What I Read in September

September was a busy month for me. Back to school. Two collections including my stories. A great number of stories to pore through in under thirty days.

I am including my favorite stories out of the Bundoran Anthology, Second Contacts, that includes my story “This Beautiful Creature.” I’ll probably do something similar next month with the Game Fiction Volume 1. I think both collections contained some killer stories and it’s my pleasure to talk up them and their authors.

Okay, on to the picks for September 2015:

The Oiran’s Song by Isabel Yap (Uncanny Magazine) A beautiful and terrible meditation on war and the thirst for violence and death. An oni daughter infiltrates an Imperial Japanese army unit and begins to feed upon them. Her tent mate is a boy neutered by his anguish and loss, slowly sliding into being an accomplice.
The Peace of Worlds by Jaime Babb (Second contacts) So everyone knows what happened when the Martians invaded before. For all of their overwhelming fire-power and technology in the end the smallest of earthly life-forms, bacteria, laid waste to them all. In this clever alt history tale the Martians try again with applied economics. As any student of history knows, soft-power can succeed where overt uses of force often fail.
Get the Message by Peter Wendt (Second contacts) Nifty story revolving around that most plausible of all impossible technologies - the ansible. Although Wendt uses a different term to describe this instantaneous communications device with alien races, what he is describing is an ansible. The pleasure here is that because the aliens are simply another voice (?) on the phone he can introduce a great number of different species in a very short story. Also enjoyable is the twists and turns of the plot as Earthlings cast desperately about for extraterrestrial assistance in the face of an alien invasion.
Ten Things to Know about the Ten Questions by Gwendolyn Kiste. (Nightmare) This is my favorite Kiste story since the last Kiste story I read. She gets better and better as a writer, here weaving a Leftovers-like scenario into psychological test. I found myself gripped by a nameless extential dread, the fear the worst thing imaginable was about to happen. Another masterful story from my favorite new writer.
Cremulator by Robert Reed. (Clarkesworld) A haunting story about the mysteries of love and death. Poignant and scientific and yet very magical. I’m thinking about writing a post about the few recent stories I’ve run across doing this sort of thing well - this ongoing project to incorporate fairy tales and magical realism tropes into solid science fiction.
The Springwood Center for Genetically Modified Animals, by Verity Lane (Crossed Genres) One of the best science fiction stories I’ve read on CG. Easily one of my favorites this month. This poignant, uber creepy story follows a human orphan looking for a job in an animal shelter for GMO pets. A slow steady burn through a sad, sad future.

Review of R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before

First, a word about how I came to pick up the first novel in R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing historical fantasy series. In short, after finishing "A Dance with Dragons," by George R.R. I googled what should I read next. This series came up. I mention this because it might serve as a usual gauge for what to expect from "The Darkness That Came Before;" people liking Martin's mix of history, in-depth characterization, dark subject matter, and world-building will probably like Bakker's work. People not fond of entire chapters devoted to the Byzantine political maneuvers, a dozen pages of appendices on characters, maps, and language trees, or character names with umlauts should avoid this book. Basically, the story of 'The Darkness That Comes Before," follows a warrior monk by the name of Anasürimbur Kellhus, who during a quest to find his father, becomes entwined with a Holy War against a nation of fanatical monotheists. The story is...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

Ancient Logic

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