"Atheism and Flight" by Dominica Phetteplace :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

So I've been homebound for a while, recovering from a spot of surgery, and taking the chance to catch up on some of the recently published short fiction in the field. Which is to say, Story Recommendation of the Week is officially a thing again!

My first 2016 Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Atheism and Flight," a novelette by Dominica Phetteplace, from the January 2016 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

In the near future, our first-person protagonist Bos is despondent over the loss of an arm in an accident. He moves in with his best friend Jimeo and his girlfriend Cleo, who soon moves out. ("I felt like a child of divorce.") Bos determines he's not merely going to overcome his injury, he is going to transcend it.

He begins to plan joining up with a group of mystical canyon-leaping daredevils. His body seems to share his fierce ambitions, as before long his arm begins to regenerate.

This is a nicely constructed piece, with an elegant style and wonderful interactions between the characters throughout. I love how Bos's search for transcendence plays out through the end of the piece.

I confess I don't know much about Dominica Phetteplace, other than she is a Clarion grad, whose fiction has been popping up in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Flytrap, and other places in the past five years. Here's looking forward to much more of her work!

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 :: Ray of Light by Brad R. Torgersen

An alarming trend over the past few years has been the dismal tone of most new science fiction. Gene Roddenberry credited the success of Star Trek to the fact that it offered viewers hope for the future. While there is plenty of excellent new science fiction today, not much of it is very hopeful. It's as if a few years' economic slowdown has defeated our collective abilities to imagine a better future.

My story recommendation of the week is for "Ray of Light" by Brad R. Torgersen, from the December 2011 issue of Analog (cover art by Bob Eggleton), which lives up to its title, a ray of light in the gloominess of 21st Century science fiction.

"Ray of Light" starts out well within the parameters of the dark style currently in vogue. The story is set some twenty years after aliens entered our solar system and scattered a cloud of small mirrors inside the Earth's orbit, depriving our world of most of the sun's light. Max Leighton and his teenage daughter Jenna are two of the small group of remaining humans, struggling to survive at the bottom of the frozen oceans. Early on, Max flashes back to when Jenna was four and asked why they didn't live where it's dry and sunny like the characters on Chloe and Joey, her favorite pre-catastophe kids' show:

People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to survive without the Sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.

And we did, after a fashion.

I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

She grew very sad, a tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

"I don't want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore," she said softly.

Max and the other adults in this deep-water society work hard to keep everyone alive, but in their hearts they have lost hope for the future. Jenna and her young friends will need to teach them (and us) a lesson about maintaining the determination to reach for a better tomorrow. It makes for a moving reading experience.

I had the pleasure of meeting Brad Torgersen at the Writers of the Future workshop -- he was a winner the year before with his excellent story "Exanastasis," which you can find in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVI. Brad is a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, and looked sharp in his dress uniform at the WOTF ceremony. Since winning WOTF, he has become a regular in Analog. His story "Outbound" was the AnLab winner as Analog readers' favorite novelette of 2010, and I certainly won't be surprised if "Ray of Light" makes him a repeat winner.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson

My story recommendation of the week is for "In Apprehension, How Like a God" by R.P.L. Johnson, the third SROTW I'm permitting myself from Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVII. The gorgeous illustration is by Dustin Panzino, reproduced here with his kind permission.

"In Apprehension, How Like a God" was this year's WOTF Gold Award winner, and a most worthy champion. (But not necessarily the only story that would have been worthy -- I'm glad I didn't have to vote on that.)

The story is set in a future where the internet has been superseded by the aethernet, which allows everyone to see images and information superimposed over everything around us using the Higgs field, a quantum field permeating the universe. (The Higgs field is a real physics concept, but not yet known to have all the properties described in this story.) Our protagonist, Detective Conroy, must investigate a murder at the monastic "Academy" in Uganda, home of the AI "nodes" that superimpose all that information onto the Higgs field. Conroy soon learns that the Academy is working on improving the nodes so they can "read" the Higgs field as well as "write" onto it:

Now I was the one feeling sick. "You're describing a machine that's as close to omniscient as makes no difference."

"Omniscient," the Arch-Mage weighed the ancient word. "I suppose so, within certain practical parameters of storage, processing capacity and power consumption. But in any case the project is at an early stage."

Hopefully it's not giving too much away to say that the murder relates to someone's attempt to gain control of the aethernet, control that would give you the power to change the reality being experienced by anyone you choose. The savvy reader can guess that Detective Conroy will be subject to such a reality shift, which not only makes his job difficult, but also proves an effective metaphor for his personal turmoil since the death of his daughter.

"In Apprehension, How Like a God" (the title is from Hamlet) is a great example of effective post-cyberpunk science fiction. It has all the interesting techy speculations of a future where we simultaneously co-inhabit the real world and a consensually visualized virtual world. But at the same time it is a strong story on an emotional level, with none of the coldness or smartassery that pervaded much of the original cyberpunk subgenre.

In addition to Writers of the Future XXVII, Richard Johnson has appeared at AlienSkin Magazine -- you can find that story here -- and he has another story forthcoming at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, with hopefully many more to follow.

Let me conclude by emphasizing one more time, all of the WOTF27 winners are excellent. For purposes of SROTW, I've limited myself to three stories that especially spoke to me personally, but another reader might as easily have three different favorites. I read quite a bit of short fiction, and I keep a running list of my favorites of the year. So far I've read well over 100 pieces of short fiction published in 2011, and most of the WOTF27 winners are currently on either my top ten novelette list or my top ten short story list. That's some high-quality writing, and I am proud to be in a table of contents with every one of the other winners.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Medic! by Adam Perin

My story recommendation of the week is for "Medic!" by Adam Perin, from Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVII, the second of the three SROTW's I'm permitting myself to give to fellow WOTF27 winners (even though all the other winners are deserving). The illustration is by Gregory J. Gunther, reproduced here with his kind permission.

While all the Writers of the Future winners are exceptional in different ways, to me "Medic!" is the single most successful WOTF27 winner at creating a distinctive voice. The first-person narrative perfectly conveys the main character's brusque but conflicted personality, right from the opening lines:

Some guys go insane from being buried alive. I always get drowsy.

Our protagonist Sergeant Silk is a convict who was paroled because his skills as a medic were desperately needed in a bloody interplanetary war. He can go home to his fiancée if he survives long enough to save 1000 soldiers. He's currently at 995.

Adam Perin does a nice job of understandably presenting a far-future medic's difficult job. More importantly, "Medic! is a superb character study. Sergeant Silk is skilled at his work, he takes no shit from anyone rank be damned, and he is barely holding a lid on his tumultuous emotions. His story makes for gripping reading.

After sampling a host of different professions (including emergency medical technician), Adam Perin is now a diplomat with the U.S. State Department. "Medic!" is his first professional fiction sale. We'll let him retire when he gets to 1000.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman

Nobody who reads this blog needs to be told that Neil Gaiman is a pretty fair writer, but just in case anyone missed this one, the Story Recommendation of the Week is for "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" by Neil Gaiman, from the original anthology Stories, edited by Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.

The first-person narrator of "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is a very small but very dangerous man. He hires Calum MacInnes as a guide to take him to a mysterious cave in the black mountains on the Misty Isle, where a fabulous treasure awaits them. They converse on the journey, in beautifully written passages like this:

I thought about it. "Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take."

Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, "You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone on the mountainside."

In the course of their conversations, we learn the two have reasons to fear and despise each other. Their past, and the nature of the treasure they seek, will lead them to some terrible choices.

Gaiman coedited Stories, an anthology designed to highlight the storytelling talents of a wide variety of authors from different genres. It includes a number of excellent writers, but none of them could hope to surpass the storytelling skills of Gaiman himself.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Crawlspace by Stephen Graham Jones

Putting together my Hugo ballot reminded me there are several top-notch stories from 2010 for which I neglected to do a Story Recommendation of the Week. We will begin to rectify that with "Crawlspace" by Stephen Graham Jones, an original story from his 2010 collection The Ones That Got Away, published by Prime Books.

"Crawlspace" is the first-person narrative of Gabriel, a working-class fella whose best friend insists his infant son is telepathic -- the kid cries every time the friend reads a horror novel. It sounds silly enough that Gabriel would dismiss it, except he had some telepathic tendencies himself as a child, and by the way Gabriel has been sleeping with his friend's wife. He really, really does not want to think through the implications.

This is the story of a man who has painted himself into a little corner of hell. His descent into paranoia and unbearable guilt makes for an emotionally harrowing reading experience.

Perhaps best known for his novel Demon Theory, Stephen Graham Jones (not to be confused with anthologist Stephen Jones) combines an off-beat sensibility with a down-home yet hardly simple writing style, somewhat similar to Joe Lansdale. Jones has been a nominee for the International Horror Guild Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and The Ones That Got Away is currently up for the Stoker Award. Even so, I suspect there are many more readers out there, both genre and mainstream, who would enjoy his work if only they gave it a try.

Aaron's 2011 Hugo Recommendations :: Best Novelette

Here are my nominations for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, along with some near-misses.

MY FIVE FAVORITE NOVELETTES OF 2010:
Neil Gaiman, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains (Stories)
Stephen Graham Jones, Crawlspace (The Ones That Got Away)
Geoffrey A. Landis, Marya and the Pirate (Asimov's, Jan '10)
Jason Sanford, A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story (Tales of the Unanticipated #30)
Eric James Stone, That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made (Analog, Sept '10)

OTHER RECOMMENDED NOVELETTES:
Joe Abercrombie, The Fool Jobs (Swords & Dark Magic)
Kage Baker, The Bohemian Astrobleme (Subterranean, Win '10)
Aliette de Bodard, The Jaguar House, in Shadow (Asimov's, July '10)
Aliette de Bodard, The Wind-Blown Man (Asimov's, Feb '10)
Jim Hawkins, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Matter (Interzone, July-Aug '10)
Robert Reed, The Long Retreat (F&SF, Jan-Feb '10)
Sarah Totton, A Sip from the Cup of Enlightenment (Animythical Tales)

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: "I Was Nearly Your Mother" by Ian Creasey

My story recommendation of the week is for "I Was Nearly Your Mother" by Ian Creasey, from the March 2011 issue of Asimov's.

Here is a 10,000-word story in which the main character never much does anything but talk, yet I found it fascinating reading. The protagonist of "I Was Nearly Your Mother" is Marian, a teenage girl living with her grandparents, because her mother died four years earlier and her father is in prison. She has come through these trying circumstances with admirable composure, but there are hints that her mental state remains fragile.

Then arrives on her doorstep an unfamiliar version of her late mother. This woman (who refers to herself as Della) has traveled from an alternate universe, where she aborted her pregnancy then came to regret the decision. Della assumes that Marian will instantly accept her as her lost mother, even though it is obvious from her behavior that she knows nothing at all about parenting, but of course Marian's reactions are far more complicated than that.

Marian is a flawed character and her para-Mother is deeply flawed (she pays for her alternate universe excursions through multiversal drug deals), but Creasey presents their flaws with sympathy. For instance, Marian is well on her way to an eating disorder, but Creasey shows this as a believable manifestation of her distrust of a world that has betrayed her: "She hated being told that weight didn't matter, when it so obviously did. It was just another way that adults lied, pretending the world was different, pretending that the fake surfaces didn't eclipse anything real that might lie underneath."

Creasey nicely develops alternate universes as a metaphor for how we all have choices to regret, we've all strayed from the path that would have worked out best for us:

Marian thought about the world Della came from, just one of an infinite range of worlds where things had happened differently -- mostly gone wrong in various ways. It felt like there was one real universe, a shining summit where everything happened as it should: a needle-thin pinnacle, surrounded by endless swampy lowlands full of bad decisions, unlucky accidents, and damaged people. As you slogged through the mire, could you clamber up to some better state? But how, when you couldn't see the landscape of probability? You'd find yourself flailing inevitably downward to your doom, confronted with far more wrong options than right. And everyone else in the world plummeted down too, dragging you with them. Even if you did the right thing, you had no control over other people's mistakes, their car crashes and jail sentences. Every time you slept, the world fell a little further during the night.

Even if we could travel between universes, that wouldn't relieve the need to come to terms with our own mistakes or the mistakes of those around us.

Clearly a new writer to watch, in the past five years Ian Creasey has had ten stories in Asimov's -- including "Erosion," which was chosen for multiple year's best collections for 2009 -- and has appeared in other top-notch magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Postscripts.

To my tastes, Asimov's has been a bit uneven for the past few years, but the March 2011 issue is excellent, reaffirming the magazine's position as the premier source of short fiction in the field. I'll recommend another story from the March issue next week.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Beauty Belongs to the Flowers by Matthew Sanborn Smith

My story recommendation of the week (only the third one since December, but "Story Recommendation of the Month" would sound stupid) goes to Beauty Belongs to the Flowers by Matthew Sanborn Smith, posted in January at Tor.com.

Most of the stories I recommend here grab me from the opening line, and often I start composing an SROTW post in my head halfway into the story. It didn't happen that way with "Beauty Belongs to the Flowers." I found the piece well-written from the outset and Smith's future Nagasaki nicely imagined. But the story of a young woman's unrequited love did not grab me at first. I felt the love story could as easily have been set in the present day or even Victorian England; it seemed to me disconnected from the futuristic setting.

Sometimes it's nice to be completely, gobsmackingly wrong.

By the end of the tale, Miho's love story proves wonderfully revealing of this all-too plausible future Nagasaki. In this future, young people are so tied into the "feeds" to the video strips over their eyes that our protagonist Miho transmits a photo of someone she just met at a party to a friend, rather than simply pointing him out. Smith conveys the feel of this future through some wonderful imagery, such as an advertisement overlay to Miho's feed, by which a huge version of Aimi, the anime-dream-girl robot, seems to be emerging from the bay like Godzilla.

This society values the artificial above the natural, so Miho only feels sad for the misguided old man who tells her a real flower is more beautiful than a man-made one. Naturally then, when the narcissistic young man Miho loves falls instead for a shiny new Aimi model, it doesn't occur to Miho to tell him to grow up. Instead, she wonders how she can be more like a robot. Her solution to the problem is memorably disturbing.

I urge you to check out "Beauty Belongs to the Flowers," and if it doesn't grab you at first, keep going -- you'll be glad you did.

The only bad thing about "Beauty Belongs to the Flowers" is it led me to Smith's blog, where I read that he named his protagonist after the lead singer of Cibo Matto, and now I will have "Know Your Chicken" bouncing through my head for the rest of the day. Oh, well, small price!

I am glad to see Tor.com publishing more fiction by promising new authors, rather than just promoting its existing corps of novelists. Matthew Sanborn Smith's fiction has appeared at ChiZine and GUD, among other publications. He's also big into podcasts, at StarShipSofa and his own Beware The Hairy Mango. He has vowed to write nearly 900 more stories in the next ten years, so we will either be seeing much more of him or he will soon be institutionalized.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone

My story recommendation for the week is "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone, from the September 2010 issue of Analog. "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" takes a strong SFnal premise and uses it as the framework for an interesting moral dilemma.

Eric James Stone has become a regular in Analog in the past five years, and has appeared in many other publications, such as Apex, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Jim Baen's Universe. As an aside, he is the only author I am aware of to appear in two different volumes of the annual Writers of the Future anthology. I presume he was a "published finalist" one year, before becoming a full-fledged winner the next year. (The intricacies of the WOTF contest are fascinating to me at the moment, as I am currently a finalist myself.)

Analog (once known as Astounding) is the old gray lady of science fiction magazines. I confess that for years it's been my least favorite of the major magazines, but a couple more tales like "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" could change that in a hurry.

The setting of "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is the interior of the sun, which is inhabited by "swales" or "solcetaceans," huge plasma creatures who can harness solar energy to create interstellar portals. Harry Malan is sent to Sol Central Station for business——as the site of the portals, the sun naturally becomes a center of commerce——but as a Mormon it also falls to him to serve as president of the local LDS branch, most of whose members are converted swales. (This neatly explains why Harry is on the station and in contact with the swales even though he knows little about them, prompting others to lecture him without it being too obvious an infodump.) Harry's presence is an irritant to attractive scientist Juanita Merced, who disapproves of the Mormons' interference with the solcetaceans.

Harry is contacted by a swale member, Neuter Kimball (literally a neuter, one of the swales' three genders), who fears it has sinned by being forced into sex by another swale. Harry learns that the swales have no laws or taboos against rape, since sex is always physically pleasurable for them and cannot lead to unwanted pregnancy. He determines to persuade Leviathan, the largest and most influential of the swales, to prohibit forced sexual activity. Dr. Merced believes this a fool's mission, but is excited at the opportunity for close inspection of the 38-kilometer Leviathan.

At first I found it difficult to credit that a human religion could have much appeal to aliens of such awesome size and power, but Stone reveals why some of the relatively weak among them are drawn to Mormonism, when Harry relates his initial conversation with Leviathan to Neuter Kimball:

"She told me she is the first and greatest of all swales. Isn't that true?" I asked, suddenly worried that I'd been taken in by a swale con artist.

"She told you?" Neuter Kimball said. "We are not supposed to talk of it to humans, but if she has revealed herself as a god to you, then that is her choice."

"A god? Leviathan is not a god. She's just . . ." I stopped. What was I going to say: an ancient immortal being who created an entire race of intelligent beings? If that didn't fit the definition of a god, it was pretty close. "Neuter Kimball, if you believe Leviathan to be a god, why did you join the Church?"

"Because I do not want her as my god."

Harry's efforts to persuade the swales to adopt an aspect of human morality leads him and Dr. Merced on a fascinating and entertaining journey. Typical of Analog, the characterization does not have great depth, but Stone gives the two main characters enough personality for some amusing banter, and he handles the devout Mormon businessman and the atheist scientist with equal respect. This story should work for readers of any religious background.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story by Jason Sanford

We return to Issue #30 of Tales of the Unanticipated for another story recommendation of the week, Jason Sanford's "A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story."

Jason Sanford (not to be confused with Jason Stoddard, a previous SROTW recipient) is well known to Interzone readers, as he has published five stories there in the past three years with two more forthcoming, and I think he will soon be familiar to all genre readers. I've had an eye out for his work since reading his Nebula-nominated "Sublimation Angels," a terrifically inventive far-future tale. "A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story" is a contemporary fantasy, just as good as "Sublimation Angels," but even more impressive for its emotional, lyrical style.

"A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story" is a new take on the changeling story. A Scottish fairy (relocated to Chicago) whose beloved has died places her heart in the body of a dying infant girl human. He monitors her growth and tries to help the girl's felon mother but not much works out quite the way he intends. It is a bit hard to credit that some things would come together quite so neatly as they do in the story, but it is all told with such charm that it works. I highly recommend "A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story." It will amply reward your effort to track down this issue of Tales of the Unanticipated.

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 :: The Bohemian Astrobleme by Kage Baker

This week's story recommendation is a somber occasion. My recommendation is "The Bohemian Astrobleme" by Kage Baker, who passed away this week at the age of only 57.

"The Bohemian Astrobleme" is a delightful steampunk novelette from the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean Online, the quarterly e-zine from excellent small publisher Subterranean Press, which routinely prints short fiction from some of the top names in the genre.

Kage Baker is best known for her "Company" time travel stories, but she has written in many styles. "The Bohemian Astrobleme" is lighthearted steampunk, set in the same universe as her recent novella The Women of Nell Gwynne's (which obliquely ties into the Company sequence), with an appearance by the heroine of that tale, the intelligent and admirable prostitute Lady Beatrice.

In "The Bohemian Astrobleme," the Gentlemen's Speculative Society discovers a material with strange and useful properties, possibly of extraterrestrial origin. Two of its members, along with a less-than-trusty assistant, set off from England to find more of the material, making use of a remarkable array of equipment most of us did not realize was available in the Victorian era. They proceed into Eastern Europe for the hunt, which ends up turning on an amusing but convincing point of chemistry. "The Bohemian Astrobleme" makes for highly entertaining reading, and what a shame it is we cannot look forward to much more of the same from Baker in the future.

Incidentally, I do not intend to turn the Story Recommendation of the Week into an obituary column (the "obit" effect contributed to the current hiatus of the Book of the Week, which became depressing), but by coincidence I came across "The Bohemian Astrobleme" just before Baker's death, and what better way to honor the memory of a departed author than by enjoying her work?

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Marya and the Pirate by Geoffrey A. Landis

This week's story recommendation is "Marya and the Pirate" by Geoffrey A. Landis, a novelette from the January 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

Some readers complain that nobody publishes the kind of fun space adventure that was the bread and butter of science fiction in the 1950's. The trouble is that all those stories were published in the 1950's, and it is awfully difficult to write a story like that today that doesn't feel stale.

Geoffrey Landis pulls it off in "Mary and the Pirate." Like a Murray Leinster story of old, it begins with a space pirate closing in on a transport ship carrying a very valuable cargo into Earth orbit. Later, the pirate and his captive face a problem of inexorable celestial mechanics, reminiscent of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations." But Landis manages to add enough new twists and details and modern sensibility to keep it all fresh, and not just a pastiche of old-style skiffy.

Among his many awards, Geoffrey A. Landis has garnered two Hugos and a Nebula. His output has declined in quantity the past few years, but not at all in quality.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Placa del Fuego by Tobias S. Buckell

Inspired by Lev Grossman's controversial article denouncing plot-free modernist fiction, the story recommendation for the week is a very entertaining planetary adventure, Placa del Fuego by Tobias S. Buckell, from the July 2009 issue of Clarkesworld.

Set on the same harsh world as Buckell's novel Sly Mongoose, "Placa del Fuego" follows young pickpocket Tiago as he confronts in quick succession a powerful android, a resourceful female crime overlord, and a vicious alien beast. Typical of Buckell's fiction, the story is fast-paced and high-octane, yet also slips in some food for thought. In particular, "Placa del Fuego" raises the question whether the idea of free will has any meaning to someone as downtrodden as Tiago.

Tobias S. Buckell's related novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose were all well received, but "Placa del Fuego" demonstrates that his style also works well at shorter lengths. You can find most of his short fiction to date in Tides from the New Worlds from Wyrm Publishing.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Curandero and the Swede by Daniel Abraham

My story recommendation for the week, and possibly for the month since I'm off my pace recently and I don't much expect to read a better story this month anyway, is Daniel Abraham's "The Curandero and the Swede: A Tale from the 1001 American Nights", a novelette from the March issue of F&SF.

"The Curandero and the Swede" begins with a young man nervously introducing his Yankee fiancée to his traditional Southern family, but proceeds from there into a series of nested yarns retold by his eccentric uncle. The stories are each enjoyable independently, but blend together to make some fascinating points about the American experience and about the importance of storytelling.

With his Long Price Quartet -- the final volume of which, The Price of Spring, is just out -- Daniel Abraham has emerged as one of the strongest voices of 21st Century SF/F. His last short piece, "The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics," was a Hugo nominee, and "The Curandero and the Swede" is every bit as good, if not even better.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky

My story recommendation of the week is for "Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky, (illustration by Sam Weber) published on-line at Tor.com.

In our world, it is usually futile for women to try to change the basic nature of the men in their lives. But what if they could? In "Eros, Philia, Agape," Adriana purchases a male robot whose consciousness is programmed to shift to create a personality that best meets Adriana's desires. The program works very well. Despite her emotional scars from an abusive childhood, Adriana soon falls in love with, emancipates, marries, and begins a family with her ideal man.

It is no surprise that things don't turn out quite as Adriana intends, yet the flow of the story is subtle. Swirsky is not using her science fictional set-up to hammer home any particular message; rather, she is giving us a new framework to consider universal issues about identity and love and marriage and family and parenting.

This is a story Isaac Asimov might have written, if only he had been an amazing prose stylist. "Eros, Philia, Agape" is beautifully written throughout (once you're past the slightly pretentious title anyway) and I strongly recommend it.

I first encountered Rachel Swirsky with her powerful story "The Debt of the Innocent" in Glorifying Terrorism. She has only been publishing fiction for some three years, but in that time has appeared in Weird Tales, Interzone, Subterranean and Fantasy among other publications, and has already built up a solid body of work. Check her out!

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.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Gambler by Paolo Bacigalupi

My story recommendation for this week is "The Gambler," a novelette by Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo is the first author to garner two of my weekly story recommendations, which is fitting, since in my view no one today is writing better short fiction. (I suspect the two novels he has been working on are great as well, but he hasn't shared them yet.)

You can find "The Gambler" in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders (cover art by John Picacio). Just out from Pyr Books, Fast Forward 2 contains fourteen tales by some of the leading names in science fiction today, including Ian McDonald, Cory Doctorow, Mike Resnick, and Nancy Kress. As I wrote in my review of Fast Forward 1, the resurgence of the unthemed original anthology series is very encouraging for the SF/F field, in light of the major magazines' declining circulations. In addition to the Fast Forward series, there is strong work in the Eclipse anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan and in the ongoing The Solaris Book(s) of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann. But Fast Forward is the best of the lot, in no small part because it has Paolo Bacigalupi.

Paolo's work is often praised for taking an unblinking look at important social and political issues. This is true, but it understates what he achieves in his fiction. First and foremost, Paolo writes beautifully crafted stories. He gets you to care about his characters and what happens to them. That is why his stories' messages are effective.

"The Gambler" is set in a near-future newsroom, when reporting is dominated by the ever-present need to draw net traffic, depicted in a great graphic representation called the "maelstrom." Our main character Ong, a political refugee from Laos, wants to investigate serious issues, but there is little room for such stories alongside the latest celebrity sex scandal. This is meaningful social commentary cleverly presented, but what makes the story work is that Bacigalupi gets you into Ong's skin early on:

Sometimes, when I wake in the night to the swish and honk of Los Angeles traffic, the confusing polyglot of dozens of countries and cultures all pressed together, in the American melting pot, I stand at my window and look down a boulevard full of red lights, where it is not safe to walk alone at night, and yet everyone obeys the traffic signals. I look down on the brash and noisy Americans in their many hues, and remember my parents: my father who cared too much to let me live under the self-declared monarchy, and my mother who would not let me die as a consequence. I lean against the window and cry with relief and loss.

Every week I go to temple and pray for them, light incense and make a triple bow to Buddha, Damma, and Sangha, and pray that they may have a good rebirth, and then I step into the light and noise and vibrancy of America.

It is not Ong's parents who need a good rebirth. Soon Ong will receive a huge career break. Whether he can take advantage of it makes for a terrific story, because you care about his fate.

All of which is not meant to minimize the importance of the issues Bacigalupi addresses in his fiction. Indeed, one reading of "The Gambler" is that Ong is a stand-in for Paolo himself, who no doubt has also been told that "no one wants to read about how the world's going to shit." Paolo writes about the world going to shit, but believe me, you want to read it.