a dreamlike story of a race of merfolk descended from the slaves thrown overboard in the crossing to America.
Click the jump for a review of works by Siobhan Carroll, N.K. Jemisin, and Rivers Solomon.
For He Can Creep – Siobhan Carroll
…if he were to have an opinion, it would be that the humans should let the man finish his Divine Poem. The ways of the Divine Being were unfathomable—he’d created dogs, after all—and if the Creator wanted a poem, the poet should give it to him. And then the poet would have more time to pet Jeoffry.
It’s a familiar story; a man makes a deal with the Devil, and it’s up to their dearest friend to get them out of it. In this case the man is a formerly-successful poet locked away in an 18th-centry insane asylum for failure to pay his debts (and for being convinced that God himself has requested an epic poem), and his dearest friend is Jeoffry, dashing adventurer, ladies’ man, protector of the asylum and the poet, vanquisher of demons.
And also a cat.
Jeoffry is very good at his job, said job being to keep imps and dark angels from bothering his poet. Unfortunately in a moment of weakness Jeoffry makes his own deal with the Devil, forgetting that the Devil can’t be trusted to deal fair. So now Jeoffry has to fix the mess, and the solution he comes up with will get him immortalized in verse.
Siobhan’s novelette is just delightful. Most of the story is set from Jeoffry’s point of view, so we see the world from a cat’s perspective with a cat’s priorities (number one priority being Jeoffry, and anything that makes it easier for everyone to be nice to Jeoffry). It’s a tale of cunning and battle rage and elegantly-censored 18th-century profanity (<D—n your eyes!> Black Tom roars. <I demand satisfaction!>) and has an appearance by possibly the most adorable (and terrifying) scourge of the neighborhood and killer of butterflies.
Emergency Skin – N.K. Jemisin
Are you not magnificent? Or you will be, someday. But first, you must earn your beauty.
However many years ago, the world of Telus was dying from environmental collapse. The very brightest and best of Telus – the Founders – developed a faster-than-life drive and created a technological utopia on another planet, sadly leaving behind billions of people to die with their homeworld.
Now the Founders have sent their artificial-agent back to Telus, dangling the prospect of being given his own skin if his mission is successful. A snippet of the Founders’ consciousness has been uploaded to the agent’s brain so they can narrate his journey, and the agent is fully equipped to survive the toxic atmosphere and barren wasteland of the ruined planet while he collects samples that are (somehow) vital to the Founders’ survival.
Spoilers: nothing on Telus is what the Founders were expecting.
N.K. Jemisin has opinions about what’s actually causing most of the problems of modern life, and all of this is very entertainingly conveyed in the ongoing narration by the Founders (with my favorite kind of dialog, where you only hear one side so you have to figure out from the answers what the actual questions were). And the Founders are without a doubt the most domineering, judgemental collection of pricks you can imagine. The story manages to be two things simultaneously: hopeful, and infuriating. No matter how bad things can get on a planet, the author has illustrated a solution that’s just so simple, and also in many ways completely impossible. The whole concept is actually making me even more hopeful that Elon Musk’s space program succeeds, but for completely different reasons from what I had before.
The Deep – Rivers Solomon
If Yetu died doing something reckless and the wajinru were not able to recover her body, the next historian would not be able to harvest the ancestors’ rememberings from Yet’s mind. Bits of the History could be salvaged from the shark’s body, assuming they found it, but it was an incredible risk, and no doubt whole sections would be lost.
I’ll admit that when I first read the description of this, I thought the novella was going to be mostly wish-fulfillment, a daydream about how drowned slaves were transformed into merfolk to make a paradise under the sea. The story itself is much, much more complex than that.
According to the afterward, this is the result of an evolution, from the mostly instrumental music of the band Drexciya, which inspired a song by the band Clipping, which inspired the novella by Rivers Solomon. Every iteration has been a little bit different depending on who was studying the what-if about a particularly gruesome part of the slave trade. It’s very much like the oral tradition of storytelling, which is particularly appropriate since the main focus of this story is history.
The wajinru live a life that’s pretty close to idyllic, but it hasn’t always been that way. From their origins as the children of drowned slaves to their on again/off again war with the “two legs” trying to invade the ocean, there are a lot of memories that are just too bleak to deal with. And yet not having those memories and losing their history forever just makes everyone feel that their lives are empty. The solution that the wajinru have settled on are the historians. One person in each generation carries all of the memories of their people, sharing the History with the wajinru once a year before taking it back again.
Yetu is the latest historian. Since she was fourteen years old she has been the keeper of the wajinru History. All of it, every memory that’s been collected by the previous historians. And it’s killing her.
When Yetu has a chance to get rid of the History she makes a run for it, leaving the rest of the wajinru with all of the generational memories and no way to process them. The viewpoint flows in and out, from the larger story of the wjinru, and back to the individual story of Yetu trying to deal with the crushing weight of history that made her forget to eat or do anything except drift, lost in the memories. There are larger questions about what history is for and what the balance is between preserving one’s heritage and moving forward, between the extremes of vengeance and forgiveness. And there are the smaller questions about what one individual’s happiness is worth, and how we treat people who’s brain and ways of dealing with the world are different, and the pain that comes from acting like they’re just not trying hard enough to be normal.
And it’s also a story of a beautifully improbable friendship between a reclusive fisherwoman and a mermaid trapped in a tidepool.