Ann LeBlanc's THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE

Whomst among us hasn't been here: you're the very best cheesemaker (curd nerd in the parlance) outside of Earth's gravity well, famous for your unique, creamy and full-flavored products on every space station, asteroid and shuttle plying the solar system (and possibly beyond? You really don't pay much attention to matters of trade; you've built yourself a body perfect for stirring, curd cutting, measuring and tasting, and hacked your brain decades ago so you can tune out absolutely everything else in the universe and just concentrate on making that beautiful RedOrion), you've got an entire asteroid hollowed out, moved into a stable orbit, kept at the perfect temperature, humidity and gravity and inoculated long ago with the perfect population of beneficial microorganisms to assist in the fermentation and aging of your famous handiwork... and then suddenly one day you happen to hear a snippet on the news about how a big shot businessman has announced that an asteroid he owns and manages for his silent and reclusive genius of a business associate is going to be let go and allowed to crash into the Sun. It will burn up with all its contents in about two weeks. Wow, sucks to be that sucker. But hey wait, which asteroid was that again?

Such is the plight of Millions Wayland, cheesemaker of, in, among and to the stars, or at least the bodies orbiting this one, whose life's work is currently careening sunward on a collision course for financial reasons beyond her comprehension, in Ann LeBlanc's stunning little novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. And of course there's no time to handle this the way most artisans of her caliber would; she's going to have to cross a rather large volume of outer space to even begin to lodge a complaint, and meanwhile there's these batches of cheese she just got going here in her workshop (not in the hollow asteroid-cum-cheese cave, not aboard the space station where that irresponsible jerk of a managing partner is, either, but another third place where crewed spaceships don't even go, just automatic cargo shuttles that periodically bring in supplies and bring out fresh wheels of space cheese to transport them to be aged in the cheese cave with the suddenly curtailed life span).

So, Wayland does what any of us would do: she makes a perfect cognitive duplicate of herself, memories, personality, connectome and all, and shoots it in a tight-beam to the space station in near-Earth orbit where the restaurateur, who didn't even bother to warn her about her cheese cave's imminent demise before she heard it on the news, lives and works and maintains contact with the financial, military, civic and religious authorities of Earth. She -- or rather, this newborn version of herself -- is going to give that chucklehead a piece of her/their mind, even if she has to confront, head-on, the scene of the greatest trauma of her past, and of his -- and of all the other versions of themselves that are out here in space.

Versions? 

Yep. This is a trans-human soap opera, kids, and all of the characters except a few heavily armed thugs recently come up from Earth are cyberpunk interations of one of the first people ever to decide to upload himself to the Net and start making custom bodies for himself -- work bodies with extra arms, business bodies that look good in suits and are focused on the bottom line, party bodies for various recreational pursuits (mostly food and sex) and oh, by the way, before most of the copies of this character came into being, the original made a male-to-female transition, which is why I've mostly used female pronouns in this post but switched to male ones for this paragraph. There is trans-humanism and then there is trans-humanism. Which I should maybe call trans-trans-humanism? Except that would be silly? I mean, some of the bodies containing versions of the Millions character are more like giant robot millipedes than anything else, and are capable of directly metabolizing starlight and thrive in conditions of hard vacuum, because at some point in Millions' life they decided the best way to explore beyond the solar system would be just to become the spaceship!

Which is to say that, title aside, this book is only superficially about cheese, though in addressing the question of whether or not future batches that Wayland Millions may make in the future, without her cheese cave, could be regarded in any way as the same cheeses she was making with it, The Transitive Properties of Cheese takes on lots of bigger questions about how far the society in which she lives -- and the one she left behind when she left Earth -- are going to be willing to stretch the idea of "humanity," and how much that is even going to matter.

All in just over 100 pages. Because LeBlanc is a goddamn storyteller, who makes every sentence count for "world building," character development, plot advancement and the conveyance of exquisite sensory detail. In an age of 800-page doorstops, half of which seem to be devoted to that first (and least interesting) element of a piece of fiction, LeBlanc's talent for the tight and pithy novella is cause for considerable celebration. And The Transitive Properties of Cheese deserves to sell many, many, many more copies than any of those doorstops. What are you even doing? Go! And while you're at it, have a look around the publisher's site. They have a lot of good stuff there.

Eric LaRocca's THEY WERE HERE BEFORE US: A NOVELLA IN PIECES

The tension between humanity and the rest of existence that we usually call "the natural world" is kind of implicitly the core theme of all of our stories, so it's a little weird how powerfully affecting it is when someone comes along with a book like They Were Here Before Us: A Novella in Pieces that just rubs that tension in our faces. We're really good at ignoring the harm we do to our environs, and the harm that all the other inhabitants of this world are doing to each other while we're wringing our hands/telling each other it's not so bad over the latest oil spill or waste dump, though, so maybe it's not that weird.

As the first few "pieces" of the novella unfold, the reader gets the feel almost of, say, Patricia Highsmith's wickedly fun animal revenge tales, though a bit more anthropomorphized; the beetle who narrates the opening "All That Remains is Yours to Keep" and the chimpanzee telling us of "Delicacies from a First Communion" both share their stories in colloquial American English from a first person perspective, for instance. But by the third "A God Made of Straw" we shift to the third person and we get our first hints of something more explicitly in the realm of speculative fiction going on, allowing us to ask how it is we have become privy to these creatures' thoughts and feelings and internal dialogue, even as the tension amps way up and the scenes of wanton cruelty start multiplying. And oh look, that bird on the very attractive book cover has elements of the Biblically accurate angel about her, doesn't she?

We're nice and softened up and probably still a little in shock as "Bug and Bird are Happy" begins, suddenly concerned with human characters who happen to have cute nicknames taken from the animal world. But look at that cover again; while Bug is our point of view character in this piece, and as we come to understand the pair's bittersweet relationship and the changes cruel time has wrought on it, well, it's not the beetle who's in control of the situation on that cover, is it? Or is this maybe meant to be the beetle who told us the first piece, maybe being punished for its gloating possessiveness? Could that bird with eyes in her wings be a reincarnation of some of the other pieces' victims, getting their own back before the whole story is told? This "novella in pieces" thing demands that we come up with our own way of putting those pieces together. I wonder how many of us end up with the same contraption at the end?

By the time things wrap up with "When It's Dark Out" all of these themes of cruelty and consumption, of metamorphosis and decomposition and brutality come together for a speed run through a scenario straight out of a story in, say, Cosmic Horror Monthly,  in which a man and his son confront monsters within and without on the way to say a final farewell to a beloved family member. The simple narrative is now elegantly amplified and elevated by the material preceding it, making it feel both claustrophobic and cosmic - a neat trick, that. 

I'll be looking for more of this gentleman's stuff.