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coalescentOne of the nice things I did at Truck was to start catching up with Fantasy & Science Fiction's 2004 issues. I took out a subscription earlier this year (at current exchange rates, it was only about UKP20!), but what with one thing and another hadn't got around to reading any of them before this weekend. Short fiction is perfect festival reading, though; bite-size stories for when you're between bands, or just want a break. And, of course, if you come across something good, you can hand it around.
Case in point: Paolo Bacigalupi's novellette 'The People of Sand and Slag', from the February issue. One of Bacigalupi's stories from last year, 'The Fluted Girl', made it into three separate Year's Best anthologies and garnered a Sturgeon Award nomination, so I was interested in seeing some of his work. I enjoyed 'People...' and successfully made![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tinyjo, oxfordslacker and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
twic read it as well. Jo liked the strangeness of it; Alex commented on the appropriateness of the ending; Tom liked it, but I got the impression he saw it as a sort of 'minimum standard' goodness - almost that it was the least that could be expected from sf (no doubt those involved will correct me if I've misquoted them).
In brief, it's a sharply cynical look at the effect of technology on humanity, and on the world. It asks what would happen if technology could ensure our survival no matter what. What would happen if any wound healed instantly; if we could eat sand and survive on it. What would happen if humanity became completely independent of Earth's biosphere?
Bacigalupi's answer is that the world would be a cold, claustrophobic, environmentally devastated place; not for him a post-scarcity utopia. He focuses on a trio of miners who encounter a dog - a species thought to have become extinct some years earlier. The strangeness comes from the gap between how the characters react to the dog - incomprehension being the least part of it - and how the readers view their actions. By our perspective, they have lost so much...but for themselves, they barely notice, and if they do they don't mourn its passing.
This is a character piece, so the state of the world is only described in glimpses. When it is described, however, Bacigalupi manages to be evocative in a few well-chosen words, without descending to cliche:
Case in point: Paolo Bacigalupi's novellette 'The People of Sand and Slag', from the February issue. One of Bacigalupi's stories from last year, 'The Fluted Girl', made it into three separate Year's Best anthologies and garnered a Sturgeon Award nomination, so I was interested in seeing some of his work. I enjoyed 'People...' and successfully made
tinyjo, oxfordslacker and twic read it as well. Jo liked the strangeness of it; Alex commented on the appropriateness of the ending; Tom liked it, but I got the impression he saw it as a sort of 'minimum standard' goodness - almost that it was the least that could be expected from sf (no doubt those involved will correct me if I've misquoted them).In brief, it's a sharply cynical look at the effect of technology on humanity, and on the world. It asks what would happen if technology could ensure our survival no matter what. What would happen if any wound healed instantly; if we could eat sand and survive on it. What would happen if humanity became completely independent of Earth's biosphere?
Bacigalupi's answer is that the world would be a cold, claustrophobic, environmentally devastated place; not for him a post-scarcity utopia. He focuses on a trio of miners who encounter a dog - a species thought to have become extinct some years earlier. The strangeness comes from the gap between how the characters react to the dog - incomprehension being the least part of it - and how the readers view their actions. By our perspective, they have lost so much...but for themselves, they barely notice, and if they do they don't mourn its passing.
This is a character piece, so the state of the world is only described in glimpses. When it is described, however, Bacigalupi manages to be evocative in a few well-chosen words, without descending to cliche:
Lisa was a good swimmer. She flashed through the ocean's metallic sheen like an eel out of history and when she surfaced, her naked body glistened with hundreds of iridescent petroleum jewels.I like this story for the reasons that Jo and Alex gave; I like it because the world is different, and because the ending is honest. It's a story that does just about everything well (it could so easily have become heavy-handed moralising, for instance), and I'll be keeping an eye out for other work by Bacigalupi from now on.
When the Sun started to set, Jaak lit the ocean on fire with his 101. We all sat and watched as the Sun's great red ball sank through veils of smoke, its light shading deeper crimson with every minute. Waves rushed flaming onto the beach. Jaak got out his harmonica and played while Lisa and I made love on the sand.
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Date: 2004-07-29 07:34 am (UTC)I think i described it as "okay". As in "passable". As in "basically pretty lame, but that's what you get in F&SF".
Okay, i did like the perspective shift when they jumped out of the flyer (they break all their limbs, and this is unremarkable), but other than that, it didn't really do anything for me.
Also, not a very believable treatment of nanotech, or of the world's ecology. But then i am a hard SF fundamentalist.
-- Tom
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Date: 2004-07-29 07:41 am (UTC)Yeah,the tech in 'People...' is basically magic; it can heal any injury, and duplicate or fix any function of the biosphere that happens to get messed up. Given that, the rest of what happens is, well, maybe not plausible exactly, but I found it at least believable, in a dystopian way. One upon a time, magic tech would have bothered me; now, not so much. I'm not sure why that is.