Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

25. “Snake Eyes” by Tom Maddox

When you let the US military mess with your mind, you don’t get it back so easily.

At the beginning of the story I felt like this was a Vietnam War metaphor. At the end I felt like it was the uncompleted opening to a novel. Although, I’ve trouble imagining where that could go without twisting away from the focus of the story so far.

Thinking about it, perhaps the reason this feels unsatisfactorily incomplete is the AI and minions promising our test protagonist subject great agonies, a need to endure some sort of baptism of fire before he can become fit for their purpose. And while he does try to kill himself, and fails, and thereby to have become what they wished to mould him into, and while we do mostly follow his perspective for this… I feel what we get is insufficiently internal. There is not enough sense of what he is going through to get closure on this arc. So I suppose in that sense I should regard this story as failed, or my reading of it was off.

Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

26. “The Gate of Ghosts” by Karen Joy Fowler

I approached this story warily. On the one hand, Karen Joy Fowler has a strong reputation among people whose opinions on sf I respect. On the other, the only story of hers I’d read previously, “The Lake Was Full Of Artificial Things” in the third of these anthologies, did nothing for me. And on a third hand - if I may be so bold - the nature of her reputation suggests “The Lake Was Full Of Artificial Things” could be representative of her work, so while she might be an excellent writer, she might also be one who doesn’t suit my taste.

So, reading this was a bit of mental tug-of-war between yes and no as I was a bit distracted by trying to form an opinion of the writer at the same time as the story.

What we have is a young family, white American woman, Chinese American man, and their toddler daughter. It seems like the mother is overprotective, but the daughter says there’s a special place she goes to, which no one else perceives or believes…

You know, I forgot to say this isn’t science fiction. Not something that bothers me, but I like to mention it because the title of the book says these are science fiction stories.

I had to take some time after reading to appreciate what went on here. Possibly it helped having people on IM to whom I could dump my thoughts immediately; the act of doing so prompted re-evaluation.

My immediate reaction was that this story is ambiguous in just the way I don’t like, when not only interpretation of events but even events themselves are unclear. Like with “Chance” earlier in this collection, I tend to feel that if something as basic as ‘what happened’ is indeterminate, the story may as well not be there (I tend to react similarly against stories which end in memory wiping such that for the characters effectively nothing happened).

Thinking about it a bit more I realised there is quite enough here for me to decide what this story is, to decipher it from within itself. Something I still don’t find to be true of “Chance”. “The Gate of Ghosts” as I see it is divided into three parts, three different characters telling their stories of what it is to go to ‘another place’. First Margaret, seeing her life, her relationship with her daughter Jessica, and what it is in her past that brings her to fear and why she sees death. Second Mei, Jessica’s paternal grandmother, telling a story of China that serves as oblique warning to Jessica. Finally, Jessica herself and what happens to her.

I still don’t know if I like this story but I am surely impressed by it.

Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

27. “The Winter Market” by William Gibson

So far the only stories of William Gibson’s I’ve read are the two published previously in this anthology series and I’ve yet to like any of them.

This one might suffer from coming at the end of the anthology when I am especially weary of the battered, wired, struggling cyber-future of the US of A.

Here we have a disabled, dying woman, her mental landscape of drive and suffering and determination, her hate for pity and charity, some of that bafflingly popular dream-weaving trope, and a protagonist who’s a bit at sea wondering if her uploaded self will be really her. Okay, he’s pretty sure it won’t be, but this woman who passed through his life like a corrosive fluid boring through his heart, ah!

But there were some flashes of phrasing I quite liked.

(with an author like William Gibson I wonder about my reactions. is it a case of “you had to be there”? like how Pat Cadigan’s story bounced off me only subtler so I don’t recognise? and how much is built upon the huge influence he had on the genre before I got there, so that perhaps his reflection is all over and when I see the thing itself I mistake it for just another image? and yet, better than meh.)