The Future is Japanese (2012)

My recent reading of Thinking, Fast and Slow, made me realize that I often judge stories and books whether I liked the ending or not, regardless of whether what came before was good or bad overall. Having a strong preference for a fitting ending makes, at least to me, sense in these cases, but I also realized that when it comes to collections or anthologies, it really doesn’t. Oftentimes I judge those on single stories that really had a strong impression, either positive or negative, and I don’t know how often the impression of the last story influenced my opinion of the whole.

But as ridiculous as it seems when I see others (or as I have done myself in the past) counting the number of stories they liked vs disliked, it really seem to be a good measure whether a collection or anthology was good or bad (as fuzzy as these things are). I admit buying TFiJ for one story, which didn’t disappoint, but it’s hardly a good measure of the quality of the entire anthology.

So let’s do numbers. I liked 70% of the stories, which divides into 30% strong liking and 40% moderate liking. On the other side, there’s only 7% strong dislike (basically one story) and 23% moderate dislike. What these numbers tell me, is that I obviously liked the entire anthology a lot, which admittedly wasn’t actually my impression when I finished it. What I thought was I liked a few stories, but that the overwhelming rest was rather mediocre. That’s a fascinating result.

Still, if there’s one thing the anthology lacked, for a better word, where more stories of the kind Sterling wrote with Goddess of Mercy: down-to-earth speculations about Japan’s future. Sure, with most of these stories you could make a connection to Japan or Japanese culture in some way, but an anthology with such a title gives the impression (at least to me, I admit this is all a bit subjective and not cold hard fact) of near futures where Japan plays at least some important role (even Sterling’s story didn’t manage that, but it came the closest).

I wasn’t even expecting fantasy stories in there. On the other hand, I enjoyed the fantasy stories more than some of the more conventional SF stories and the stories I liked the most, weren’t even close to what I was expecting in terms of content. So there’s that. An anthology I bought for one story (Itoh’s Indifference Engine), which didn’t provided what I anticipated and which I still enjoyed more than I thought.

Mono No Aware (2012)
The Sound of Breaking Up (2012)
Chitai Heiki Koronbin (2012)
The Indifference Engine (2007)
The Sea of Trees (2012)
Endoastronomy (2012)
In Plain Sight (2012)
Golden Bread (2012)
One Breath, One Stroke (2012)
Whale Meat (2012)
Mountain People, Ocean People (2012)
Goddess of Mercy (2012)
Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds (2009)

The Prophecy (2002)

Written supporting material for CPRGs has been with the genre from the beginning, thought then it often was less a choice and more due to the technical limitations. Supporting paragraphs for games like in the Gold Box series from SSI were often of the same level as the game itself, but prequel novellas that expanded or introduced the overall story often were of much weaker quality (not that the in-game writing was all that good to begin with). Point in case the prequel novella for Divine Divinity, which is – what I would call – barely readable.

If you read this merely to get the gist of what happened previously to Divine Divinity, then okay, the novella does a reasonable job. But apart from that, it’s just terrible. Ten pages in, and it completely changes the focus of what is happening from the far past to a few years later, still in the past. There’s no indication at the start that the first pages are reminiscences of one of the major characters who lived a few years later. The rest is just a rough (very rough) outline of how the council of the seven defeated the Lord of Chaos and how the Sword of Lies ended in the treasure room under Castle Stormfist.

In general, while I think most writers know when to heed the advice show don’t tell, it’s a rule written exactly for material like this. Too much telling, not enough showing to give the reader a personal frame of reference why he should care for any of those characters nor why the story matters at all. Not that any of those characters gets enough characterization to be anything more than just a plot element shifted to get the reader up to the status quo at the beginning of the game.

Not that reading all this is even essential for playing the game, as you get most of the main informations while playing the game. So, superfluous supporting material badly written. The kind of stuff nobody really needs.

Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds (2009)

The Future is Japanese 13/13

At first I wasn’t sure how literal I should or could take most of the story. Like some of the best science fiction stories, you get only hints of what is going on, have to interpret them, speculate about their meaning, how they all fit together and to me it wasn’t entirely sure they would fit together in any meaningful way.

There are traces of the Sumerian language from Stephenson’s Snow Crash or any other story that deals with controlling human behavior via language (another example would be the deep grammar from Itoh’s Genocidal Organ), only that in this case we have the software agents of a future stage of Google’s book scanning project trying to deal with an entity that has the ability to rewrite humans itself (named Imajika), which was born from the various discarded meta-relationships between all of human literature (actually, more than just that, all written words translated to all known languages and interpreted and correlated on an unprecedented scale).

This doesn’t mean it’s just a gimmicky story that is all about the reader figuring out what is going on and that’s it. The main focus is on a dead human who has had the same ability as Imajika and used it to kill over seventy people during his life. Emulated as a multi array personality by the search agents, trying to find a way to deal with Imajika, they discover that there’s more to him and the deaths that occurred in his wake.

As can be seen from this short recap, this is a pretty dense and cerebral story which at the same time, despite seemingly cool and reasoned at the surface, has an emotional undercurrent that is easy to miss. Probably not for everyone, but it hits all the right buttons for me and putting it at the end of the collection was a stroke of genius (because I like things that go out with a bang). One of the best stories in the anthology.

Goddess of Mercy (2012)

The Future is Japanese 12/13

This is the second time that a story in the anthology feels like the first chapter in a novel and not a full story. Just like the David Moles story it’s not bad, but the sudden ending that doesn’t resolve anything leaves a bad taste. Of all the stories here, Sterling’s is probably one that fits best my initial expectations of what the entire anthology would provide, which is some interesting near future scenarios of Japan.

This kind of thing is what Sterling’s been doing for years now: writing near future fiction that manages to incorporate the complexities of the places they are taking place, the politics, the people together with where things might be going (soon) and some believable near future technology into a sometimes irresistible mix. When he’s good, he’s on fire. This one isn’t one of these, but it’s competent enough.

But the lack of a proper ending is really bugging me.

Mountain People, Ocean People (2012)

The Future is Japanese 11/13

One of these stories that relies too much on a gimmicky setting, but which upon further reading reveals that under its hood are neither good science fictional ideas nor a story worth reading. Upon a great cataclysm some people in the past fled up the mountains, created a society of air gliding people and forgot the people below. Conditions are harsh, a generic don’t change the status quo leader rules (he even threatens to kill an emissary from below for hinting that things could be better elsewhere, can you be more cliched than this) and in general most of the people share this sentiment. A few dreamers look upward or downward, but life in general is shitty and only death is an escape.

It’s the generic repressive society drone finds enlightenment trope in full force, sadly with all the usual cardboard characters and the not so typical god awful setting, which really doesn’t make sense in any way. One of the worst stories in the anthology.

Whale Meat (2012)

The Future is Japanese 10/13

There’s a pretty flimsy excuse why this was even included (the sperm whales aren’t extinct yet, so this is the future), on the other hand it was well written and a nice read.

The personal angle is about the estranged daughter of a Japanese man who lives mostly in the US, but due to her job goes occasionally back to Japan and thus her dad. He’s trying to connect to her, but is having a hard time getting through, while she seems to both want it and not. This time she follows him on a job where he has to solve a murder, thought it looks more like an excuse for some dad-time.

Since this is more slice of life than everything else, don’t expect either a solution to the murder angle nor a tearful reunion of father and daughter. It’s more like real people doing real things with the occasional strangeness mixed in, trying to grapple with their personal issues in the haphazard way most people do.

One Breath, One Stroke (2012)

The Future is Japanese 9/13

One of the less accessible stories in the collection, this one is structured like a numbered bullet point list of vignettes about a house that has a mundane and a supernatural half, with the one human living on the mundane side having a strong impact as his supernatural self (a living brush) on the other half of the house.

Catherynne Valente’s story requires you to keep close attention or you get lost with who is who and the connections between the characters (I had to start over halfway into it, because my attention had wandered), but you’re rewarded with her usual eloquent and beautiful writing that soaks each word and each sentence with the pure love of writing. There’s a playfulness in the structure here, that is just as enjoyable to follow as trying to untangle the story behind it.

Also, as a point of comparison, while just as opaque and vague as Cadigan’s In Plain Sight, it nevertheless manages to reach a satisfying finish without compromising its own style.

Golden Bread (2012)

The Future is Japanese 8/13

Probably the most conventional SFnal story in this collection. A member of the Yamato military force crashes into the Kalif habitat and has to wait some time before he is fully healed and can go back to his own people. These kind of stories usually play out in on of two ways, either the visitor to an alien culture becomes a messianic figure who saves them, often from the evils of his own culture (see Dance with Wolves, Avatar, etc.), or he becomes transformed by the alien culture and learns to question his own.

Golden Bread is the second variant and while arguably not the most subtle story, doesn’t completely hit you over the head with the setup (just a bit, it’s obvious that the whole story isn’t kosher from the start) and the whole self-transformation isn’t as annoying as all those travelogues of the “I found transcendence in far-away india”-variant that get crapped out each year by the dozen.

I quite liked it, both for being the first story in the anthology that seemed to fulfill the promise of the title and I liked the (admittedly somewhat cliched) dynamic between the main character and his overseer. Like I said, conventional and a bit simple, but it just jibes with my own preferences.

In Plain Sight (2012)

The Future is Japanese 7/13

One upon a time Pat Cadigan wrote two novels about VR detective Dore Konstantine that seemed to shift her style toward deep opaqueness and left me pretty annoyed and befuddled. And despite that some of her earlier work had been absolutely phenomenal (Mindplayers, Fools), my reaction might not have been entirely singular, since with those two novels she effectively managed to kill her novel-writing-career. All that came afterwards where some media-tie ins, but they seem barely worth reading even for media-tie ins.

With her entry in The Future is Japanese anthology, she returns to the world of Dore Konstantine and the story has all the problems I’ve found so aggravating about Tea from an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital: story hooks that lead nowhere, allusions and references that seems to imply something without giving the reader enough information to figure it really out and an ending that just doesn’t make any sense.

Endoastronomy (2012)

The Future is Japanese 6/13

This is one of these stories where I have no idea what I just read. I understand each sentence, get the gist of the overall structure of what goes on, but the finer points elude me. Is it a meditation on the limits of science and the malleability of knowledge, is it a meta-textual game the writer plays on the reader or a tale of the far future where the laws of the universe break down and people have to adapt to the new rules. Really, I have no idea. Even the character conflict is opaque to me. Didn’t to anything for me.