Fourteenth Annual Year's Best Science Fiction

Edited by Gardner Dozois

Sometimes I'm a very slow learner. Last year when I bought the Fourteenth Annual Year's Best Science Fiction the first story I read was Robert Reed's novella Chrysalis because Reed is one of my favorite writers of short SF. Alas, the story was disappointing, in part because of my high expectations for it as well as for weaknesses in the story itself.

So recently I bought the Fifteenth Annual Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois and, after reading Dozois' usual fine 50 page Summation, I immediately turned to Robert Reed's novella Marrow. This story actually shares the same background as Chrysalis and both stories share similarities with The Remoras, one of my very favorite Reed stories, in that all three stories are set on starships in the midst of millenia-long journeys across the entire Milky Way and are populated by extremely long-lived beings of many races.

The story's premise employs Robert Reed's familiarity with some very old and very traditional science fiction tropes. The starship is actually a hollowed out Jupiter-sized planet that was turned into a starship by a mysterious ancient race of Builders which then abandoned the planet and vanished. It was discovered by humans who revitalized it and proceeded to hitch a ride. While I've grown tired of mysterious old races who leave fascinating artifacts behind, I was willing to suspend my slight boredom at the premise since it seemed relatively harmless table-setting.

In Marrow the starship's crewmembers discover that the core of the planet is actually a planet itself called Marrow. A group of them are sent to explore the core and end up trapped by severe seismic activity. The novella shares several similarities with Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama in that much of it is exploration of the planet-in-a-starship. It also shares a similarity with Kim Stanley Robinson's A Short, Sharp Shock mainly by the fact that Reed, while a fine writer, is not particularly comfortable with action scenes. So the novella is somewhat choppy, having a three year gap detailing a group of crewmembers' wanderings across the surface of the planet, followed immediately by an eighty year gap as they settle down waiting for a rescue which seems doomed never to come.

So the trapped explorers settle down and breed, but their children form a strange cult in which they believe they are the heirs to the original Builders who have been selected for some mysterious purpose. This sets them at odds with the original crewmembers which leads to a somewhat strange climax in which 2 crewmembers and 2 offspring escape to the ship itself only to learn that the entire expedition to Marrow had been a hoax developed by one crewmember as part of an elaborate mutiny.

The resolution of the mutiny is an action sequence that doesn't quite come off, and which somewhat trivializes the rest of the story. But overall it is still a worthwhile story, although I wish some of those enormous gaps had been filled in by Reed to alleviate the story's choppy, incomplete effect. In a Locus interview Reed said he intends expanding Marrow to a novel. I hope his intend is to fill in the gaps rather than carry it further, because this is one novella which would be considerably improved with novelization if done the proper way.

Next I read the Hugo and Nebula nominee We Will Drink A Fish Together... by Bill Johnson, a story with a strange Jekyll/Hyde feel to it. The basic story is interesting enough: Earth has been contacted by an alien race which sends an ambassador to negotiate with the U.S. government. The story is told from the point of view of the ambassador's human bodyguard who resigns from his government job to attend the funeral of the head of his family in a small town in the hills of the Pacific Northwest from which he hails. Meanwhile, the ambassador is forced to flee would-be assassins of another alien race so he leaves Washington and his mother ship and goes to the Pacific Northwest where he encounters -- you guessed it! -- the same bodyguard.

What follows is a traditional SF adventure about the bodyguard's efforts to protect the ambassador while attending the funeral, all of which builds up to a climax wherein the would-be alien assassin finds the ambassador and attempts to kill him. It's the type of traditional SF pulp adventure that filled the pages of Astounding in the 1950s.

However -- and this is a fairly important point -- We Will Drink A Fish Together... is not a pulp adventure story at all. It is intended to be a serious, literary story built around a traditional genre plot. There's nothing wrong with that intent. Samuel R. Delany and Greg Benford have done similar things for decades with varying degrees of success. But it means Johnson's story must be judged more harshly than it would otherwise, since a story whose goals are higher is automatically answerable to a higher authority: does it qualify as literature?

Unfortunately -- and all those people who voted the story onto the Hugo and Nebula ballots might disagree with me -- I think the story fails as literature. If the story had been written by, say, Michael Bishop, it might have succeeded because Bishop understands that what makes successful literature is a true understanding of the human heart (or at least a valid attempt to understand it). Johnson, on the other hand, seems to feel literature is primarily, or at least partially, a gathering of cliches.

Take the title for example. That in itself is fairly pretentious and, I assumed, mostly symbolic. But soon after the hero arrived back home in rural heaven -- and it was made to seem heavenly indeed compared to the outside world where unwanted flatlanders live -- he was offered a fairly important ceremonial drink which was a form of alcohol brewed in a bottle containing the carcass of a fish. The ceremony was almost, but not quite, affective, until Johnson enjoyed it so much that at the end of the story all the main characters sat around "drinking fish". This was definitely a case of overkill since what seemed sacred at first became downright trivial the second time around.

And the story was full of similar tidbits, all obviously intended to give the story the feel of literature. Where one or two might have been effective, the overall effect of one piled on top of another was so numbing as to be totally ineffective: the kindly hill people united in a common bond where one member's word was totally sufficient for everybody else; the hero's giving his word to the alien that he would care for him without quite accepting him as a member of his "line"; how easily the alien fits in with the hill people so that by story's end he was more accepted by them than any Earth-born flatlander could possibly be;

Perhaps most revealing of Johnson's idea of literature is "Indian" who used to be the best (wood) carver in this part of the state...magic used to flow out of his knife. Now he's got some bad arthritis and his fingers don't work so well. The magic still flows in him, but only in his mind. So he cuts the wood to remember, and he still sees the final carvings in his mind. That sounds moving enough, although combined with so many other similar moments it is slightly numbing. But now consider the story's climax: The alien killer has a weapon that can locate the ambassador right through the body of a car, so he quickly finds him and fires two supposedly-lethal shots at him. Fortunately, although we had no hint of it earlier, the ambassador is wearing some type of flak jacket that not only saves his life but leaves him totally unharmed only a few minutes later (even though after he was hit he lay motionless, half in the grave, half out, and when the bodyguard asked if he was still alive, the reply was, "He's breathing... not real regular, but he's breathing.").

So when the killer turns towards the bodyguard and prepares to blast him as well, the alien's head abruptly explodes after being shot by Indian carrying a scoped rifle. Indian? The same Indian whose arthritis was so bad he could only carve meaningless flakings of wood? Yep, same one. It's possible bad arthritis really has no effect on a person's ability to blow off another's head at a distance of several dozen feet, but that was jarring enough that it made me stop and think and actually flip the pages back to find out just how bad Indian's arthritis actually was!

Please don't think I hated We Will Drink A Fish Together... As a simple pulp adventure it was relatively successful. But it was Johnson's attempt to make it high art that failed. He tried to inject too many literary allusions while leaving too many holes in the story itself. Literature can only succeed when it successfully imitates true life. The less credible the story, the less chance it has of succeeding on a higher plane. And the more you think about the events in this story, the less credible it all appears until it is obviously all a setup rather than a realistic version of reality.

A story with a much simpler goal is James Patrick Kelly's Itsy Bitsy Spider. Its goal is to rouse the reader's emotions, particularly their feelings of sympathy for a 90 year old man whose reasoning powers are so far gone he lives in a nursing home with an artificial human servant. Except when his estranged daughter comes to visit him she recognizes the servant as an exact replica of her as a five year old girl! At first she experiences shock and anger, but spending several hours with her father and the girl gradually fill her with profound sadness, not only at her father's obvious need for the girl-doll, but also for what it she herself means to him.

Both Kelly's story and Michael Swanwick's The Wisdom of Old Earth are perfect examples of the quintessential short story: brief, concise, every moment in the story directed towards a single focus illustrating whatever point the author is striving to make. In Swanwick's case, it is an examination of hubris and where it may unwittingly lead somebody. The heroine is a human tour guide who has never lost a customer. Now she is in the employ of a posthuman whom she is anxious to impress that she herself is not as lowly as her fellow humans but stands intellectually on the boundary between human and posthuman. Until her client unwittingly puts her arrogance to shame, causing her to abruptly realize the enormity of her actions in trying to impress him. Two fine examples of outstanding writers at the top of their form.

I don't particularly like high-tech stories, which is why I abandoned Paul McAuley's thriller Second Skin and Nancy Kress' Steamship Soldier on the Information Front in the middle. I almost didn't read Greg Egan's Reasons to be Cheerful at all, because what stories I've read of his in the past were so drenched in technology they also bored me. But I decided to at least give this story a try, and I was glad I did. Although the story has a high tech rationale to it, it is really a story about happiness. A 12-year old boy has a brain tumor that has somehow activated some secretion in his brain that causes him to experience a constant state of euphoria. So all the while he was presumably dying, he was happy as he could possibly be. When the tumor is totally destroyed, so does his ability to experience happiness at all. 18 years of misery pass, during which his life is totally pointless, until a revolutionary operation repairs the happiness-producing portion of his brain. But with a difference: he is now capable of raising or lowering his happiness experienced at any time or by any stimulation at will! Imagine that: I currently enjoy science fiction, China, writing, and cooking/eating considerably. If I wished, I could immediately reduce my pleasure at all of those pursuits and arbitrarily replace them with a love of long-distance running, auto mechanics, origami, whatever I wish. And tomorrow replace them with other loves. What the protagonist does is get a job in a bookstore and await the appearance of a likely-looking female customer, then raises his happiness level so she deliberately becomes the love of his life!

A very interesting, thought-provoking story that I wish had been expanded a bit. It is rare that the premise of a story intrigues me such that I immediately want to sit down and write on the same topic myself, but I have that desire right now. If only I could turn down my pleasure level somewhat so I would not have to choose between desire and plagarism. :)