Home sick. Like actually sick. The sleep for four hours in the middle of the day sick. It is the launch day for Hanzai Japan, so if you like my taste in short fiction, please pick it up. Locus reviewed it earlier this month and said, in part:
The opening story, ‘‘(.dis)’’ by Genevieve Valentine, shows just how lightly the stories are bound. It is set in Japan, featuring a pastime called haikyo that involves exploring urban ruins. The narrator discovers a corpse in the course of her excursions, but it is barely the focus of the story. Instead we get a dark and haunting exploration of the narrator’s particular character. She returns to the corpse but not to treat it as a crime scene, and the story is strange rather than fantastic. This is a great opener, both with its excellent bleak atmospherics setting the tone, and also in the sense that anything might happen here – even nothing at all. But so many things happen!
The yakuza try to take advantage of Godzilla’s statistically analyzable landfalls in ‘‘Best Interest’’ by Brian Evenson. A disastrous earthquake in Tokyo leads the countryside to rapidly become an apocalyptic dystopia in ‘‘The Long-Rumored Food Crisis’’ by Setsuko Shinoda (trans. Jim Hubbert). The vampiric minority uncovered by universal surveillance is implicated in a string of murders in the most police-procedural story here, ‘‘Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’’ by Jyouji Hayashi (trans. Raechel Dumas). A kitsune loses her kistunebi (the object that holds her soul) in the fun and lovely ‘‘Hanami’’ by S. J. Rozan.
The choice of perspectives is equally diverse. While ‘‘Three Cups of Tea’’ (Jeff Somers) is narrated by a traditional down-on-his-luck private investigator (investigating a man who may have been killed by his sex doll), ‘‘Run!’’ by Kaori Fujino (trans. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) is told by a fascinatingly self-introspective psychopath, and ‘‘Jigoku’’ (Naomi Hirahara) is told by a serial killer in a peculiar kind of hell. One of my favorites in the whole book is ‘‘Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection’’ by Yumeaki Hirayama (trans Nathan A. Collins) – I have a particular fondness for physical books as narrators, as one can also find in James Morrow’s and Zoran Zivkovic’s work. This one is told by a dignified book of road maps owned by an unusual taxi driver.
‘‘The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife’’ (Carrie Vaughn) and ‘‘The Saitama Chain Saw Massacre’’ (Hiroshi Sakurazaka, trans. Nathan A. Collins) are both narrated by teenage girls in the grips of obsession – one over music and one over a lover – and both go as far over the top as it is possible to go.
All of which is to say that Haikasoru has put out another winner of an anthology...
Neat, eh? In other news that is pretty good but insufficiently so to sooth by GI tract, Lightspeed Magazine reviewed Gene Mapper: While reading Gene Mapper, I got the sense that reading this book was like reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time: it was like an electric shock to my brain. This novel is full of vivid ideas for how the future will look, from augmented reality to genetic engineering. ...There are some obvious comparisons to other climate change/biological science fiction novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, but where Bacigalupi’s novel trends pessimistic, Fujii’s novel brims with technological optimism. Fujii seems to revel in the possibilities of what technology can do, and it’s an interesting book to read in a climate where entire countries are banning GMO crops and states within the United States are mandating that GMO products be labeled. Fujii’s characters are clear where they stand: what they’re working on will feed billions of people, even as they acknowledge that in the past, there were some problems along the way.
Cool, eh?
Finally, Olivia has dusted off her kiddie media review tumblr with a new post about various Cbeebies shows.
The opening story, ‘‘(.dis)’’ by Genevieve Valentine, shows just how lightly the stories are bound. It is set in Japan, featuring a pastime called haikyo that involves exploring urban ruins. The narrator discovers a corpse in the course of her excursions, but it is barely the focus of the story. Instead we get a dark and haunting exploration of the narrator’s particular character. She returns to the corpse but not to treat it as a crime scene, and the story is strange rather than fantastic. This is a great opener, both with its excellent bleak atmospherics setting the tone, and also in the sense that anything might happen here – even nothing at all. But so many things happen!
The yakuza try to take advantage of Godzilla’s statistically analyzable landfalls in ‘‘Best Interest’’ by Brian Evenson. A disastrous earthquake in Tokyo leads the countryside to rapidly become an apocalyptic dystopia in ‘‘The Long-Rumored Food Crisis’’ by Setsuko Shinoda (trans. Jim Hubbert). The vampiric minority uncovered by universal surveillance is implicated in a string of murders in the most police-procedural story here, ‘‘Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’’ by Jyouji Hayashi (trans. Raechel Dumas). A kitsune loses her kistunebi (the object that holds her soul) in the fun and lovely ‘‘Hanami’’ by S. J. Rozan.
The choice of perspectives is equally diverse. While ‘‘Three Cups of Tea’’ (Jeff Somers) is narrated by a traditional down-on-his-luck private investigator (investigating a man who may have been killed by his sex doll), ‘‘Run!’’ by Kaori Fujino (trans. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) is told by a fascinatingly self-introspective psychopath, and ‘‘Jigoku’’ (Naomi Hirahara) is told by a serial killer in a peculiar kind of hell. One of my favorites in the whole book is ‘‘Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection’’ by Yumeaki Hirayama (trans Nathan A. Collins) – I have a particular fondness for physical books as narrators, as one can also find in James Morrow’s and Zoran Zivkovic’s work. This one is told by a dignified book of road maps owned by an unusual taxi driver.
‘‘The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife’’ (Carrie Vaughn) and ‘‘The Saitama Chain Saw Massacre’’ (Hiroshi Sakurazaka, trans. Nathan A. Collins) are both narrated by teenage girls in the grips of obsession – one over music and one over a lover – and both go as far over the top as it is possible to go.
All of which is to say that Haikasoru has put out another winner of an anthology...
Neat, eh? In other news that is pretty good but insufficiently so to sooth by GI tract, Lightspeed Magazine reviewed Gene Mapper: While reading Gene Mapper, I got the sense that reading this book was like reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time: it was like an electric shock to my brain. This novel is full of vivid ideas for how the future will look, from augmented reality to genetic engineering. ...There are some obvious comparisons to other climate change/biological science fiction novels such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, but where Bacigalupi’s novel trends pessimistic, Fujii’s novel brims with technological optimism. Fujii seems to revel in the possibilities of what technology can do, and it’s an interesting book to read in a climate where entire countries are banning GMO crops and states within the United States are mandating that GMO products be labeled. Fujii’s characters are clear where they stand: what they’re working on will feed billions of people, even as they acknowledge that in the past, there were some problems along the way.
Cool, eh?
Finally, Olivia has dusted off her kiddie media review tumblr with a new post about various Cbeebies shows.