Like someone said a couple of stories ago, I am dog-tired of first-person narratives. I am tired of a lot of things, and this story manages to hit on a lot of them. So if you strip away the science-fiction aspects of the story, you have a slightly sexist and racist reactionary stick-figure of a protagonist worshiping his golden idol of a father because his father loves him less than his dogs. I’d have considered the father-son relationship here a cheap, sentimental trick in a better story. Here, the main character is so warped by this unlikely relationship that he’s effectively emasculated, despite the fact that he has worlds more power than his father in every conceivable way. The only way to make the device more crass would be to move it into 1970s American Male Author daddy-issue territory by having the kid lust after Mona more and have a painful scene in which the kid discovers that his daddy have been ‘comforting’ her in her grief, after her husband died. Suffice it to say that I find the characters unbelievable, schematic, and uninvolving.

The embedded assumptions are maybe going to be less apparent or obnoxious to the non-American people; it might even be West Coast specific. Capitalist/libertarian-oriented, dully US-centric, assuming that each tech boom will be followed by another, the country is better than the city, manual work better than intellectual work, government is evil when not incompetent, etc., etc., so on and so forth. It circumscribes the world declaring that while it might be different, it can never really be better. I am against the golden age, as a human concept. The fact that we all feel it says something about us, rather than something about the world. If the story had been a dissection of this feeling through its blinkered and backwards-looking main character, it might have been something interesting, but it doesn’t even remain unexamined; it seems to be the explicit position of the story.

It could be that I am riding my own hobby horses into someone else’s narrative, and taking these things too seriously, but the fact remains that improvements in the state of the world do have real consequences. To write a story in which the betterment of the lives of billions of people is sidelined by the quotidian drama of the decline of the aged is, in some ways, to entirely miss the point of using a science-fictional setting. No doubt there are issues of taste at the heart of it. Also there’s an election coming up, and that always gets my political juices flowing and my ideological antennae quivering.

Even putting aside the ideological underpinnings of the story, the failures of character would be enough to damn it, all on their own. Prose-wise, it feels under-baked, larded with a few too many stock phrasings.

I suppose that that failure was the beginning of the end of my flirtation with singulatarian fiction. I still enjoy a finely-wrought peice of it, but I never could make it work for me, and I was less impressed with work in the sub-genre thereafter, having struggled with the setting issues up close and rarely seeing anyone solve them in a satisfying way.

I struggle too much, a lot of the time, with the underlying meanings of stories, both the ones I try to write and the ones I read. I don’t think that SFF is required to be allegory at all times, or even most of the time. I don’t subscribe to Gibson’s theory that all SFF is built around a re-framing of some contemporary issue or the current zeitgeist. But I suppose I at least expect an argument, a lesson, a possible issue, or something to think about.

This story was good. It was coherent, it managed not to over-explain, it was about real-feeling people and realistic relationships. Rajaniemi has the storyteller’s spark. It was a bit baggy, like it was told at the granularity of a novel, rather than a short story. It’s satisfyingly low on exposition. There are many moments where the writing is quite nice.

There are two takes on the ending, I think. Either the sky-people planned the entire affair to go off the way it did, or they didn’t. I like the former theory better. A bit of theater, allowing Kosonen to move on and his son and the quantum girl to finally go free in a way that makes them less dangerous to the people around them (presumably they’re reduced somewhat by translation into poetical form). The setting here then is a neat bit of work, but doesn’t really get behind the story and push. It’s stronger if you’ve read “Deus Ex Homine”, I think.

If the latter is the case, then the story is unfinished, the ending makes very little sense, the setup is stupid, and Rajaniemi is betrayed by the allure of his setting, much like I was.

There’s a longer discussion to be had, now that the singularity thing is just about wound down, but I am not sure that this story is the right tee for kicking it off.

As opposed to the first two stories here, I slotted this one into my ‘interesting failures’ category. I did this mostly because I think that it’s a tolerable story and a great example of a major error in genre fiction.

The story here moves along quickly, with deftly sketched characters straight out of steampunk central casting. We’ve a valet with a secret, an expedition into an interdicted country, vaunting overconfidence, and eventually an awakening to a grave danger. Everything flows smoothly and is topped off by a fine action sequence.

And yet… The story is somehow weightless, taking each element of the subgenre that is uses out of the box and placing it just so. Noting new is originated and nothing is actually said (I suppose that one could argue that the statement is that aggressive hegemonizing swarms are bad, or that individuality is important, or that loyalty is more important than kind, but all these seem to go without saying). We are told a story. It is fluent, complete, and hollow, concerned primarily with manipulation of scenery and furniture. No element of the standard building blocks is questioned, or goes unused (it’s even hinted that somewhere out there are magicians, although we never seem to see any).

It could be, as sometimes seems the case with BCS, that we’re reading an opening chapter or prologue, refitted into a standalone piece while the larger work languishes in draft, but if so, this one needs the counterweight of the main body to give it weight.

1: Misdirection

One way swings around that deliberately provocative ending line. We’re asked to fully reimagine the movie from the perspective of the all-invading alien monster, protean, agressively hegemonzing. A monster for whom the very rape cannot have any meaning. In the comments, Watts says,

Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you suggest: a metaorganism without sex wouldn’t know what rape was. Which is why I introduced the “rapist” dialog with Childs’ searchlight a couple of scenes earlier, during which the missionary admits to levels it cannot understand in that word. But it does learn connotation of “forced penetration of flesh”.

Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.

The typical convention to signal that a word being used is foreign is to put it in italics. Watts, or Clarkesworld, hasn’t done so here, but I think that it might have been useful to do so, just to emphasize that the creature doing the talking doesn’t actually understand the concept, but I figure it isn’t strictly necessary. There’s an argument to be had there, as the convention is certainly used earlier:

Later I hid within the bipeds themselves, and whatever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or assholes. It said that MacReady was sometimes called Mac. It said that this collection of structures was a camp.

The final line signals that we’re not being told the story that we expect we’re being told. We spend the entire story meticulously repicking each pivotal moment of the film, explaining why the missionary isn’t at fault, how the harm it caused all springs from incomprehension. But at the last we see the reversal: the missionary does mean to have us all, to release use from death and our tiny, brutish suffering.

The last line is there to tell us that we’re exploring ‘evil’ from the inside and that while we’re seeing the other side of the story, the interior interperetation is entirely consonant with the exterior.

It’s a neat trick.

2: Pacing

Another way to look at it is how to tell a story that most of the readers already know in a way that’s compelling. Reimagining is often a sterile exercise (imagining is often a sterile exercise), but finding a motivation for the creature, working a backstory that fits the facts on the ground and enriches, rather than usurps the polt. Whe shuffle back and forth between two strains. Missionary-as-Childs, walking into the long night and thinking through its experiences; and a retelling of the events in the movie, reinterpereted through the newly invented backstory.

Left alone, neither of these threads would work. A simple recounting of the story of the movie would leave us bored. What does it matter if the creature is there, sorrowing at the hostility that it encounters? By the same token, its reflections on the differences between its nature and that of the world that it finds itself in are hollow without the context of the framing story. Compellingly written, sure, but nothing but a decision and a small, quiet death happen. It takes a different kind of artistry to raise this sort of introspection out of the level of the dull. It’s unclear whether or not Watts can manage it, but here, hung of the scaffolding of the other thread, it becomes a sail, rather than a baggy pile of canvas.

3: Critter gonna get ya

Something of the evergreen popularity of this genre of story is that it makes for almost automatically compelling cinema. Honestly, it’s pretty hard to fuck it up too bad. Your characters can be paper thin or gilt cardboard and no one is going to care. Faults are excused and rationalized away by the stark moral dilemma of needing to get rid of the monster that is killing everyone one by one. No one really cares that MacReady is a swaggering jackass with silly hair, he’s as close as we’re going to get to a hero, so we’ll root for him as long as he lasts.

One of the things that makes The Thing so sticky in the memory is that the critter might already have got you, but you haven’t realized it yet. It’s a break from the standard convention. Later betrayals might not be telegraphed, as is a core of the form, because the characters are never sure which side they’ll shortly be on.

To some extent, to offer the critter’s perspective is to defuse the tension somewhat. Part of the fear comes from the fact that you never know where the threat is going to come from. I think that Watts does the best thing here. He doesn’t try. He knows that most of the readers will know how it comes out, that even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ll know the form, know the standards. He allows the movement and tension of the story to come from a course of revelation walked in a void in the existing story. Who will the creature get next stops being important. At the time of the telling, everything is already over, or almost. Who it will get next stops being the question, and it starts being, ‘What will it decide, and what will that mean?’.

4: Conclusions

This story more than most is ensnared in nets within nets of meaning, right from the workd go. “I am going to rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective”, is a simple enough statement. But since the source text for this remix exists in the way it does, you already have threads about cancer and paranoia and our unreliable biology and the feeling that death is hunting us all down one by one anyway, all before you write a single word. The colonialist stinger in the tail adds another layer of difficulty. I guess what I mean here is that I can’t get past the excellence of form and all of the accreted meaning to what Watts is trying to actually say. Which may be nothing, honestly, other than that it’s a fun thing to try and rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective.

The Naturalist by Maureen McHugh
Under the Moons of Venus by Damien Broderick
Brownian Emotion by Tom Holt
Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi
Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story by Peter S. Beagle
The Bodhisattvas by Gord Sellar
What We Take When We Take What We Need by Daryl Gregory
Harboring Pearls: A Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick
Her Deepness by Livia Llewellyn
Second Journey of the Magus by Ian R MacLeod
The Bohemian Astrobleme by Kage Baker
At the Store by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Flu Season by Barbara Roden
The Heart of a Mouse by K. J. Bishop
The Library of Babble by Michael Bishop
The Nonesuch by Brian Lumley
The Taborin Scale by Lucius Shepard
A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed by Lawrence Block
Amor Vincit Omnia by K. J. Parker
Ghosts In My Head By Cory Doctorow
Six Blind Men and an Alien by Mike Resnick

Clarkesworld Magazine

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M. Valente
Messenger by Julia M Sidorova
Beach Blanket Spaceship by Sandra McDonald
The Association of the Dead by Rahul Kanakia
Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My Father’s Singularity by Brenda Cooper
A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell
A Sweet Calling by Tony Pi
Between Two Dragons by Yoon Ha Lee
January by Becca De La Rosa
Alone With Gandhari by Gord Sellar
The History Within Us by Matthew Kressel
Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake
The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar
The Things by Peter Watts
All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg

Futurismic

Or We Will All Hang Separately by Nancy Jane Moore
Your Life Sentence by C C Finlay
Miguel and the Viatura by Eric Gregory
Windsor Executive Solutions by Chris Nakashima-Brown and Bruce Sterling
Out Walking the Streets by Eric Del Carlo
Tupac Shakur and the End of the World by Sandra McDonald
Biting the Snake’s Tail by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
White Swan by Jason Stoddard

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Prashkina’s Fire by Vylar Kaftan
The Shades of Morgana by Dean Wells
The Territorialist by Yoon Ha Lee
Throwing Stones by Mishell Baker
The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere by Marissa Lingen
The Isthmus Variation by Kris Millering
Memories in Bronze, Feathers, and Blood by Aliette de Bodard
Remembering Light by Marie Brennan
The Jewels of Montforte, Pt. I by Adam Corbin Fusco
The Jewels of Montforte, Pt. II by Adam Corbin Fusco
Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride by Saladin Ahmed
The Secret of Pogopolis by Matthew Bey
As the Prairie Grasses Sing by Sarah L. Edwards
And Other Such Delights by James Lecky
The Circus of King Minos’ Masque by Michael J. DeLuca
Pawn’s Gambit by Adam Heine
Knowing Neither Kin Nor Foe by Nancy Fulda
Waiting for Number Five by Tom Crosshill
Sanji’s Demon, Pt. II by Richard Parks
The Leafsmith in Love by K.J. Kabza
Sanji’s Demon, Pt. I by Richard Parks
In Memoriam by Alys Sterling
A Skirt of Many Colors by Catherine Mintz
Pale by Kathryn Allen
To Slay with a Thousand Kisses by Rodello Santos
The Motor, the Mirror, the Mind by T.F. Davenport
Gizzard Stones by Garth Upshaw
Shatterach Gates by Paul Daly
A Serpent in the Gears by Margaret Ronald
Bellwether by A.C. Smart

Strange horizons

Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier by Georgina Bruce
Where It Ends by Swapna Kishore
Father’s Day by Jen Larsen
The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu (part 1 of 2) by Grady Hendrix
The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu (part 2 of 2) by Grady Hendrix
The Red Bride by Samantha Henderson
Out of Sombra Canyon by Kyri Freeman
How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade by Nick Poniatowski
The Night Train by Lavie Tidhar
Kifli by Rose Lemberg
Waiting by Eilis O’Neal
On Not Going Extinct by Carol Emshwiller
Worlds Apart by Marlaina Gray
WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!! (part 1 of 2) by Meghan McCarron
WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!! (part 2 of 2) by Meghan McCarron
The Freedom by K M Lawrence
Birds by Benjamin Parzybok
Middle Aged Weirdo in a Cadillac by George R. Galuschak
The Duke of Vertumn’s Fingerling by Elizabeth Carroll
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra by Vandana Singh
Merrythoughts by Bill Kte’pi
The Kiss by Lauren LeBano
Who in Mortal Chains by Claire Humphrey
Small Burdens by Paul M. Berger
Sundowning by Joanne Merriam
Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions by Saladin Ahmed
After We Got Back the Lights by Eric Del Carlo
Cory’s Father by Francesca Forrest
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter (Part 1 of 2) by Theodora Goss
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter (Part 2 of 2) by Theodora Goss
The Blue Wonder by Chris Kammerud
Four Lies from the Mouth of God by Megan Arkenberg

Lightspeed

How to Become a Mars Overlord by Catherynne M. Valente
The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine
No Time Like the Present by Carol Emshwiller
Amaryllis by Carrie Vaughn
The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt
Cats in Victory by David Barr Kirtley
I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno by Vylar Kaftan

Fantasy Magazine

And the Blood of Dead Gods will Mark the Score by Gary Kloster
Stem, Stone, and Bone by Deb Taber
Perhaps this is Kushi’s Story by Swapna Kishore
Violets for Lee by Desirina Boskovich
The Seal of Sulaymaan by Tracy Canfield
The Stable Master’s Tale by Rachel Swirsky
Abandonware by An Owomoyela
Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory by Paul M. Berger
Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archaeology by Chris Howard
The Slavesinger by Louise Marley
Daha’s Son by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String by Lavie Tidhar
Wishes and Feathers by Patricia Russo
The Sometimes Child by Caroline Yoachim
Lighter than Air by Norman Spinrad
Exile by Karen Heuler
Whisper’s Voice by Elena Gleason
Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Saving the Gleeful Horse by KJ Bishop
In the Emperor’s Garden by Jay Lake and Shannon Page
The City of Lobster, or, The Dancers on Anchorage St. by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Bearing Fruit by Nikki Alfar
A Stray by Scott William Carter and Ray Vukcevich
Tenientes by Nathaniel Williams
The Armature of Flight by Sharon Mock
Stranger by Patricia Russo
After the Dragon by Sarah Monette
my mother, the ghost by Willow Fagan
Above It All by Carol Emshwiller
The Wing Collection by Eilis O’Neal

shareable.net

The Guy Who Worked For Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Playing to Type by Mary Robinette Kowal
Playing Against Type by Mary Robinette Kowal
A Type of Favor by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Exterminator’s Want-Ad Bruce Sterling
The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening by Cory Doctorow

tor.com

Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure by Richard Parks
The Final Now by Gregory Benford
Fare Thee Well by Cathy Clamp
Fangs for Hire by Jenna Black
[Eve of Sin City by S. J. Day](http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/07/eve-of-sin-city The Courtship of the Queen by Bruce McAllister
The Cockroach Hat by Terry Bisson
The Cage by A. M. Dellamonica
[Bogieman by Carole Nelson Douglas](http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/07/bogieman Olga by C.T. Adams

Apex Magazine

Fair Ladies by Theodora Goss
Four Is Me! With Squeeeeee! (And LOLer) by Nick Mamatas
Artifact by Peter Atwood
Shrödinger’s Pussy by Terra LeMay
Laika’s Dream by Holly Hight
Sol Asleep by Naomi Libicki
The Last Stand of the Ant Maker by Paul Jessup
City of Refuge by Jerry Gordon

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the confidence of the narrative voice. The story follows an unnamed protagonist from a quite close third-person perspective through a future war in South-East Asia, concerning a particular MacGuffin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-La of the title), virally transmissable fellow-feeling that stops hostilities in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before everything is blown to atoms by the unseen backers of our nameless viewpoint character. The story’s prime emotional conflict is his struggle between destroying the peace plague and letting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This struggle would have more resonance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another viewpoint on whether or not the plague nullifies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t perfect, of course. There are only token female characters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Consequence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in warzones far away from the home front, without any real engagement with the consequences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the cleverness of its synthesis of these elements, and I think that it succeeds very well (that said, I tend towards synthesis ( see update below ) in my tastes, perhaps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick being favorites of mine).

Since reading it, I’ve gone on something of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as quality stuff, some of it better, I think, than this particular piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opinion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought HebrewPunk and ordered The Bookman, so I may be in the throes of an irrational enthusiasm. Looking forward to what he produces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clarification of the terminology that I’m using above.

I missed the first week and some spirited discussion of a fairly weak story, so it may be that this story, weak in another way, might spur some similarly interesting discussion.

I thought that this one was well written, but otherwise failed on most other levels. I have to admit some bias, in that I have essentially no interest in fantasy specifically featuring fairies. It’s a trope at this point that has been so brutally overused that it’s hard to imagine it having any sort of resonance with anyone at this point. I realize that my point of view clearly isn’t shared, so I’ll try to put it aside. The story imagines one of the changelings taken by the fairy court, Oberon and Titania and the whole lot, getting leukemia and going into treatment. In terms of playing the conflict in a humorously deadpan way and depicting the process in an accurate way, the author gets high marks, but as a story it never really gets anywhere, or says anything, or really has any characters. Any one of those could be fine, of course, but at some point the story just falls down, when you decline to provide your readers with any reason to care.

If we’re to read this straight, Oberon and Titania are fairies and so at least somewhat alien and distanced from human concerns. It’s never clear why either of them should care about this particular changeling over any other, other than he’s sick. The author never bothers to make them human characters, nor does he manage to make them convincingly alien. They speak on one hand from a desire for the story to move forward, and on the other from a desire by the author to make the story humorous.

Over the course of the stories, interactions are detailed, scenes are set, jokes are constructed and delivered. The boy sickens, recovers, sickens more, and dies. Nothing else actually happens. No point is delivered, nor is one possible to infer, given the half-assed inhumanity of the characters.

It strikes me that the author had a neat idea for a story, then didn’t realize that his conceit didn’t have legs enough to stand alone at such length. Maybe he had some inkling, hence the jokiness, the places where it’s overwritten. Halfway to Rembrandt Comic Book territory, more or less. Still, in the end, it stacks up to more or less nothing interesting, and the author, while clever and skilled, simply isn’t writing at the level where you’ll stick around to listen to him talking about anything, just because the prose is so good.

And so we reach the end without me having said much interesting or clever, but I feel that the conceit here doesn’t stand up to criticism any better than it stands up to reading; that it is, in fact, a conceit and only provides the critic with his thinnest gruel, stylistic analysis. I am hoping that I’m missing something, and that some of the other commenters will provide a view of the story that illuminates a more interesting angle from which to view the story.