Five Very Good New Albums by Old Favorites

As previously mentioned on this blog, I've been getting back into music over the last year, having not done much listening to music since my first kid was born in 2018. Some of what I've been doing is picking up albums by new-to-me bands (The National, Belle and Sebastian, My Friend the Chocolate Cake). That I will probably make a different post about someday. But the other thing I have been doing is collecting albums that bands I listened to pre-kids have put out since I had kids. I am seven years behind, so there is quite a lot to catch up on!

Florence + the Machine, High as Hope (2018) 

This is the fourth album by Florence + the Machine, an alternative rock band (I think? I am so bad at genre) from the UK. I think their most famous album remains their 2009 debut Lungs; certainly "Drumming Song" is probably their most famous song. Lead singer Florence Welch has an amazing, powerful voice, and I would say the band's sound is often distinguished by big, powerful arrangements. My favorite song by them is actually the title track from their 2015 album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, which features both powerful lyrics from Florence but also a beautiful trumpet solo.

High as Hope is actually a bit different, with somewhat less emphasis on the powerful stuff. There are a couple stripped back songs about the necessity of faith and grace that really resonated with me: "Big God" and, in particular, "Grace."

Kate Nash, Yesterday Was Forever (2018)

I think it was my sister who got me into Kate Nash, another female vocalist from the UK. In particular, I love her song "Foundations" from Made Of Bricks (2007): "My fingertips are holding onto / The cracks in our foundation / And I know that I should let go / But I can't." Her songs alternate between this very earnest emotion and cheeky irreverence that appeals to me; she has weird and fun lyrics but also a lot of anger and energy.

Though I like her a lot, I did kind of worry she had a very specific, period-based vibe. Like was that angsty, late 2000s/early 2010s vibe still going to hold up in 2025? Well, I guess I don't know about 2025 (she has a 2024 album I haven't got to yet), but 2018 was a good year for her because I think Yesterday Was Forever has a number of strong tracks. In particular, I like "Karaoke Kiss":

To be honest, like many songs, I'm not sure I could totally tell you what it's about, but my vibe is that it's about new love, and how meeting someone can fill an emptiness in you even when it's not necessarily the right thing for you: "Kiss me in the karaoke bar / I need something, I feel so dark."

Lena, Only Love, L (2019)

Look, they can't all be quirky UK female songwriters; some of my favorites are quirky German songwriters. I discovered Lena Meyer-Landrut back when I was in grad school, thanks to the magic of Pandora. She's probably worth a full post someday, because I think she's had an interesting trajectory, from her early work which has this kind of "I'm so cute and quirky and wholesome vibe" that I associate with mid-2000s female singer-songwriters (though she was always more poppy)—see for example "Satellite" or "Caterpillar in the Rain" from her 2010 album My Cassette Player—that transitioned into more traditionally sexy stuff—I am a huge fan of "Taken by a Stranger" from 2011's Good News.

Of all the albums on this list of five, this is probably the one it took me the longest to warm up to, and I do think some of it is pretty generic pop, not as fun or interesting as the work Lena was doing earlier in her career. I was thus a bit surprised to find myself coming around to and then actively enjoying the track "skinny bitch," which is about a far from wholesome as you can get!

However, there is something kind of freeing about the chorus, which I enjoy belting along with: "When life gives you lemons, mix it up with vodka soda. / Love your imperfections, fuck the haters, they don't know ya!"

But just not when my kids are around! 

Ingrid Michaelson, Stranger Songs (2019)

See, some of my quirky female vocalists are even American! Ingrid Michaelson has had what feels like a kind of typical trajectory for an artist I am interested in, which is from very quirky, stripped back stuff to more overtly poppy material. I feel like there's a world of difference between her strumming the ukelele on "You and I" from Girls and Boys (2006) to pop anthems like "Girls Chase Boys" from Lights Out (2014), even if I like both. I do have to say I don't really get why the conceit behind this album is that they are all inspired by Stranger Things, but it did result in some good songs nonetheless. My favorite from the album is "Jealous":

(What I did not know until just now is that "Jealous" has a music video with art by Amanda Conner, one of my all-time favorite comic book illustrators. What a weird and unexpected collision of two totally different worlds.)

Regina Spektor, Home, before and after (2022)

I swear do I listen to songs with male vocalists, but indeed, you will find none of them in this post. Once again we have a quirky 2000s singer-songwriter... perhaps the most archetypal quirky 2000s singer-songwriter of them all! If you didn't listen to Begin To Hope (2006) in college, are you really a millennial? So much good stuff throughout her career; I would be hard-pressed to pick an album as a favorite. I do have to say that 2016's Remember Us to Life is my least favorite; it has some good tracks but it's certainly the one I relisten to as a whole the least. Thus, I was a little trepidatious about her newest album after a six-year gap, Home, before and after, but it won me over basically right away, and I have been listening to it quite a bit since I picked it up earlier this month.

Lots of great stuff here, but I have particularly enjoyed the desperation of "One Man's Prayer" ("I just want some girl to talk to me / And tell me that I'm different or say that I'm the same. / I don't care what she thinks, just think of me.") and the extravagance of "Spacetime Fairytale" and the weirdness of "SugarMan."

But the one that knocked me over was "Up the Mountain," a kind of creepy song with very tantalizing lyrics:

In the ocean there’s a mountain.
On the mountain there’s a forest.
In the forest there’s a garden.
In the garden there’s a flower.
In the flower there’s a nectar.
In the nectar there’s an answer.
In that answer there’s another
And another and another
And another and another.

Not only did I love it, but it came on my iPod when I was driving my seven-year-old somewhere, and once it was done, they demanded I go back to the beginning so they could hear it all! If you know my seven-year-old, you'll know that it rarely gets better than that.

Five Very Good Albums from When I Was in College

A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.

I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.

This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.

For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.

The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)

My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."

The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)

I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!

But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:

I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.

Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)

I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:

Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.

...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:

Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.

Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":

Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.

Now take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.

Is the lyrics website I just looked at right? I always thought it was "stow them safely." Anyway, I very rarely feel like I know what any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song is actually about but I always enjoy the vibe.

Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)

I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."

Chill but you can also jam out to it I guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to music.

Five Subsequent Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

The fourth in an intermittent series.

"The Commuter" by Philip K. Dick

"We don't have any service to Macon Heights." 

Over the last few years, I've been working my way through the short stories of Philip K. Dick. Many of them are justly praised, but this is probably my favorite of the three volumes I've read so far; originally published in 1953, the story is collected in volume two of the Gollancz Collected Short Stories. Above I've linked to it on a not-at-all dubious site.

Like Dick's best stories, it takes place in the real world with a sense of unreality creeping up on you. In this case, a guy who sells tickets to railway commuters has someone ask for a ticket to a suburb that doesn't exist... or does it? It's a simple story, I suppose, but effectively done, Dick doing what really only he could do.

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

She turns to him and their eyes meet and he touches her and they make love in the fashion of the deads.

I read this as a potential story for my class on life extension in science fiction. It's about a future society where people who die get a second life—but they want nothing to do with those who they knew in their first life. The protagonist is a man who can't move on when the woman he loves dies and is reborn. Originally published in 1974, but unfortunately, there seems to be no online copy of it that I can fine, legal or even illegal. I read it by borrowing The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four from the library, but you can see on ISFDB that it's been anthologized a lot, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Four, which I do own, so I don't know why I didn't just read it there. I ended up not assigning it in my class; it's very good, but at seventy pages a bit too long compared to the amount the social issues we were interested in actually turned up.

Anyway, I really liked it. Silverberg is a writer I've read very little of but almost always enjoy when I do. This story is very creepy in its depiction of the ethos of the new dead, and it does that doubling thing I love so much in science fiction: it's both about a weird new society and it's about the world that we live in, the protagonist's inability to move on from his dead wife being a literalized metaphor for when we can't move on from a dead relationship... but man, it is a creepy and disturbing story on top of all that. Good stuff.

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them. In Omelas, there were only good parents and no child suffered except the single one who did. How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own.

You've probably read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the justly famous thought experiment. Courtesy of Clarkesworld, this is a gonzo over-the-top reaction to it, about people trying to solve the problem by just killing the kid. There have been a number of Omelas responses and riffs over the years, but this one surely has the most jokes. I nominated it for the 2025 Hugo Awards; based on the buzz, I'd wager it has a good chance of being on the ballot.

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covered up a murder, the coach decided that he’d finally had enough.

I discovered this story when I was on my hermit-crab story kick last year; it was recommended to me on Reddit. The story is written in the form of a Law & Order SVU episode guide. It's very effective; I've never seen SVU and so at first the descriptions all came across as perfectly plausible summaries of episodes. But as you go on, they get increasingly weird and increasing creepy. Between the lines, a bizarre story of doubles and duplicates, of violence and crime, emerges. It will take you a while to read, and I don't recommend trying to plow though all twelve seasons in one sitting, but it's worth spending some time with it.

"If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt

And as terrifying as the Mississippi River was, Fern knows it’s the West that kills the most teams.

This story was originally published in Slate, as part of its "Future Tense Fiction" series; I of course read it in a Best Science Fiction of the Year volume from Neil Clarke (number 8, which I'm still working my way through). It's set in the future, after some kind of climate apocalypse. Infrastructure has largely collapsed and nature is taking back America's transportation networks. The three protagonists are a team of racers, competing to make the dangerous trip from East Coast to West and hopefully win themselves new lives in the process. Beautifully told, in terms of characters, prose, world, and theme. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I'd read it at the time it came out; I probably would have ranked it over anything on the year's Hugo Award for Best Short Story ballot (other than "Rabbit Test").

Five Very Good Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction Novels (not by H. G. Wells)

Earlier this week on Reddit, a post in r/printSF (the very best sub) asked, essentially, "Who are all the good nineteenth-century science fiction writers who aren't Jules Verne and H. G. Wells?"

Well, never was a question so well designed for me! Unfortunately, I came to it kind of late; I did write a reply but I think most people had moved on from the thread by then. But it occurred to me as given I gave five novels, the comment would also make a good installment of my sporadic "Five Very Good..." series here on my blog, where I list five things in some category.

These aren't necessarily the five best; I've skipped some heavy hitters like Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in favor of some less common and probably less good good ones because I found them particularly interesting in some way. Unfortunately, the thing you will find when you read a lot of nineteenth-century British science fiction is that the reason we only talk about Wells now is that, largely, only Wells was any good. Wells was excellent at taking the tropes of what was a pretty crappy genre in his day and doing very clever things with them, such that he redefined the tropes! Wells didn't write the first alien invasion story or the first time travel story or the first invisibility story... but he did write the first good alien invasion story, the first good time travel story, the first good invisibility story. (And what I mean by good is that his stories have both the exact right level of scientific rigor but also the ability to say something about a concept outside of science.)

But anyway, here are books I would recommend if you want to read some fun nineteenth-century sf. If I've reviewed them on this blog before, I've included a link to the post.

Jane Loudon, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
For a while I was obsessed with this book... and I still do think it's pretty great. It's a world where multiple revolutions have left England a Catholic country with a matriarchal monarchy. Education has come to all classes, leading to incredibly smart laborers-- and thus rich people act incredibly stupid so no one mistakes them for poor people. Technological inventions abound, extending to sending mail by loading letters into metal balls that are launched into a steam-powered cannon, aiming for a net at the house of the recipient. Which is awesome and hilarious all at once. There's a lot of satire going on, here: on class, on gender, on science, on progress. Some of it is funny, all of it is fascinating. Genuinely fun and readable; most early sf isn't. And I haven't even gotten to the mummy accidentally resurrected by a mad scientist who hides in the English palace and dispenses political advice. (You can get the original three-volume edition from Google Books, but I think the reprint edited by Alan Rauch is just fine for casual reading despite being abridged; he captures all the good bits.)

Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
Several generations into the future, after a mysterious disaster has ripped through the heart of Victorian Britain, the Thames is a giant lake and London a deadly swamp. With the upper and middle classes having fled the country for parts unknown, civilization and technology collapsed, leaving a new feudal order to come about, constantly under threat from invasion by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish, all out for revenge. The first third of the novel is just a description of this postapocalyptic world, telling how animals and plants have been affected (Jefferies was a nature writer), and about the political and social setup, with marauding bands of "gipsies" and the sinister Bushmen lurking between cities for hapless travelers. It's well-thought-out, detailed world-building, the best I know of in the nineteenth century, almost Tolkienesque. There are so many fruitful avenues for stories suggested in just five chapters.

George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893)
Griffith isn't a great writer, but he is a genuinely clever one, basically the first guy to unite the Verne-style "amazing technology" story with the Butler/Lytton-style "strange society" story, giving us a novel about anarchists who use airships to bomb Europe into submission... leading to a utopia! He wrote a lot of novels, and was the leading writer of "future war" fiction for a long time; Wells even makes fun of him in The War in the Air. Angel is his first and best book. Lots of fun stuff; it was reissued under the title "Tsar Wars" for a reason, though the best edition to get is the annotated one Steven McLean edited for Victorian Secrets Press.

T. Mullett Ellis, Zalma (1896)
Count Pahlen (a Russian nobleman, Tsarist counter-spy, and professor of biology) give his illegitimate daughter up to the Catholic Church, which raises her in a convent and plans to marry her to the heir to the throne of England to turn it into a Catholic country, but the plan fails, and Zalma rejoins her father, who is actually the ringleader of an anarchist conspiracy. Her father dies before he can bring his plans to fruition, and so Zalma decides to dump anthrax on all the capital cities of Europe from balloons. And that just scratches the surface of how bonkers this book is. Sometimes meandering and dull, of course, but usually fascinating. (The book has no modern reprint, but the complete text is available on the HathiTrust site.)

M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
Not quite nineteenth-century, I guess, but close enough. What would you do if you were the last person left alive? Why, you'd probably conclude that the world was made for you-- why else would only you have survived?-- and so you'd tour the cities of Europe, burning each of them down when you were done. Because once you're done with them, certainly no one else is ever going to see them. The novel is filled with brilliant bits where we get to see the narrator trying to cope with being the last man-- and seeing the world those last panicky humans left behind. There's just a lot of nice little moments peppered throughout the novel, which feels so intense and so real. Shiel's ability to depict human isolation without ever getting dull is extraordinary. (I recommend the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" edition, which uses the weirder 1929 revised text.)

Five Very Good Podcasts Now on BBC Sounds

Longtime readers around here will know that I am still a devotee of the iPod Classic, using it to listen to my music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Unfortunately, my iPod Classic has been having battery problems, meaning I can only use plugged in to power. So, it works in the car, but is essentially useless for listening to while doing house chores or working out.

This means I have been forced to listen to stuff like someone from the 2020s (or 2010s); that is to say, on my phone. The first thing I listened to this way was the podcast Doctor Who Redacted, because it can only be accessed through the BBC Sounds app. But once I listened to this podcast (highly recommended, by the way), I realized there was a whole wealth of material that I've been listening to on there, now for around a year I think. As an American, you can listen to whatever you want!*

There doesn't seem, alas, to be a way to view a list of everything you've listened to on the BBC Sounds app, so I am going to give you some recommendations from memory. Probably there is other good stuff I am forgetting.

• "Beethoven Can Hear You" (2020). Actual Deaf actress Sophie Stone plays a Deaf time traveller who travels back in time to meet Beethoven... and discovers that he is not in fact Deaf. Beautifully performed by Stone and Doctor Who's own Peter Capaldi, beautifully written by Timothy X Atack (who I know from the Doctor Who audio dramas), and beautifully sounding, with some interesting things to say about disability and identity.
• Two on a Tower (2021). There are a lot of Thomas Hardy (and other Victorian fiction) adaptations on BBC Sounds, but this has been my favorite of them so far, a genuinely moving adaptation of my favorite minor Hardy, a book that has otherwise gone unadapted. Captures the leads' uncertainty and passion in equal measure.
• Mrs Sidhu Investigates: Murder with Masala (2017). This is a fun mystery comedy, about a nosy Indian caterer who keeps sticking her nose into murders. Meera Syal is hugely funny as the lead, as is Justin Edwards, who plays her long-suffering police contact. My main complaint is that there was only one four-episode series, though it was later turned into both a tv show and a novel.
• Decameron Nights (2014). Ten installments of Boccaccio's Decameron are dramatized in 165 minutes. Lots of good actors in this, and lots of good jokes, really brings the sexual farce elements of the original to life with a lightly modern touch. Lots of familiar voices (Samuel Barnett is good value of course) but you haven't lived until you've heard Big Finish's Jane Slavin as a horny abbess.

• A Vindication of Frankenstein's Monster (2024). I'm not quite done with this, but I am loving it enough to confidently state it will be on my Hugo ballot next year. This story mashes up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What if the woman we now mostly remember as the mother of the mother of Frankenstein... kind of became Frankenstein's monster herself? Or, perhaps, she already was? Great science fictional exploration of monstrousness and gender.

* Except for, apparently, Numberblocks Tales, which is a great tragedy for us in the Mollmanns.

Five Further Very Good Short Stories I've Read Lately

I've been enjoying these posts, so here's another one. This is the third in a series.

"The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G.

I read this late last year in an excellent anthology, much mentioned by me, called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Kosmatka was a new-to-me author. The story was originally published in Asimov's in 2007, and doesn't seem to be legally available online in text form, but it was released as an audio reading in an episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, which I've linked to above.

The story is set in a universe where science ended up showing that six-day literal creationism is true, and follows a paleontologist in that world—who ends up involved in the discovery of the very real so-called "hobbits of Flores," which threaten to upend science. The worldbuilding is incredibly well done, the story is tightly written, and it got pretty intense. Much like a similar story for Ted Chiang, it's a neat way of exploring science and technology issues in our world. It was later expended into a novel called The Prophet of Bones; this got mixed reviews but I must pick it up.

"The Silence of the Asonu" by Ursula K. Le Guin 

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

This Le Guin story was originally published (under the title "The Asonu") in an environmental magazine called Orion in 1998; it was subsequently incorporated into her 2003 story cycle Changing Planes, which is where I read it. It has since been reprinted many times, including in Lightspeed magazine, which is what I've linked to above.

Like most of the Changing Planes stories, it takes the reader onto another "plane" and explores the people who live there. The Asonu start out capable of speech, but gradually give it up as they grow older; in one example, an Asonu elder says eleven things in the last four years of his life. The story explores the way humans want to make sense of things, want utterances to have meaning, want to ascribe wisdom to what is cryptic. Like all of Le Guin, clever and kind of funny, but also dark.

"Muallim" by Ray Nayler 

“I must go to the school, or I will be late.”
     “Are you avoiding the subject?” Irada asked.
     “The first subject is math,” Muallim said. “There is no avoiding math.”
     “Hey – that was a pretty good joke!”
     “That was not a joke,” Muallim said as it walked out of the yard. “There really is no avoiding math.”

This is a more recent story than most of what I describe in this post; it's the very first story in the most recent volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and was originally published in Asimov's in 2021. It's about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done.

"Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers" by Kij Johnson 

And, riddles solved, Phix kills herself. She has served her purpose in advancing the hero's story, and now she is extraneous, a potential plotline complication down the road when sex with his mother, his blinding, and his ignominious death should be driving the story; and so she is hustled off-stage. She throws herself from the column and dies.
     A life depends on the answers to the Sphinx's riddles: yours, if you are wrong—but hers, if you are not.

I read a volume of Kij Johnson stories last fall and overall enjoyed them, but this was probably my favorite. (It was originally published in an online litmag called Diagram, which ISFDB does not seem to know about.) It bounces back and forth between a take of the sphinx myth, a modern girl growing up who is captivated by riddles, and embedded riddles that resonate with the events of the story. Johnson is probably one of the best writers in terms of craft in the contemporary sf&f space, and this story certainly helps show that. Like much of her work, it's a striking reflection on the stories we tell and what we think of the nonhuman.

"History Report" by Simon Rich 

My Great-Grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people had finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interest in becoming naked, without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my Great-Grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First, you asked the other person if they had seen “Arrested Development,” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably wanted to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it didn’t mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

Now, this story I discovered where I least expected it: driving home from dropping my family off at the airport, I didn't happen to bring my iPod and was thus forced to endure This American Life. The last segment of the episode I listened to was a reading of this, a 2022 New Yorker story about how two people fell in love, narrated by their great-grandson after everyone has left the Earth due to the climate apocalypse. (Unfortunately, Ira Glass introduces it with a joke about StoryCorps that made me confused about what it was trying to do at first.)

It's quite funny, it's nostalgic if you went to college and dated in the mid-2000s, and it's a pointed take on the things we say are important versus the things we actually act on. If you didn't go to college in the mid-2000s as I and evidently Simon Rich did, you might not find it very entertaining, but I suspect that most of the people who care about my recommendations for short fiction probably did.

Five Very Good Christmas Albums You Should Listen To

I love Christmas music.

I'm not one of those mad people who starts listening to it in early October, but as soon as we're home from our Thanksgiving trip, I synchronize the iPod and load up my collection of Christmas music—416 tracks and counting. And it is my firm belief that if Christmas lasts twelve days, you ought to be able to keep listening to Christmas music until January 6th... though my wife strongly disagrees with that.

I don't know that I could articulate exactly what I like about it... joyousness, hope, redemption, certainly, but also cold, and a sense that we're keeping that cold at bay.

Every year I try to pick up one or two Christmas albums that I don't already own and add them to my rotation. Here are five Christmas albums that I've been enjoying recently:

Bing Crosby, Christmas Classics (2006)

I am a big fan of Bing Crosby's Christmas music; I own 45 different tracks by him. Mostly in two albums, this one and The Best of Bing Crosby: The Christmas Collection, but also some tracks by him on an album my family owned growing up, It's Christmas Time, which had a mix of stuff by him, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, and is what introduced me to him. His version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" is definitive.

A few years ago I suddenly wondered if he had ever done "The Little Drummer Boy" because it seemed like one he would have done really well. Some poking around led me to this album, which collects sixteen of his Christmas songs, only three of which overlapped with ones I already owned. Not just "The Little Drummer Boy," but some others of my favorite Christmas songs like "O Holy Night" and "What Child Is This?" The most fascinating song on the album, though, is a second version of "The Little Drummer Boy," done intercut with an original song "Peace on Earth" sung by David Bowie. This was created for a Bing Crosby tv Christmas special.

Over the Rhine, Blood Oranges in the Snow (2014)

The first two Christmas albums of Cincinnati band Over the Rhine, The Darkest Night of the Year. (1996) and Snow Angel (2006), have been favorites of mine since introduced to me by my father. The first is a mixture of staples and original compositions, the latter is all original (I think). Like a lot of stuff on this list, they have a slightly melancholy tone that really captures the Christmas spirit for me. This year, it occurred to me that it's been seventeen years since Snow Angel, had they put out a third Christmas album? Yes... almost a decade ago!

All the tracks on this one are good of course, but one day my five-year-old was there when "Let It Fall" was playing and he started going, "No, don't let it fall!", which made me really pay attention to the lyrics to that one for the first time: "Whatever we’ve lost, / I think we’re gonna let it go. / Let it fall, / Like snow. / 'Cause rain and leaves / And snow and tears and stars, / And that’s not all my friend, / They all fall with confidence and grace. / So let it fall, let it fall." It's a good reminder that there are things we needs to let go of and let fall, we can't keep it all wound up inside ourselves.

Chris Standring & Kathrin Shorr, Send Me Some Snow (2011)

I first heard a song from this album at Panera Bread, actually, frantically getting some grading done the Saturday after finals week in 2019. I was instantly drawn to its "cool vintage style" and Shazamed it to discover it was the work of Chris Standring (who plays the guitar) and Kathrin Shorr (who does the singing). I think they're married? I believe he's an bestselling performer of... jazz or something.

Anyway, this is an album of entirely original Christmas compositions that instantly feel timeless. They feel like something you could imagine coming out of the Big Crosby era of music... only he never sang any of these songs because they didn't exist yet. Shorr is a breathy, beautiful vocalist and really the person who makes the album soar. I like "Naughty or Nice" a lot, and the title track is excellent, but the one I've elected to share here is "Someone's Gotta Get Something for Christmas." Could that someone be me?

Sting, If on a Winter's Night... (2009)

When we regularly went home to Cincinnati every Christmas, my friend David would have us over for dinner. One year, this was playing and he revealed to me that it was by Sting of all people. (Admittedly, when it comes to Sting, I mostly think of him as the depraved Harkonnen nephew from Dune, but I'm reasonably certain most people don't think of him as the kind of guy who puts out Christmas albums.) There are few Christmas standards here; rather, it's an album of traditional English folk songs with lutes, guitars, trumpets, and so on. More than any other item on this list, it captures that idea I mentioned in my opening: it's a cold album, but what it celebrates is how we push back against it. 

There are a lot of good tracks, but my favorite is "Soul Cake," about people going "souling" (door to door begging for a cookie-like food called a soul cake): "If you haven't got a penny, / A ha'penny will do; / If you haven't got a ha'penny, / It's God bless you." Sting's version mixes in some of the melody of my favorite Christmas carol, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," too. (Wikipedia tells me this owes a debt to a version by Peter, Paul, and Mary.)

Seth MacFarlane & Liz Gillies, We Wish You the Merriest (2023)

My choices can't all be original hipster nonsense, can they? When I was in grad school, a colleague—even more into Christmas music than me—was blaring some Bing Crosby-, Frank Sinatra-esque Christmas music in the program office. Who was singing, I asked, and I was astonished to learn that it was Seth "Family Guy" MacFarlane. I went home and picked up his album Holiday for Swing! (2014). He's no Bing Crosby, of course, but it's a pretty strong pastiche.

This year, he has a new one out, a set of duets with the former Disney Channel star Liz Gillies. The title track is strong, but my favorite is probably "Christmas Time All Over the World," where the two sing Christmas greetings from a variety of different languages. (Apparently this is originally a Sammy Davis, Jr. song, but as far as I know, this is the first I've heard it.)

Hopefully you've found something new here! This was fun to write up; maybe I'll do it again next year but with (somewhat) less pretentious picks.

Mele Kalikimaka!

Five More Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

I liked writing this up last time, even if as far as I know it's yet another post that no one read, so here's another list of five very good short stories I've read recently (in no particular order), so you don't have to read about them buried in some anthology review or something. Go and read some excellent short fiction!

"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky

There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.

This is a 2009 short story originally published on Tor.com. I read it in the anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. It was a finalist for Best Novelette at the 2010 Hugo Awards, but came in third to two stories I haven't read; it beat out a Paul Cornell story that I have read, and in that, at least, I agree with the voters.

The story is about the disintegration of a marriage, but the marriage is between a human woman and her robot husband and they have a human daughter. We simultaneously follow the woman and daughter after the break-up, the husband as he sets out on his own, and (in a series of flashbacks) how everything got to this point to begin with. It's beautifully told, well observed, and genuinely moving, with some haunting images. Yes, it's about a woman in love with a robot, but it uses that as a jumping-off point for a powerful meditation on kinds of love, especially what it means to own something you love—in many different ways.

"A Better Way of Saying" by Sarah Pinsker

The title after the mugging included an editor’s note: “Aphasia is a mental condition, vouched for by all our best novelists and dramatists.” Why was that necessary? It followed “For five years after this unfortunate occurrence, Florian’s life was a blank to him,” but it pulled the viewer from the narrative, in my opinion, by reminding them of the writers in the very moment they should have been losing themselves in the story. The acting was fine, the film well enough made, but I could barely stand to utter the words.

This is another Tor.com story, one I encountered in Pinsker's collection Lost Places; it was originally published in 2021.

It's a first-person tale set in the early twentieth century; the narrator is a boy hired by the owner of a movie theatre to read the intertitles of silent films aloud, for the benefit of the recent immigrants in the audience whose ability to read English isn't so great yet. Only he begins to decide that he could write those titles better himself. This is paralleled with his later participation in a real incident, where the actor Douglas Fairbanks on a press tour demonstrated his skill with a bow and arrow. It's a story with a small but powerfully effective fantasy element, and it's difficult to say much more about it without giving it all away. As usual for Pinsker, it's beautifully told, and it demonstrates why she continues to be the best writer of short sf&f of our times.

"Finisterra" by David Moles

Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.
     There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died.

This was originally published in F&SF in 2007; like the Swirsky above, I encountered it in Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden's Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Here, I've linked to an on-line reprint of it in Clarkesworld.

It's about an engineer who's from Earth, but an Earth devastated by the economic impact of interstellar civilization; for her in particular, her options as a woman are limited with increasing conservative Muslim influence on society. She travels to a gas giant called Sky that has an oxygen atmosphere and giant flying animals, so large that communities have sprung up on their backs. It's evocatively written and sharply characterized, and it depicts a really interesting civilization that it explores in rich ways, connecting what's going on on Sky (a rich man is seeking to poach one of the giant beasts) to broader thematic concerns in the story. I had never heard of Moles before, but the story left me wanting to read more by him.

"The Education of Junior Number 12" by Madeleine Ashby

“Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”
     “Oh, for—”
     “And very eagerly, I might add.”

Again, I encountered this in C21 SF. It was published on Ashby's publisher's web site in 2011, and it remains there, but somewhere along the line, a web site reformatting means that the current version of the story is missing all its paragraph breaks, so I'm linking to a Wayback Machine version of it.

This is sort of the dark mirror of "Eros, Philia, Agape" above—not that "Eros, Philia, Agape" wasn't itself pretty dark! A tie-in to a novel by Ashby called vN, it's about a self-replicating android (a von Neumann machine, or "vN") who derives its pleasure from pleasing humans at all costs, but also is forced to periodically reproduce; it trains its "Juniors" before releasing them into the world. The world of this story is a harsh one: the main character, Javier, does his best for his Juniors, but is limited by the need he has to please humans. It overrides every other desire he has. But, as the story points out in many ways, humans have desires to that aren't exactly ethical or rational, or vNs wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. It really works in its depiction of human selfishness. Is a vN so bad? They are callous to please others but humans are callous to please themselves. Cool technology, neat extrapolation of how it might be used and abused in society.

"The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu

“People have always associated the mind with the technological fad of the moment. When they believed in witches and spirits, they thought there was a little man in the brain. When they had mechanical looms and player pianos, they thought the brain was an engine. When they had telegraphs and telephones, they thought the brain was a wire network. Now you think the brain is just a computer. Snap out of it. That is the illusion.”
     Trouble was, I knew he was going to say that.

You might be noticing a pattern here: this story was also one I found in C21 SF. It was originally published in Strange Horizons back in 2004. Unlike most people, I find Ken Liu hit or miss, but this one I enjoyed a lot.

A lot of Ken Liu stories, I would argue, use relationships as a crutch for creating emotional investment in a technological concept, but this one is actually about the emotional relationship and the way it will be affected by technology. It's about a programmer who works on creating extremely realistic dolls, and it alternates between her life story and what she's up to in the present; eventually her dolls begin passing the Turing test—and this has her unsettled at the implications. Dark and creepy, I really liked it both for what it said about our future technologies and for what it said about ourselves.

Five Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

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.