If you are like me, it feels like just yesterday that Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend was president, that Kennedies were falling from the sky (so careless, those Kennedies, smh), and that we were introduced to SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward. Let's relive those happy days by reading these three 1999 SF tales that Dozois saw fit to celebrate as the best of that year, a year which sat at the deceptively smooth tail end of a black century of blood and at the dawn of a new century of upheaval and terror.
This is a long story, serialized over two issues of Amazing, the pioneering science fiction magazine at that time owned by the people who took over TSR and apparently devoted primarily to promoting television shows. How the mighty.... The Fall 1999 issue of Amazing is right there at the internet archive, but finding a scan of the Winter 2000 ish was a little more challenging and I gave up, though I did come across a scan of the 600th anniversary issue of Amazing, which has a picture of Harlan Ellison's lovely mug on the cover, though SF's bad boy is perhaps upstaged by a painting of a leggy blonde in a metal bra. Anyway, I'm reading "Hatching the Phoenix" in a scan of Dozois' anthology.
"Exchange Rate" debuted in a magazine I perhaps have never heard of before, Absolute Magnitude, and I am reading it there. This magazine feels pretty cheap--each story gets one or two illustrations, and to fill up dead space the same illustrations appear multiple times. A picture of a vehicle appears within "Exchange Rate"'s 22 pages eight times, and a picture of a satellite five times. Maybe they should have just made the print bigger if they had a lot of extra space to fill and couldn't find advertisers--my 55-year old eyes would have appreciated it.
If you judge by who can write a good sentence and who can paint vivid images, Tanith Lee is one of the very top speculative fiction writers. And "The Sky-Green Blues" is far and away the best of today's three stories. Of course, it is not about science, but about sex and danger and the craft and life of the writer and a twist ending that is supposed to blow your mind.
I think this story is quite well written, but I'm afraid the resolution of the plot is disappointing me. The whole this-is-not-real-life-but-a-story-gimmick feels tired and silly. Admittedly, Lee tries to use the gimmick to talk about life and the profession of writer in a philosophical way, but I'm not convinced this really works all that well. I'm still recommending the story, but I can't love it like I wish I could.
Of course I'm too cheap to pay four dollars for a huge book with a mush cover illustration that, after I read just three stories from it, will do nothing more than gather dust atop a pile of similarly forgotten books on the floor of MPorcius HQ. So I'm reading today's stories in scans made available thanks to internet piracy. Feel free to read along at the links below, me hearties.
"Hatching the Phoenix" by Frederik Pohl
"Hatching the Phoenix" is an OK story composed of three elements that, in my mind at least, are pretty distinct. We've got the hard SF business--an expedition to study an astronomical phenomenon. We've got soap opera business--should the protagonist marry this guy, or that guy, or maybe listen to her nagging feminist friend and swear off men and sex once and for all? Sort of sprinkled over this is left-wing social politics, attacks on Christians and laments over how poorly men treat women and how warlike people (Christians, mostly) are. I'll deal with these elements one at a time.
I read Pohl's famous Gateway as a kid and then again as an adult, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is set in that same Heechee universe. Our narrator, Klara, a character from Gateway, got rich over the course of that novel and its two immediate sequels, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon and Heechee Rendezvous, books I remember very little about, as compensation for her participation in a disastrous expedition. With her vast wealth, Klara has financed a major research project, the study of a planet which was wiped out in the supernova that created what we call the Crab Nebula. The team of scientists conducting this research have dubbed the planet the Crabber planet, its native population Crabbers.
I'm not smart, so it was a little confusing, but it seems that by going to a certain spot in space, the scientists Klara is financing can, by using a nearby black hole as a lens, look back through time by observing old light that was generated thousands of years ago by the Crabber star just days before it went nova and bounced off the Crabber planet. When their equipment is set up, the scientists can record what was happening on the Crabber planet right before it got wiped out. It is suggested that Klara has the dream of somehow immortalizing the people who lived on this planet before it was destroyed, the existence of whom we cannot doubt because many thousands of years before the sun went nova, the Heechee recorded videos of primitive tool-using carnivores on the planet. The question is whether these primitive Crabbers evolved to the point they could build a modern civilization; this is the main thing the scientists are trying to figure out. Pohl tries to generate tension and suspense by having the camera apparatus that can look into the past only half built when Klara arrives, so the pictures of the past are very low resolution. As the story proceeds, the pictures get more and more clear until the terrible truth is revealed. Also meant to build suspense is the fact that the various ships which are the setting of the story--Klara's ship, the ship used by her unfaithful boyfriend, and the research ship--can't safely stick around where they are because the radiation from the supernova might hurt them. Didn't all three ships already fly through that radiation wave to get to a point where they can see light that preceded that wave? Isn't the first sentence of the story "We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova"? Like I suggested, I am too dim to really understand this story's science component.
The aforementioned terrible truth: Klara's multicultural band of boffins discovers that the Crabbers had developed a 20th-century technology and society just before the supernova exterminated them. But Klara loses interest in immortalizing them when she finally gets the high quality video that makes clear the Crabbers were engaged in a World War I slash World War II type total war, complete with strategic bombing of cities by aircraft, submarine warfare, and large scale land battles with tanks. Also, the civilized Crabbers were committing imperialism against the still-primitive Crabbers.
At the end of the story there is also some business about Klara moving people from the research ship to her ship and to her unfaithful boyfriend's ship so they can escape the radiation wave from the supernova--I feel like something similar happened at the end of Gateway.
Now let's consider the human relationship or soap opera elements of "Hatching the Phoenix." A lot of the story's text is devoted to Klara's relationship with her computer, which she has given a personality and which has a holographic simulacrum with which to express that personality--when Klara is drinking the hologram will sometimes present the illusion that the computer is also drinking. Much is made of how Klara tries to maintain an illusion of free will and independence when in fact the computer does everything for her, and she almost always takes the computer's advice. (Gateway, I recall, was largely about a man's relationship with a computer therapist.) The computer is a man-hating, Christian-hating, feminist, and keeps trying to convince Klara to achieve immortality and escape physical needs and problems by having her consciousness uploaded into a computer. Of course, Klara herself designed the computer to have this bitchy nag's personality.
Klara kind of wants children but doesn't know if her current boyfriend, a TV journalist whom Pohl depicts as a total jerk who is terrible at his job, is the right man to have a child with. In the first half of the story, the chapters in the Fall '99 ish of Amazing (the one with the Star Trek cover), Klara arrives at the research ship and interacts with the sexually and ethnically diverse crew, and then in the final sentences of that installment of the serial we get a soap opera cliff hanger--the journalist is arriving in his TV station's rented ship to interview the scientists, and he has an assistant with him--a hot chick! Is he cheating on Klara?
It turns out in the second installment of the serial in the Winter 2000 number of Amazing (the one with the Babylon 5 cover) that yes, he is. Is this a big deal? After all, are Klara and journalist being exclusive? Anyway, Pohl spends quite a bit of time on the journalist's efforts to have sex with our narrator and Klara's efforts to put him off and to flirt with one of the scientists, a man who is also going through a difficult relationship, his wife back home cheating on him. In the end Klara and the journalist stop seeing each other, and Klara starts seeing the scientist, but it doesn't work out--Klara is more like a mother to that guy than wife material.
Finally the left-wing social politics component of "Hatching the Phoenix." Klara's computer's personality is based on Hypatia, who in this story is presented as the first woman scientist whose accomplishment men failed to erase. The computer is constantly demeaning Christians, and men, and living human beings in general, apparently even trying to sabotage Klara's relationships with other humans as a means of encouraging Klara into being turned into a digital file. In the computer's voice, Pohl bangs on repetitively at the anti-Christian stuff and misanthropic stuff about how humans are warlike, which is cagey as the computer isn't necessarily trustworthy, so it doesn't necessarily come off as our narrator Klara or our author Pohl droning on and on misanthropically but perhaps Pohl merely depicting Klara's annoying friend. Though of course we know Pohl wrote this stuff and Klara designed the computer's personality so it really is Pohl and Klara expressing these opinions.
Popular fiction, I always say, is wish fulfillment fantasy, and it seems possible one of the things Fred Pohl, like 80 years old when this story was published, wished he could have done was set up vast programs to help single mothers and other underprivileged women and girls, as this is something Klara does with her wealth. There is a lot of talk about Klara's tropical island where she has a refuge for orphans and single mothers and the implication is that Klara doesn't need a child of her own, shouldn't have to settle for a man, seeing as no man is good enough for her, that her motherly instincts should be devoted to helping all those orphans and single mothers. I suspect we are supposed to consider that she could have been like a mother to the Crabbers in some way I don't understand, seeing as they died thousands of years ago, but the Crabbers, just like the journalist, proved to be unworthy of Klara, what with their war and imperialism.
Finally on this theme, we might note that the lead scientist on the research ship is a woman, and among the scientists who actually have no bearing on the plot that I can remember is a tall muscular Afro-Briton who says "crikey" and a jealous homosexual. Even if they don't affect the plot, these people have their own sexual relationships and add to the soap opera atmosphere as well as the story's diversity levels.
All three of these elements more or less work, though they do not excel, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is never actually boring, but it feels a little long and bland. There's too much boring everyday stuff that I guess is supposed to humanize Klara, like how she likes coffee and what clothes she wears for this or that occasion and how she feels about her face and what plastic surgery she has had to make it less mannish. The anti-Christian stuff is a little overboard and the anti-war stuff is repetitive, with every different type of warfare the Crabbers engaged in being presented as some new revelation. "Hatching the Phoenix" also feels inconclusive--the research study of the supernova and the doomed aliens doesn't come to much, as far as I could tell, and the soap opera elements are also inconclusive, as the narrator dumps one guy with ease and picks up another with ease but then breaks up with him a few months later after the narrator has healed his psychic wounds, which I guess serves Pohl's women-are-so-giving-and-men-don't- deserve-them theme, but doesn't really make for a good conclusion to a story. isfdb is telling me that "Hatching the Phoenix" would later be integrated into the 2004 novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever so maybe we should think of this thing as a part of a larger narrative and thus can't really blame it for feeling inconclusive.
I'm grading "Hatching the Phoenix" acceptable. Besides Dozois' yearly best of volume, you can find it in The Hard SF Renaissance.
"Exchange Rate" by Hal Clement
Like "Hatching the Phoenix," "Exchange Rate" was included in The Hard SF Renaissance. But no, I won't put a picture of that anthology's cover in this blog post two or three more times.
The planet humans call Halfbaked is extremely inhospitable. Gravity is like seven times that of Earth, air pressure 17 times that of Earth sea level. The planet's tectonic plates are much smaller and numerous than those on Earth and are always scraping against and pushing into and away from each other, so there are constant earthquakes and fissures and ridges are always appearing and vanishing, creating new and forbidding obstacles to travel. Clouds above this forever changing landscape obscure the sky, and lightning almost never stops. Rain and dust storms severely lower visibility, while ceaseless emissions of radiation make radar and radio very unreliable. Clement is of course famous for conceiving of alien planets where extreme conditions prevail and working out how those conditions would affect life and human operations, and much of "Exchange Rate"'s text is taken up with descriptions and depictions of the crazy geographic, geological, meteorological and biological facts of Halfbaked and how human explorers there keep body and soul together and go about their business.
All this science and technology isn't necessarily easy reading; here is a sample:
The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.
The science in "Exchange Rate" is all interesting and it all makes sense--it is both more complex and ironically easier to understand than the science in Pohl's "Hatching the Phoenix." Unfortunately, Clement's characters and their motivations are boring--the people in the story are forgettable, one almost indistinguishable from another. People complain about cardboard characters in stories, how an author will give each character one personality trait and push it to the extreme, but the characters in Clement's long story here have no personality traits and it makes reading "Exchange Rate" sleep-inducing.
The plot of "Exchange Rate" concerns weeks-long journeys taken by humans in heavily armored vehicles across the treacherous surface of Halfbaked. Halfbaked, it appears, has native inhabitants, and, after radio communications with them that suggest the aliens are interested in trade, two human women drive a tanker truck thousands of miles, a trip of many days across shifting terrain that makes as-the-crow-flies travel impossible, to what they expect will be a native city to deliver some chemicals to the natives. The women then, apparently, head back to the human base, but cease transmitting messages to the base. Their nervous husbands hop in another huge heavily armored vehicle and set out to meet their spouses on the way, but turn back when the women's vehicle seems to be responding to advice transmitted by their husbands and by the base personnel, suggesting the wives--and their receiver--are OK, but their transmitter is out of commission.
Clement presents "Exchange Rate" as a mystery story, so we never get a view inside the women's vehicle or hear anything from their point of view. Clement instead focuses on the husbands, and everything we learn about the women's mission comes to us second or third hand--it is like those monster movies in which we barely see the monster and instead the camera spends most of its time in a room with military men and eggheads who look at radar screens and talk on the phone, saying stuff like "the blip on the radar screen shows the target is now heading northwards," or like a detective story in which the detective learns about the murderer and victim not from the murderer or victim but from a police officer who spoke to a witness who perhaps saw the murder from a distance through fog a long time ago. I find stories that put this kind of distance between the reader and the activity kind of frustrating.
I also didn't appreciate reading about the husbands' journey in excruciating detail only for that mission to be aborted and end up being absolutely moot.
The men do other work back at the base, then are sent out on a job to survey the height of a cliff, seeing as the cliff's height has probably changed since they last saw it. While they are out there, satellite and other data sources suggest the women's tanker truck is not behaving properly, so the men again set out to intercept their wives. Why does Clement abort the first intercept mission to only send the men off on an identical mission a second time? This is not good narrative structure, in my opinion.
After weeks of driving, the husbands finally find the tanker, and their wives are not aboard. The rest of the story involves figuring out what happened to the women, detective work that takes place over the course of this story's fourth weeks-long drive--another trip to the alien city to deliver more chemicals. Yes, the humans decide to deliver another shipment to the aliens, even even though the last shipment suffered 100% casualties and the aliens are suspected of murdering the women.
At the alien "city" the astounding truth is revealed. There is only one alien, a single huge being with many disposable components that get killed all the time without any long term detriment resulting. It killed the women due to what you might call an accident or misunderstanding; the alien doesn't even have such concepts as individual personality, love, friendship, or sexual reproduction, and of course is extremely robust compared to a fragile human. The climactic scene of "Exchange Rate" is when one of the husbands contemplates revenge on the alien and his colleagues talk him down from committing this sin--these future humans have evolved past the "War stage." The alien knows not what it did and must be forgiven. The briefly vengeful man talks about the need to teach the alien a lesson so it won't misbehave again, an idea his comrades dismiss, and I wondered if Clement was offering criticism of the justice of punishment as a crime prevention measure.
I have very mixed feelings about "Exchange Rate." The science and technology stuff is all very good, as I have suggested, ands there are multiple cool sciency things I have not mentioned. But the actual story is poorly structured and the characters are nonentities, so "Exchange Rate" does not engage the emotions and reading it feels like a long slog. When Clement at the very end tried to depict emotions and present some philosophy, I was not on his wavelength--of course you should kill an alien who kills your wife so it doesn't kill anybody else.
I guess we'll be generous and call "Exchange Rate" acceptable.
"The Sky-Green Blues" by Tanith Lee
Our narrator is a journalist, a woman who has reported from numerous dangerous regions. It is some kind of alternate reality future; our heroine has a chip in her arm that allows her to understand foreign languages when spoken, and even read foreign languages; she carries around a computer with which she can watch TV and send messages back and forth with her employers as well as record her notes; to save time, before interviewing an author, she has his books fed into her brain while she sleeps.
The author lives in a city in a jungle. "The Sky-Green Blues" is, I think, set on Earth--"Europeans" and "sparrows" and other Earth people and animals are mentioned, but there are also animals and people from other planets around, or at least that is where I think they must have come from. As our narrator is interviewing the author over the course of days or weeks, she is also conducting a strange affair with the author's manservant; this servant is a humanoid alien, and every night he comes to the narrator's bedroom and they have sex, sex which never leads to an orgasm for either of them. At the same time, an enemy army is advancing on the city.
The morning of the day it looks like the enemy is going to take the city, the author commits suicide. The narrator and the manservant jump in the author's armored vehicle and drive through the jungle--at the coast they hope to be picked up by ships being sent by some authority or other to rescue refugees.
In the jungle, after a day's driving, the alien manservant leaves the vehicle and leads the journalist to a beautiful waterfall by an ancient decaying temple. Within the temple the narrator is astounded to find the author! Still alive! And scribbling away! The author provides difficult to refute evidence that the journalist and the manservant and even this war-torn world are not quite real, but the product of the author's imagination and pen! The author and manservant send the narrator on her way, with the prediction that, even though the manservant never ejaculated while they were having sex and their species cannot breed, she will soon give birth to the manservant's child because a hybrid baby like that will be a good plot development. The narrator makes it to the coast alone on foot and is among the crowds of people taken away in VTOL aircraft by soldiers; the soldiers grope her, but she doesn't take much offense.
"The Sky-Green Blues" debuted in the British magazine Interzone. This magazine suffers a little from the embarrassing expedient of reprinting illustrations in an effort to make sure there are illustrations on most pages, but not as much as the issue of Absolute Magnitude we just looked at. "The Sky-Green Blues," it appears, has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dozois' 17th Year's Best anthology, which include a British edition titled The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 13th Annual Collection.
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All three of today's stories leave me feeling uneasy. Pohl's science I found hard to understand, and while I could grok Clement's science, the story was long and tedious with no human drama, no human feeling. Lee's story was brilliantly written, but the plot and central gimmick were underwhelming. Maybe recent SF just isn't for me, even when written by the masters of the field.
