How High We Go in the Dark
By Sequoia Nagamatsu
A collection of linked short stories dealing with the effects of an “Arctic plague” of alien origin released by melting Siberian permafrost might seem very timely in 2022. This makes it all the more remarkable that How High We Go in the Dark was mostly completed before 2020 and the outbreak of COVID.
The actual working of the plague — which causes organs to start copying the function of other organs, with predictably disastrous results — aren’t as important as its human impact. These are stories (calling it a novel seems more about marketing) that deal with the subject of grief and loss, especially as felt by parents and their children. Broader considerations also come in to play, however, as the pandemic impacts on both a personal and political level. The funerary industry, for example, becomes a major growth sector almost overnight. It turns out that mass die-offs are good for some parts of the economy.
In the face of so much death, science throws up various surrogates for lost loved ones and family members: talking pigs, robot dogs, and even plasticized corpses. Given the subject matter, Sequoia Nagamatsu has to occasionally walk a fine line to avoid falling into sentiment. That he does so is a tribute to his imaginative range and how finely he explores the psychological ramifications of the end of our world.
A lot of successful novelists see short stories as little more than finger exercises: warm-ups for more substantial work. I think this was how H. G. Wells saw them, considering stories as too restricted in both form and effect to bother with as much in his later career. That said, he wrote a lot of great stories and they’re nicely sampled here by Ursula K. Le Guin, who also does a great job introducing them.
SF authors score a lot of points for getting the future right, and E. M. Forster’s 1909 novella (or “meditation,” as he calls it) looks pretty good with a century-plus of hindsight.
COVID-19 feels like it’s been with us for so long, it actually comes as a bit of a surprise that this is the first Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy with stories published during the pandemic.
The challenging stories in S. D. Chrostowska’s latest collection aren’t really science fiction, as they take place in a universe largely without science. But then they’re scarcely stories either, taking more the form of essays or parables set in fantastic worlds where giant worms are hunted or flowers sprout from the palm of your hand.
Toronto author Hugh A. D. Spencer is a singular voice in Canadian science fiction. While borrowing from pop-culture SF conventions that are so familiar they feel a part of us he nevertheless manages to spin them in quirky directions that take us places entirely new.
Genres can get stuck in a rut, in need of a jolt to get them going again. In twenty-first century SF, for example, there have probably been too many political dystopias and climate apocalypses. The end of the world used to be more interesting.
A book classified here under “Stories” because I don’t have another category for it. I suppose you could think of it as a kind of graphic novel, being a series of 55 illustrated trading cards (including index) that tell a through narrative of a Martian attack on Earth.
In her introduction to this neat anthology of classic SF tales Rebecca Romney informs us that “it isn’t a science-fiction writer’s job to predict the future.” What they’re more inclined toward is projecting contemporary anxieties. If some present trends were to continue, what would the world look like? And what does that tell us about the way we live now?
Alex on SF 