Book Review: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol. 2, edited by George Mann

SF and SF: Science Fiction and Short Fiction

Short Fiction was the bedrock of SF in the early 20th century, when it started to coalesce into something you could point to as a living, definable genre.  Trade magazines like Gernsback’s Amazing Stories or Campbell’s Astounding Stories gave scientists aspiring to be fiction writers (or vice versa) forums to speculate on the future, try on ideas, and perform the genre of SF.  The rise of the paperback in the latter half of the 20th century meant that longer works of SF and collections could be published more cheaply and easily, and the market for short fiction started to wane.  It didn’t die, however,  and magazines like Asimov‘s and Analog still publish short fiction, but it’s not what it was.

So why did I choose The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol. 2 as my first review of short SF?  Well, I found it in a used bookstore for about $2, that’s why.  The imprint aims to fill in the gap in anthologies of new SF (as opposed to the gobs of single-author or “best of” collections that are out there)  that was the result of the market trends mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Editor George Mann writes in the introduction that “Novels are the order of the day.  Casual readers want the perceived ‘value for money’; they want ot buy books by the inch, want their experience to last longer” (9).  Still, Mann has great faith in the power of short fiction, declaring:

It’s my particular view that short fiction is the lifeblood of the SF genre, a fundamental testbed of ideas, a breeding ground for new writers…Many writers first come to the attention of editors through their short fiction…the whole experience of reading short fiction is also markedly different than the experience of reading a novel–a good story punches you in the gut, makes you sit up immediately and pay attention, whilst a novel can toy with you for longer, playing the long game. (8)

As Mann says, we have to adjust out expectations a bit when we read, or try to write, short fiction.  My undergraduate degree had a focus in Creative Writing, and I can remember several imperatives of writing short fiction versus more extended work.  One should open as close to the action as possible, and characters have to be developed more through action than through their ruminations or the the slow unfolding of a theme or motif.  Description and exposition generally has to balance being evocative and concise.  A novel allows a writer to pursue/develop multiple themes or ideas, whereas things tend to be more contained in short fiction.  Poe declared that short fiction should be read in a single sitting and that it should have a “unity of effect,” in that it has as few extraneous parts as possible so that every piece works towards the overall effect.   In short, it’s a very different game than novels.

I kept the intricacies of this balancing act in mind when I dove into The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Two.  This would be the first time I attempted to tackle an entire anthology of new, original SF.  I enjoyed the anthology overall and I thought it was sequenced pretty well.  Mann starts you out with some lighter stories before throwing in the longer, more involved stories, which is helpful.  Some stories I enjoyed, others I didn’t, and a couple I found riveting (for instance, I am giving serious thought to putting Watts’ “The Eyes of God” on my students’ reading list for the Introduction to English Studies class I’m teaching over the summer).  In the end I had a good time nibbling away at the volume a story or two at at a time.  I’m going to highlight a few stories in particular in the following sections to give you an idea of what you can find in this volume.

What I liked:

There is a pair of stories called “Mason’s Rats” by Neal Asher that are about a farmer named Mason who has to deal with things that seem fantastic to us that are really just everyday headaches for him, things like making compromises with the hyper-intelligent rats ruining his grain stores or his computer-run combine’s agoraphobia.  I enjoyed it because of its kind of mundane atmosphere: it’s not a story about the fate of nations or about the protagonist’s life hanging in the balance, and instead its more of a story about someone in one of the worlds oldest professions (farming) trying to come to terms with how he can get by with these annoying problems that, to us, seem fantastical.

The “Line of Dichotomy” by Chris Robertson was, in the end, an interesting exploration of a war between different cultures.  It is set on a low-gravity planet being colonized by the Middle Kingdom, which reads like a new Chinese empire.  The bannermen of the Middle Kingdom are at odds with the Mexic warriors, whose practice of ritual sacrifice is reminiscent of Aztec culture.  The story details the action of a conflict between the two, but was all caught up in atmosphere and action/tension and didn’t get into it’s real brain candy until very close to the end.

There are three stories that really blew me away and made me think.  Peter Watts’ “The Eyes of God”  starts with one of those mundane annoyances many travelers are unfortunately familiar with: the hassles of getting through security in the airport.  Watt’s twist is that a new apparatus used for airline security will read your mind, your desires, and your intents before you are allowed to board.  This technology is also used by advertisers and leads to a particularly distressing moment when the protagonist has a sudden desire for liquor that is the result of an advertisement beamed directly to his brain.  The protagonist, a man traveling for a funeral, has had a traumatic past that he is afraid will be read by the machine as something sinister.  Watt’s story presents a sticky moral question with no easy right or wrong, which is the kind of nuance I really like.

“Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal is a very short, evocative work about a hyper-intelligent, uplifted ape who must endure being treated as a zoo animal despite his human-level intellect and emotional maturity.  It is a particularly insidious tale since in less than five pages it managed to yank pretty hard at my heartstrings.

“Blood Bonds” by Brenda Cooper is about twin sisters, one a pilot and the other a paraplegic (crippled after a terrorist attack).  The pilot lands a job on Mars which she hopes will allow her to make enough money to restore her sister, but (minor spoiler) her sister’s body dies when she uploads her personality into a virtual intelligence and is smuggled to her sister on Mars.  The story becomes entangled with the laws that prevent AI and VI who want to change, evolve, or become downloaded into physical forms.  It presents some interesting questions about how humans should legally and morally treat AI.

What I Didn’t Like and What Could Have Been Better

“Shining Armor,” “Space Crawl Blues,” and “Sunworld” had interesting ideas, but ended up being predictable, underdeveloped, and too cliche respectively. I didn’t even finish “Sunworld.”  When people started talking like they came out of a hackneyed comic book I lost interest pretty quickly.  While I did like the concept in Space Crawl Blues, I felt Kenyon could have played with it a bit more or presented it a bit more in detail.  Dominic Green’s “Shining Armor” is about a greedy corporation’s attempts to neutralize the pilot of a small town’s giant robot guardian so that they can safely exploit the nearby resources.  It ended up being too predictable, which I could have forgiven if the dialogue and character interaction wasn’t so wooden and uninteresting.   Probably the most abstract story was “Fifty Dinosaurs” by Robert Reed, and it had this weird existential dilemma thing that just wasn’t my taste.

There were two stories in the volume, “Point of Contact” and “Mathralon,”  that completely eschew traditional narrative technique in that they are pretty much comprised of exposition directed towards the reader.  “Mathralon” was neat, but “Point of Contact,” which tried to tackle the many different cliches about first contact, felt to me like a gag that was allowed to play itself out too far.

Final Evaluation: Overall this was an enjoyable anthology with a satisfying variety of topics, speculation, and narrative techniques.  Some of the stories I didn’t enjoy or thought could have been presented better, but that seems par for the course for any anthology. I honestly didn’t expect to love everything in here, and I respect Mann’s decision to include such a variety in order to try to cater to a wide readership in SF.

I’m not sure how to rate an SF anthology, since I have no experience with other SF anthologies to compare this to.  I’ll leave this one without a score for now and will probably come back to it once I tackle another one and have a better idea as to how to score collections of this sort.  In the end, however, it’s given me more of a desire to engage short SF and keep an eye as to what kind of SF is being published today.