At the End of Babel, by Michael Livingston

"At the End of Babel," by Michael Livingston. Art by Greg Ruth. From Tor.com, edited by Claire Eddy.

Published: July 1, 2015

Word count: ~7600

Rating: 4/5 stars

As a linguist and avid reader, I live for words. Stories about words are the best kind of stories, in my opinion, and anything referencing the Tower of Babel immediately jumps to the top of my 'to-read' list.

In Livingston's "At the End of Babel," words are powerful - but most of them are forbidden. All languages have been outlawed except one (which I assume, but I don't think is specified, is English). Tabitha Hoarse Raven is the last remaining member of her clan, and the last speaker of Keresan. She watched her father and the rest of her community get gunned down for speaking Keresan and dancing the moondance when she was a child. Now, she is going back to her ruined village to dance the moondance and call the gods in Keresan.

The story is anchored on Tabitha, and although we know a lot about her life, I feel she's lacking in personality. Still, she has a persistent, focused determination to complete her mission, and the story feels much the same. It is focused, constantly moving forward, and while it leaves little time for niceties (like elaborate character touches), it grabs your interest and marches you through this tightly-written story. Her determination is Livingston's determination is the reader's determination. We are all in this together, and we want her to succeed.

Until it happens, it's left a mystery what this 'success' entails - and when it does, it provides the most fantastical element of the story. In the beginning, I almost didn't recognize the story as SF/F, because the premise of a country (especially a dry region of the southern US, where I imagined this taking place) outlawing any minority languages under the pretense of 'unity' is hardly far-fetched. Livingston starts the story off, even, with a quotation from a proposed amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 that states:

No person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English.

This isn't a dystopia; it's modern-day America.

Livingston, though, shows us the visceral strength of language, the surprising and powerful things minority languages can do, in his closing act. Tabitha sings to the gods and they rain lightning down on her enemies in a storm that doesn't dissipate but travels on. And like that storm, Tabitha and the other native people she accumulates along the way show that people and cultures don't simply disappear, either, but persist.

The Killing Jar, by Laurie Penny

"The Killing Jar," by Laurie Penny. Art by Koren Shadmi. From Motherboard, edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant.

Published: January 14, 2016
Word count: ~5300

Rating: 3/5 stars

So Motherboard does science fiction. That's news to me, but apparently they've been publishing short fiction for over a year. I've been poking around their website for a while now and I absolutely adore the artwork they use. It looks like a lot of it is done by Koren Shadmi, who did the above art for "The Killing Jar," and who is absolutely killing it. Go check out the link above for some great SF art!

"The Killing Jar" didn't knock my socks off, but it was a good read. The premise is cute: the main character is an intern for a professional serial killer. Oh yeah, and professional serial killers exist, and are encouraged by the government, because serial killing has been designated a Fine Art. It's a tough gig to get, though, so you have to intern and work your way up through the ranks.

Our main character has a knack for killing, and a is pretty darned good at the paperwork that goes along with it. She is repeatedly frustrated by her employer, Tony, who just doesn't get what makes a good serial killer good. He's never in the news, and he can't figure out why - but our main character does. She understands that you need to be creative, you need to go after the right kind of people, and you need to fill out all the paperwork so you can keep killing people.

She also has a roommate, Mona, who dissects frogs, and as a gift covers the main character's walls in dead butterflies.

Like I said, it didn't blow me away, but there are some great moments here. In the culmination of every millennial intern's dreams and the climax of the story, the main character kills her boss and takes his place. She's encouraged by her roommate (and now partner, both romantically and in business), who shows her that she is truly suited for this. You get the feeling that she's a psychopath, or sociopath, but maybe just a frustrated intern.

The prose is clean and functional, and while some short stories fall flat on their neat little premises, this carries it out to a conclusion that is both interesting and logical, and keeps it fun along the way. The professionalism of both the website and the writing is encouraging; I may not have a compelling desire to read more by Laurie Penny (though I would if I came across it), I will definitely be reading more of these Motherboard stories.

Savannah Liars Tour, by Will McIntosh

"Savannah Liars Tour," by Will McIntosh. Art by Galen Dara. From Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams. Featured on io9.

This week, I read "Savannah Liars Tour" by Will McIntosh. I heard about it through one of my favorite websites, io9, which features one short story each month from the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine. I've heard great things about Lightspeed - it won a Hugo in 2014 (plus four nominations), and its short stories often get nominated for SF short fiction awards. The current editor, John Joseph Adams, recently edited a volume I've been meaning to read: the first ever Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

(A brief aside: I've had an obsession with the Best American series since high school, when I read one of their Best American Essays collections. Each Best American series collects either short fiction or essays from a particular genre; generally one person is the series editor, and they have a guest edit each volume. I've purchased almost every Best American book I've ever found at my favorite used book store, more than . There's a Best American collection for everything, from essays to horror to science writing. But there wasn't a collection for sci-fi and fantasy until 2015?! Atrocious.)

Either way, for better or for worse, I've heard great things about Lightspeed but nothing about Will McIntosh in particular, and nothing about the story - I'm trying to add a smattering of short stories, both recent and archived, from a variety of sci-fi mags, to my reading app each week, but I don't generally read the blurb so I'm always surprised.

The title of the story captures possibly the most charming and memorable part of the story for me. The main character (Ben)'s dead lover, Delilah, was in her life the tour guide for the titular tour. Her job: tell outrageous but entertaining lies about the town of Savannah to tourists on the trolley. She never tells the same lie twice - Ben can attest to this because he takes her tour frequently before approaching her. The brief yarns we hear from her in the corners of the story make me want to hop onto the trolley with her, and add some much-needed character to the story.

Because this is largely one of those Idea stories characteristic of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. The author has an Idea, either for a cool world or a particular story frame or character they want to use, and then add the rest of the story elements to serve that Idea; everything else comes second to whatever the Idea is. Of course, that's not a bad thing, per se, if it's done well and the characters aren't flat and the story and the world-building work together. Nor are these stories unique to SFF - I think they're more obvious in those genres, though, because SFF places much more emphasis on world-building (obviously), and because navel-gazing description of a realistic idea could summarize most short stories in the New Yorker and is therefore a canonized 'literary' style, while navel-gazing description of an SFF idea reads as indulgent at best and infodump at worst.

I'm not sure if the Iiea here is the SF device or the plot; one is slaved to the other, but I'm not sure which. The device: people can speak to any dead person, but only if they pay exorbitant fees to go into cryogenic sleep. The plot: Ben is torn between his dead lover, Delilah, and his wife, Jillian. We know almost nothing about these characters, except that Ben keeps visiting Delilah, Jillian doesn't want him to, and Delilah delights in lying (and is dead). The conflict in this story feels artificial or contrived - exactly like McIntosh had an Idea for a story and forced everything in the story to revolve around that idea. The characters' wants and existences didn't matter beyond the conflict of desires that propelled the story forward. We literally get no details about the characters, and few details about the world, beyond what is directly necessary for this story to work.

For me, this is a fatal flaw. It wasn't like it was unpleasant to read, but I was distinctly un-wowed by this, and was surprised it made it to publication. To me, it read like stories I've read as a slush reader for an SF/F/horror magazine and passed on. Sure, it has some lovely turns of phrase and an interesting premise. But your world, your characters, and your message all need to take a step beyond the premise to be interesting and compelling. There's a lot of opportunity in a story where death is kind of a nebulous concept to delve into deeper topics, but instead the story hinges on what feels like a cheap twist. Overall, I'd say this is 2 stars (which, according to the Goodreads metric, means 'it was ok' - and it was). 

Adult Children of Alien Beings, by Dennis Danvers

"Adult Children of Alien Beings," by Dennis Danvers, edited by Ellen Datlow, illustrated by Chris Buzelli, and published on Tor.com.

This is the first story I've ever tried to review on its own, and it's proving a bit harder than I anticipated. There's less to work with, less context, less content. I should be doing many more of these - I've begun using a wonderful app called Pocket, which allows me to send short stories (or news articles) from any of my favorite sites to my phone for later reading. Short stories are perfect for fitting into those moments waiting for the bus or waiting in line at the checkout (two things I spend a lot of time doing), and since I've been trying to read more short stories lately, this is absolutely the perfect app for my needs.

But enough about apps! We're here for a short story!

"Adult Children of Alien Beings" was a story with a lot of promise in the premise but a confused tone that had me constantly tripping over conflict between what was happening in the story and the narrator's reaction (or lack thereof). Told in first person, it's a story of an aging man, Stan, who seeks out the story behind his parents, who he describes as not "like your parents," not "like the ones in the Mother's Day cards and Father's Day cards." He proceeds to describe them in more detail; they sound like typical people who happen to be in love and have some idiosyncrasies that might be odd, but their daily lives definitely fall within a standard deviation or so of normal. Their deaths, though, are slightly suspicious; they both fell into an "abyss" in New Mexico when their younger son (Stan) was 18. Also suspicious are their origins, as Stan discovers all of their papers are forged, prior to his older brother Ollie's birth certificate. And when Stan seeks help to find their history, an expert tells him that they were most definitely aliens, and refers him to the titular coping group.

The attempt to convince the reader of the supernatural when evidenced with only the natural reoccurs throughout the story. There is certainly supposed to be some doubt - after all, the claims are outrageous. But I was never convinced, and I was never convinced that Stan himself was convinced, either. In fact, it was hard to tell how the first-person narrator really felt about anything, except occasionally in retrospect. He states things matter-of-factly, seemingly taking them at face value, which he does - unless he doesn't, which happens sometimes, but the reader is never informed of that until he says it out loud. He doesn't react. And between the difficulty ascertaining exactly what the narrator feels about the strange things thrown in front of him and the general predictability of the story (and what is true versus what isn't), it was hard to wrangle a foothold into the story, to care about what happened.

In the end, it wasn't important whether Stan's parents were or were not aliens. What matters instead is that he learned about himself and reached out to others, which felt as trite as it sounds. There were moments, though, of pretty prose, and the story moved at a steady clip, so it wasn't a dull read. I also appreciate an SF story with an amount of ambiguity to it, and this had ambiguity in spades (perhaps too much for some readers). And although Stan's parents weren't all that weird, the moments describing their lives together - his mother's paint-by-number picture where she switched all the numbers, their obsessive love of peppermint - illustrated to me an otherworldly kind of love, a mutually compatible weirdness that I truly enjoyed.

Rating: 2.5/5

The author, Dennis Danvers, is also a VA resident! Way to represent my home state!