Book Review | Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. 

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

***

"If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden," muses Haruki Murakami in the materials accompanying Men Without Women. He must, then, be something of a glutton for punishment, having immersed himself in metaphorical forestry for the decade and change since his last short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, allowed the World Fantasy Award-winning author to tend to his wending trellises.

Compared to the twenty four works of fiction featured in that last, Men Without Women is a strikingly slim volume, compiling only seven stories, six of which Murakami's legion of English-language fans may well have read already. And whilst I wish I could tell you their haunting quality makes up for their wanting quantity, so many of said struck me as uneventful retreads that I can only recommend this collection with a handful of caveats.

That being said, if you come to Murakami for the cats and the cars, the deep obeisance to The Beatles and the bars choked with smoke, then come! Men Without Women has all that jazz—and oh so many miserable men and mysterious women.

The day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you're already there. But by then there's no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called 'Men Without Women.' Always a relentlessly frigid plural.  

Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking it is to become one. (p.224)

That's as may be, but if this collection is about anything, it's about communicating that pain, that heartbreak, to the reader.

Book Review | Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive... and even evolve.

***

World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar rewrites the rules of the short story collection in Central Station, an ambitious assemblage of thirteen tales tall but indubitably true that are all the more remarkable when read together.

"Substantially different versions" (p.251) of eleven of the efforts it collects were previously published, in various venues, between November 2011 and September 2014, and the handful of them that I read then impressed me immensely. 'The Smell of Orange Groves' and 'The Lord of Discarded Things,' for instance, represented intimate glimpses into the lives of a few of the disaffected folks who call the "bordertown" (p.34) at the base of the Central Station spaceport home.

In one, after decades in the Belt, birthing doctor Boris Chong returns to his roots to tend to his ailing parent, only to end up hooking up with his childhood sweetheart Miriam Jones, who's grown older in the intervening years—as has he—and adopted a boy. In the other, Ibrahim, an alte-zachen man, or "junk gypsy," (p.48) finds a genetically modified messiah in a small shoebox, and resolves to raise him himself—free of his fate as far as is possible in a place like Central Station, which is so rife with religion that it boasts a "faith bazaar." (p.23)

They were little things, those stories; lovely, and lively, and large of heart, but little, admittedly. Not so in Central Station, which generously extends the two tales I've touched on at the same time as seamlessly stitching together their characters and narratives with those of the other eleven featured here.

Book Review | The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. 'Afterlife' is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanours. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in 'Obits'; the old judge in 'The Dune' who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In 'Morality,' King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

***

"I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction," confesses Stephen King in the introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: an unusually introspective yet no less effective collection of eighteen variously terrifying tales, plus a few pieces of poetry, from the affable author of last year's similarly reflective Revival.

This is far from the first time King has discussed his "struggle to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realisation of that idea's potential," and although, as readers, we only have the end product to parse, the ideas the Edgar Award winner explores here—and the characters, and the narratives—are not at all inadequate. If anything, in dispensing with the hallmarks of Halloweeny horror to which his bibliography is so bound in order to investigate a goody bag of markedly more grounded goings-on, the stories brought together in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams number among King's most thoughtful and evocative.

Which isn't to say they ain't scary. They absolutely are! 'Premium Harmony,' 'Batman and Robin Have an Altercation' and 'Herman Wouk is Still Alive,' for instance, are still seething somewhere under this critic's skin, but said tales are scary in a more mundane way than you might imagine. Respectively, they address the mindless last fight between a man and his wife, the hellish senselessness of senility and suicide as a means of finally achieving freedom.

If the components of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams have a common denominator, and I dare say they do, it's death... but death by misadventure, or as a direct result of dubious decisions, or as something that simply comes, like the setting of the sun, as opposed to death by killer car, or wicked witch, or eldritch mist. According to Dave Calhoun, the elderly subject of 'Mr Yummy,' a bittersweet story set in an Assisted Living facility, "death personified isn't a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks." (p.350)

Death is depicted in countless other, equally ordinary ways over the course of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: as a name sketched in the sand in 'The Dune,' an unpleasant smell in 'Under the Weather' and an increasingly meek mutt in 'Summer Thunder.' King hasn't suddenly come over all subtle, but this collection clearly chronicles a gentler, more contemplative author than the purveyor of penny dreadfuls whose part he has played with such panache in the past.

The Scotsman Abroad | We Need to Talk

I suppose it's fair to say that the summer's behind us. The summer holidays certainly are.

For most folks—most adults, I mean—that's got to be good news, because instead of treasuring them as we used to do, we tolerate them, if we're honest. The weather is an almost constant disappointment, except for the midges and the mozzies. The entertainment we all enjoy the rest of the year round goes away, and in its place? Big budget, lowest common denominator nonsense that leaves the likes of us with The Great British Bake-Off and little else to distract ourselves from the influx of children suddenly under our feet in the street.

But as a full-time teacher, a regular reviewer of books—books that take me ten times as long to read as they used to do—a columnist for Tor.com and, lest we forget, a boyfriend to my better half of damn near a decade, the summer holidays have, in recent years, come to mean something very real to me: a chance to make some changes. To finally follow through on a few long put off promises. Maybe even realise the dreams I've dreamed for decades.

The thing of it is, the summer holidays also represent an opportunity to rest, and most years, that's about all I end up doing.

This year, though, I figured fuck it, I'll catch my breath when I'm dead, and in the seven weeks of the summer holidays, I made some of those long-delayed changes. I kept a couple promises—to myself and my nearest and dearest. Readers: I even realised a dream!

Not to start the show with the show-stopper, but folks, I finally stopped smoking: a nasty-ass habit I picked up when I was 15 and swore to shake before it was too late.

I started running. First a mile every morning. Then two when I found one wasn't quite cutting it. These days, I don't feel right about my routine until I've finished a 5k.

Last but not least, like many readers, I've always nursed notions of writing stories of my own. Truth be told, I don't know if I have a novel in me, but as it happens, I do have a few short stories. One of those—the first work of fiction I ever submitted, in fact—a 2,000 word tale called 'Let's Play'—is widely available as of today.

We Need to Talk features original work from Daisy Buchanan, Robert Sharp, Kim Curran, Andreina Cordani, Amy McLellan and over a dozen more—all stories inspired by (very) difficult conversations! 

All proceeds are given to the women's cancer charity, The Eve Appeal. September is Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Month, and [Jurassic London, in collaboration with Kindred, is] proud to support their efforts. 

The lovely paperbacks are exclusively available through Foyles, who are currently selling the book at a chunky discount (seriously, it is under a fiver). For those of a more digital inclination, the ebooks can be found on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Just to be published would have made my summer. To be published by a publisher I have such immense respect for, alongside an array of properly awesome authors, and in support of such a phenomenally positive cause?

I can hardly begin to express how very much being featured in We Need to Talk means to me, but it'd mean that much more if I could share it with a few of you.

If you like it, let me know!

Guest Post | "Short Fiction in the New Publishing Reality" by Gail Z. Martin

Not too long ago, people were quick to say that short fiction was dead. They pointed to the demise of several long-running, celebrated fiction magazines, and to lackluster sales for anthologies, and concluded that the long form had won.

As Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Whether you bless ebooks or curse them, one thing they have given us back is the viable short story and anthology. Authors discovered that writing short stories and selling them on Amazon and other online platforms was a good way to keep existing readers happy and bring in new readers with a low-risk opportunity to sample the wares. Anthologies do exceptionally well on Kickstarter because multiple authors each with his/her own fan base can quickly gin up support and boost the signal for the project.

Never has a corpse returned to the land of the living quite so quickly.

Ebooks and online bookselling has substantially altered the business of publishing and continues to send shockwaves through the industry. But by creating a viable and potentially profitable way for authors to bring short fiction to market, the incentive exists for authors to write short form. Whether they are contributing to a Kickstarter anthology or bringing their self-published short stories to market independently, authors are no longer limited by the number of paying venues for short fiction and the time-consuming effort of pitching a story, sometimes multiple times before finding it a home. Stories can also tackle timely issues more easily, since the time-to-market is decidedly shortened.

A funny thing happened when people began reading on smart phones and tablets. All of a sudden, they discovered that they liked reading a story they could finish in the car pool van or on the train in the way into work, instead of always being stuck at a good part and not being able to get back into a full book for hours. Mobile device readership is growing, especially in the under-30 demographic, and those readers enjoy bite-sized fiction, stoking a demand for more short stories.

Short stories have also become a promotional tool for novel writers, in addition to being an end in themselves. I’ve been part of four Kickstarter anthologies in the last year. Each of them featured one of my short stories as part of the anthology. In addition, backers received a three-pack of stories from my two short story series if the anthology reached specific dollar goals.

What this meant was that thousands of new readers got a sampler platter of my short stories based on my book series, introducing them to me and my worlds. Sites like Wattpad take this a step farther, enabling authors to reach millions of members with free short fiction to garner comments and build audience.

A year ago, I began writing two series of short stories related to my novels. The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures are prequels to my Chronicles of the Necromancer series. That series is currently on hiatus as I write the Ascendant Kingdoms books, but loyal readers wanted more in the Winter Kingdoms world. By serialising what are essential three prequel books into stand-alone short stories with a larger plot arc, I’m able to give readers what they want without foreclosing future publishing opportunities, and earn a nice side income to boot.

Likewise, my Deadly Curiosities Adventures began as a universe I created specifically for anthology contributions. When Solaris Books liked “Buttons”, the story I contributed to Magic: The Esoteric and Arcane, and asked for a book series based on that story, the short stories continued in anthologies and direct to ebook on Kindle/Kobo/Nook. The short stories aren’t required reading to enjoy the books, but they do add additional details and background that fans of the series will find interesting. They take place before, after and in between the novels. I bring out a new short story in either my Jonmarc Vahanian or Deadly Curiosities series once a month. I’ve also written an original Deadly Curiosities novella and posted it free on Wattpad to reach a new, mobile device-intensive audience.

Thanks to ebooks and Kickstarter, short fiction has a promising future. From being a moribund format to becoming the hot new thing, short fiction has rebounded with vigour that would be the envy of any zombie master. Here’s to new opportunities.

***

Gail Z. Martin's Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with never-before-seen cover art, brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more. Each article comes complete with extra excerpt links for stories and books by author friends of hers, plus a special 50% off discount from Double-Dragon ebooks, but just like Trick or Treat, you’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies! Hit up AscendantKingdoms.com for all the details.

In the interim, enjoy an excerpt from her short story 'Buttons,' a bonus bit from her contribution to the Kickstarter-funded Athena’s Daughters anthology, and—last but not least—an excerpt from Jean Rabe's novel The Cauldron, also by way of Wattpad.

Guest Post | "Interconnection and Telling Myths" by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

When Niall asked me to pick a blog topic and suggested, as one option, why I kept coming back to the mythological grounding of Scale-Bright and its related stories, I jumped at the chance: it seems like a perfect way to combine that particular subject and the more general one of writing interconnected short stories that share a world or characters.

I have it on good genre authority—mainly Rachel Swirsky and Niall Harrison—that interconnected short stories are far from uncommon; Aliette de Bodard is famous for it with her Xuya stories, which share a space opera universe best known for its sentient ship AIs and complex families, and the novella On a Red Station, Drifting in the same setting. We know Ann Leckie’s Radchaai mostly from Ancillary Justice, but there are also short stories like They Sink and Are Vanished Away’ and ‘Night’s Slow Poison’. Richard Parks has his Lord Yamada stories and the novel Yamada Monogatari. Lavie Tidhar has built up his Central Station over the years. E. Catherine Tobler has her Unreal Circus, Jason Sanford his Plague Birds while Mike Allen has phantasmagoria SF Hierophants stories and poetry. That’s just to name a handful! It seems to me that the drive to establish a sense of continuity is shared by many writers; sometimes we come up with a world, or a set of characters, we can’t entirely let go after just one story.

But another draw for me is that while reconfigurations of folktales and myths are plentiful, the type of what gets retold tends to be particular. Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and so on are the frequent choices. I wanted to pick a story outside that range. It’s far from obscure; the story of the archer Houyi and the legend of the White Snake are staples—but to some the fact that I gender-flipped Houyi can go entirely unnoticed! So it’s interesting to try this out, introducing tales that are new to some readers while being deeply familiar with others. I’ve observed that retellings tend to give sly nods to readers who know the original—through motif, iconic moments—and that’s part of the delight; I do it too, though I also like to think that I’ve drawn these stories in a manner that can be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with them as well. And once I did one part of this, the rest demanded their turn. ‘Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon’ came first, focusing on Chang’e and Houyi; it led me to research Xihe, the mother of the suns Houyi (somewhat inconsiderately) brings down, and then I wanted to give her a story too—one mostly of my own invention, taking elements from the original material and reconfiguring them to varying degrees. I couldn’t stop there though; at the time I wanted to do so much more with these characters, but ran into the issue that Houyi and Chang’e had already finished their arc, if you will. They’d overcome most of their obstacles, achieved narrative closure, and it’s time to relegate them to secondary roles.

I needed a new character, a new focus, and a new story. Bringing all of this to our time seemed like a fine way to do it, and making the main character a many-times removed grandniece of Chang’e’s gives them a crucial family connection. Then I lit on the concept of tying it into a different myth—which offers its own (relatively) young, hot-headed figure in the Green Snake as foil to the young, uncertain woman I’ve made the lead of Scale-Bright. Things ballooned and before I knew it, I had in my hand an entire novella. It couldn’t be squeezed back into a short story anymore.

It’s not all smooth as this is not my culture, but I hope that I’ve put in thought and research, though if concerns are raised I would be more than happy to attend to them. Part of my goal was relentless fidelity in specific aspects. I never include glossaries in my work, as it’s important to me that words are understood through their contexts organically. The characters speak more than one Chinese—readers who know will recognize the markers around that. There are terms in the novella I leave untranslated and undefined, and while that might make the reading experience challenging to some, in that regard I’m of the Junot Díaz school of thought: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao comes without a glossary, so I like to think I’m safe, or at least in good company!

And it’s satisfying, as well, to fulfill the obligation to characters who’ve taken root in your head. To make them complete, while simultaneously sharing something you love—a body of myth that resonates with me, recast slightly in a way I hope will resonate with others too. That, to me, is one of the best things of this business: sharing what you care about, what matters to you, and writing from a place of joy.

***

Benjanun Sriduangkaew is "a writer of SF, F, and other things in the between" whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, GigaNotoSaurus, Tor.com and a number of anthologies such as Solaris Rising 3, Phantasm Japan and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures. A 2014 Campbell Award finalist for Best New Writer, her debut novella Scale-Bright is out now from Immersion Press. Find out more about it and its author at A Bee Writes.

Book Review | The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Throughout Thomas Ligotti's career as a horror writer, many of his stories have evolved from physical or emotional crises. And so it was with the surgical trauma that led to the stories in The Spectral Link, an event that is marginally mentioned in the first of these stories, 'Metaphysica Morum.' In the second, 'The Small People,' Ligotti returns, although not precisely in the usual fashion, to his fixation with uncanny representations of the so-called human being. Having nearly ceased to exist as he lay on the surgeon's table, the imposing strangeness of the nature and vicissitudes of this life form once again arose in his imagination.

So what project and publications are forthcoming from Thomas Ligotti? As ever, not even he knows.

***

An anachronism in an age when authors are expected to be out there, selling themselves every second, Thomas Ligotti has never been particularly prolific, however he did, for a period of years, publish new short stories on a semi-regular schedule, every one of which represented an event among enthusiasts of his existential efforts.

Then, a decade or so ago, Ligotti was laid up with a crippling case of writer's block. Perniciously, this persisted until 2012, when a near-death experience moved him to pick up his pen again. The Spectral Link is the result: a slender collection of novelettes that is no less essential for its relative brevity.

In 'Metaphysica Morum,' the descendent of "degenerate swamp dwellers" (p.40) documents his desire to die. Feeling left behind in life, and utterly unable to relate to reality, our unnamed narrator dreams of release, but cannot bring himself to do the deed.

Book Review | Rogues, ed. George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois

If you’re a fan of fiction that is more than just black and white, this latest story collection from #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois is filled with subtle shades of gray. Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. And George R. R. Martin himself offers a brand-new A Game of Thrones tale chronicling one of the biggest rogues in the entire history of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Follow along with the likes of Gillian Flynn, Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Cherie Priest, Garth Nix, and Connie Willis, as well as other masters of literary sleight-of-hand, in this rogues gallery of stories that will plunder your heart—and yet leave you all the richer for it.

***

Give genre fiction fans a fat fantasy novel each and they'll read for a week. Give 'em an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois and they could be rolling in stories forever more.

Rogues is the latest in a long line of collaborations by the pair, and like Warriors and Dangerous Women, it represents a commingling of forms of fiction. Fitting insofar as the rogue is "a character archetype that cuts across all mediums and genres," (p.xii) as the author of A Song of Ice and Fire asserts in his introduction, thus the fantasy narratives forecast are accompanied by stories of historical heroics, replete with romance, ghosts and gunslinging. Which is to say there are Westerns as well, in addition to efforts emblematic of a small army of other categories, including horror, mystery and the mainstream. Herein, expect to see science fiction rubbing shoulders with the traditional thriller.

In that regard, Rogues is rather a throwback.

As a matter of fact, Martin begins the book by looking to his youth. In 'Everybody Loves a Rogue,' he reflects on the good old days when "everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn." (p.xv) "I liked it that way," he goes on to say:

I still do. But in the decades since [...] publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that's a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to place we have never been and show us things we've never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered. 

We think we have some good one heres. (p.xv)

And we do, to be sure.

Book Review | Reach for Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan

Anthologist extraordinaire Jonathan Strahan presents an extraordinary assemblage of hard science fiction stories in Reach for Infinity, the latest phase of a great undertaking that started with a simple idea six years ago and has gone from strength to strength since.

"The stories that went into that book, Engineering Infinity, were a diverse bunch," the estimable editor quite rightly reminds readers, and "that diversity, that lack of an attempt to force an editorial perspective on hard SF, was the book's strength." (p.11) So it was that Strahan set about expanding the purview of what he calls The Infinity Project, by way of "a book that gathered together stories of an achievable future, one where we had taken our first steps off our home world and into space, but hadn't yet left our solar system." (p.12)

In the conceptual stages, its successor was to tell "the story of how humanity might actually climb out of its own gravity well, if it could, and begin to make its way out onto the broader stage that could be seen in Edge of Infinity." (p.12) But as the short fiction started rolling in, Reach for Infinity "became a collection of stories about striving, reaching for that next elusive state in the development of each world created by the writers who took part." (p.12) Writers who represent an array of the greatest creators working in the industry today.

The Scotsman Abroad | Award-Winning Short Fiction

Rather than annoy you all every time one of the columns I curate I is published on Tor.com, I've allowed them a life of their own of late, but with awards season in full swing, I wanted to make an exception today.

Before the Short Fiction Spotlight, short stories were a blind spot of mine, and I have reason to believe that's the case with a great many genre fiction fans. By dint, I dare say, of our well-documented fondness for vast sagas and expansive narratives, fiction of the aforementioned form is sometimes seen as inadequate, inessential.

But it isn't. I've come to believe that some of the most important stories being told today are expressed in 8,000 words or less. And it's so satisfying to start and finish something quickly, especially for a serial reader like me.

In short, short fiction = awesome. Particularly short fiction along the lines of the two tales I've shone the Spotlight on in recent weeks. And you don't have to take my word for it, either. The subject of the first column I want to point you all towards today—'The Waiting Stars' by Aliette de Bodard—just won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette:

Catherine’s contemplative sections can of course be read as a response to the real-world brainwashing of so-called “savages” by the dominant races of the day: an uncomfortable subject which de Bodard addresses as sensitively as ever. It’s of particular significance that her depiction of the issue does not insist; instead, it suggests, allowing readers to make the story their own by bringing different details to the table. 

This openness is no less than I’ve come to expect from de Bodard’s short stories. She’s an incredibly generous author, well-practised in her purposes and dexterous in their development. Crucially, she’s also capable of writing gripping science fiction. Take the other half of the whole: though it is no less nuanced than Catherine’s, our time with Lan Nhen is more typical, more traditional. It’s practically action-packed, in fact—at points I was reminded of reading a story by James S. A. Corey. 

Likewise, Laird Barron just took home a Bram Stoker Award for 'The Men From Porlock,' an immensely unsettling short that's haunted me since I reread it recently:

Few authors can pull off cosmic horror as confidently as Laird Barron can, and this story is a stellar example of his carefully controlled craft. As Norman Partridge notes in his introduction to The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, ‘The Men From Porlock’ “mates Lovecraft with the best of Sam Peckinpah. It’s The Wild Bunch versus the Old ones, and it’s a magnificently brutal tale that would make HPL cry for his momma.” 

I don’t know about that—dead men tell no tales, and I dare say it’s about time we left off talking about the historical origins of this form of fiction anyway—but contemporary cosmic horror doesn’t get better, and it pleases me a great deal to hear the HWA say so.

Long story less long: please do pop on over to Tor.com if you're in the least interested in short fiction. And if you aren't, then there are something like sixty editions of the Short Fiction Spotlight in the index as it stands—more than enough to spark a short fiction fire.

Book Review | Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, ed. Kij Johnson

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories in the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. The editor selected by the SFWA's anthology committee, chaired by Mike Resnick, is the American fantasy writer Kij Johnson, author of three novels and associate director of the Centre for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. 

This year's winners and contributors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Andy Duncan, and Aliette de Bodard, E.C. Myers and many more.

***

The Nebula Awards Showcase series has been published on an annual basis since 1966, reprinting in each edition a selection of the previous year's finest speculative fiction. Its is a long legacy, then, which guest editor Kij Johnson—herself a recipient of the Best Novella Nebula for 'The Man Who Bridged the Mist'—evidences a welcome awareness of.

In her introduction she discusses how things have changed in the nearly fifty years since the founding members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America rewarded its first round of genre authors—Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss and Harlan Ellison, which is to say an array of talent no award can match today—as well as touching on those things that have stayed the same.

In this fitting fashion the 2014 edition of the Nebula Awards Showcase series begins... with a look back at beginning. But as Johnson reminds us, this is a time to look to the future too.

One conventional wisdom is that our field is a graying field; the writers and readers at its heart grow older; the In Memoriam lists at each year's Nebula Awards banquet lengthens. And it is hard not to stare backwards, ticking each loss off a roster of living greats. 

There is a second conventional wisdom that pulls contrary to this current, that the field is not graying but growing. In recent years, speculative fiction storytelling has exploded across modes and media to fuel 100,000 person conventions and rule the theatres. Even the cloistered garden that written SF sometimes seems to be is immeasurably vaster than it was fifty years ago. (p.9)

Size matters—that's a fact—but bigger is not necessarily better, as this slim Nebula Awards Showcase shows.

Guest Post | "From Ceres to Saga: Research and Inspiration" by E. J. Swift

One of the nicest things about getting a writing career off the ground is the point where someone asks if you can contribute something to a project. There’s a warm fuzzy glow when this happens, and it’s almost impossible to resist, because however little time you have, it feels like a privilege to be asked. This is especially the case when the brief is as exciting as a project as The Lowest Heaven, a solar-system themed anthology which was published by Jurassic last summer.

By the time I came on board, most of the major planets had been snapped up, and my choices came down to Ceres and the Oort Cloud. Whilst the Oort Cloud got kudos for being generally weird and cool (with some wonderful theories expounded on Wikipedia and elsewhere), I wasn’t sure I could do it justice in the short time I had to write the story.

After some research into Ceres, though, there were a couple of things on the table that caught my attention:

• In mythology, Ceres is the goddess of agriculture, fertility and maternal relationships.
• Despite its lowly dwarf planet/large asteroid status, Ceres occupies a rather strategic point in the solar system, and has an icy mantle, the possibility of water below and the potential for mining.

Taking the motherly relationships angle, my original idea was to write something around an astronaut/explorer mother and her relationship with her daughter. The brief for the anthology was to take inspiration from the planets, rather than to locate the stories geographically within the solar system, but I was intrigued by the concept of the lengthy time and distances that would be involved in early space travel, and how that might impact on familial relationships. Initially I had the daughter character pegged at a child or teenage age, and thought the focus of the story would be on growing up with a mostly absent parent.

Then I stumbled across a story by the author Joe Dunthorne which was written in the first person plural, and something sparked in my head. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, a creepily atmospheric novel which sustains a first person plural voice throughout. But I’d never come across it used anywhere else, until now. What if I could try a collective voice with this?

After I’d pinned down the voice, the scope of the story broadened and suddenly I was writing something from the perspective of three adults looking back on their lives. For once, the title to the story was easy.

'Saga's Children' is available to read for free on Pornokitsch and an audio version is available in this episode of Starship Sofa.

***

E. J. Swift is the author of Osiris and Cataveiro, the first two volumes in The Osiris Project trilogy. Her short fiction has been published in Interzone magazine, and appears in anthologies including The Best British Fiction 2013 and Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven. She is shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award in the short fiction category for her story Saga’s Children.

Guest Post | "The Dawn of Autumn" by Dave Hutchinson

I said as much yesterday, but it bears repeating here: Europe in Autumn is awesome; a canny concoction of sci-fi and spies which took me entirely by surprise, largely because I wasn't familiar with its author beforehand.

In the weeks since reading it I have, however, gotten my grubby paws on The Push, and it was bloody good too. So it was with high hopes that I approached Dave Hutchinson about putting together a guest post for TSS, and sincere glee when he agreed.

As is my habit, I asked the author a selection of questions, with my fingers firmly crossed that he'd be able to come up with something fun in answer to one. What I didn't expect was for him to answer them all! Here, then, is an absorbing account of how Europe in Autumn came about which also takes in the relevance of short stories on the novel form, Dave's personal favourite pocket nation, and—last but not least—his ideas for a potential sequel.

***

Years ago, a friend of mine—oh, why not drop names? It was Stephen King’s Polish translator—told me that I was, at heart, a short story writer.

This was a little disappointing, as I’d just finished what would be my first published novel, The Villages. It had taken me over a year of very hard work and I was rather pleased with it. But then I had a think about what he’d said, and I realised he was right. Virtually everything I’d written since I began to write somewhere back in the mid-70s was short-form. Some of it was very short indeed.

The Villages itself grew out of a short story which I workshopped with some other writers. In the course of the workshop it was suggested that maybe the story could be the seed of a novel. When I expressed doubt about this—I think I actually said, "Are you out of your minds?"—someone suggested a simple way of doing it. “Just look at it as a novella and keep going.”

Of course, it wound up being more complicated than that. The story got rewritten and rewritten and sort of grew backwards and forwards and sideways until it was sitting buried, a little to one side of the heart of the book, like the grit in a pearl and only I could tell it was there.

After The Villages, I went back to writing short stories. And as time went on, the short stories got longer and longer. Where I had once been able to tell a story in a couple of thousand words, now my stuff felt uncomfortably rushed if it ran to less than about ten thousand. I don’t think I was getting more verbose in my old age, it’s just that the rhythm of the stories I wanted to tell needed space to breathe.

Europe in Autumn started out as a completely different novel, set in three similar but separate versions of Europe. In the first, a journalist investigating what seems to be a routine Drugs Squad raid gone wrong in London suddenly finds himself in a reality where he never existed. In the second, a worker on the Warsaw Metro gets involved with a shadowy crime boss and a Continent-wide conspiracy. And in the third there was Rudi the Coureur, bless his little cotton socks.

The idea was to write the book in alternating chapters from the point of view of each of the characters, until somewhere near the end all their stories connected up, but early on I found myself more interested in Rudi’s story than the other two. Okay, I’ll put my hands up; the Rudi chapters were easier and more fun to write. Eventually, I shelved the other two stories and concentrated on Rudi.

I wound up writing the book the way I did for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Rudi chapters I’d already written were quite self-contained because I still wasn’t sure how they’d fit into the original book and I wanted to be able to swap them around if I had to.

Secondly, though—and more important, I think—by that time, I was reading a lot of Alan Furst. In case you’ve never read him, Furst writes these wonderful, atmospheric, almost impressionistic espionage novels set around the beginning of the Second World War—what someone once called "the midnight of the century." Many of his books tend to be structured as self-contained chapters within the larger narrative, the way each novel itself is just part of a huge mosaic picture of Europe on the brink of war. I liked that, and though I can’t pretend to be anything like as good as Furst, I thought I’d like to try and pull it off with Europe in Autumn. It’s a structure I find rather pleasing, and of course it keeps me in my comfort zone, writing a string of short stories and novellas which add up to a larger story.

Of the locations in the novel, I’ve only really been to London and Poland. I live in London, and I’ve visited Poland quite a lot. It’s a country I’m extremely fond of, but I didn’t want to prettify it. That’s for another book, maybe. A friend of mine says I "get" Poland and that’s really quite a compliment.

The other locations in the book really come mostly from research. I’ve never been to Prague or Estonia, for instance, although I really want to visit Tallinn one day. Again, though, I didn’t want to prettify any of these places. The central premise of the book, the engine that drives it, is fantastical enough; I wanted to balance that with as realistic and rational a picture of Rudi’s Europe as I could come up with.

Having said that, I was a bit cruel to Scotland. I have no idea—and I suspect no one else does, either—how Scottish Independence is going to shake out [you're scaring me, mate!—Ed.] but for the purposes of the book I needed it to happen in a certain way, a way in which I really hope it doesn’t happen. The bit about it being bankrolled by the Chinese was meant as satire, but since I finished the book there’s been news of Beijing investing heavily in the Manchester Airport redevelopment and the Prime Minister selling a large part of the nation’s supply of pig semen to them, so I have to wonder...

The Europe in Europe in Autumn is one of proliferating pocket nations, a place where U2 fans can set up their own little country, for instance. I’ve been asked a couple of times whether I’d like to set one up myself, and to be honest the idea never occurred to me while I was writing the book. I rather like the idea of a national park that’s a sovereign nation, though, so if I were to do it I think it would be splendid for the Peak District to declare independence and strike out on its own. No motor cars, no heavy industry. Just a big quiet place. I could do with living in a big quiet place.

At the moment, I’m working on a novel which is a sort of companion to Europe in Autumn. It’s not a sequel so much as something that happens in parallel to the action in the first book. Since I started plotting that out, I’ve begun to see possibilities for a direct sequel, picking up the action in Europe in Autumn maybe ten or fifteen years down the line. But we’ll see. That’s a way away yet.

Bargain Books | Five Years of Speculative Fiction, Free

In case you hadn't heard, Tor.com's fifth birthday is this week. This Saturday, in fact.

And what is Tor.com doing to celebrate its coming of age?

Why, it's having a party... and everyone's invited!

Yes, you too. Assuming you can make it to the Housing Works Bookstore and Café in New York City next Wednesday, you can look forward to free booze and free books. Plus, attendees can expect to rub shoulders with the likes of Ellen Datlow, Lev Grossman, Genevieve Valentine and Michael Swanwick—not to mention Stubby and the staff.

Not that I wasn't desperately tempted, but 24 hours of travel is a touch too much for yours truly, so I won't be able to make it.... but if you can, then indubitably, you should.

That isn't all Tor.com is doing to celebrate the big week either. Which brings me to the reason this is a Bargain Books post. You see, they've "assembled the entire last five years of [their] award-winning original fiction into one handy, and possibly physics-defying, ebook." That's not hyperbole either: the PDF is 500 MB. I made do with a MOBI file at only 153 MB.

You need to register for a free account to download The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com, but that's the only requirement. Otherwise, this incredible compendium is completely gratis.

Well what are you waiting for? Go on and download it!

In short, happy birthday, Tor.com! And thanks for making the big day such a pleasure for the rest of us.

Giving the Game Away | Among Other Things

It's been a quiet couple of weeks here on The Speculative Scotsman, hasn't it?

Sincerely, I'm sorry about that. I've been meaning to blog about any number of things, but I just haven't had the chance till today. I've been sick as a dog, you see, and what little time I've had with my wits about me I've had no choice but to dedicate to deadlines, which of course grow ever more pressing the longer you put them off.

Funny how that happens.

Anyway, as of today, the most desperate of my deadlines are defeated, and I'm officially over the worst of whatever it was that ruined my Easter week, so expect regular service to resume soon.

For the very moment, before we get any further out from the Among Others giveaway so many of you fine folks entered, allow me to announce the lucky winners. They are:

• Darren Goldsmith
• Kristini Wilde
• and Kunal Modi

If you so happen to be one of these three people, expect a brief email from me later today to confirm your details. Then, thanks to the kindness of the fine folks at Constable & Robinson, a copy of the brand new British edition of Jo Walton's wonderful novel will wing its way to wherever you are.

Massive congratulations to the winners—and commiserations, of course, to the less lucky. There's always next time!

Now in advance of a full-fledged post here on TSS, I've blogged a bunch about Iain Banks in the latest edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, as I said I would last week when the devastating news about his health broke. Later on, there's discussion of a number of other stories—including Joe Abercrombie's comic book and the hundred best novels ever according to a superteam of teachers—but truth be told, today's column is mostly an ode to Iain Banks, whose work has always occupied a special place in my dark heart.

With that, I'll say good day. But there'll be more to look forward to tomorrow, I promise!

Short Story Review | Immersion by Aliette de Bodard

However much we pride ourselves on our uniqueness, from time to time, I warrant we’ve all wished we were different—which is to say, we’ve every one of us wanted to be more like someone else, and less like ourselves, if only for an instant.

Fitting in is evidently a tempting premise. To be, for a time, a little prettier, or a little wittier; I wonder what we wouldn’t give for an opportunity to do so. Failing that, we can always fake it till we make it.

But it’s not so easy to change who we are—even briefly—nor indeed should we, because what does being one of a number win us, ultimately? Consider, in contrast, all that we would lose, were we to flick some transformative switch.

In her BSFA award-nominated short story, Aliette de Bodard, author of the Obsidian and Blood books, gives voice to that very idea via the immerser, a device which essentially corrects “abnormal” thought processes—but at what cost? And who’s to say what normal is, anyway?

Winningly, 'Immersion' begins with this telling address in the second person:

In the morning, you're no longer quite sure who you are.

You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment's ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

You're dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

The author’s unusual choice of perspective renders ‘Immersion’ immediately engaging, and it proves doubly powerful throughout, not least because it works to obscure the identity of our central character; a clever technical reflection of the identity crisis Aliette de Bodard suggests in the story’s opening moments.

The setting of 'Immersion' is equally considered, I think. The entirety of the tale takes place on Longevity Station, an independent yet isolated spaceport where a commingling of distinct cultures clash. I admit to picturing Deep Space 9 in my mind’s eye; an appropriate point of reference given this story’s focus on trade and tourism. In any event, Longevity allows the author to realise the potential of her premise, particularly when our unknowable narrator crosses paths with Quy.

Quy, whose third person POV punctuates the aforementioned sections, is a wistful young woman who works under Second Uncle in her grandmother’s Rong restaurant. When she’s called in on her day of rest to facilitate an important meeting, Quy comes face to face—or perhaps only avatar to avatar—with a client in real danger of disappearing, so long has she had her immerser on.

That latter’s rationale for relying so heavily on said, whispered so innocently in her ear, illuminates one of this story’s darkest aspects:

People like you [...] have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

In this way, Aliette de Bodard draws attention to the difficult, not to mention discomfiting question 'Immersion' asks: if, after all, we can so utterly alter ourselves at the touch of a button, where do we draw the line, and why? Surely it cannot be right to reorient our race, but what about class and gender and other such issues? When we can be anyone we want, who are we really?

Striking yet subtle, thoughtful but not ponderous, and ultimately uplifting, 'Immersion' is without question one of the strongest contenders on the BSFA’s shortlist. I wouldn’t be in the slightest surprised to see Aliette de Bodard take home the Best Short Story trophy for this entrancing effort.

***

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard was published in Clarkesword Magazine #69 in June 2012. You can read it for free here.

Short Story Review | The Flight of the Ravens by Chris Butler

In the year 1889, childhood friends Bernard and Elizabeth are essentially inseparable... until a deadly game divides them forever after. The BFFs cannot resist but investigate an abandoned building, nor, alas, can its occupant—some sort of a soul-sucking vampire, complete with red wine and a raven—resist the visiting children. He vanishes Bernard, to devour at a later date, and casts Elizabeth out, alone yet alive, that she may remember this terrible day.

Ten years passed, years in which Elizabeth lived with the certain knowledge that there were monsters in the world and they would consume you if you did not adequately protect yourself. To that end, she learned all she could of the magical nature of the world.

Fast forward to the turn of the century, during which period the bulk of this gloomy tale takes place. Even now, Elizabeth unable to talk about the events of that fateful night, but Bernard’s father has taken an interest in her development in any event. In fact, she and Huginn have becomes fast friends themselves.

The loss has so overwhelmed Huginn’s wife, however, that a certain turn-of-the-century psychologist—let’s play Spot the Sigmund!—has had to take her into his care.

Then, when a parent comes to the school where Elizabeth currently works to enrol his son as a new student, Elizabeth finds herself falling for yet another father figure. But there is more to Lukas Nostrand than meets the eye, and only Huginn seems to see it.

Though Chris Butler has been nominated for four BSFA awards before, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is the first of his stories to hit the shortlist proper, and I dare say it takes a certain amount of creativity to think of it as science fiction in any sense.

Indeed, whilst reading through it for the column this review previously featured in, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop... for some aspect of the narrative to be unmasked as science fictional in some way. But no. No such turns occur. The closest we get to the tropes typical of that category is a black hole in someone’s belly—but this is an incidental glimpse at best. At bottom, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a fairly straightforward story about gods and monsters.

Huginn and Muninn were the ravens of Odin, king of the Norse gods. The ravens were brothers. Huginn was the thoughtful one, interested in the why of thing, while Muninn sought to unlock all the mysteries of the world, to know the what and the how. [...] In times of war, the ravens were intelligence-gatherers. In the times between wars, they brought Odin knowledge and understanding of the worlds, so that he, already the wisest of gods, could become wiser still.

Call it historical horror, or dark fantasy perhaps, but whatever you do, don’t think of 'The Flight of the Ravens' as science fiction. It simply isn’t. Which leaves me wondering why in the world the British Science Fiction Association opted to shortlist it for an award.

That said, this is the same organisation who crowned Coraline as the year’s Best Short Story in 2002. Read into that what you will.

So 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a far cry from sci-fi. Nor, by most measures, could you call it short fiction. At almost 100 pages long, with 25 short chapters, several narrative perspectives, three time periods and scenes taking place from Frankfurt to Amsterdam—not to mention Vienna—Chris Butler’s novella has markedly more opportunity to (ahem) spread its wings than any of this year’s nominees for the BSFA’s Best Short Story trophy... yet it lacks the impact of even the least of these.

The premise is nothing new; the scattershot narrative is, shall we say, strangely paced; and through it all, the denouement is a forgone conclusion, albeit one with an interesting twist.

Thus, our penultimate contender seems utterly out of place on this specific shortlist, but leaving aside questions of form and content, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a fine, if not sublime story, with absorbing characters, an authentic setting and undeniably admirable ambitions. Though I struggle to understand what the British Science Fiction Association see in said, overall I enjoyed the experience of reading it regardless.

***

'The Flight of the Ravens' by Chris Butler was published by Immersion Press in September 2012. You can buy a copy of the novella here.

Short Story Review | Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville

The presence of 'Three Moments of an Explosion' on the BSFA's shortlist for the Best Short Story of 2012 may strike some as strange, but consider that this brief piece comes from China Mieville, author of the Association’s choice of Best Novel in 2010, The City & The City, and a shoe-in for subsequent awards if ever there was one.

And it is, despite its succinctness, a searing short, packing more panache in 500 words than most stories ten times its length can conjure. Also more ampersands, per the perplexing example the serial nominee set in Railsea recently.

'Three Moments of an Explosion' starts with... well, what else but a bang? But this is an explosion of ideas inasmuch as actual matter:

The demolition is sponsored by Burger King. Everyone is used, now, to rotvertising, the spelling of company names & reproduction of hip product logos in the mottle & decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition—Apple paying for the breakdown of apples, the bitten-fruit sigil becoming visible on mouldy cores. Explosion marketing is new. Stuff the right nanos into squibs & missiles so the blasts of war machines inscribe BAE & Raytheon’s names in fire on the sky above the cities those companies ignite.

All too plausible, isn’t it?

Here, however, China Mieville makes do with a rather more modest illustration of the press push outlined above: instead of some oil-rich nation state, the titular explosion is of “an old warehouse, too unsafe to let stand,” brought to you by BK.

Have it Your Way, eh?

That said, this too comes at a cost—indeed, you might measure the collateral damage in lives—because in the story’s dense second paragraph China Mieville moves from the moment before the explosion to the moment of it, pulling back from one big idea to reveal another. Herein we hear of three demolition-trippers who have taken “tachyon-buggered MDMA” to be excepted, temporarily, from time. Thus, in these stolen seconds the trio mount a frenzied survey of the structure... as it crumbles.

This is extreme squatting. The boisterous, love-filled crew jog through their overlapping stillness together & bundle towards the building. Three make it inside before they slip back into chronology. Theirs are big doses & they have hours—subjectively—to explore the innards of the edifice as it hangs, slumping, its floors now pitched & interrupted mid-eradication, its corridors clogged with the dust of the hesitating explosion.

Come the third and final paragraph of 'Three Moments of an Explosion,' time has passed—this, then, is the moment after—but if you’ll pardon my Metallica, the memory remains. I’ll let you find out how on your own.

As I’ve touched on I don't know how many times here on The Speculative Scotsman, China Mieville is one of my very favourite writers. His Bas-Lag books in particular proved pivotal during my younger years, and ever since The Scar I’ve had a special place in my heart for his weird and wonderful worlds. Also his way with words; his wicked wit; and his specific stylistic signature—ampersands & all, of late.

In terms of character I confess he tends to be less successful, but 'Three Moments of an Explosion' showcases none by name, smartly sidestepping that potential pitfall. Furthermore, the verbosity which characterises China Mieville at his least appealing is also absent, for there are no wasted phrases in this shockingly short story. Every sentence, one senses, serves a purpose.

'Three Moments of an Explosion' may appear to be minor Mieville, but its brevity behoves us to look more closely. Read it once, read it twice, read it thrice. You’ll unpick the puzzle soon enough, and the solution is sublime.

***

'Three Moments of an Explosion' by China Mieville was published in Rejectmentalist Manifesto in September 2012. You can read it for free here.

Short Story Review | Adrift of the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales

Imagine, for a moment, that the Earth had died, but somehow, you were still alive. That’s the possessing—if, yes, depressing—elevator pitch for the first short story we’ll be discussing today.

Saying that, Ian Sales’ story is not, strictly speaking, short at all. I’m not sure about its exact word count—it’s either a novelette or a full-fledged novella—but whatever its length, and aside the pros and cons of including it in this particular category, what 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains' is... is extraordinary.

Brace yourself, however, because this tour de force begins bleakly. Which is not to say it ends happily either!

Some days, when it feels like the end of the world yet again, Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.

In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic susurrus within the confines of his helmet. This noises reassure him—sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.

If he turns about—blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia—he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.

No prizes for guessing where Peterson and the eight other survivors Ian Sales soon introduces us to were when the world ended.

But as a wise man mooted many years ago, the moon is a harsh mistress, and it’s all the crew of Falcon Base can do to wake up each day without a home to go to.

It’s been twenty-four months since Earth stopped responding to messages from Peterson and his fellow Americans. Twenty-four months since the world’s beautiful blue gave way to a dismal, gritty grey. Since the conflict between the United States and the Soviets culminated in a planet not going but gone, leaving only this sliver of life behind.

They all have their own ways of dealing with the situation. Deep inside each of them, hope has been eroded away to a tiny nub, as useless as an appendix. Peterson loses himself in the lunar landscape. McKay locks himself in his room and listens to mournful country music, as if their misery renders his own smaller and more manageable. Scott has put away his personality, consigned it to some corner of his mind where it cannot be battered and bruised by their slow descent into despair. Curtis reads, working his way obsessively through every manual and technical document in the base. Kendall has his torsion field generator, the Bell, whose arcane workings he claims to understand more with each passing week.

It is this last device that our wretched moon-men have hung the weather-beaten wreck of their expectations on. With the Bell, they may very well be able to turn back time. But all the potential points of divergence they program into the thing seem to lead to the same inevitable end, and even if they are able to find a replacement present—which, with precious resources diminishing by the day, seems increasingly unlikely—what then?

Excepting said tech and an alt-history element, Ian Sales seems comprehensively committed to accuracy in all things relating to the several subjects addressed in 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains,' as evidenced by its independently lengthy appendixes. But though the level and texture of Sales’ procedural detail is remarkable, it does not detract from the narrative’s forward progress, nor the arc of our central character, who snaps out of his trance just in time to crash a spectacular last act.

The supporting cast, on the other hand, hardly figure in to the fiction. But given that “despair has made strangers of them”—“Their paths cross only at meal-times—and even then, the nine of them might as well be in separate rooms”—this is wholly appropriate; in fact, this pervasive sense of solitude, even (or especially) when Robertson is in the company of others, adds to the effectiveness of an already sorrowful story.

So too does the author’s use of the present tense imbue each moment with the dreadful emptiness Peterson himself feels—and this is but one of the compositional tricks Ian Sales has up his sleeve. Indeed, 'Adrift of the Sea of Rains' is but one of the four proposed volumes of The Apollo Quartet, the second of which is already upon us. Let me stress, though, that both parts of the whole stand alone; their only real relation beyond the obvious is that they’re both brilliant.

I dare say you too will despair as you read through 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains,' and though this might not sound particularly pleasant, believe you me: this nominee is required reading for anyone with the remotest interest in science fiction.

As it its successor. But we’ll leave 'The Eye with Which the Universe Beholds Itself' for another time, perhaps...

***

'Adrift on the Sea of Rains' was published by Whippleshield Books in April 2012. You can buy a copy of the novella here.