2 stories of a new trend?

The stories with bot swarms are common. So are the stories where crawly creepy things move over the human bodies, to the disgust of victims. But adaptable bot swarms that are willingly allowed by humans to crawl all over their bodies to do specific things? I've seen two 2012 stories featuring this already, & I don't think I'd seen one of the kind before these.

First one makes a better read of the two.

1. [ss] Jessica Barber's "MonitorBot and the King of Pop" (B); download; Strange Horizons, 2 January 2012: A woman club dancer, under police surveillance because her brother is a "rebel", slowly makes friend with shape-shifting police robot assigned to watch her.
2. Aliette de Bodard's "Scatterd Along the River of Heaven" (B); download; Clarkesworld, January 2012: A freedom fighter who had to live in exile once the freedom came, seen at her funeral from the eyes of a granddaughter she never knew.

Shweta Narayan's "Nira and I" (short story, fantasy, free): Fighting deeply entrenched social taboos

I'm not sure how readers outside India will react to it. It's thinly allegorical about certain social taboos in India. Literal reading is likely to be less rewarding.

Indian readers will find it sticks to safe forms of discourse on the subject, avoiding the really hot & controversial issue of "king" actively encouraging & perpetuating the taboos.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 16 March 2009.
Rating: B.
Download full text from publisher's site. [via Free SF Reader]

John Scalzi's "Alien Animal Encounters" (short story, humor, free)

A collection of short tales about human encounters with alien animals (plus one of an alien's encounter with an earth animal). Light reading.

Joke in the last one went over my head, & is probably comprehensible to only US folks.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 15 October 2001.
Rating: B.
Download full text from publisher's site. [via Mary Anne Mohanraj]
Related: Stories of John Scalzi.

A M Dellamonica's "Five Good Things About Meghan Sheedy" (short story, science fiction, free): Aliens now own earth!

Well written & with colorful imagery, but I just could not feel anything about its plot. It's obviously a take on US occupation of Iraq.

Story is set in Seattle, Washington, US.

Story summary.

At an unspecified time in future, aliens called Kabu have overrun humanity, & now are effectively rulers of earth - though there is resistance, guerrilla style. Current human generation has always had them - so they've been around long.

This is the story of Dinah, a woman with two kids who has lost her husband apparently to resistance fighting. She lives in Seattle with her childhood friend Meghan Sheedy, also a widow - along with her own two kids. And it's a very hard life of poverty.

Dinah works in an office of Kabu. By the end of the story, she has been enrolled by an underground group resisting Kabu via acts of terrorism; they've just bombed a school full of human kids!

Title is actually arbitrary. Role of Meghan Sheedy is minor in the story, & she is in fact called just Meg. "Five Good Things" are also arbitrary & unimportant to story.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 21 & 28 April 2008 as two part serial.
Rating: B
Download full text: part 1 & part 2.

* Tim Pratt's "Artifice & Intelligence" (short story, science fiction)

A bored AI creates a worthy adversary - another AI & a villain that is meant to wreck havoc to humanity so original AI can play a game with it to save humans!

Collected in.

1. David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF 13" (2008).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 6 Aug 2007.
Rating: B
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

* Helen Keeble's "In Stone" (short story, fantasy)

You need a great deal of imagination to enjoy this fantasy. Since I lack it, it's not for me. Something to do with some kind of symbiosis between men, mountains, & fire.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 10 September 2007.
Rating: C
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

* N K Jemisin's "The You Train" (short story, non-genre)

Two girl friends doing the girl talk. One of them - narrator - appears to be a bit maladjusted.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 3 December 2007.
Rating: C
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

* Sonya Taaffe's "Teinds" (short story, non-genre)

A woman is grieving the loss of someone loved in a car crash - in the arms of her lover. Narrated by lover.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 29 October 2007.
Rating: C
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

* Amy Sisson's "Minghun Unlikely Patron Saints, No 5" (short story)

(Probably) folklore - presented as a ghost story. A woman soon after death is offered salvation while she is in ghost world, but refuses - choosing instead to help aid the salvation of ghosts of young babies that everyone is ignoring. Kind of Mother Teresa of ghost world.

Fact sheet.

First published: Strange Horizons, 24 September 2007.
Rating: B
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

Corie Ralston's "Looking for Friendship, Maybe More" (short story, science fiction)

A rather light read about pleasure drugs. OK - not pleasure drugs but something with equivalent impact. There are also aliens. But I wasn't bored.

Story itself is in the form of electronic bulletin board messages. Several characters - some interesting.

Full text of this story is available for download.

Fact sheet.

"Looking for Friendship, Maybe More", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 28 January 2008.
Rating: B

Genevieve Williams' "Kip, Running" (short story, science fiction)

Description of a race of urban kids' gang - no one must buy ticket to reach the destination several miles away; they will ride public transport but without tickets. Kip is the heroine - one of the runners; story is told from her perspective.

Story is set in an overpopulated future city with multiple levels of the city & many kinds of wonderful commuting options. This colorful detail takes space - it might have served as useful background in a larger work, but in a short story it just gets in the way. Not enough space to describe any individual thing, & there is an attempt to describe too many wonders.

Full text of this story is available for download.

Fact sheet.

"Kip, Running", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 10 March 2008.
Rating: C

Ruthanna Emrys' "Ghosts and Simulations": a facility to manage "uploaded consciousness" of clients!

Full text of this story is available for download.

Story summary.

Story describes "Personality Support Center" (PSC), a facility that will manage your uploaded consciousness after your death - for a periodic fee I suppose, though it's not mentioned - so your ghost can live for as long as you are willing to pay for keep! They apparently also have a hospital attached - though I wonder why anyone would bother going to a hospital that probably makes more profit from your death than life! Narrated by Jim, an employee.

They can take your backup, & create a digital simulation ("ghost") from one of the backup copies. You are encouraged to take frequent backups for more faithful restore; it's also profitable for PSC since you have to go there to get backed up.

The computer simulation can live its own life, interact in the society of other simulations, interact with those still in flesh lives via appropriate computer interfaces. It can even earn money in the world of flesh - e.g., by lecturing.

While this is not quite my kind of story, I must say it's one of the more comprehensible ones of the kind. If you have a taste for the thing, you may even like it.

Fact sheet.

"Ghosts and Simulations", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 12 November 2007.
Rating: C

Will McIntosh's "One Paper Airplane Graffito Love Note": Love story that was doomed from the beginning

If you like poetry, you might like it more than me - that is how its prose sounded like. It's generally an ok read, but I don't like sad endings.

Full story text is available for download.

Story summary.

There are three parallel intertwined threads:

1. A woman's thoughts keep appearing in other people's work - aka Morley Roberts' "The Anticipator".
2. A town falls in love with confessions from its citizens in the form of graffiti.
3. A married woman falls in love with a man, but cannot leave her husband - so the love story is doomed.

Anna has had a fantastic experience since he mother died in bizarre circumstances. Her experiences keep getting replayed at her, e.g. via plots of the movies she sees! She finally decides to make them public herself - by writing very personal experiences as graffiti. Soon, the whole town of Chester falls in love with this mode of confessing.

When Samuel, the lover, discovers Anna's marital status, he walks out. She tries approaching, but Samual is adamant. She finally begins using graffiti as love letters.

End is where Anna figures it's time to let go of Samual - via the last graffiti letter. There is a vague hint near end that they might yet still meet!

Fact sheet.

"One Paper Airplane Graffito Love Note", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 22 Oct 2007.
Rating: B

Ellen Klages' "The Green Glass Sea": Picnic at the site of first test of the atom bomb

I found the casualness with which this story is told a bit difficult to bear.

A few weeks after testing the atom bomb, the family of Dr Phillip Gordon from Manhattan Project takes a trip to the test site - a place called Trinity.

Mostly told through a 10 year old girl, Dewey Kerrigan - who is barely comprehending the enormity of what is going on. The atmosphere at the Los Alamos establishment & later the physical state of the test site - the later a sea of green glass created by high temperature fusing of the sands at the test site.

Full text of this story is available for download.

Fact sheet.

"The Green Glass Sea", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 6 September 2004.
Rating: B

Jason Stoddard's "Making Payments": Hopeless techno-babble

Among the may be a dozen stories I have read from Strange Horizons, this is the first science fiction story that just went over my head - completely incomprehensible techno-babble.

Much of the story can be read as either of a world inside a computer simulation, or of a human techno-world where I got totally lost. Only the end suggests it is the later - protagonist, completely dissatisfied with life in this techno-world, wants to migrate to some place simpler.

Full story text is available for download.

First published: Strange Horizons, 15 October 2007.
Rating: C

Theodora Goss' "Catherine and the Satyr": A slave is freed

Don't bother with this story unless you are familiar with English history & some mythology. If you qualify, & like snob stories with cruelty, you are still likely to find it a very ordinary one.

Full story text is available as a free download.

Story summary.

A group of snobs in colonial era England. One of them likes to collect exotic animals. Among his collection is a caged Satyr.

Webster tells me Satyr is either a mythological Greek god, or a man with rather excitable libido. As the story progresses, Satyr of this story appears very much human, though he is described as a savage; colonists had picked him up in some foreign land. He is pretty much a caged slave, kept for owner's amusement. You poke him with a stick when you want him to make sounds - e.g., when you show your visitors around!!

Catherine is a woman among these aristocrats & she is going through a bad patch with her husband. Feels empathy towards Satyr. Frees him, has sex with him, & gets pregnant. But this is a small part of the whole story - near end.

Fact sheet.

Length: short story
First published: Strange Horizons, 1 Oct 2007.
Rating: C

Lavie Tidhar's "The Master": An old man has seen better days

I found this novelette-size story extremely readable primarily on the strength of beautiful language. Plot is rather weak, end is pessimistic, & there is nothing sf about it.

Also much of the subject matter is politically very controversial. If your sympathies lie on the Arab side of Israel/Arab conflict, you might want to either skip this story, or mentally replace all occurrences of Israel with humans & Arab with aliens to make acceptable text! I sometimes wonder if politically controversial stories will have a larger market if presented as parables?

Full text of this story is available as a free download.

Story summary.

Shaul Canaan is an old man - once a very successful writer of political propaganda style children's adventure stories where Israeli kids beat bigger Arab villains. He stopped writing after the death of his wife Na'ama, & is now living the life of a recluse.

Much of the story is his ruminations on better days. Near end, he mingles with crowds for a while, & comes back disenchanted - wishing old days back.

See also.

1. Kevin Anderson & Rebecca Moesta's "Rough Draft": Another story about a fiction writer who has given up on writing. But there is a deliverance at end.

Fact sheet.

Length: short story
First published: Strange Horizons, 8 Oct 2007.
Rating: A

William Davis' "Waiting on Alexandre Dumas": A rich customer visits a restaurant

I found this story by searching fiction tagged "humor" in Strange Horizons archive search; I saw this search option only recently. But this story appears to be wrongly tagged; if there is humor here, I didn't get it.

It's a readable but very ordinary story about a dinner visit to Rosie's, a restaurant in Santa Fe, by an apparently rich customer, French speaking Alexandre Dumas, with his date.

Download full story text here.

Note.

13 November 2007: When I wrote this article, I did not know about the apparently well known in the west author named Alexandre Dumas - primarily as author of well known work "The Count of Monte Cristo". I had not even heard of Monte Cristo till a few days ago, & haven't read it.

So may be this story had some ghost or celebrity factor. But I don't feel like rereading just to clarify this point.

Fact sheet.

"Waiting on Alexandre Dumas", short story, review
First published: Strange Horizons, 26 June 2006.
Rating: C

Jerome Stueart's "Brazos": Matrimonial negotiations of a god & a human

Fantasy, not science fiction; full story text here.

Brazos, the river god, is in love with a human girl. Story is of the human girl's dad's tough negotiations with the god-dad of Brazos, when Brazo's dad brings on matrimonial proposal.

First published: Strange Horizons, 2nd July 2007.
Rating: B

Eliot Fintushel's "How the Little Rabbi Grew": Coming of a messiah

This generally readable tale is of the life & miracles of a messiah. Imagery is biblical & sometimes went over my head. Atheist in me doesn't see anything worth recommending, but pious might not be bored by it.

I only wish Strange Horizons will begin tagging stories as science fiction or otherwise - so the uninterested don't waste time.

Full text of the story can be downloaded here.

Strange Horizons, 17 September 2007
Rating: C