Today, as part of our special Hugo week, we are reviewing the nominations for Best Novelette, for which 243 ballots were cast:
In The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics, Daniel Abraham concocts a story of intrigue, debauchery and capitalism running wild in what seems to be more a parable of sorts than a fairytale (obviously, the irony of the title doesn´t go unnoticed).
In what seems to be an alternate 19th-Century England, Olaf Neddelsohn is the cambist of the Madgalen Gate postal authority. He´s a man not only fond of his job, but also very proud of it. On the other extreme of the Capitalist spectrum, lies Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, is reputed to be almost as rich as the King Walther IV (maybe more than him). The city abounds with tales of his exploits - specially of his cruelty.
One day, Lord Iron goes to the the Madgalen Gate postal authority, only to pester the cambist with a nasty prank: he presents him a sheaf of notes from a Moorish nation, the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat. Neddelsohn informs him that that isn´t a listed currency. But Lord Iron already knew that: he quotes the Lord Chancellor´s amendment of 1652 (second provision), that states that any cambist in the employ of the crown must "complete a requested transfer between legal tenders within 24 hours or else face review of licensure."
Neddelsohn is obliged to close early and spend the rest of the day researching about any known conversion from the guilders of that nation to pounds (apparently the last one had been into a system of shells), but to no avail: it´s a Gordian knot of a problem, for Neddelsohn can neither delay the exchange nor invent some arbitrary value for the guilders, for such things would certainly make his licence be suspended.
He even considers running away, but his honor prevents him to do so. But then, in the middle of the night, we wakes up remembering of something he had read that evening in the paper concerning the diary of a famous courtesan. There was nothing in it related to his situation, but even so he rejoices. The next day, when Lord Iron appears at the postal authority, he is beffudled by the fact that Olaf has indeed sold his guilders and exchanged them for pounds. All the more startling is the lesson in economics the Olaf gives to the Lord Iron, explaining to him in a very Adam-Smith-esque approach the very foundations of exchange and barter, and how men started to attribute value to things - all this to explain that he simply went to the local market and made a kind of auction between a the shop owners and won by the glassblower, who would use the notes as wraaping paper.
But, although everything goes all right and Lord Iron accepts the ten meager pounds the cambist offers him, Neddelsohn couldn´t have known what was to come after. Six months later, he is summoned to the Club Baphomet to settle a dispute between Lord Iron and one of his enemies. The dispute consists in establishing the value of a day in the life of His Majesty and describe it in days if life of an inmate in the crown´s prison. They give him one week to solve the puzzle.
This is much worse than the other prank. Slowly, despair descends upon him. He can´t work anymore, nor he can answer this question in any rational means. But, as the deadline approaches, Neddelsohn once more manages to articulate a way to measure both values and explains it to the members of the Club Baphomet. To go home again safe and sound - only to be called again by Lord Iron so he can help the powerful but utterly sad man in one last calculation of values - the price of a soul, no less.
This story reminded me very vividly of a late Brazilian writer, Júlio César de Mello e Souza. Under the pen name of Malba Tahan, he wrote several books on Middle-Eastern tales and folklore, many of them invented by him in way not dissimilar to Jorge Luis Borges. His most famous in Brazil, O Homem que Calculava (The Man who Counted) is a fix-up of stories featuring a very wise man who solves by the power of mathematics every situation that befalls him. The Cambist and Lord Iron is a sound tale indeed. - much sounder than many currencies.
Speaking of Islamic tradition, Ted Chiang is straightforward in his telling of an Arabian Nights-like story. In The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, he tells us the story of Fuwaad ibn Abbas, born in Baghdad, son of a grain merchant and purveyor of fine fabrics himself, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco. Fuwaad was a prosperous man, but his heart was troubled, and nothing could soothe it. Having being arrested and brought to the Caliph, he stands before him and tells his incredible tale.
Needing to buy a gift for a man he had to do business with, he noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, and thinking that he entered to peruse its wares.
The new owner - Bashaarat was his name - was a metalsmith, but also an alchemist. He shows Fuwaad a strange hoop with a surface black as night, and that, after a small demonstration, proves to be a kind of portal, or a space-time warp that alters causality. (He even explains some of the "magic" behind the construction of the hoop, using a more than adequate metaphor of 'the holes worms bore into wood".)
Bashaarat then leads him into another room, farther in the back of the shop, where stood a circular doorway whose frame was made of the same polished black metal, mounted in the middle of the room. He tells Fuwaad that the first hoop was a "Gate of Seconds," and that this one is a "Gate of Years": "The two sides of the doorway are separated by a span of twenty years," he says.
Astonished, Fuwaad asks him if he had stepped through. Bashaarat answers that indeed he had, "and so have numerous customers of mine." Fuwaad is eager to know what his costumes learned when talking to their older selves. Bashaarat answers thas question telling him three stories: The Tale of the Fortunate Rope-Maker, The Tale of The Weaver who Stole from Himself, and The Tale of The Wife and Her Lover. All of them tales of time paradoxes - one of luck, one of despair, and one of cleverness.
After hearing intently each one, Fuwaad finally expresses his desire to go through the portal, but not to see the future. He merely wants to revisit his youth. Sadly, Bashaaarat tells him that is not possible, since that portal has been built only a week ago. But Fuwaad askes him if his first portal, that in Cairo, still remains. It still stands, so he can travel to there, pass through, and travel back to see his younger self.
For he wants to change the past. What he didn´t tell Bashaarat was that, twenty years before, he was married to a woman named Najya. One day, less than a year after their wedding, he had to travel to Basra to meet with a ship's captain, where he would start in slavetrading. But Najya did not approve, and they argued on the morning of his departure. He never saw her again, for she was badly injured when the wall of a mosque collapsed, some days after he left. The physicians could not save her, and she died soon after. Since then Fuwaad is only half a man - but now he longs to correct his error so she can live. Even so, he ponders to himself just before passing through to the unknown past:
"Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity," and I understood the truth of those words better than most. And yet I dared to hope that Allah had judged my twenty years of repentance sufficient, and was now granting me a chance to regain what I had lost.
The beauty of the story is that Ted Chiang can use a time-honored cliché and make it new, make it beautiful. Even this story being an invention set upon the background of medieval Arabian times, it makes us wonder how it is that some people can be so prejudiced against a people who gave us such pearls of wisdom and culture?
A good story, but maybe the weakest of the lot, is Greg Egan´s Glory. Egan can be hard to read sometimes (maybe it´s a quirk of his profession, Egan being a mathematician), but the effort to read him always pays off handsomely. In Glory, however, he sets calculations aside and tells us a rather simple story (simple in Egan´s terms, that is): what happens when a very advanced Galactic civilization decides to make first contact with a crude, hostile species not unlike our own.
This story walks in a fine line between literature and a run-of-the-mill Star Trek episode (choose you favorite spinoff), but Egan saves the day when he focus on the plight of the two agents designated for the contact, insect-like creatures who can create copies of their bodies and download their minds at will).
Alas, that seems to be the reason why, im my opinion, the story doesn´t work very well. The agents are constantly threatened and even tortured at some point in the narrative, but they have nothing at all to lose, except a few weeks or months´s worth of their memories, for they virtually can´t die. A nice, elegant story, but definitely not the best of Greg Egan.
On the other hand, the same can´t be said of Dark Integers, his other nominated story. As Asimov´s editors explains just before the story:
Our new story from Greg Egan is a stand-alone tale that follows on the events of "Luminous" (September 1995). It's also the first story we've seen from Greg since "Oracle" appeared in our July 2000 issue. The author tells us, though, that "after spending a few years away from writing, trying to assist some of the asylum seekers that Australia imprisons in remote detention centers, I recently completed my seventh SF novel, Incandescence, which is due to be published by Gollancz in the UK in May 2008." We hope that this return to writing means we'll soon be seeing more of his brilliant fiction.
Ten years after the events depicted in Luminous, the protagonists of that story must fight once more against the incursion of the beings of the neighbouring parallel universe (the far-side, as they call it) they accidentally discovered with their quantum computer, and that threatened to destroy our Earth then. Bruno Costanzo and his mathematician friends Yuen and Alison are informed that, somehow, someone managed to make another accidental incursion into the far side). They must do everything they can to discover who is doing the same thing again.
Since Luminous had been decomissioned years before, they can´t imagine who could have done such a feat. But Alison has a small clue:
"The only thing I can think of is some gossip I heard at a conference in Rome a couple of months ago. It was a fourth-hand story about some guy in New Zealand who thinks he's found a way to test fundamental laws of physics by doing computations in number theory."
They soon track down the culprit, Tim Campbell, and Bruno goes to Wellington to spy on him. There follows a battle of intellects, when both of them show off their knowledge of integers and quantum computation. Campbell shows Bruno a new kind of integer he developed:
"A dark integer. It's a type I defined. It holds four thousand and ninety-six bits." "But why the name?" "Dark matter, dark energy . . . dark integers. They're all around us, but we don't usually see them, because they don't quite play by the rules."
Bruno knows that they must either kill Campbell or bring him to their side. Even though Bruno had been kidnapped and tortured ten years before, he knows they can´t kill anyone, so he co-opts Campbell. Together, they must avoid a new incursion by the people of the far-side.
Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. They seldom communicate with the far side, but they start doing it again in order to avoid a disaster. Even convincing their contact there, Sam, they can´t block the beginning of an incursion, that in our universe manifests as a major breakdown in electronical systems (a "digital blackout", as the media call the phenomenon):
Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes. Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had crashed, and four trains. There'd been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five thousand and rising.
They propose the Sam that they "shift the borders", to make it more difficult to anyone in our side to discover them accidentally again. But Sam must convince the powers-that-be in the far side first.
This is Greg Egan all right. It made me want to read more stories in this universe.
The last novelette in the batch is David Moles´s Finisterra. In the distant future, Earth-born Bianca Nazario travels to the world of Sky, where human colonists dwell not on land, because of the pressure differential, but on giant balloon-like creatures called zaratáns. Hired as an engineer by poacher Emmanuel Valadez, Bianca meets the extrañado (born off Earth) naturalist Erasmus Fry and together they start exploring Sky to - so Valadez tells them - hunt and kill zaratáns. Bianca doesn´t pretend that what she´s being paid to do is legal, but it is a living.
Until she discovers that Valadez is planning to kill Finisterra, the biggest and oldest zaratán, home to more than seventeen thousand humans - and he´s not planning to rescue any of them. So it´s up to her and Fry to avoid that to happen, but maybe it´s too late for that.
A mix of Moby Dick and the Joseph Conrad sea stories, Finisterra is a complex story that tries very hard to be many things at once. Even though the scenario is very intriguing, the human diaspora (or hajj, as they aptly call it) takes place in a kind of Moorish-Spanish civilization before the Reconquista; the technology seems to be a very Victorian steampunk, even if sometimes it seems to conflict with the rest of the story (when Bianca gets off Earth, she does so through an elevator system, for example), so that makes the story seem a little far-fetched in its intentions. Finisterra is a good action story, but it doesn´t seem to find its center.
illustration by Fabio Cobiaco
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