"Empty Planets" by Rahul Kanakia :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Empty Planets" by Rahul Kanakia, from the January-February 2016 issue of Interzone Magazine (cover art by Vincent Sammy).

One of my favorite little sub-genres of science fiction is far-future, post-scarcity stories where people sit around wondering what the hell to do with themselves.

An example I recently dusted off and enjoyed was Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee from 1976, where young people work their way though a great but not inexhaustible supply of decadent and pointless ways to waste their time. Tanith Lee played the concept tongue-in-cheek, but in "Empty Planets," Rahul Kanakia applies a somber approach I like even better.

"Empty Planets" takes place in a distant future run by a (mostly) benevolent artificial intelligence called the "Machine." The humans' needs are all provided for, and so they pass their time to no apparent purpose. The students at Non-Mandatory Study are a possible exception. But when our protagonist David attends the school on a whim — he believe he has a deep thought inside that he hasn't learned to articulate — we soon find that the students have little love of learning; they simply want to answer one of the questions posed by the Machine, in order to win "shares" as a bounty. An additional share allows one's family to expand, and it's about the only commodity in this universe that people still covet. David does not much approve:

It seemed so sillly, all this looking for bounties and trying to acquire shares, when reallly there were far more important things to think about. I still hadn't quite gotten ahold of the deep thought that'd brought me to NMS, but I could see its outline. The thought had something to do with shares, I knew. And something to do with the Machine. And something to do with wealth and with the age of the universe and the destiny of mankind. And music was tied up in there too.

David falls for Margery, an intense student from a colony slowly dying for lack of shares. They travel to Altair III to study its mysterious, possibly sentient clouds hoping for a bounty, and perhaps they will find themselves there.

"Empty Planets" does a wonderful job of depicting a strange, far-future universe whose residents have problems that seem not very different from our own. And, spoiler alert, Kanakia is wise enough not to try to offer the answers to those problems.

Rahul Kanakia's short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and other places. His first book, a contemporary YA novel confusingly titled Enter Title Here, is due in August.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders by Aliette de Bodard

This week's story recommendation is for "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" by Aliette de Bodard, from the September-October 2010 issue of Interzone. Aliette de Bodard is the first three-time SROTW recipient, which will surprise no one who has read her work. Lately I've been trying to teach myself to write decent short fiction, and so I have a mental list of very good authors to read and learn from. Well, de Bodard has moved off that list, onto the list of writers I don't dare try to emulate or I might hurt myself.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" shows us a fascinating, original setting, where the Aztec Empire has been replaced by a strange, machine-dominated culture that never (quite) existed in our world. (Note that this is not the setting of de Bodard's debut novel Servant of the Underworld, although it could be in the same universe at a later date.) Even better, the story doesn't just use that setting for scenery, but to frame important questions de Bodard would not have been able to convey through a mimetic setting or a conventional medieval fantasy background.

In "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders," the new god-machine has done away with the sacrifices and brutality of the former empire and its bloodthirsty deities. A mechanical "heirarch" arrives in a small mining town with the last of the old gods in chains, to conduct a symbolic execution of the god, who will only be resurrected for the next stop on their tour. But the ordinary people of this town are beginning to question whether they are any better off under the machine-god, which demands their hard labor in the mines to sustain it. We see the points of view of the old god, the heirarch, and the townspeople, all of whom are conflicted in different ways, but de Bodard offers no simple answers to their conflicts.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" is set after the time of the Aztecs' human sacrifices, but it prompts us to wonder what sacrifices we are still making, for which we will never be able to atone.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster

This week's story recommendation is "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster, a novelette from the January/February 2009 issue of Interzone, reprinted here in the August 2009 issue of Apex Magazine. This is Foster's second SROTW, joining Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, Aliette de Bodard, and Leah Bobet as two-time recommendees. Perhaps even more significantly, "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" was nominated last week for the Nebula Award.

"Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" is set in a world whose residents don a different mask each morning, abandoning their individual personalities (a concept utterly foreign to them) in favor of the role represented by that day's mask. Perhaps inevitably, our viewpoint character(s) encounters a person who challenges this way of life.

A story with a premise like this can easily be swallowed by its own metaphors, but Foster manages to keep the tale moving forward, using elegant but not flashy prose. This is a fascinating, absorbing story, even if I have mixed feelings about the resolution, and I will certainly be including it in my Hugo Award ballot.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

My story recommendation of the week is "Crystal Nights" by Greg Egan, a novelette from the April 2008 issue of Interzone.

From what I have read recently, I am not sure that Interzone is quite as strong overall as it was a few years back. Still, the occasional presence of Greg Egan, the leading hard science fiction author of this age, is more than enough reason to keep an eye on the magazine.

"Crystal Nights" is a modern updating of Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God." A very wealthy man corners the market on an advanced form of crystallized processor, which allows computations at such tremendous speeds that he believes he can use it to evolve artificial intelligence through an electronic version of natural selection. Hopefully it is not too much of a spoiler to say that after some false starts the system succeeds, but the resulting digital beings are not as deferential to their creator as he might wish.

"Crystal Nights" examines moral issues surrounding the creation of artificial intelligence -- for example, is it all right to alter or erase a computer program that is showing signs of becoming self-aware? -- issues that may not be so far in the future as you think. By drawing his title from the terrible persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, Egan lets us know that he does not regard these as trivial concerns.