31) ‘Vector’ by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Out through the school gate, part of a crowd pouring out, you hope for familiar smells of roast pork and sticky rice, for colours you recognise: an old tree with a pink sash around it to mark the spirit within. Tiny plates of food at the base of a utility pole, to curry favour with any small god that might live in the wires or the concrete. It does no harm to put such things out. But they are superstitions and the farangs passing by smirk. A tourist more freckles than skin pauses to blink at it; her spectacles give off a flicker. Photo snapped and uploading, to be laughed at and rendered into a joke. Who believes in divinities so diminutive? 

In the near future, a young woman sacrifices her life to be turned into a computer virus, the ultimate post-human condition. Her country’s cultural landscape has been overwritten, used as a strategic stepping stone by a dominant power. As she readies herself to complete her mission, memories of her human life struggle to rise above the surface of an imposed reality:

She ascertains that she’s in a ruined hospital in Palangkaraya, basement level, far from home. It chills her until she remembers the distance is irrelevant, that come success or failure she will never leave this place. What remains of her will not survive being disconnected from the tank. 

All is anatta. Sangkarn is transient. She needs to let go. Panic rises anyway, even though she’s so detached from flesh that she should be beyond this choking terror, above this mindless fear of the grave.

This is impassioned, driven writing, with not a word wasted. The science fictional conceits merge seamlessly with the shifting layers of images worked from two opposing realities. ‘Vector’ constitutes a powerful fusion between feeling and meaning, thought and word, image and idea. I admire the strength of purpose in this narrative, which serves as a darker, angrier counterpart to de Bodard’s Immersion. This story has weight. It’s even better on a second reading.

 

32) ‘Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities’ by Angelica Gorodischer

I loved this piece – for me it had the feel of a novel in miniature – so much I was moved immediately to search for more information about it. Angelica Gorodischer is a writer I’ve been meaning to read for some time now, and ‘Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities’ felt like the perfect introduction to her work. If it reminded me of anything it’s Jan Morris’s Hav, or even some of Roberto Bolano’s more discursive factioneering. The story is actually a single chapter from a longer work, Kalpa Imperial (go to this page and you’ll find some links to extracts from the book, also an interview with Gorodischer), a novel detailing the rise and fall and rise again of ‘the greatest empire that never was’. The ‘mountain city’ at the centre of this particular story is described – or more accurately word-painted – as a microcosm of history in flux. Kings, empresses, wars, artists, hucksters, armies – they all pass through the city and they all leave their mark, some more indelibly than others. Always, at the centre, the city herself, warping and changing but never quite laid low, inimitably herself in spite of the erosions wrought upon her by an unruly populace:

The mountains are buried under walls, balconies, terraces, parks; a square slants down, separated from a steep drop by stone arcades; the third floor of a house is the basement of another that fronts on the street above; the west wall of a government building adjoins the ironwork of a courtyard of a school for deaf girls; the cellars of a functionary’s grand mansion become the attics of a deserted building, while a cat flap, crowned with an architrave added 200 years later, serves as a tunnel into a coal hole, and a shelf has become the transept for a window with golden shields in the panes, and the skylight doesn’t open on the sky, but on a gallery of waterwheels made of earthenware.

The city as organism is a beloved theme among readers and writers of speculative fiction alike. Gorodischer’s work here is a fabulous addition to this particular canon. It’s a privilege to see a master at work.

 

33) ‘The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew’ by Catherynne M. Valente

…and my Beast came up to me one night and said: “Oh please, oh please, can you write me a story where Venus is like it was in old SF books, all waterworldy and with big fish and stuff?” (While I was writing Golubash, he said “oh, please, oh please, can I have a pony in it?” You can’t blame him, he’s been waiting for me to write SF for four years–exactly, in fact, as today is our anniversary–so it is a bit like getting a vending machine suddenly stocked with your favorite stuff. He just keeps mashing the buttons to see what will come out.)

(Catherynne M. Valente – extract from a post at Rules for Anchorites)

This is the story of the documentary film maker Bysshe, who goes to film the legendary callowhales of Venus. Lovely links and resonances with both Gorodischer’s story and Truslow’s. There’s as much New Weird here as there is science fiction – the story’s aesthetic brought Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film The City of Lost Children instantly to mind – but who cares about categorisation when the writing is this good? I love Valente’s work. Her imagination is so fluid, so fearless, and her command of language feels completely effortless, even though I know that isn’t the case, that prose like this has to be crafted and fought for every word of the way.

The levitator told her of a town called Adonis, a whole colony on Venus that vanished in the space of a night. Divers they were, mostly, subject both to the great callowhales with their translucent skin and the tourists who came to watch and shiver in cathartic delight as the divers risked their lives to milk the recalcitrant mothers in their hibernation. They built a sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaiting their roofs with grease-weed and hammering doors from the chunks of raw copper which comprised the ersatz Venusian beach. They lived; they ate the thready local cacao and shot, once or twice a year a leathery ‘Tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months. 

I think I mentioned before how much I enjoy stories that contain found documents or pose as secret histories, fictitious biographies. This is one of those, and it is a beauty.

 

Well, that’s the last of our 33 stories. It’s been an amazing journey. Stay tuned for a wrap-up post, coming soon!