As promised before, we´ll also review the short fiction that´s running up for the Hugos. We already know by now that 270 ballots were cast for Best Short Story. So, which one of the following is going to win?
In Distant Replay, by Mike Resnick, a 76-year old man finds himself "haunted" by her late wife Deirdre - but not in the regular sense of the word. A widower for seven years, Walter Silverman suddenly starts to see a younger version of his wife everywhere - jogging in the park, shopping in the supermarket, and eating at which was his and his wife´s favorite restaurant. Naturally, Silverman dismisses at once the possibility of a ghost or something of that nature:
"It didn't make any sense. She hadn't looked like this in more than four decades. She'd been dead for seven years, and if she was going to come back from the grave, why the hell hadn't she come directly to me? After all, we'd spent close to half a century together."
And he approaches the girl, just to talk to her. And finds out that not only her name is also Deirdre, but also that she does everything like his late wife did, and think exactly the way she thought. After convincing her he´s not a nutcase, all he asks for is that he can talk to her again. "It'd be like being with Deedee again for a few minutes," he says.
She finally agrees. And they start a kind of friendship, which Silverman looks at as an opportunity to change her life - for he´s very old and he´d rather reunite with her Deirdre as soon as he can. But he can, for example, try to help the new Deirdre to sort things out with her fiancé, because their relationship doesn´t seem to be going anywhere - the opposite of his very happy forty-year-old marriage.
Does Distant Replay qualify as science fiction? Maybe not in the old-fashioned, hardcore, fanboyish sense of the genre. Who cares, anyway? It is a nice and sweet retelling of the too much worn trope of reincarnated / doppelgänger / late loved one. It´s like having a nice, warm cup of chocolate in a rainy afternoon.
Originally published in The New Space Opera (ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos), Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? is slightly reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon´s The Skills of Xanadu, with an even madder twisted ending. MacLeod tells us the apparently simple story of a virtually immortal man (or, as he tells us himself in the very beginning of the story, maybe not, maybe his implanted memories are to blame on the fact that he really believes it), a gallant, gallivanting rogue who is caught with the wife of a powerful man and is force to face a very singular punishment: travel to the distant world of Wolf 359 and bring back anything that might have survived the collapse of civilization there. But he does find a civilization there, after all - it´s his reaction to the beings he finds in Wolf 359 that will be essential to a successful completion of his mission.
That´s where MacLeod and Sturgeon goes their separate ways -- the space trigger-happy cowboy Bril of Kit Carson resists any kind of involvement with the inhabitantes of Xanadu, only to be slowly wooed by their gentle ways. Not so with MacLeod´s protagonist, which only wants to make a profit - any profit he can. It´s a short, sharp story - and a funny one, which makes all the difference. He is more of a brother to adventurers/profiteers like Fritz Leiber´s Fafhyrd and the Gray Mouser in this respect.
Elizabeth Bear´s Tideline is entirely set at a beach - but of which country, or even which world, we never get to know. All that we can gather from the information which is given to us by Chalcedony, and old, battered robot ("last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider's palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass," as the description goes), is that there is no one else to salvage her (the AI is gender-oriented).
Until a human being appears on the beach. A boy, actually, ragged and famished. A boy she feels compelled to help, because her programming demanded she sustained him in health. Together, they comb the beach in search of stones, shells and everything else she can use to make funeral necklaces to all the 41 members of her dead platoon. Even if that task proves deadly to her:
She must make each one worthy of a fallen comrade, and she was slowed now by her inability to work through the nights. Rescuing Belvedere had cost her more carefully hoarded energy, and she could not power her floods if she meant to finish before her cells ran dry. She could see by moonlight, with deadly clarity, but her low-light and thermal eyes were of no use when it came to balancing color against color.
Tideline offers us an interesting approach of the relationship between man and machine. Not necessarily quite original, but delicate and complex, particularly in the dialogues between Chalcedony and Belvedere. A moving story.
Michael Swanwick is a writer who constantly defies classification. Cyberpunk in Vacuum Flowers and Stations of the Tide, Weird Fantasist in The Iron Dragon´s Daughter, and even Chemical SF Author with his Periodic Table stories. Now, how one can classify his A Small Room in Koboldtown? A Weird Steampunkish Mystery? A Borges-Conan Doyle collaboration from the grave? Be that as it may, A Small Room... is a strange tale set in a Victorian-like city, where a murder happens and important officers (both police and political) must join forces to solve. The answer is so weird that it´s justifiable only because of the rules it creates in the end for itself! (Talk about closed-room mysteries! This story may as well be called a "closed-loop mystery", because of its donut logic. The bells and whistles are beautiful, however, even if the story doesn´t seem to work very well.
Stephen Baxter´s Last Contact is the most terrifying story of the lot. It depicts three days in the lives of Maureen and her daughter Caitlin, at the brink of the universe´s end. The "Big Rip", as the total destruction event is being called, is simply, as Caitlin explains to her mother in a very nice (and useful) as-you-know-bob:
"It's all to do with dark energy. It's like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can't reach us anymore. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip. We've known about this stuff for years. What we didn't expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now--"
And now all they can do is talk about daily stuff, the stuff that matters, before the dark matter rules it all - ok, terrible pun, but it´s a very good story. The final moments of Earth, even if we just witness it through the eyes of mother and daughter in a lawn of a cottage in Oxford, are palpably painful. It´s not for the faint of heart - and that´s meant as a compliment.
All in all, a fine batch of stories, very different in scope and subject. Even though I would have liked to see more new authors in the mix (Keith Brooke, Eric Brown, and David Louis Edelman are just a few names that come to mind as I write this), the good, old, established writers are still efficient in the heat of the battle.
illustration by Fabio Cobiaco
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