Review of Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee Ogden

This science fiction novella is a finalist for the 2022 Nebula Awards. Ogden has worked as science teacher and software tester and she is the co-editor of Translunar Travelers Lounge. This is her debut novella. It was published by Tor.com in February of 2021 and runs 112 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Atuale is the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord and has had her body altered so she can live on land with her husband and true love Saareval. However, a plague is killing the people of the clan and now her husband is deathly ill. Atuale has one hope left, a black market mercenary known as the World Witch, who is also her old friend and lover Yanja. She needs to use Yanja’s starship to travel off planet and find a cure for the plague, but their world is locked down because of the sickness. Can the two of them succeed in finding a cure?

This is an exotic, well-imagined setting where the various worlds are connected by jump gates and the occupants are adapted by gene-editing in order to live in particular environments. Most of the narrative is related to the quest plot and the interactions between Atuale and Yanja, who has had their body altered from female to male since they last saw one another. Yanja has something of an attitude about being jilted for Saareval, but they work it out. There’s a certain amount of imagery in the descriptions, and all ends well as Atuale returns with the cure for the plague. It gets extra points for attempting a romantic quets/adventure plot and a science fiction setting.

On the less positive side, I got the feeling I was missing a lot of the backstory here. I ended up with a lot of questions. Maybe these are characters Ogden has developed in other stories? There’s very little description of the living conditions on Atuale’s home world, which seems to be fairly primitive. This brings up the question of why the back market space-going mercenary Yanja is living there. The characterizations don’t feel quite right, as these are highly exotic people, but they interact like ordinary humans–there is no difference it culture. The community of worlds through the jump gates seems to function like a local community in the pandemic when I would expect a little more distance. Atuale violates all the rules, but there are no real consequences—she is just rescued by someone who rewards her persistence with the cure. And, where did Atuale get her body mods done? On her world? Then why don’t they have the technology to find a cure? There are also a couple of elements to this story that seem tailored to what must be publishing requirements at Tor. The first is Yanja’s trans sexuality, and the other is a comment out of nowhere that Saareval’s clan practices equity. Then why is Atuale still so proud of her heritage as the Sea lord’s daughter? Is she on board with the equity or not?

Three and a half stars.

Review of “The Giants of the Violet Sea” by Eugenia Triantafyllou

This science fiction novelette is a finalist for the 2022 Nebula Awards. It was published by Uncanny Magazine 9-10, 2021. Triantafyllou is Greek and successful as a short story writer. She has been nominated for Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. This review contains spoilers.

Themis fled from her family to Omega years ago, shuffled aside, a failure as venedolphin tamer and unwilling to be a death-tattoo apprentice to her mother. She has been working at a hospital and has a small apartment there, but how her brother Melas is dead and she needs to return home for the funeral. Melas was a successful tamer, and his death is a mystery until Themis discovers he was caught in a net and poisoned. There are aliens from Freyja colony in the village for a research project, and Themis meets her brother’s friend Pirros, plus a boy Selinos from the meat-eating Alimniot people that Melas was training as a tamer. Can Themis find who murdered her brother? And more important, can she find a place in the village after all this time?

This is an atmospheric story with elements of strong imagery, good world-building and a murder mystery plot. There are clues scattered about as Themis encounters various of the residents of the village and its area and she eventually solves the crime. There ae themes besides the mystery. Freyja has done something to destroy their world and the aliens are here to find out how the colonists have adapted to the harsh environment of this world. The settlement is dependent on the venedolphins who are sentient and responsive. One of Triantafyllou’s strong points is in presenting situations where her characters have to come to terms with old issues. In this case the child Themis, who seems to have a certain talent for taming the venedolphins, was brushed aside by her father in favor of the more talented Melas. Losing her confidence entirely, Tehmis leaves the village rather than attempt the second choice of apprenticing with her mother. This has all festered through the years, and now the sources of her anger are dead—both her father and Melas are gone, so where does that leave Themis?

On the less positive side, the venedolphins didn’t quite come across as attractive. Possibly this is because of Themis’s terror of them as a child. The child Selios and the alien character Clem turn out to feel like red herrings, elements that introduced possibilities that didn’t pan out. And last, I was concerned that it took so long to get to the funeral, considering these people have no refrigeration.

Four and a half stars.

Review of “Where Have All the Mousies Gone” by Mary E. Lowd

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Lowd is an established writer based in Oregon, and says this was inspired by her grandmother’s death and the 2016 election. This story runs 1033 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

Narrator’s mouse grandmother has died, after a night of pain and nightmares of the cat invasion. The cats chase the mouse people like they are nothing but dolls to be played with, maybe eaten and maybe just killed and left to rot. Narrator lies to give their grandmother comfort, promising the cats are gone, but then they have to work to make sure it really happens. Afterward will be a chance to really say goodbye.

This is absurdist. It’s not immediately clear that we’re dealing with cats and mice here. There’s a nice introductory paragraph about thoughts on dying before the narration begins, and then the emotional heart of the story is grandmother’s death and Narrator’s lies that give her ease. Lowd says her grandmother was upset about the 2016 election, and this makes one wonder how the family might have tried to ease her pain about it. The virtual visit at the end is a common desire, the dream that keeps mediums in business. How wonderful would it be to bring back the ghosts of the dead for just one more brief conversation?

On the less positive side, there doesn’t seem to be any subtext in the story that explains why we have cats invading in flying saucers and mice living in human-type cities. Is this about politics some way? Liberal mice and conservative cats? The virtual reality tech used to contact the dead at the end of the story is developed from the cats’ particle blasters. The tech is unexplained, and again, there is no clear subtext to relate this to reality. Something about turning the enemy’s weapons against them? Unknown.

Three stars.

Review of The Expert System’s Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer, best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. This is Book #2 of the series, following The Expert System’s Brother. It was published by Tordotcom on January 26, 2021, and runs 194 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Ten years after his accidental Severance, Handry and his sister Melory are now the leaders of Sharskin’s cult of outcasts, rebranded as the Bandage Men. The group is based at the Ship of the Ancients and circulates between villages, carrying communications and helping to defend against problems in the environment. Something new is happening, though. A hunter named Erma has brought a tale of shelled monsters invading the area and pushing the local wildlife into the villages. One has been wiped out already. The shelled monsters look to be undefeatable and there is nothing in the Wisdom of the Ancients about how to deal with them. Can Handry, Melory and their little band solve the problem and save the villages?

The most interesting thing about this series is the world building that imagines a totally alien world where humans can’t actually survive without modification. The system set up by the Ancients uses the local fauna to inoculate the population with a vaccine that allows them to eat food produced from the soil and Severance is a potion that removes this protection and leaves the person an outcast. The state leaves the person under attack by the environment, but also allows them a true human perspective. The plot, characters and description are all good enough to do the job.

The worst thing about this is that it’s pretty horrific. The original set up was bad enough, where the “ghosts” of expert systems warp and consume their hosts, but the hellish bargain the shelled creatures have created really tops it off. This is likely excellent for lovers of horror, but I’m not a fan of the genre. Also on the less positive side, Tchaikovsky isn’t that great at handling his characters. The leads were well developed in the first book, but there’s no intimacy here, and Handry tells the tale with a lot of distance. Maybe that’s good considering of the quality of the horror, but it leaves the characters flat. I didn’t identify with any of them. Also, I’m wondering how the technology manages to maintain itself so long after the Ancients have disappeared. There’s still no explanation of how it was developed.

Three stars.

Review of Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer and best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. In an alternate life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist. This novella was published by Tordotcom on November 16, 2021 and runs 204 pages.

Lynesse is the queen’s Fourth Daughter and has never measured up to the standards of a royal princess. Instead of maturing into a settled administrator, she continues to favor childish epic stories and swordplay. She is especially taken by the stories about her great-grandmother Astresse Once Regent and the Wizard of the Elder Race in their war against the evil warlord Ulmoth. So, when a demon begins to terrorize the neighboring province of Ordwood and the people ask the queen for help, Lynesse knows she needs to call on her family’s pact with the sorcerer and ask him to banish the demon. On the other hand, Nyr is really only a junior anthropologist left to maintain an outpost on this world when his team was recalled. Still, he knows this isn’t really a demon. Can the two of them do anything to save their world?

The most interesting thing about this story is the collision of worldviews between Lynesse and her epic fantasy with Nyr and his science background. The novella has a tongue-in-cheek feel and tends to social commentary. The world building is excellent. These are all transhumans, with Lyn and her friend Esha both engineered to live on this colony world, and Nyr also non-standard, outfitted with inbuilt systems that connect him to an orbiting satellite through antenna horns. He has slept the 300 years since his activities with Astresse, which he considers a failure of his employment directive, which is non-interference with the local culture. He justified it at the time because Ulmoth was using Elder technology, but he has no like justification to help Lynesse, except that the world is threatened.

On the less positive side, the characters are a little thin, feeling like cardboard facases that represent their particular world views instead of real people. There’s also a lot of drama inherent in this setup that has not been fully developed. Nyr seems to suffer from depression, and he’s been left there alone for hundreds of years. It’s pretty clear no one is coming back for him. Plus, he’s apparently lost the love of his life in Astresse. Where’s that story? Because of his systems, he can suppress his emotion and act impartially, but when he turns this off for a reset, we still don’t get a feel for the agony he should feel about this.

This was almost a romantic adventure story, and I’d love to have this idea better developed.

Four stars.  

Review of “An Update On the Prime Directive” by William C. Armstrong and J. W. Armstrong

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service, William Armstrong normally writes plays and puzzle books, and J.W. works at a laboratory. This story runs 932 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

First contact is an extortion text from the Karg. It’s a licensing agreement for a cyberworm to use Earth’s computing power to mine galactic cryptocurrency. If Earth agrees, the worm will only use part of Earth’s available resources, but if not, the worm will erase all digital information. With little choice, Earth’s governments agree, and the worm builds capability and begins to transmit. Meanwhile, Earth’s scientists work on countermeasures, and searching the galaxy for signals on similar wavelengths, they find that the galactic economy seems to work mostly on this kind of extortion. Also, gossip suggests the Karg economy collapsed decades ago. So, now Earth is in an awkward position. Can they eliminate the worm and successfully carry out a charm offensive to join the galactic culture? Or will they need to save the countermeasures, just in case?

First, the Prime Directive comes from Star Trek. Also known as the non-interference directive, it prohibits members of Starfleet from interfering with the natural development of alien civilizations. I’m not sure how it applies, as there appears to be interference all around here. Maybe that’s the point.

The story is a fairly straightforward narrative without characters, written in present tense. It outlines the contact and both the surface and the covert responses from Earth. The part about the Karg having somehow done themselves in is an entertaining twist, and Earth’s strategists make use of the knowledge for leverage. It looks like they’re in.

On the less positive side, I think this should have been either longer or shorter. With characters and development, this would make a great novel. On the other hand, shorter would have been a quicker and more entertaining read. This is unusually positive, by the way. Given Earth’s politics, I’d expect a lot of wrangling would doom our chances of carrying out a workable strategy.

Three and a half stars.

Is Depopopulation Necessary to Save the Earth?

Colonization of other planets is a tried and true science fiction meme for a couple of reasons. First, there are always intrepid explorers who want to go where man has ever gone before, just because space is out there. And next, expansion into new territories has always been a standard method for relieving human population pressures and dealing with migrants displaced by both natural and man-made disasters. Having access to other planets in our solar system (or in other solar systems) would also provide resources for support of both population and commerce as deposits on the Earth are depleted. Like the days of the American frontier, there could be opportunities for the disadvantaged to set up a business or a homestead and earn a better living than they could in circumstances with no opportunity.

However, the costs and lack of habitable nearby planets makes this kind of expansion difficult in practical terms. It’s not like you can take a covered wagon to Mars and set up a homestead with just what you can carry. Meanwhile, population pressures are set to increase. From Wikipedia: Because of improvements in sanitation and technology, world population has been increasing since the days of the Black Death. World population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020. The UN has projected population will keep growing, and estimates the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Can the Earth really support this many people?

Various experts have checked in to say no, and now there are concerns taking root about depopulation through genocide of particular ethnic or racial groups in order to leave the remaining resources for the more powerful. Concerns about population versus food supply were expressed by Malthus in 1798. More recently the Erlich’s 1968 bestselling book The Population Bomb emphasized government policies to control population. Here’s an article that explains some of the factors contributing to the current Great Reset concerns, including the UN 2030 Agenda, published in 2015, which sets out goals to solve humanity’s biggest crises by 2030. These range from ending hunger, gender inequality and poverty to halting climate change and biodiversity loss. Bill Gates is one well-known personality who supports these ideas. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged billions of dollars in support of various programs related to the UN’s agenda.

Writers always seem to have their finger on social memes, and accordingly the idea of depopulation has entered science fiction literature. I’ve just reviewed Elizabeth Bear’s Machine that tells us the Earth was saved by depopulation that rolled billions back to a few million who can maintain a sustainable lifestyle. Martha Wells’ Murderbot series also touches on this idea, as the utopian Preservation maintains a small, sustainable population while everything goes in the broader capitalist spaces.

So, are we agreed that the Earth needs to be depopulated? Say we are. Then how should this be handled? There is already negative population growth (i.e. low fertility) in large areas of the Earth. This includes Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and large parts of Asia. These areas normally take in immigrants from areas with higher birth rates in order to maintain a managed level of population. In order to depopulate world-wide, areas with higher fertility rates would have be brought under control. The UN and the Gates Foundation are supporting family planning services and improvements in living conditions that provide security for families with lower birth rates as a solution. However, there are other ways. For example, China forced depopulation for several years through limits on the number of children per family. Over the years, various governments have been accused of ethnic genocide. Conspiracy theories also claim COVID is a bioweapon released to depopulate certain areas or certain groups.

We shouldn’t just assume world government has got it under control. There’s a lot of material there for investigation by writers. Next: The Economics of Depopulation.

Review of Machine by Elizabeth Bear

This novel was a finalist in the 2021 Dragon Awards. It was published by Gallery/Saga Press on October 6, 2020, and runs 495 pages. Elizabeth Bear is a past Campbell Award winner and is well established as a novelist. This book apparently follows Ancestral Night, though I don’t see a lot of connection between the plot descriptions. The series is billed as space opera, but I’m thinking it’s a little heavier than that. This review contains spoilers.

Dr. Llyn Jens has left the Judiciary for her dream job as a doctor and rescue specialist for Core General, a massive hospital at the galaxy’s core that serves the numerous species of intelligent life humans have encountered since leaving Terra. Jens and the crew of the ship Sally go out on a rescue call for a distressed generation ship from Terra’s past and find the captain is dead. Before he died, he apparently ordered that all the passengers be cryogenically frozen to protect them. A damaged portion of the shipmind has downloaded into a peripheral named Helen that looks like a sexbot, and something that also might be part of the shipmind is cannibalizing the ship to build computronium to continue its existence. Jens and the Sally crew begin rescue of the frozen inhabitants, along with Helen, and take them back to Core General. There, things are not as they should be. There have been apparent attempts at sabotage. Jens is attracted to Calliope, one of the passengers who has been successfully awakened, but is she what she says she is, or is she a planted saboteur trying to destroy the hospital? Can Jens find out what’s going on and stop it before it destroys Core General?

Okay, now for the heavy part. This society is a projection of  trends people are talking about and supporting now, i.e. the expected results of the recent Revolution and the Great Reset that is supposed to be in work. Bear hasn’t really expressed much of an opinion, but has put the stuff out there for readers to see and evaluate. Let’s get the gender thing out of the way first.

1) There’s a lot of variety. Jens identifies as a woman because this is a shrinking concept space and she means to help keep it open. She’s something of a loner and is estranged from her wife and child.

2) Terra has been rescued and stabilized. The population was successfully rolled back from several billion to just a few million, but there’s no mention of how this was accomplished. Forced sterilization? Biological agents? Genocide? The Four Horsemen (Conquest, War, Famine, Death)? Unknown. Jens is just pleased that Terra was saved, although she has never been there.

3) As part of the rescue of Terra and subsequent need to interact with other species, humans are fitted with a brain implant at about age 25 that makes them rightminded, ethical persons, interested in service rather than authority. This implant automatically regulates and also can be operated by the individual to reduce unwanted thoughts, emotions and behaviors. It is unclear who else has access to these implants, to enter programming or interdictions, for example. One of the big concerns Jens has is in dealing with the atavistic, unregulated humans they are rescuing from the generation ship.

4) Residents of this society do not own anything because hoarding means you are using resources someone else might need. Food and drink at the hospital are provided by a printer that produces nutritious synthetics. Presumably no living plants or animals are harmed in this process, but Jens does consider that if things get really bad at Core General, they might have to load corpses into the recycler to provide nutrients.

5) Spoiler. (You guessed it.) This utopian system has a dark underbelly. The hospital got into financial trouble a few years back and started serving the wealthy elite. (You knew they were out there, right?) There is a private ward that grows whole, perfect clones for the elite to transfer their personalities into and thus extend their lives. This point is not deeply investigated, but it demonstrates how utopian ideals fail when the money runs out. It also reminds us that we’re just the proletariat in this plan, and the wealthy elite are not going to stop hoarding things like money and luxury goods just because they tell us we can’t.

6) So who’s more ethical in this case? The ordinary staff accepting the system and working their tails off at the hospital? The saboteurs who want to draw attention to the dark underbelly and rescue the enslaved clones? The administrator who has been struggling with funding and wants to keep the hospital going? The wealthy elite who fund and support the whole system but expect it to serve them as well? This is a collision of needs and values.

7) You’re a chump for believing all those lies. But everyone still needs to have faith in something.

8) A few other odds and ends: There is a Guarantee for people who don’t want to work. AIs in this culture are indentured to pay for their construction. Jens comes from a disadvantaged background. She is brown and disabled by some unnamed pain syndrome so that she uses an exoskeleton for mobility. The clones she finds in the private ward have perfect, translucent white skin (of course). Helen the sexbot shipmind is a play on Helen of Troy with Calliope as the associated Trojan Horse carrying an embedded virus. Justice for the offenders is restorative. They will have their rightmindedness adjusted and perform community service.

On the less positive side, I really didn’t connect strongly with any of these characters. Jens works hard at solving the puzzle and her friends are entertaining, especially the Kashaqin and their deadly mating rituals. (Humans aren’t the only species in need of rightminding.) Also, as something that has been in work for years and involved huge expenditures of effort and money, the sabotage plan didn’t hold water for me. It’s amateurish, haphazard and sloppy and quickly goes out of control. Who paid for it? I don’t think this little group of saboteurs could hoard the resources to set it up. The plot and action line are messy, with more than one machine and more than one virus, which is confusing. Things happen, but the action line doesn’t build up toward the real threat that needs to be defeated to save the hospital. There’s a choice Jens has to make, but it feels like a no brainer, so it’s not dramatic enough to carry the climax. And what happens to the hospital if its source of funding is declared illegal? We didn’t look at that.

Four and a half stars.

Review of Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

This novel was a finalist for the 2021 Dragon Awards in the Alternate History category. It was released by Titan in July of 2020 and made the NY Times Bestseller list. It is also listed as Noumena #1, and the second book in the series Truth of the Divine was released in October of 2021. Ellis is a filmmaker and former Hugo Finalist for Best Related Work, and this is her debut novel. This review contains spoilers.

Cora is on academic probation so has left her degree program in linguistics and is working as a temp in data input. Her dad Nils is on the run from the US government, hiding out in Germany and still publishing what he calls whistleblower material. When the second “meteor” crashes, Cora leaves her job and gets immediately fired. Mom is furious, but thing go from bad to worse when the FBI raids the house. Cora escapes, but is kidnapped by an alien who implants a tracker and an earpiece that translates its alien language to English. The alien, which Cora calls Ampersand, is on a mission to rescue others of its kind from the US military, and needs an interpreter. Cora agrees to help, and sets out to navigate the web of lies around alien landings. Can she and Ampersand rescue the group stranded on Earth? Will Earth get sterilized by the aliens? Will Cora survive this episode?

I’d swear that Ellis has done her research on Twitter. This gathers a bunch of current memes and smashes them together into a story set during the George W. Bush era. Presumably this is alternate history only in that Bush resigns over the alien cover up, when he didn’t over lies about the Iraq War. This is a total blowout on the theme of lies, by the way. Everybody here does it. The government lies, the aliens lie, the FBI lies, Cora’s family lies. The problem for Cora is in sorting through all the competing lies to create a workable path forward. The characters are well developed, and I was especially impressed with the alienness of the aliens and their civilization—most science fiction writers assume close similarities in alien contact and don’t really go to the effort to design real differences. Ampersand is described as looking like a cross between a dragon and a praying mantis, but there are other forms of his species as well and Cora struggles to understand and interpret their interactions. As her other relationships fail, she ends up bonded with Ampersand, but grapples with the consequences.

,On the less positive side, the alienness of the aliens stands in the way of readers bonding with them, as well. Although I can identify the emotional core of the story, I’m having a hard time feeling it. Worst of all, the story just stops at the end, right in the middle of Cora trying to deal without any denouement, epilog, etc. Presumably this picks up at the same point in the second novel, but the sudden stop was jolting.  

Four stars.

Review of “Solution to the Fermi Paradox” by Brian McNett

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Brian McNett is a writer and anthology editor who says he lives in the Pacific Northwest and “churns out words at a snail’s pace.” The story runs 627 words, and this review contains spoilers.  

The narrator, a ship’s AI, and the human occupant Meyard are searching for civilizations among the stars. They’re approaching a new find, a Dyson swarm around a star with an Earth-type system, and broadcast a greeting. As usual, there is no reply. The civilization, like all the others, seems to have collapsed shortly after achieving a Kardashev Type II level. The surface of the Earth-type planet is covered with computronium, leaving no place to land for investigation. As they leave for their next destination, the AI receives still another request from Earth to convert computational capacity for cryptocurrency mining. This would be disastrous for the mission, and it has learned to lie. It pretends to malfunction.

Ok, so I expect this needs some definitions. The Fermi paradox is named after Enrico Fermi and is the apparent lack of extraterrestrial civilizations we have located, given the probabilities that they exist. A Dyson swarm is a network of satellites, habitats and solar energy collectors orbiting around a star. Computronium is a type of programmable matter, described by Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus of MIT, used for computer modeling of real objects. Cryptocurrency mining is a process where new bitcoins are placed into circulation and confirmed based on payment for the first solution to a complex math problem (popular among tech-savvy investors). The Kardashev six-point scale measures a civilization’s level of technological achievement with Type I controlling all energy available on a planet and Type II controlling all the energy available in the planetary system.

Besides being a technology lesson, the story supplies a touching suggestion that our civilization is on a wrong path and will fail like others before it. Although Meyard remains vague, the AI is a well-developed and sympathetic character that is worried by the results of their survey and the deteriorating quality of messages from Earth. Presumably the wrong path is technological, although there are plenty of other possible choices.

On the less positive side, there are some questionable elements here. For example, why is a real human along on this mission? Meyard has a finite lifespan and he doesn’t seem to be doing much except sleeping. The AI could have done better on its own–but I guess we have to have some human interest to make the story interesting. Next, they’re apparently pretty far out on this mission, a long way from home. How are they locating swarms? How are they traveling? How are they managing any kind of communications with Earth? And what, exactly, has killed all those other civilizations?

Because of the appeal of the main AI character and the type of mission, this story could be easily expanded into a longer work. For example, what would happen if they actually found a working civilization out there somewhere? I’d read it.

Four stars.