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“Cyclopterus,” Peter Watts — Galik is on his way to survey a site under the ocean, but his submarine pilot, Moreno, seems to dislike him. As it turns out, Moreno hates the idea of Galik’s company coming in and strip-mining one of the last untouched places in the world. They argue their points of view until the voyage ends, where we finally see what Galik is up to.
This story is one of several that take place in the ocean or a drowned city, in a world that is partly destroyed by climate change. There’s a serious danger of becoming trapped in infodumps with these kinds of stories, but Watts avoids this by going light on lectures and opinions and heavy on the plot. (More on this later.)
“Secret Stories of Doors,” Sofia Rhei — Joan Perucho works for the World Encyclopaedia in Barcelona. As a subtle way to defy the ruling regime, he forges documents and uses them to add fictional entries to the encyclopedia. He’s busy inventing Sor Assumpció Ardebol, an Inquisition-era writer whose stories about the devil flirt with heresy, when he gets an invitation to a mysterious meeting. There’s a lot of Jorge Luis Borges here, but also Carlos Ruiz Zafon, another Barcelonés who writes about fiction influencing the outside world and vice versa.
“This Is Not the Way Home,” Greg Egan — Aisha and her baby are on the Moon when they lose communications with Earth. Her hosts take the one ship back, leaving her stranded and forcing her to use an extremely ingenious method to get home.
So I really liked about a fourth of these stories, and I enjoyed some of the others, though not enough to write about them. (Which is a pretty good ratio, all in all.) There’s something else I noticed about these choices, though. A lot of them deal with serious issues: prejudice, slavery, colonization, depletion of planetary resources, social justice. Unfortunately, some of them are so full of dumps of fact and opinion (opino-dumps?) that the stories themselves collapse under their weight.
This is a difficult thing to say, in part because these issues are undeniably important, but also in part because I end up siding with the Sad Puppies (remember them?), who claimed to dislike message fiction. (The hilarious thing about the Sad Puppies was that they truly thought they themselves didn’t write message fiction, it was all those other people.) In any case, the problem with lectures is not the message itself; it’s the fact that they’re boring, they take time away from the story. Fiction dealing with current issues can certainly be written — see Peter Watts, above — but it’s tricky to do, and I felt impatient with several of the tales in this volume.
