Shortly Ever After: What Even Are Months?

The new development for 2019 is that time has no meaning and there is no such thing as a month of reading short fiction, and therefore I can never say what short fiction reads were the best of that month, because that set of words make no sense under the new world order. NO MORE MONTHS.

Erm, but actually, work just got busy, and I fell behind in my short fiction reading. SORRY. Please accept instead this very belated post plus a link to info about the Hugo nominees for this year. I, a short-fiction-reading person, have read five of the six novelettes and five of the six short story finalists. I hope you are as impressed with me as I am. Of those short stories and novelettes, I would vote for Zen Cho’s “If at First You Don’t Succeed” and “Stet,” just in case you are wondering what to put on your Hugo ballots.¹

Onward to my faves of February and March! (Except months don’t exist, so this isn’t a February and March post, and I’ll deny it if you say that it is.) The inadvertent theme of this indeterminate-not-monthly period of short story reading has been the lives we set aside, beginning with “Give the Family My Love,” by AT Greenblatt (Clarkesworld, 5325 words). This one’s about an explorer called Hazel on a mission to a massive, mysterious space Library, where it is hoped the solutions to all of our dying planet’s problems can be found. Hazel is recording messages back to her brother Saul, whom she loves and loves despite their differences, and whom she does not think she will see again. I can be exceptionally choosy about my library stories, as I think bookish people sometimes get too into congratulating ourselves on our Wisdom and the Value we place on Knowledge, but Greenblatt avoids any precious talk like that. The story is, instead, about hope. In the end it’s about letting someone else do the hoping for you when you can’t. I got teary.

Where Hazel chooses to put aside her life to seek knowledge across the universe, the protagonist of Matthew Baker’s “Life Sentence” (Lightspeed, 9240 words) has his life taken from him. As the sentence for a crime he no longer remembers, Wash has all of his procedural memories wiped from his mind. He can still remember dates and presidents and how to tie his shoes, but his wife and children are strangers to him. He becomes a kind of detective in his own life, asking questions and finding clues to the self he used to be — but really this is not a story about Wash uncovering the crimes he’s being punished for. It’s about the awful and glorious mundanities of this imagined world, and the question of how a person can be a self without any of that self’s memories. I loved it. (Disclosure, I met Matt Baker in a professional capacity once, and he was a treasure. I don’t think it’s made me more likely to gush over his stories, but who knows. He really was awfully nice.)

“Okay Glory” is the exact reason I will never get an Alexa creature for my home and you shouldn’t either, oh my God they are so creepy. Ahem. This is by Elizabeth Bear, Lightspeed again, 9880 words, a reprint, and it’s about a man who farms everything about his life out to the AI that runs his house. Its name is Glory. When it is hacked to believe that an apocalypse has fallen outside the house, tech company mogul Brian Kaufman finds himself unable to leave — and increasingly, unable to do much of anything else. He can’t access his bank accounts to pay the ransom the hackers are demanding, and he can’t make outside contact with anyone because Glory won’t let him do it. FRANKLY IT IS ALL A BIT TOO REAL FOR ME, but I guess that’s the mark of good science fiction, right? Right? (Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here anxiously disabling all the permissions on all my phone apps, and then like, mocking myself for believing I have any control over what all the companies do with my data.)

Last but not least, Woody Dismukes’s “My Children’s Home” (Lightspeed, so much Lightspeed this time!, 4460 words) is a melancholy dystopia about a man whose job it is to raise children to be sold into various kinds of labor. He himself was once a child in a school like this; in fact this exact school; in fact he has never left the school. Part of him feels safe in the familiarity of his life — there are worse things that the children under his care are auctioned off to do — and part of him wonders about life beyond the trees. I struggle to articulate what I liked so much about “My Children’s Home,” as the first adjective that comes to mind is gentle, and that’s nonsense in a story about a group of people as violently controlled as the protagonist and the children he raises. But I think what the story’s about is the ways we humans find to create small pockets of comfort and happiness, even amidst the most terrible circumstances.

I hope, friends, that your circumstances are good and not terrible, even though time no longer has any meaning. Were we really using time for anything, anyway? Probably not.