Lavie Tidhar follows up his 2016 Mosaic Novel/Short Story collection Central Station (John W Campbell winner, Clarke shortlist, and book of the year for me) with Unholy Land, an alternative history concerning a Jewish Homeland in Africa which turns out to be much more more.
It's not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it's maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.
It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of 'inconsequential fantasies' in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here. But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it's actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out... it's a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.
“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”
World, rejoice, for what we believed impossible is coming true! S. P. Somtow, aka Somtow Sucharitkul, who faded from SF and focused on creating and conducting music, his other major muse (and his music is very much worth checking out!) is writing again - and writing more material in the Inquestor universe!
After 33 years, S.P. Somtow is finally creating a fifth book in the Inquestor universe, the galaxy-spanning science fantasy series that Theodore Sturgeon called "the greatest magnitude of spectacle and color since Olaf Stapledon." The book is being released in a series of installments in pulp-sized magazine format.
Besides the new book installments we also get the original short stories which turned into the original 4 books, we get notes on the language and other background material, we get introductions to the stories from other greats of the genre, and we get assorted commentary from the peanut gallery, as it should be. The first two installments are now available on Amazon, and more is to come.
Supporters of the author on Patreon get to read the new stories (and much else) early and for free, but that means you miss all the other fun! So I'd suggest you do both - support the creation of more of this on Patreon, but also buy the individual books. Because it's worth your time and money!
As a researcher into 'the connections between the weird and ecological fiction' (her words) or 'climate-change fiction, in particular its Gothic and weird aspects' (Anglia Ruskin University, where she is a PhD student) Marian Womack is evidently working to her core interests, and to her strengths with this book. She is a Clarion alumni, writing in both Spanish and English, and is involved in the translation of speculative fiction as well as in publishing it as co-editor of Ediciones Nevsky/Nevsky Books.
Lost Objects, her first collection of short stories, was published by Luna Press; a number of her stories have also been published in magazines and other collections, including in 'The Year's Best Weird Fiction'. Besides the expected dystopian and degenerative ecological angle you would expect given her interests and background these stories also at times present interesting windows into promising futures, unusual takes on SF tropes, and evoke both the inevitable New Weird touchpoints like LaLumiere or Tidbeck (whom she translated) but also literary classics like Borchert in her portrayal of slightly hallucinatory states of the mind.
Below I run through the stories in the collection, 4 of which were previously published in magazines and books – if you would rather approach this without all the spoilers this entails then stop here, with my recommendation that I think this collection is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in unusual/weird fiction; even if I found not all stories equally/entirely engaging.
What do you do when a book you've been asking, wishing, begging for finally arrives, several years later than you'd have liked it to? When several Christmases plus your Birthday have come in one go? You complain about it, of course. So, to be clear, this is no way long enough. We want more, and we want it now! Although one notices that the credits contain a Series Editor (Jacob Weisman). There is hope yet...
Peter Watts is an award-winning Canadian hard SF author, a lapsed marine biologist, a survivor of necrotising fasciitis, and a convicted felon (just ask the TSA) who will not enter the US again. I guess there are worse fates... He now has 8 published Novels (one of them published in two volumes for ‘commercial considerations’) and 2 collections of short stories under his belt; he has been labelled a “sociological futurist Lovecraft” in a discussion on Charlie Stross’ blog - a quip which predates the story at hand, but is nevertheless fully appropriate, too.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution is set in his Sunflowers universe, ie the same universe in which the Hugo-Award-winning Novelette The Island (as well as a raft of other stories and snippets published over the last few years) is set in, and follows the same wormhole-building ship/asteroid and its dysfunctional crew and AI.
Whilst he wrote novels, too, I always consider Fredric as one of the grand masters of the short - sometimes very short - story, frequently with an surprising twist to it that can turn an entire story on its head and forces the reader to start again. This is not one of those, but the twist is a classic.
For those not familiar with the term, Wikipedia provides the following definition for Solipsism:
from Latin solus, meaning 'alone', and ipse, meaning 'self', is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.
Once in a while a book comes your way which transcends boundaries - sometimes because the author is rooted or interested in several things, sometimes because the book, the story, the characters ran away with the it and created something bigger and more complex in the process; and sometimes because, like with An Android Awakes, the originators (Mike French, and illustrator Karl Brown in this case) set out to do so - successfully, in this case. An Android Awakes is a hybrid novel, part classic SF book, part graphic novel, with both parts interlinked and feeding off each other. It’s an interesting concept, going way beyond the classic ‘illustrated story’ approach, whilst adding the depth of story and character which pure graphic novels frequently struggle to bring to the table from the text portions. The closest I can compare it to, in format and interaction at least, is Ian Sinclair’s Slow Chocolate Autopsy, although that is a completely different monster of a book.
The book is set in a future where all or nearly all fiction, as well as other creative tasks, are done by androids, and not humans anymore - so much for there being areas where robots will never be able to replace humans!
But in the end this is simply a consequent extrapolation of where we’re going already: “In the future some of you will become great writers, renowned artists, visionary filmmaker and talented photographers. Most of you though will just have more sex. Go forward a few more generations and none of you are creative save that of your procreation. Your culture is shaped by machines.”
