Kij Johnson's AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES

"Where does it begin?" she says at last. "Where does it end?"

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. "No one knows," he says: "Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don't know that he knew, either. Maybe there's a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There's no ocean of bees anyway." 

No guesses as to what attracted me to Kij Johnson's fantastic short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. My proclivities are well known to you all by now. But I mean, come on, just look at this cover. And yes, I think this bee's mouthparts look kind of weevil-y, but bees come in lots and lots of varieties and mutations and variations and I mean, she's just cute, right?

Johnson first won my devotion with her extraordinary Lovecraftian novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which took inspiration from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a piece HPL neither revised from its early draft nor got published in his lifetime, but which might just be my favorite thing he ever wrote and yes of course at least part of it is because Chad Fifer sold me on the space-faring kitty cats. For her take on this crazypants universe, Johnson gave me a childless spinster just like me as a tour guide, and I'm forever grateful for the resulting adventure.

So my expectations for this story collection were quite high going in, and I'm delighted to say they were more than met! For one thing, Johnson shows mastery in pretty much every sub-genre of speculative fiction here, meaning there is guaranteed something for every reader here. For another, she is that kind of writer best for short stories, a master at quickly sketched world-building that still feels complete even in just a few lines, the better to get on with the storytelling. Not everbody can do that, but Kij Johnson sure can.

I'm not going to discuss every story in the collection, though every one of them has something astonishing or thought-provoking or just plan cool to offer and only one of them is one I'd skip if there's a next time I read this collection because yuck (but yuck, too, can be a testimony to a writer's powers!).

But let's talk about themes for a moment. One is loss; many of these stories are explicitly about losing something, someone, or a whole lifestyle, and how to cope with it (not always gracefully) or, in one notable case, postpone it for a while. Another is animals, anthropomorphized or not. Another is Asia; several of these stories have explicitly Japanese or generally Asian-inspired settings and bear that extra burden of "writing the other" but bear it very well indeed.

Best among the animal stories (though not quite of the Asian) is the delightful "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" and no, no evocation of that song is necessary, thank you. Our little heroine, Small Cat, does not fall down at anybody's door, for a start. Raised in an abandoned city house and garden in Japan by a large family of feral cats who've developed their own take on fudoki, to which she hopes to add someday, Small Cat sees the downfall of this feline paradise and decides to live out a story from her ancestral fudoki about The Cat From the North, in reverse; instead of coming from the north, she will go north, eventually going as far north as a cat can go without crossing an ocean. Her adventures along the way are by turns exciting, heartbreaking, charming and adorable.

Of the Asian themed ones, "The Empress Jingu Fishes" is a standout. The titular empress is a shaman, blessed/cursed by the gods with complete and perfect foresight. She knows when she gets married that her husband would not live long, so she loved him as well and as fiercely as she could. She knows that he will die while their kingdom is at war with a neighboring one (though not the one the gods had commanded them, through her, to attack) and before their son could even be born. She knows that their son will be a great emperor in his time and will eventually be elevated to godhood. She knows all of this while she sits by a spring and fashions a line, hook and some bait to try to catch a trout that she doesn't need purely to feel at least a tiny illusion of having a bit of free will; she is powerless against the forces that took her husband and will take her son and wants to kill something, but this is her sole opportunity to do so. It's an exquisite tale.

Other stories are closer to our own experience, or seem that way at first. For instance, "Names for Water" seems like a mundane slow burn about a student looking for excuses to skip or even drop her math class and change her major, but turns out to have galaxy-spanning impact and implications by the time its few pages are off the paper and in the reader's head. For all we know, little things like this are happening every time our cell phones ring. But probably not. Kij Johnson is much better at writing realities than the hacks in charge of the one I live in are.

She's also good at 17th century naturalist pastische, as it turns out. "MyWife Reincarnated as a Solitaire - Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife's Character - The Nature of the Bird - The Possible Causes - Her Final Disposition." is just that, both a biting satire on the pompous and patriarchal style of narration fashionable at the time and a delightful poke in the eye of the kind of patriarch who wrote that way, as it tells the story of how his much disliked wife apparently reincarnated as an extinct flightless bird, as the title gives away, but has gotten a last laugh on him right under his nose the whole time. Henry Fielding would applaud. And possibly bite his thumb at Kij Johnson, sir. As such.

Then there's the title story, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" in which a young woman and her ailing German shepherd find themselves on a road trip like no other, compelled to follow the course of an annual migrating bee swarm so large and long that it blocks major highways for days on its northward course. What she finds at the end of the journey is terribly bittersweet and doesn't have a whole lot to do with bees, but like in my favorite Paul Valery poem, the bee isn't really the point; it's a "tiny gold alarm" there to sting us into taking necessary action. For some reason, I pictured this as a major motion picture starring Dakota Johnson. Your milage may vary.

A final favorite I'll mention, and the story that occupies the biggest chunk of the volume, is the extensively imagined and constructed "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" which takes us either to a fantasy world or a science fiction one -- it doesn't really matter which -- in which a society at roughly the medieval level of technological development must contend with a unique geographical feature if its to extend the benefits of civilization to its outskirts and other side. Not only is there a vast river of water dividing the Empire, but over top of it is another, more dangerous and weirder, river of "mist", but it's not like any mist we've ever encountered. It flows along the course of the water but it's denser than water, dense enough to row boats across but corrosive AF and prone to strange disturbances and, oh yes, home to monsters the locals call Fish but are unlike any fish you or I are thinking about. For a start, the Big Ones could destroy whole towns if disturbed enough to surface. Our fish out of water coming to this mist-river is an architect there to build a vast suspension bridge across it, the first of its kind. The majority of the story concerns this effort of his and of those he hires to help him, including two members of a family whose hereditary duty has been to ferry people and cargo across this river, who won't be needed if this giant construction project is successful. This story I'd especially recommend to people who like reading about logistics and mundane projects like building. I promise you it's not boring for those who aren't into that sort of thing; just that those who are, will especially like this one.

There are also stories about marauding tribes in another fantasy-or-sci-fi setting (and how I love that Johnson is comfortable letting these settings of hers be either, just fine with the ambiguity), a bureaucrat who is being groomed for minor godhood but doesn't want to leave his mistress, a family of foxes who beguile a young husband into madness in order to survive, and an exceptionally brutal Galactic empire and how its tactics for keeping everybody unified actually affect populations at its edges. Like I said, there's not a bad story in the bunch, though if graphic and weird sex isn't your cup of tea, maybe skip "Spar", the slightest of these stories in any case.

All in all, this was the perfect collection with which to wind down my reading year, cementing Kij Johnson as a writer to watch and filling a lot of little moments in between tasks in exactly the way I most want a collection of short fiction to do. The buzz was warranted.

Bethany C. Morrow's MEM

Why is memory this way? Why isn't it content to hurt you once? Why must it remind you of all the times you've been hurt before?

What if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but set in an alternate Montreal in the early 20th century with a strange and analog version of that technology? But what if the painful memories scrubbed from one's mind not only assumed human form but assumed your human form and could sort of be interacted with by others, a la Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man? And what if we got a whole short novel of same as narrated by one of those embodied ambulatory memories, permanently 19 years old and something of a celebrity because she's not like those other embodied ambulatory memories, she's actually self-aware, makes new memories and has lived an independent life of her own for the last 20 years?

Head spinning yet? It's gonna spin some more.

Bethany C. Morrow's Mem is the firsthand account of one of these embodied ambulatory memories, called "mems", who has led a somewhat different experience than the rest of her kind does. Generally what happens to make a mem is that an obscenely rich person who feels plagued by a particularly unpleasant memory pays an exorbitant sum to a Montreal clinic to have that memory extracted, creating an eerie and uncanny but very, very limited duplicate of the rich person: it looks almost exactly like that person* and to a very small extent it moves around and might even sound like that other person, but since the mem is trapped forever in the original's bad memory, all it can do sort of pantomime the original experience on and on until its physical form wears out. Mems are kind of weird to have around, so mostly they are kept by the clinic in an underground facility called the Vault, where they live out their weird little not-lives in dormitories housing others of their very specific kind, i.e. most people who undergo this treatment have done so more than once, creating more than one of these weird echoes of themselves, so each person's collection of mems shares a dormitory.

Our mem, however, officially referred to as "Dolores Extract No. 1" to designate that she is the first mem created for a person named Dolores, was different right from the start. Visually she is and remains a perfect copy of her original at the age at which she was extracted; the same tone of brown skin, the same vividly copper-colored hair -- a sign from the moment of her creation that something unusual had occurred. Not only that, DE1 was aware of herself as a person, capable of expressing wants and needs, remembered incidents and conversations and overall just really seemed like she might actually be a person. Eventually, her creator decided to release her into the world to live as such a person, under his and his wife's help and guidance. DE1 first lived with them but eventually moved into an apartment of her own, furnished fully with help from the colleague's wife Camilla (who very early on adopted DE1 as a kind of daughter, for reasons that seem entirely not-sad or sinister at first). Not long before our story begins, DE1 gets fixated on a movie, going to see it multiple times a day for a week and deciding to model herself on the movie's heroine a bit, even to taking on her name of Elsie.

As the novel begins, however, Elsie has been recalled to the Vault with no explanation. Having no legal status as an autonomous being, she has little choice in the matter and complies, and it's all a huge shock. For 20 years she has not only enjoyed considerable autonomy, but also been a bit of a celebrity -- the Mem who Remembers, feted at parties, written about, studied, admired (it helps to be permanently 19) -- but now she is not even a person. The clinic staff make little or no eye contact with her, are unambiguously uncomfortable in her presence even before she tries to have conversations with them, and quickly stick her in the dormitory where other Dolores Extracts live, currently occupied only by a very late mem, very faded and discolored and just lying in a fetal ball on a bed, only to "expire" that very night. Imagine watching a pale and shuddering copy of yourself -- or rather, of the person of whom you are also a copy -- just fade out and die before your eyes...

But there is worse in store for our Elsie, like the reason she's been summoned back to the Vault. The technology that made her has continued in its development, and her Source wants to take advantage of one that poses an existential threat to Elsie, who is, after all, her Source's property to dispose of as she will. Tears in the rain.

All of this gets resolved in unexpected ways as Elsie comes to a new understanding of herself, including why she isn't like other mems, is treated with a fair amount of physical violence, and teeters on the brink of a doomed love affair. I wonder if Bethany C. Morrow ever thought about writing for the soaps. She'd have been brilliant. Which to say there is a lot of High Emotional Drama to this story.

I stumbled across this looking through my "included with your subscription" selection on Audible, so this is another novel I listened to late at night when I couldn't sleep.  Narrator Soneela Nankani and her pleasant, sweet voice were ideal for this; nice to listen to, but not so much so that I fell asleep, though this was largely due to the Drama. Nankani wrang every last bit of it out without getting too melodramatic, and proved a perfect match for this story, with a light and delicate voice that sounds like a 19-year-old's might, but with a performance that actually sells that the character is twice as old as she appears, and is realizing that she'll just keep getting older without aging, even as everybody she has known gets left behind by time... or will they?

*Usually a bit paler, less vividly colored all around, like an old color photo that's starting to fade out, except of course color photography isn't a thing yet because this memory-extracting technology was developed at the dawn of the 20th century.

Annalee Newitz' THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE

It's been a while since I indulged myself in some fun time travel shenanigans, and my trusted guides to all things cool, the maginificent Prince Jvstin and the ever-correct Popqueenie, have often mentioned Annalee Newitz as a trusted source for the kind of shenanigans we like, so I kind of feel some egg dripping down the deepening crevices in my face that it took a big fat sale at Audible to get me to finally actually read them.

Better late than never. Even if it's time travel. Or especially if it's time travel?

The Future of Another Timeline starts off the way more cool science fiction adventures should, at a great big punk rock/riot grrl concert in the late 20th century. As described by narrator Laura Nicol, it's a thrashing good time that takes no prisoners or bullshit and just brings back all the great memories of wishing I had grown up somewhere where things like that actually happened in the late 20th century, instead of somewhere they have both kinds of music, country and Christian. It's so on the nose that at first one could easily not notice that this scene is not taking place in our world. My first clue was the Wonder Woman tee shirts celebrating the terrific Tim Burton Wonder Woman film that came out in the late 80s.

Oh. Oh...? Oh!

Before we know it, we have a woman folding herself -- well, not exactly, but she is observing the trail of effect caused by her own younger self in a world where time travel is not only real but also not a secret -- and in an incredibly intriguing way. Machines that make time travel possible are buried deep in ancient geological features in several out-of-the-way locations all around the Earth, including one on the border between Manitoba and Saskechewan, and another in the nation of Jordan, and are the subject of general knowledge. Nobody has to have that awkward conversation in which they have to try to persuade someone that no, really, they're from the future, not even in the late 1800s. AND... Nobody has to make the same tired observation about something being bigger on the inside. Etc.

I think this is a first, for me.

But, somewhat more conventionally -- because cool world building and neat set pieces do not a novel make, one needs a story -- there is a sort of temporal cold war between at least two factions over how much "editing" can happen and what kind of world that editing is to try to make for everyone. Agents from each side keep meeting up at different points in a history that is not, as currently understood by the "geoscientists" of this world (delightfully, since the time machines are buried in shield rock, time travel and its various academic offshoots are the province of geologists), governed by the "Great Man" theory -- someone once traveled back and killed off the tyrant who originally conquered almost all of Europe in the early 19th century, only to see some other guy named Napoleon rise up and take his place and do pretty much the same thing, for instance -- but can still be altered through patient nudging of social movements. A well-executed leaflet campaign can do more, in this world, than a well-aimed shot from a gun, whether that gun be period or anachronistic. I like this. So much.

But so, does this mean that Annalee Newitz has found a way to make the bog standard "time police" motif of science fiction into a fresh and new... metaphor for Culture War? In fact, they have. Meaning this is a hell of a novel to have been reading right when the United States Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs Wade, the law of the land for most of my adult life that has established abortion as a Constitutional right and done the most since the 19th amendment to uphold in no uncertain terms the right of a little over half of the human race to enjoy a certain standard of basic humanity to a greater degree than any generation born before us.

Which, along with other pesky ideas like offering education to all regardless of whether or not they have functioning uteruses, letting such people vote, choose their own marriage partners (or none at all) on their own terms, etc. (to say nothing of the rights of people who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, or Christian) are very much in the crosshairs of one of the factions involved in this version of the Time War, the Comstockers (named for and kind of led by Anthony Comstock, of Society for the Suppression of Vice fame).*

I think he's rather well represented in this, the best book trailer, maybe ever, by the way. I'd like to think the real Comstock had nightmares just like this.

But, back to the Temporal Culture War. Its other faction, to which our time traveling concert goer, Tess, belongs, call themselves the Daughters of Harriet (as in Harriet Tubman, who in this world was once a U.S. Senator). Headquartered in California in the year 2022, they meet in secret to plan operations to preserve the freedoms they have gained, to extend them to other marginalized people, and to expand them. Operations in pursuit of this goal include missions such as sending Tess back to the famous Columbian Expedition of 1893 to hook up with some sort-of-Algerian belly dancers getting ready to take the Midway by storm and open a lot of closed minds -- unless the Comstockers can succeed in persuading the Respectable White Ladies of Chicago that the dancers are a threat to the good moral character of their city and must be shut down. While there, Tess befriends a dancer, a crusading young muckraker, and no less a personage than Sol Bloom, who all enthusiastically join her cause.

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans going on in the sixth century, BCE that have the potential to render all of the Daughters' efforts moot forever. DRAMA BUTTON PUSH ALL THE DRAMA BUTTONS YOU GUYS.

In lesser hands, this could be an awful, hectoring, didactic bore of a read, or a chaotic mess, or both, but Newitz maintains a high standard of storytelling, especially character drama, focusing on Tess's adventures in time but also on the somewhat ordinary suburban life of her younger counterpart, Beth, the Riot Grrl who originally went to that great punk show in 1992 but whose teenage years seem destined to have rather a higher body count than any teenager since J.D. met Veronica and all the Heathers in suburban Ohio back in 1989, if you know what I mean. How very.

The novel comes especially to life as an audio book, by the way; Nicol has just the right kind of California cool to her delivery to sell Beth's story especially, but imparts just enough gravitas to Tess's chapters to help us see her as the kind of woman Beth might could become if wibbly wobbly timey wimey all works out. As an extra treat we get something that only an audio edition can bring us -- a sound clip from fictional band Grape Ape's hit single from another timeline "What I Like to See", and an interview between Newitz and Desi Lopez about the making of the book trailer and the writing of the seriously catchy song featured in it. Popqueenie and I agree, if Grape Ape had been a real band in the 90s, we would have moved heaven and earth to be at every show.

All in all, The Future of Another Timeline is one of the most amazing balancing acts I've ever seen in book form. There are so many things that could go wrong with it, and none of them do, and it still has plenty of surprises for even the most jaded time travel reader. It's a tremendous accomplishment and has definitely turned me into a Newitz fangirl. Which, I really already should have been, because of Io9 and Charlie Jane and all...

I would (ahem) read any number of sequels to this if (cough) certain parties felt like making those a thing. As such.

*That jerk's best appearance in literature since his side-cameos in various Robert Anton Wilson joints in the 70s and 80s.

Jack Vance's EMPHYRIO

Despite its originally having been penned in 1969, it's really hard not to see Emphyrio as a sort of allegory of our current predicament, you guys, so I'm not even going to try. Hey, it's not like this is the first time. Remember how I read Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth in terms of the 1% versus the 99%? Yeah, like that.

Only more so.

Emphyrio is a coming of age story set in a world not very much like our own except in all of the ways that it is, or could be. A world in which a populace of extremely skilled and worthy artisans are required to craft only one-of-a-kind originals and sell them via their guilds for a pittance, which is pitched to them in the language of a Welfare State but is really just starvation wages the artisans are indoctrinated to believe could become, if managed correctly, Financial Independence, but let's be honest, are just enough to keep them slavishly creating astonishing works of art that middlemen can get rich on. A world in which a really, really silly religion (as in prayers are performed as intricate, acrobatic dance routines that no one ever really masters but everyone feels more or less obligated to keep trying to learn) combined with a Welfare administration that is slavishly following regulations laid down by a government that no longer exists (and thus can never be amended or updated, no matter what changes in the rest of the universe) and ruled over by a parasitic elite that is still profiting from "investments" made centuries ago, investments in basic infrastructure that was destroyed by war and mismanagement on the part of the government that no longer exists and... See where I'm going.

Enter Ghyl, son of an especially talented artisan who is also a bit of a sneaky non-conformist, who enjoys a rare free-range childhood before settling into the family craft, who is raised on legends of an ancient non-conformist named Emphyrio who once exposed lies, spoke truth to power, saw the universe, and then... Well, that part of daddy's ancient manuscripts didn't survive the centuries so, really, who knows how that story ended?

Ghyl's story, then, is mostly a gentle coming-of-age, but also the story of how a myth can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that can repeat in ways no one imagined. Ghyl follows in Emphyrio's footsteps as he strives to learn how Emphyrio's story ends and to find out if Emphyrio ever really existed, and winds up changing everything, just like Emphyrio maybe did.

That's all great right there, but this is also Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth novellas are not only gorgeous prose masterpieces in their own right but are also major inspirations for an obsession of mine, yep, Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, which means tons of heady ideas, extravagantly beautiful prose, wry and satirical observation, and sensual details of color and aroma and tactile sensation and longing and all of the good stuff that one reads quality escapist literature for.

And it's a book that is (barely) older than I am. Yet it still resonates perfectly. Truly, it is an SF Masterwork, and one I'm kicking myself for only reading now (and that only because my good pal Jonathan Green asked me recently if I've read much Vance and I realized that it's been a LONG time since I read those Dying Earth novellas but I'd bought tons of Vance on the strength of those, only to have them just languishing on my e-readers unread).

Near damned perfection.