This (possibly) marks the start of an irregular feature around here. (God knows I need more of these, but actually, having things I do regularly makes it easy for me to come up with ideas for posts!) Obviously I write up all my reading of "books," but what of short stories? Either they're buried in an anthology review, or I read them on their own and I never mention them at all. So, here they are, complete with links where you can read them too. (I definitely read some good stuff for the Hugos, but I didn't write it up here because I always write those stories up in detail already.)
"An Important Failure" by Rebecca Campbell
Then he fitted it, and it hid so perfectly in his violin, maybe no one would know the terrible thing he had done, the secret history he had stolen like all the other secret histories that constituted his violin.
I read this in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6; it was originally published in Clarkesworld in 2020. It's about a kid who's an apprentice violin maker in the near future, when the trees are burning away and dying off, and he hears a beautiful violin performance that makes him want to present the performer with the perfect violin. But making such a thing is a series of difficulties, especially if the world's going to pot. After a somewhat confusing start (I always read my BSFY stories over lunch after teaching, which usually means I am not in a very focused mindset), it quickly grabbed me. I often hate writing about music, but like Sarah Pinsker, Rebecca Campbell has the gift of making the beauty of the sound come alive in prose. Genuinely moving without being maudlin, and the way it keeps coming back to various "failures" is the kind of thing that resonates with me at thirty-six years old. Things are going to hell and the world wasn't meant to be like this, but there's some beauty to find in all of it anyway.
"AirBody" by Sameem Siddiqui
“You’re not gonna soak the dal first?”
“Oh so now you’re such a refined cook?”
“I can make dal.”
“Then tell me, why soak the dal? What difference does it make, aside from wasting two hours of our lives?”
“Well it’s just, what . . . it’s just what you do.”
Like the Campbell, I read this in Clarke's Best SF of the Year, and like the Campbell, it was originally published in Clarke's own Clarkesworld Magazine in 2020. It's set in a future where people can temporarily "rent" the bodies of other people in different locations; like, you might live in San Francisco, but rent someone's body in New York so you can go to a meeting in person without traveling. The main character is a young Pakistani man in the D.C. area who rents his body to an "aunty" back home. It's very cute, has some great worldbuilding, and good jokes—a satisfying tale of missed opportunities.
"Your Boyfriend Experience" by James Patrick Kelly
Was I aroused? I was. Was I that twisted? Maybe.
I read this in Clarke's Best SF of the Year, but it originally was published in an MIT Press sf anthology called Entanglements: Tomorrow's Lovers, Families, and Friends (2020). The above link will only work if you have access to the MIT Press Direct database of ebooks. (My university, for example, does not subscribe to it.) It's a kind of disturbing story about a couple where one partner is very interested in food, but the other, a developer, has never been able to share his interest. The developer is working on a project to make a male robot companion for gay men, and he tests it out on his partner. Pretty emotionally intense, very strong. I was left somewhat uncertain by the ending, in the best possible way.
"Exile's End" by Carolyn Ives Gilman
The story enthralled the public. It was better than finding a species given up for extinct. It was a chance at redemption, a chance to save what was lost, to reverse injustice, to make everything right.
The reality of the Atoka faded into inconsequence.
Like all the above stories, I read this in Clarke's Best SF; it was originally published on the Tor.com blog in, yes, 2020. It's told from the perspective of an museum curator on a human colony planet—her museum's pride and joy is a native artwork depicting a native woman who plays a key role in her planet's founding myth, someone who bridged the gap between human and colonizer. (Like a more significant Pocahantas.) Those natives are all dead now, so the artifacts in her museum are all that's left... until someone turns up, claiming that there's a small population of them still alive on a distant colony world, and they want their stuff back. It's a striking story, beautifully told, about what art is: how it derives its meaning from what we attach to it, not what it actually looks like, and how different people and different cultures can attach different meanings to the same physical artifact, and thus see it in completely different ways. There's no easy answers here and no sanctimony, just a strong tale of the conflict of cultures.
"Hobbies" by Clifford D. Simak
The pups were bringing in the cows for the evening milking.
Here's the exception. This story was originally published in Astounding way back in 1946; it was later incorporated into Clifford Simak's fix-up novel City, which is where I read it. (My link above goes to a scan of the issue of Astounding in which it originally appeared.) City spans several thousand years of future history in eight short stories; "Hobbies" is the sixth one. I read it in context, of course, but I think it would work on its own. In the future, humanity has largely abandoned the Earth, and those humans that are left have all their needs provided for. In Simak's future, dogs have been raised to sentience, and there are also robots left behind by humankind. The end result of all this is purposelessness: dogs and robots were made to serve humans, but there are none. Even humans themselves don't know what to do. Humanity no longer strives forward, no longer strives to survive. City is my third Simak in the last year, and "Hobbies" is pretty typical of him: atmospheric, detailed, contemplative. But "Hobbies" is also that style at its best. There's something very moving about all these people and things and animals drifting through the world, trying to find reasons to be.
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