Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The N-Body Solution by Sean Williams

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "The N-Body Solution" by Sean Williams, the second SROTW from the anthology Armored, edited by John Joseph Adams.

The best science fiction can inspire awe with galaxy-spanning concepts, while simultaneously pulling the reader into the story through the characters' personal dramas. "The N-Body Solution" is a wonderful example.

"The N-Body Solution" is set far in the future, as we learn on the opening page, when the first-person narrator Alex enters a bar to get "as plastered as the ancients," and describes the place as containing "humans, sub-humans, post-humans, poly-humans——every category I'd ever heard of, plus some types that probably weren't human at all."

At the heart of the story is "The Loop," a series of matter transmitters left behind by a vanished alien race, which allow you to step from one world directly onto another. Each transmitter, however, is one-way; you cannot turn around and retrace your steps. But the name "The Loop" implies that if you keep going forward, eventually you'll come back to where you started.

Except that on Cyernus, Loop Junction 163 is broken. It appears to be in working order, but when you step into the "wormcaster," you're still on Cyernus. Cyernus is a dismal little world, and people who expected to have a whole galaxy ahead of them to explore do not react well to finding themselves trapped there. The suicide rate is high.

On Cyernus Alex encounters Enforcer Ei, who has a female voice, but it's hard to know for sure, since she never removes her powerful mech suit. The failure of Loop Junction 163 affects Alex and Ei in a similar way——it keeps them from outrunning their pasts.

The ultimate explanation for what has gone wrong with The Loop is simple and elegant, one of those things that seems immediately obvious after you learn what it is. Equally important, the character development of Alex and Ei, and how their encounter plays out on an individual level, is most satisfying.

Sean Williams is perhaps the most decorated Australian author of science fiction and fantasy ever, with eight Aurealis Awards and seven Ditmar Awards. He is equally adept writing solo work, collaborations, and media tie-ins (his Star Wars work has hit #1 on the New York Times best-seller list). He is also a favorite of our book group after hanging out with us late into the evening one night during the Denver Worldcon, as we discussed his outstanding novel The Crooked Letter. "The N-Body Solution" demonstrates that, even after 35 books, the quality of his writing remains as strong as ever.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Green by Lauren Beukes

With Amy taking over the current Battle of the Books, I've had some time to catch up on my short fiction reading, which means the Story Recommendation of the Week is back for at least a few weeks. The first of our new SROTWs goes to Lauren Beukes for "The Green," from the anthology Armored, edited by John Joseph Adams.

Armored is a Baen Books anthology involving future (well, mostly future) soldiers in powered battle armor. I'm not a big military SF reader, so I wasn't sure this would be my cup of tea -- I should have had more faith in J.J. Adams. This is a very strong anthology. While there is enough straight military SF in here to satisfy readers looking for that, Armored features a surprisingly broad range of different styles and approaches to the "armor" theme. More importantly, it contains a lot of terrific writing. I'm going to highlight two of the individual pieces here, beginning with "The Green."

"The Green" has a military feel, but without any organized enemy. Rather, the story's armed soldiers are explorers and miners, searching for commercially useful alien flora in the tropical region they call the "Green":

Green is the wrong word for it. You'd only make that mistake from the outside. When you're in the thick of it, it's black. The tangle of the canopy blocks out the sunlight. It's the murky gloom after twilight, before real dark sets in. Visibility is five meters, fifteen with headlights, although the light attracts moths, which get into the vents. Pollen spores swirl around you, big as your head. Sulfur candy floss. And everything is moist and sticky and fertile. Like the whole jungle is rutting around us.

One remarkable form of native life is a type of slime mold that can animate the dead. Our characters' base is haunted by several of these reanimated corpses, which the corporate employer charmingly designates OPP's ("Organically Preserved Personnel") but the soldiers call Pinocchios.

I love the voice of this piece. Lauren Beukes creates a miserable setting, but the story is still fun to read, thanks to our first-person narrator and her wise-guy 'tude.

South African writer Lauren Beukes made a big splash with her first novel Moxyland, and her second novel Zoo City won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She also writes for film, TV, comics, and non-fiction magazines, all of which we hope won't keep her from writing plenty more of her distinctive fiction.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Coming of Age on Barsoom by Catherynne M. Valente

The Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Coming of Age on Barsoom" by Catherynne M. Valente, from the anthology Under the Moons of Mars, edited by John Joseph Adams. Catherynne Valente is our fourth three-time SROTW recipient, joining Rachel Swirsky, Aliette de Bodard, and Samantha Henderson.

Taking advantage of renewed interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books due to the John Carter movie, Under the Moons of Mars is an anthology of new stories set in the Barsoom universe. The contributors include such top-notch writers as Peter S. Beagle, Joe R. Lansdale, Theodora Goss, Tobias S. Buckell, Austin Grossman, and Garth Nix, among others. It's marketed as a book for young readers, but I think adults will enjoy it just as much, particularly adults like me, who grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs.

"Coming of Age on Barsoom" stands as a counterpoint to the John Carter books. From the point of view of one of John Carter's adversaries, it prompts us to wonder why we ever considered John Carter the hero of those stories, when to the Martian natives, especially the green-skinned natives, he was a conquering (and condescending) foreigner. The story is quite thought-provoking.

More importantly, like all of Catherynne Valente's work, it is beautifully written. After a brief introduction styled in the manner of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we go to the first-person narrative of Falm Rojut, Jeddak of Hanar Su, which is written in the poetic style we expect from Valente. Valente's eloquent language gives us a new perspective not only on Burroughs' Martian universe, but on life in general. Here, for instance, is a passage about Falm Rojut emerging from his egg as a child, which resonated perfectly with me, as a parent of a rebellious teenaged human:

They call to us, the mothers and fathers, they say: Be my child. Be my future. Battle me with your laughter and pinching and sneaking out to hunt the banth when you are not nearly ready, fight me with your every breath, your every kiss, while I struggle to make you grown and you struggle to die as quickly as possible, and then when I am grown old take my metal and my name and go on while I recede.

Catherynne M. Valente is a treasure to the science fiction and fantasy genre. Here's hoping she writes as much as Edgar Rice Burroughs did.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Lost Canyon of the Dead by Brian Keene

Two words: zombie dinosaur.

Our first ever zombie dinosaur story recommendation of the week is "Lost Canyon of the Dead" by Brian Keene, from the anthology The Living Dead 2, edited by John Joseph Adams. Even without the zombie dinosaur, I would recommend "Lost Canyon of the Dead" for its terrific voice, simultaneously funny and frightening and nostalgic for the Old West, right from the opening lines:

The desert smelled like dead folks.

The sun hung over our heads, fat and swollen like that Polish whore back in Red Creek. It made me sweat, just like she had. It felt like we were breathing soup. The heat made the stench worse. Our dirty handkerchiefs, crusted with sand and blood, were useless. They stank almost as bad as the desert. Course, it wasn't the desert that stank. It was the things chasing us.

We'd been fleeing through the desert for days. None of us had a clue where we were. Leppo knew the terrain and had acted as our guide, but he died of heatstroke on the second day, and we shot him in the head before he got back up again.

Zombie fiction is all the rage right now, and in "Lost Canyon of the Dead," Brian Keene does it awfully well.

The Living Dead 2 is John Joseph Adams' second big zombie anthology, which might have been overkill except that this volume has a different focus. The first Living Dead was a reprint anthology, collecting Adams' favorite zombie tales from over the years. The Living Dead 2 is predominantly comprised of original fiction, and even the reprints are mostly from the last two years. So this book is a great way to sample some of today's best zombie stories, written at the height of the fad.

The past decade has seen Brian Keene emerge as one of the top names of horror fiction. He has made a closet industry of zombie stories, with a trio of zombie novels beginning with Stoker Award-winning first novel The Rising, stories in no fewer than five recent zombie anthologies, and The Last Zombie comics. Collectors out there may want to grab a copy of his latest book, A Gathering of Crows, since it was published by Leisure Books just before Leisure killed its mass-market line, so copies may soon become scarce.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky by John Langan

The story recommendation of the week is "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" by John Langan, an original novella from the vampire anthology By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams.

By Blood We Live is mostly a reprint anthology, with just two original pieces, but they are two good ones, "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" and "Foxtrot at High Noon" by popular Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. While the other tales are reprints, they come from a remarkable array of talented authors and John Joseph Adams has drawn from quite diverse sources. (I had only read one of the 33 stories before, Stephen King's "One for the Road.") Themed anthologies can sometimes become tiresome but -- as he did in his anthologies Seeds of Change, Wastelands, The Living Dead, and Federations -- Adams avoids that pitfall by his knack for combining excellent stories with varied approaches to the theme.

"The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" is a great example, putting a memorable spin on the vampire legend. A group of American veterans first encountered the creature at the heart of the story while in the midst of combat in Iraq, and have since been plagued by a strange telepathic connection with it. The thing drinks blood and has the other key traits of vampires, but oddly inverted or distorted, for example it can only emerge in daylight and the soldiers believe it sleeps in an orbital chrysalis.

The best horror fiction creates a sense of dread from everyday sights and sounds. By having his monster appear out of an open sky and return to a lair above our heads, Langan manages to make the sky itself a source of dread:

Davis had stared at the sky before--who has not?--but, helpless on his back, his spine a length of molten steel, his ears full of Manfred whimpering that he was gonna die, oh sweet Jesus, he was gonna fucking die, the lieutenant talking over him, insisting no he wasn't, he was gonna be fine, it was just a little paper cut, the washed blue bowl overhead seemed less sheltering canopy and more endless depth, a gullet over which he had the sickening sensation of dangling. As Manfred's cries diminished and the lieutenant told--ordered him to stay with him, Davis flailed his arms at the ground to either side of him in an effort to grip onto an anchor, something that would keep him from hurtling into that blue abyss.

John Langan's first novel House of Windows is forthcoming from Night Shade Books, and his collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was a Stoker Award nominee this year. Look for "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" on horror award shortlists next year.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor

My story recommendation for this week is "Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor, a short story in the original anthology Seeds of Change edited by John Joseph Adams. ("Spider the Artist" appears under the name Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, but the author has recently divorced and now prefers to go by her maiden name.)

Seeds of Change is an original anthology of socially-oriented science fiction. Most of the nine stories are by familiar authors, including Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, Mark Budz, and K.D. Wentworth. But some of the strongest pieces in the book are by authors whom you may not know, but I suspect soon will: Nnedi Okorafor, Ted Kosmatka, Blake Charlton, and Jeremiah Tolbert.

Nnedi Okorafor has generated an impressive body of work in the last five years, yet has flown under the radar of many genre readers because both of her novels were targeted at young adults. Okorafor is American, but her parents immigrated from Nigeria, and her work strongly reflects that heritage.

"Spider the Artist" is set in near-future Nigeria, where eight-legged mechanical "Zombies" roam the country's oil pipelines. The Zombies are designed to protect the flow of oil from thieves and terrorists, but they will just as gleefully kill civilians who wander too close to a pipeline -- a great metaphor for how Nigeria's substantial oil wealth has only been a curse for most of its people.

In despair from her abusive husband, our first-person protagonist goes to the pipeline to play her guitar, and comes to form a bizarre bond with one of the Zombies, which she nicknames Udide Okwanka (Spider the Artist). As Udide's interest in music exemplifies, the Zombies are growing independent, a development that may be encouraging or dangerous.

"Spider the Artist" is a beautifully told story by an author who clearly has much to say.