When doing this in the past I’ve just run down the stories, but this year I noticed a thematic connection between all four stories. It’s probably just a coincidence but all four, it seems to me, are in some way about coercion of individuals or small groups by a larger group. This isn’t the foremost idea in every story, but each at least has this as an element.

“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn, published in Lightspeed Magazine, is set in what is by now the familiar confines of an energy-starved society. Instead of cities and spring power, however, the emphasis is on a small, sustainable community. The village employs what we would call oppressive rules to avoid depleting their fragile resource balance, restricting the amount the main characters can fish and even allowing reproduction only via rare permits.

It’s a nice enough story, but “Amaryllis” just doesn’t have enough substance for my taste. I feel bad criticizing stories like this, because the setting is interesting, the prose is good, and the characters are well done. Unlike many insubstantial mood pieces that have shown up in past shortlists, this even has a beginning and an end. The story employs a structure familiar from television, setting up an external conflict the characters must face while coming to grips with an internal conflict within the group. But both of these conflicts are resolved smoothly, without the characters really seeming to try very hard.

Although it’s my least favorite story of the four, I think it’s interesting to note that the characters in “Amaryllis” are happier than those in the other stories despite being at the lowest technology level and under arguably the most restrictions. They never question the justice of the rules that govern their society, merely the honesty with which they are enforced. But then, I guess it’s easier to be happy when the problems the author has set in your path are easily surmounted.

“Ponies” by Kij Johnson, published on Tor.com, is as different in feel from “Amaryllis” as you could imagine. This is a very short story about peer pressure. Like the protagonists of “Amaryllis”, Barbara doesn’t question the rules of the society she’s trying to live in, but in this case these are the rules not of reasoned government but of mean little girls. Maybe I’m stretching this too far to even say it’s like the others, but I think the fact children enforce these arbitrary rules is a useful reminder that not every regime is quite as reasoned and calculated as it claims to be.

I didn’t remember the author’s name nor did I recognize anything about the style, but just the emotion “Ponies” inspired was enough for me to guess (correctly) it was written by the author of “Spar”, nominated last year for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Like “Spar” this is an extremely effective story, and of the nominated stories it is by far the most successful at achieving its goals. I’m disappointed to see that writing about “Spar” about a year ago I said it was horror, not science fiction, because looking back I completely disagree. “Spar” was horrible, yes, but it was also an examination of the boundaries of human values as well as the difficulty, even futility, of understanding a truly alien being. Today I’d say it used the tools of horror to make a science fictional point. I can’t really say the same thing about “Ponies”. It feels a little more subtle than “Spar” in that it relies less on the shock value of words, but ultimately it’s making a simple point about human nature. The talking, flying unicorns are fantastic, but they aren’t treated that way in the story, and Johnson goes out of her way to tie the setting to our present. It’s also debatable whether “Ponies” has an interesting enough point to justify the distaste it so capably inspires in most readers.

“For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal, originally published by Asimov’s, portrays another society that, like the village in “Amaryllis”, is severely resource constrained. This time, it’s because they live on a generation starship. Once again there are draconian laws to keep everything in balance. Unlike “Amaryllis”, however, there is a genuine conflict here. Someone has broken the rules and covered it up electronically, but Rava, an AI “wrangler”, stumbles on to the scheme and eventually discovers the truth.

I liked this story quite a bit and thought it was my favorite of the nominated stories when I had finished. It was a little odd that the difficult maintenance the protagonist performs on the AI involved plugging a cable into a hard to reach port, but overall the story has some interesting things to say about AI and forces the reader to consider whether or not the restrictions on the ship’s passengers are ethical or not.

Although by most definitions Peter Watts’ story The Things, published in Clarkesworld, is basically fan fiction of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1980) and/or the John W. Campbell story the movie was based on, Who Goes There, it also strikes me as the most original of the four stories. Alien viewpoints are difficult to achieve, but Watts does a good job placing us in the alien’s shoes and allowing us to understand its very different value system. In Watts’ interpretation, the alien is convinced humanity is broken, in pain, and in need of dramatic alterations. The alien feels it should inflict the cure on us, and in fact feels morally required to do so. Once again we have the idea of coercion, but this time from a completely external entity (representing, if its memories are accurate, a galaxy-spanning civilization) who sees humans as closer to cancer than what it considers life.

When I originally read this I liked the story but found it all a little predictable. Reading far more enthusiastic reviews since then left me thinking I was more down on the story than I actually was. I was going to say I thought “For Want of a Nail” was the best story, but after giving “The Things” a quick reread, I was less impressed by the last sentence but more satisfied by the story itself. Its ideas are as interesting as those in “For Want of a Nail” and it’s told with more style and novelty, so when it comes down to it I think “The Things” is the best story on the shortlist, even if I’m still not quite as big a fan of it as a lot of other people are.

The delay in getting to this story was, of course, mostly a matter of procrastination on my part, but there was another issue as well: my reaction to the story. Namely, I didn’t particularly like it. Now, if you read this blog very often you know I’m not shy about giving negative reviews when I don’t like something, and when it comes to short stories in particular I’ve long since accepted the fact that I just don’t like most of them. Kelly Link’s stories have been a different matter thus far, however, and with the possible exception of “The Cannon” I’ve liked every single story in Magic For Beginners. What really gave me pause, however, was the fact that when I first read “Magic For Beginners” I didn’t like it either, and my objections were similar to my problems with “Lull”. If I eventually changed my mind about that story, who’s to say I wouldn’t about this one as well? Even worse than that experience, when I first read “The Faery Handbag” I didn’t like the story and thought I understood it. In other words, I didn’t even get that I didn’t get it. Could the same thing be happening with “Lull”? It’s possible. But at this point, after several rereads months apart, I feel that if I don’t get it now I’m never going to get it.

So what’s this story about? Like “Magic For Beginners”, it’s a story of stories, with several different “levels” of story. But where “Magic For Beginners” was a story not just of stories but about stories, I believe “Lull” is about regret, or perhaps more specifically our relationship with the past. The men playing cards feel as though they have no place in the present and that something went wrong in their lives that has made them unable to realize their potential. Susan is so affected by the loss of her brother that she can only think about somehow getting him back. The journey of the woman in the innermost story back to the beginning of time is presented as a sort of rejuvenation, an undoing of her tangled life that will allow for something fresh and new. The Susan at the end of the story directly cites the immutability of the past as the source of the problems with her relationship with Ed.

The cheerleader’s backwards life might seem an answer to many of these concerns. And sure enough, the cheerleader doesn’t seem emotionally impacted by her parents’ death. Why should she, she hasn’t met them yet! But her life is one that is devoid of agency. The causal arrows of her world still point in the normal direction, so she cannot cause anything to happen. Wanting to have a good childhood before confronting her rather disturbing destiny of pre-birth non-existence, all she can do is appeal to the Devil for help.

This brings us to my problems with the story. If the cheerleader is living backwards, is she saying all her words backwards? In what sense is she alive at all? This is not the sort of story that is interested in technical questions of that kind, and I can with some effort suspend my disbelief on that count. There’s a much more fundamental problem, however, and that is the way the various levels of story within story interact with each other. Unlike in “Magic for Beginners”, where there was crossover that could be explained, the conceptual bleed between “Lull”‘s stories resists any attempt to rationalize them. Starlight doesn’t know Ed and Susan, but they show up in her story anyway, as does Ed’s strange house and even the men playing cards themselves. There are some details that might have pointed to some explanation, but again they don’t resolve: “Starlight” is surely an alias, and Ed actually calls her “Susan” once, but Susan works at SETI, not a phone service. The previous occupant of Ed’s house was apparently a Satanist, but how this meaningfully connects with the cheerleader’s story or anything else isn’t obvious (in a very positive article about the story, Jeffrey Ford, though not truly venturing an interpretation, cites as important the fact the Devil is the “Father of Time”…which still would not explain much if it were true, and isn’t true in any case).

In a recent review, Martin Lewis discussed how important plausibility is for the enjoyment of fiction, briefly in the main review but then at length with Adam Roberts in the comments. I don’t want to say that for me to enjoy a story like “Lull” it must not have the sort of loose ends I’ve described, if only because that sounds a little too much like the arguments of those who dismiss the entire fantasy genre. I think a reasonable test, along the lines of the one Martin applies to Picasso in those comments, is to ask whether or not the departure from realism serves an aesthetic purpose. In the case of “Lull” the issue is not so much “realism” as consistency. The fact these stories are connected in irrational ways is a constant distraction, at least for me, and what does this narrative discord have to do with the story’s theme? If all the story’s levels were flattened, their tenuous connections were removed, and they were presented one after another in a piece titled “Four Very Short Stories About Regret”, would something be lost?

My answers to these questions are “nothing” and “no”, and that’s why in the end I feel the story doesn’t work. The individual elements are all interesting and written with Link’s characteristic humor and deft characterization, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts, all of which are too short and simple to be satisfying stories when forced to stand on their own.

“The Lifecycle of Software Objects” is Chiang’s twelfth and most recent story. At just over 30,000 words (about one third as long as a typical novel) it’s also his longest by a fair margin. It was originally published as a book by Subterranean Press, but it was reprinted in their online magazine after selling out and so can be read online.

Most of Chiang’s work has struggled with the question of humanity’s role in the universe. Sometimes, as in “Tower of Babylon”, “Seventy-Two Letters”, and “Hell Is the Absence of God” he has explored this by writing stories about the ramifications of religious ideas. He has also considered what the implications of a cold and deterministic universe are in stories like “Understand”, “Story of Your Life”, “What’s Expected of Us”, and “Exhalation”. One of the reasons I consider “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” Chiang’s best work is that in that story he manages to consider the question from those two angles at the same time.

In “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” Chiang turns to consider the place of artificial intelligence in a human world. The struggle of something other to integrate into society has a very long history in science fiction, going back at least to A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan, but in that work as well as more recent examples like Daniel Keys Moran’s Emerald Eyes and Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain it’s assumed that society will be frightened and hostile. Chiang is one of a comparative few (M.A. Foster’s Gameplayers of Zan is the only other example that’s coming to mind, and it’s not a perfect fit either) to predict a different response: apathy.

Chiang’s AIs, to which his applies the unlikely term “digient” (a word both unsightly on the page and difficult to say), are created by a tech startup to make money, and when the money dries up so does people’s interest. The idea of AIs as virtual pets is a pretty simple step from precents like Tamagotchi and The Sims, but in terms of sophistication digients represent a difference of many orders of magnitude. They learn from their experiences and can even acquire speech.

True to the title, the story charts a particular brand of digients from their creation as a product through a burst of faddish popularity into decline and obsolescence. Two employees of the company that created them, Ana and Derek, theoretically serve as main characters, but in fact most events are simply related directly in the third person narration. Although there’s a very low intensity kind-of romance between Ana and Derek, this is a science fiction story very much of the old mode. The reader is expected to be primarily interested in it as a meditation on AI and society’s attempts to integrate it and the story is balanced accordingly.

Though I appreciated most of Chiang’s extrapolation, I didn’t quite buy one technical aspect that unfortunately was extremely important to the plot. The story’s digients were created as programs that run on Data Earth, a virtual reality environment along the lines of today’s Second Life. When the Data Earth platform becomes obsolete, it’s an existential crisis, because although the digients can continue to live on a private instance of Data Earth they are cut off from wider Internet society, which has moved on to a different platform called Real Space. Unless their code is ported to run on Real Space, we are told, they can’t use it. This is, I’m sorry to say, pretty unbelievable. Why not just connect to it from their private instance of Data Earth and use avatars like everyone else? They can’t, the story says, because “the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle videogame would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.” It’s been four years since the release of the Nintendo Wii. By the time we have consumer AIs that can talk, are we going to be interacting with virtual environments with keyboards? And while something a little more immersive than a screen hasn’t quite made it to the market yet, a decent head mounted display or at least display wall seems also likely to beat AI to the hands of consumers.

More broadly, I wasn’t very convinced with Chiang’s speculations about how society would conceive of digient rights. In the story, digients have the same rights that people in The Sims do today. That is, zero.

Artificial-life hobbyists all agree on the impossibility of digients ever getting legal protection as a class, citing dogs as an example: human compassion for dogs is both deep and wide, but the euthanasia of dogs in pet shelters amounts to an ongoing canine holocaust, and if the courts haven’t put a stop to that, they certainly aren’t going to grant protection to entities that lack a heartbeat.

First of all, dogs actually have certain legal protections from cruelty which digients would apparently benefit from, since in the story depraved people broadcast records of them being tortured. Second, digient intelligence is farther above dogs than ours is above that of the digients. For most of the story, digients as intellects are compared with apes: capable of using tools and basic communication, but categorically below that of humans. This is initially persuasive but falls apart on even basic examination, for digients are in fact dramatically more intelligent than apes.

How much more intelligent? You’d expect some quantitative assessment. IQ goes unmentioned, presumably because of its increasingly bad reputation as a measure, but even more accepted metrics like vocabulary size, mathematical achievement, and reading level are not discussed. However, from the story the facts are: digients can speak, they can make logical inferences, they can read, and they can write well enough that on forums they can pass for adolescents.

Ultimately it’s a judgment call as to how society would react to AI capable of these feats. For me, I can accept a future in which they have no rights, but not one in which this wouldn’t at least cause an enormous controversy. There’s a religious argument against them, but even there I would expect to see religious people on each side. Meanwhile, if a near-future story expects me to believe the developed world would horribly persecute a minority, I demand that it pass what I think of as the Oprah test. I originally up with this in relation to the short story “The Cage”, and while I didn’t mention it in my comments on that story, it goes like this: would someone from this minority be able to go on Oprah and effectively plead their case? In “The Cage” I felt the werewolf baby’s sobbing mother would make a great Oprah episode, and here we have cute, childlike AIs that aren’t in the slightest bit dangerous. It’s not that everyone around the world would be convinced by this kind of appeal, just that more than enough would be to fight a long and powerful battle in the court of public opinion, regardless of the final verdict.

Although I don’t agree with some of Chiang’s vision, there’s no question it’s a novella that’s more thought provoking than most science fiction novels. As a story, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” with its told-not-shown narrative and its half-hearted characterization isn’t really that impressive. As a meditation on AI and society, however, it’s definitely worth your time to read.

But…but…all that said, I found myself won over to large degree upon finishing the story. Nothing about the writing jumped out at me as really superlative, but as a whole I was impressed with the execution: the slimy, amphibian true form of the goblin, the narrator’s hatred for his own body, the way the goblin’s chaos infects and destroys the narrator’s life in a way that he observes but doesn’t see as important, and then the implication that the goblin is here acting as an agent of Ru, the very goddess in whose name the matriarchs suppress the men in their society. These elements weren’t enough to turn this story into one more to my particular tastes, but they did make it unexpectedly enjoyable to read.

Although the stereogram conceit was enough by itself to make me like the story, as used there are a few weaknesses. According to Loran, taken separately each image of the stereogram means nothing, but the story didn’t quite meet this standard. By backloading a lot of context into Jessica’s point of view, the story mimics the feeling of something clicking into place, but in fact if we were just given Jessica’s point of view we would have almost the entire story. As a result the story feels at least as much like the Onion’s point-counterpoint articles as it does a stereogram. Another feature it shares with the Onion’s point-counterpoint is that after you see the way the second part begins, the rest is relatively predictable. I did like the way Jessica took advantage of Loran’s war injury to incapacitate him, though. Finally, Berger cheats slightly by having Jessica’s narrative extend a little farther than Loran’s, but the story’s more than good enough to forgive these small issues.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the setting, and probably the concept the author meant to actually show in the story’s “stereogram”, is the nature of the colonial government. Loran’s narrative makes it very clear that the Elves only respect strength and were in fact disappointed when they finally defeated humans. Unlike the colonial powers of our world, they don’t seem to be extracting labor or natural resources. There’s likewise no equivalent of the White Man’s Burden, or at least, not since the war ended, since they see humans as only being worthy of respect when they are capable of fighting the Elves. Yet Loran says that in his role as a sort of regional governor he is responsible for “teaching” the humans under his control. What could he want to teach them, then, if not to fight back again? It seems like we are meant to conclude that he has essentially planned his own murder. Although this level of manipulation seems well beyond his ability to comprehend human psychology, even Jessica’s despite the link between them, at least we can say he shaped the outline if not the detail of what happened. Thus what might have seemed like a rousing stick-it-to-the-man ending becomes fairly ambiguous. As readers we’re predisposed to be sympathetic to Jessica’s stand, but when we realize that in doing so she’s adopting the values of the colonial power, suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Loran has made her into a William Wallace when humanity would be better served by a Mahatma Ghandi.

Boiled down like this, this seems like a parody of the post-apocalypse genre. This apocalypse makes no sense whatsoever, but really, do they ever? Meanwhile it literalizes what is usually implicit in the subgenre: the loss of humanity, the emergence of animal instincts, and the destruction of the artifacts of civilization. It’s a situation, and in fact a whole world, that the reader can’t possibly take seriously. Even the characters–the hard-edged father, the naive son, the mother whose death haunts both of them–are right out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But the story is completely deadpan. The cartoon world around the characters isn’t even remotely as frightening as McCarthy’s, but the relationship between the narrator and his son is far more dysfunctional. Where McCarthy’s narrator invested his son with his hopes for the future, almost to the point of religion, Bishop’s narrator veers between different shades of despair while his son is the one with the religion, in this case a ludicrous belief system oriented around his dead mother. The story ends on a note of relative optimism, but there doesn’t seem to be much justification for it. The cognitive improvement in the narrator and his son seems to be associated with their proximity to the hut, a last unclaimed bit of our world, and with it gone it seems likely they’ll revert to what they were.

An interesting story, and well written I thought, but while it’s clearly a story in dialogue with the rest of the post-apocalyptic subgenre, I don’t understand what it’s saying. It feels a little like steampunk, having fun indulging in unusual scenery, but ultimately telling an overly familiar story.

Two major elements of the story, namely its narrator Paul and the future he’s moving into, are left mostly to the reader’s imagination. Paul comes off as a fairly cold fish with apparently no emotional attachments except a weak sense of filial duty. We are encouraged to think that Paul, after initial difficulties, has completely left his rural past behind and become wholly modern, but the world around him is given such scanty detail that the reader is left to guess what, if anything, that might imply. His father, theoretically the subject of the story, is given even less time. We learn he likes science fiction books, dogs, farming, and that’s about it. You’d think a man who read science fiction would have some sort of opinion about gene therapy or whatever the magic medicine of Paul’s future is, but the reader isn’t told anything that would clue us in to what he thought. Paul and Mona probably knew, but it doesn’t occur to either of them to mention his preferences when discussing his treatment.

Given how unimpressed I was with Paul, it’s not surprising that I didn’t find the conclusion of the story very moving. Paul, who only a moment ago was saying nothing bad ever happened to him, spends about three sentences coping with the fact his father (a man he was so close to he couldn’t bear to spend more than a day with him) can’t recognize him now. Then the story ends on a vaguely distasteful note by suggesting that getting Alzheimer’s is a singularity in the opposite direction from the SF kind. Perhaps it’s one last bit of characterization: Paul is so self-centered that he feels someone who no longer recognizes him has become something less than human.

One final note: in my (very limited) experience if there are comments on a story on the site where it was published, they tend to be universally effusive. There’s a selection effect there so that’s fine. So it’s interesting to note that there were a surprising number of negative comments on Clarkesworld. Most surprising, given I had plenty of problems with the story, the main criticisms were that it wasn’t SF (even going so far as to calling it mundane) and that the narrator was inadequately male. To me, it’s clearly SF, and when the narrator is such a cipher anyway complaining about the voice is odd. I’m guessing if this was attributed by “B. Cooper” no one would have complained.

The story doesn’t concern itself with such details, preferring to focus on werewolves and society. It seems that lycanthropes are on the receiving end of a great deal of hatred, prejudice, and violence. This is where my problems began with the story. Positioning werewolves as a stand-in for persecuted minorities is all well and good, but just like when the X-men movies did this, there’s kind of a weird dissonance. It’s taken decades to convince society that minority racial, religious, and sexual identities need not be threatening, yet when taken at face value, most of the mutants in X-men really are kind of threatening. If Scott Summers gets drunk and becomes careless with his glasses, he could kill thousands of people in a few minutes. In this story, werewolves are depicted as being extremely fast and deadly, but because the story never makes clear how functional the werewolf’s mind is while changed, it’s ambiguous just how valid the concerns of the anti-werewolf faction are. The story takes it for granted they are hateful bigots, of course, and makes them act the part, but the best evidence presented for the innocuousness of werewolves amounts to “no one’s been murdered when the moon is full lately.”

In fact, I spent the entire story struggling with the worldbuilding. Not the picture it paints of Vancouver, which seemed readily believable (and probably based to a large degree on the author’s experience there), but of everything having to do with the werewolves. It seems that werewolves successfully hid the fact they even existed right up to 2002, but now are helpless in the face of anti-werewolf vigilantes. Most of the action of the story revolves around the struggle to deal with a baby werewolf, and while that was an interesting spin on the werewolf concept, one I hadn’t seen before, it again doesn’t make sense given the story’s invented history. The werewolf’s surrogate mother comes from a long line of werewolves, and yet she seems to be inventing procedures for raising a werewolf baby from first principles. She knows a werewolf society that will take the child in but for reasons never articulated they will only do so at age five, even though it’s clearly in their best interest to keep poorly constrained baby werewolves from bringing disrepute and thus further persecution on werewolves as a whole. Also, I don’t know anything about Canadian law, but the villain apparently traveled to Canada, found a werewolf’s associate, tortured this person to get the werewolf’s location, went there and killed her, and now is in danger of escaping conviction because he said it was self defense. How is that even remotely believable? What about the whole torture thing? Was that self defense too?

Since I never got over my strong sense of disbelief in the story’s world, it’s not surprising I didn’t end up caring too much about the characters and their struggles. I did find it amusing that the author managed to find a way for her progressive characters to fight The Man, complete with a climactic stare down of police officers…while at the same time pinning all their hopes for the future in the Canadian court system. In general the story seemed a little confused as to the proper role of the government and rule of law in all this. On one hand, the government was the only thing restraining the vigilantes, but on the other, half the police department were themselves vigilantes and substantial swaths of the populace (the people who will be voting for the people writing the laws in the future) seemed sympathetic to the whole killing werewolves thing. Meanwhile, one of the characters mentions that having werewolves around can be considered a benefit because they “keep the rest of monsterkind away”, implying perhaps that werewolves are themselves anti-other-monster vigilantes, or else that, well, werewolves are basically like us, but these other monsters, they don’t deserve to be integrated into society and the rule of law. And how, one wonders, do werewolves keep the bad monsters away on those days (most of them, I believe) when the moon isn’t full?

I will note in passing that, in contrast to some of the other stories in this series, this one had a beginning, a middle, and an end. You wouldn’t think this would be unusual enough to be worthy of note, but, well, apparently it is.

My first inclination, reading the story, was that the author was going for a 1930s setting and just made a few mistakes. After finishing it, though, I looked her up and, whoops, she grew up in the Great Depression. I think she knows what it was like. So then I decided she must have been shooting for a modern voice and just not done it very well. Then I wondered if it might be on purpose. Gene Wolfe, although amazingly he is ten years younger than Emshwiller, has recently written several stories and novels set explicitly in the future while using a deliberately old-fashioned voice. There was no similar explicit marking here, though. So at length I’ve decided the ambiguity must have been intentional. The references to tasers on the one hand and Tarzan on the other are too overt. Given the Marietta’s causality concerns, the implication must be that the timeline is already altered from ours (or vice versa, I guess).

Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot else interesting about the story. Structurally it’s similar to Rendezvous with Rama (and a whole lot of other older SF stories, but I find Rama a useful template) in that the story introduces an idea, explores it somewhat, then eschews strong resolution in favor of an ambiguous ending. Clarke used this structure to invoke a feeling of awe from the reader. God moves in mysterious ways, and whoever built the Rama spacecraft was sufficiently advanced that, well, you know. Unfortunately this story doesn’t get nearly as much mileage from its vague ending, and the familiar idea of future people struggling to cope with living in the past wasn’t interesting enough to me to carry the weight the story placed on it. There is briefly a mystery as to the true nature of the new people, but it is resolved very early in the story. The time dislocation effect is pretty unusual but the story never goes anywhere with it, so all told this was another story that was just too insubstantial for my taste.

My reaction to the story is similar to how I felt about “A Serpent in the Gears”. That story was steampunk and this one is cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk, or whatever it’s called this week) but both stories spend almost their entire length on introductions. We are introduced to the titular Miguel and his brother, but, like “Serpent”, the emphasis is on introducing the world. Also like “Serpent”, this story assembles a set of tropes common to its subgenre almost as if it is ticking off boxes: poverty-stricken non-first world setting, telepresence, nanites, environmental problems, evil corporations, and a technofetishist cult, just to name some of the big ones. Like “Serpent” it does a good job with these things, and is in fact tied together with what I thought was somewhat stronger writing, but alas it has a final similarity with “Serpent” in that I found the plot to be incomplete and unsatisfying.

“Serpent” ran into issues with me when it introduced two problems for its characters, a small one I didn’t care about (the mission) and a large one that was more interesting (the reshaped society), then only resolved the former. “Miguel and the Viatura” really is telling a single story about Miguel’s fall from grace, but it just stops. Miguel doesn’t work to redeem himself or hit rock bottom, the two ways most of these stories usually end. He doesn’t even reach any kind of equilibrium in his new circumstances, which probably would have also worked. The story could have ended anywhere in the second half of the story and had the same (small) amount of resolution. The only things we learn at the end–that Miguel’s brother had an ulterior motive in disposing of his parent’s corpse in a soft echo of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and that the police and/or the evil corporation are tracking Miguel–were obvious from the start.

As it is, it feels like a good first chapter to a book, but not a satisfying short story.