Lightspeed #107, April 2019
Original Fiction:
- “The Archronology of Love” by Caroline M. Yoachim (science fiction novelette)
- “Gundark Island, or, Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help” by Matthew Corradi (science fiction short story)
- “The Seeds of War” by Ashok K. Banker (fantasy short story)
- “A Conch-Shell’s Notes” by Shweta Adhyam (fantasy short story)
After five consecutive installments, the flood of novel out-takes apparently ends with “Seeds.” The other fantasy is a short fable in which a “Conch-Shell” allows people to choose their own adventures (including a man who slays a dragon but loses a girl, another who becomes a mayor and gets a girl, and a girl who won’t speak for herself or take responsibility for her own (in)actions) with the baldly stated theme of complaint that the shell “sang of the men’s work, their sacrifices, but not of the women’s” and a selfish and simplistic ending.
The science fiction is much more interesting, but still problematic. “Archronology” is a story about romance and loss along with a dash of epistemology and stuff about a gizmo. When a colony dies, taking a woman’s beloved with it, she and others must use the gizmo (a sort of VR pseudo-time machine) and other methods to find out what went wrong. While the general concept of the gizmo is clear enough, details about it seem gratuitously nonsensical. The hyper-advanced tech is on a 1920s level, recording “light but not sound,” people can rematerialize into walls without further catastrophic effects, there’s no gravity (despite it being in a gravity field), “[t]hings you brought with you were solid, but everything else was basically a projection” and yet, despite bringing your heart and lungs with you, there is “no ambient noise, or even [your] own breathing and heartbeat.” Further, there are cases of purely logical incoherence. The main character was informed in messages that a parakeet on this colony world had died and that crops died and that more crops died and for some reason this didn’t concern her until people started dying. And it is only when reviewing the messages that she makes a connection between the non-human and human deaths. And, presumably, all the other people who have lost all their loved ones got similar messages and no one made this connection. Everyone just assumes the order of things they were told was reversed. “Yes, well, we were told a bird died and then crops failed and then more crops failed and then everyone died but we ‘assumed that the crops and animals had died because the people of the colony had gotten too sick to tend them.'” Further, it’s presented as a mystery but what happened is obvious from nearly the beginning. So, basically, things of this sort constantly took me out of the story which, despite an excess of crying, might have had a workable human-interest core and even some interesting stuff about aliens and knowledge.
Finally, “Gundark” is a sort of bildungsroman and meta-sfnal story about a strange kid’s effect on another kid’s life in the 1980s and the nature of science fiction, imagination, and life. I’m not sure how to evaluate this as a story because it punches too many buttons. It initially seemed topically interesting but fictionally weak as it wandered through a sort of slipstreamish pseudo-SF phase but it began to come together and reach a new level at the end (though I wasn’t happy with how it reassigned credit for some of our imaginative achievements). All I can say is that, for whatever reasons, it seems notable to me.
(Also, on an ideological rather than aesthetic level, I loved the ironic analysis in the section on the “college experience.” I think moving beyond this would benefit a great many people and the field.)
