I have a new piece of flash fiction out today in Frozen Wavelets that explores ship names and artificially intelligent spaceships, titled “How they Name the Ships.”
The Somsei Republic name their Ships after important historical figures (usually male). The Ucchou Federation gives Ships use-names like any other citizen, and let them select their own personal names. The philosophical alien Kfuul and the brutal Kháos Empire follow their own rules for ship names, as always. Even the repulsive, symbiotic Brakm have a specific way of naming the Ships they have scavenged.
On a surface read, the story tackles the tried and true space opera trope of amusing (or odd) ship names, with examples from several human and non-human polities that range from the droll to the disturbing.
A few examples (or formulas) from the piece:
Nju Confederation Ship (NCS) Stability
Philosophical concepts, references to obscure texts, and complex word games are popular among the alien Kfuul.
NCSHair Bog
Kháos Empire ships are named for acts of violence, types of deadly sickness, and cats.
Yet Another Bloody Disagreement, a ship from the anarchic anti-polity The Tumble, which was aptly and abruptly disintegrated by a rival faction while speaking before the Ucchou Federation parliament.
Ucchou use names for ships tend to involve words of motion and allusions to important events.
Of course, the story is about much more than space opera tropes. Each section in the piece deals with a specific polity and details not only naming patterns, but what (if anything) ships can do if they disagree with or dislike the name they’ve been given.
The last section ponders what the ships themselves do, and how to otherwise get by while living in a society that’s potentially hostile to your own sense of identity — if not your very existence as an independent being who can make your own choices.
And that’s what the story is really about under the surface level levity: identity, the power names have, and how to stay true to yourself when the society you live in won’t accept who you are.
Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games (not the cover I have, but this one has a ship on it!)
Alas, though! That page is woefully deficient in my own view, as it contains not a single ship from Iain M. Banks’s Culture series of books — apparently due to an admin deciding it was “fan cruft,” if this Reddit page is accurate.
Banks’s work was formative of how I approach reading and writing space opera, and Culture ships (listed here) are definitely the go-to for clever, ironic, or surreal ship names, to the point where space-related things in real life are now named after them.
So, with that in mind, here is a short list of my own personal favourite ship names from other authors’ work, and the stories they appear in.
My Favourite Space Opera Ship Names
Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn – From the story of the same name by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. Features poetry, a child refugee, defiance of protocol, tragedy, and hope (2017, Lightspeed)
The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods – From Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard. Poetry (yes, I know), found family, criminal hijinx. Awkward human-Ship romance that everyone but the participants can see is obviously there. What’s not to love? (2020, Subterannean Books)
Size Isn’t Everything – From Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. And yes, the ship in question is quite large…
Of Course I Still Love You, also from Banks, this time from Player of Games. Notable particularly because SpaceX has a drone ship named after it in real life.
Starbug – The name of the shuttle in British SF sitcom Red Dwarf. Known for being uh… less than reliable.
Justice of Toren – The starship now known as Breq, the protagonist of Ann Leckie’s fantastic Ancillary Justice and its sequels.
Heart of Gold – The “sleekest, most advanced, coolest spaceship in the galaxy” in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. (Stolen by that ne’er-do-well Zaphod Beeblebrox.)
Thinking about these and other ship names from space opera definitely played a part in how and why I wrote “How They Name the Ships.”
I don’t know if I can add to the conversation about ship names, what they mean, and why they’re so popular in space opera with such a small story, but it was a fun one to write, all the same. And I hope, if you read it, that it brings you something — whether that’s a moment of levity or something deeper and more lasting.
I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new story out!
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” takes place on a terraformed Mars where different ideas of justice have taken hold in different, mostly independent city-states.
Take Aala, for example. They’ve scratched out a living for themself as a petty thief and pickpocket in the glittering, turbulent spray cast up by the endless waterfalls of Marineris City, where profit is king and men like Vasilis are its loyal, vicious servants. Kirsi, on the other hand, comes from Maricourt, where community, equity and compassion hold sway.
The most Aala ever hoped for in Marineris was to slip through the cracks, to avoid Vasilis’s wrath and out of the local law enforcement’s damp and dreadful holding cells. But all that’s all behind them, now, as they travel to Maricourt with Kirsi–who, for some reason, doesn’t think they’re scum and wants to spend actual time with them.
Maricourt and Kirsi between them give Aala more hope than they dare to admit, but theft is the only way they know how to survive. Will a change in surroundings lead to a happy ending, or will a slip back into old habits ruin their run in Maricourt before they ever had a chance to start?
If you want to find out, you’ll have to read “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” out now in No Police = Know Future, edited by James Beamon and available here from Experimenter Publishing.
No Police = Know Future
“What does a future without police look like?”
That’s the central question asked by the No Police = Know Future anthology, which came out in mid-December from Experimenter Press, the publishers of Amazing Stories Magazine. With stories from me and seven other authors, including Holly Schofield, Lettie Prell, Jared Oliver Adams, and Anatoly Belilovsky, the anthology presents some possible answers.
Also, if you’re reading this before December 27th (as opposed to in the distant future) you can also attend an online launch party for the book!
Join editor James Beamon and some of the authors (including me) December 27th, 2020, at 1pm Eastern Time to chat about the book, the future of policing, and the meaning of “justice.” Check the details here on the Amazing Stories website for information on how to attend.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep”
At the core of my story in the anthology is the concept of restorative justice.
What is restorative justice? According to the Centre for Justice & Reconciliation (CJR), it’s justice that “views crime as more than breaking the law – it also causes harm to people, relationships, and the community.”
This seems pretty obvious, but where restorative justice often surprises people is that it considers the reintegration of offenders and victims as part of its concept of “justice.”
That’s not to say that victims are less important than offenders. Rather:
Offenders also face stigmatization. Since crime causes fear in the community, offenders become vilified in the eyes of society. Incarceration separates them from their families and communities. Upon release, offenders frequently lack stable support structures, and even start-up money for food and clothes, housing, transportation, and other parts of a healthy productive life. At the same time, offenders face discrimination in their attempts to become productive citizens.
Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, “Reintegration“
So what does restorative justice look like in real life? That’s a tricky question, and its worth noting that there are many disagreements not only on how to implement it, but what it even is and whether it might (intentionally or otherwise) still cause harm to offenders.
The central idea, though, is one of respect. Respect for victims and respect for offenders, giving the former restitution while still allowing—and encouraging—forgiveness for the latter so they can become integrated into society, less likely to offend again and less likely to need to. Restorative justice is about healing and support, not punishment and submission.
Given the above (not to mention all the other things wrong with criminal justice in the USA today), why not try a system that doesn’t treat every single person who commits a crime as a malicious actor who needs to be taught a lesson? A system that acts from a humane, compassionate impulse rather than a neurotic, rules-obsessed, inhumane one? A system where the main idea is to actually help people?
If these questions intrigue you, or if you’ve just never thought about it before, I’d encourage you to read up on restorative justice at the links above. (Of course, you can also see how I approach it in my story!)
But what about Mars?
Look closely: that’s Mars, not Earth! Image credit: Daein Ballard. Used under a CC-By-SA license.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” is set on a terraformed Mars, where water is plentiful on the surface — as you might have guessed from the title.
The story opens as Aala and Kirsi take a monorail over a lake at the center of Maricourt Crater, and the metaphor of water as peace and justice runs throughout the story.
Marineris City, where profit is king? Turbulent waterfalls that fall ever downward. Maricourt? A tranquil lake which glitters in the sun. (Okay, so it’s not a very subtle metaphor.)
Mars has historically been associated with water in the form of canals, which don’t make an appearance in my story in particular (a missed opportunity, now that I think about it!). And of course, water development and management would be essential on any human-livable Mars.
I have a new story out today in Nature Magazine’s “Futures” column, titled “Five Things I Hate about Phobos.”
Illustration for the story, by Nature‘s regular story artist Jacey.
The story’s about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or somethinge lse. You can read it (and a brief author’s note) online here in all its glory: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03505-9
In the spirit of the listicle-style title, I’ve come up with what you might call “Five Things about Five Things I Hate about Phobos.” If you’re into that kind of meta stuff, read on!
So meta!
1. It’s set on Phobos
Look at this guy, such a charmer.
Okay, pretty obvious from the title, probably, right?
That’s Phobos the moon, not the personification of fear and panic in classical Greek mythology.
Mr Fear and Panic makes a cameo, though, at least sort of, with the narrator commenting on how messed up it is that anyone would actually want to live on a moon named after him.
A moon which, incidentally, has an orbit that will eventually decay so far that it will crash onto the surface of Mars or break up into tiny pieces around a hundred million years hence.
2. It’s my fifth appearance in Nature
Which I actually didn’t notice until I checked just now!
That makes the title — and this post — even more numerologically concerned, especially given my Discordian tendencies. And that’s yet another connection to Classical Greek mythology, given that Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, is Discordia’s principal deity.
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
Most of my other stories appear in the sidebar on the Nature site when you read the current one, or you can dig them up from my bibliography here, as well.
3. It’s got nonstandard pronouns
One of the characters in the story, Tashi, uses zie/zir pronouns.
If you’re not familiar with these, they work just like any other pronoun. Zie is the singular third person form (like he or she), and zir is both the object (him/her) and possessive (his/hers) form.
Zie (often also spelled ze) is a gender-free pronoun most commonly used online, so you can think of it as similar to they/them. Although if someone uses zie, that doesn’t necessarily mean zie identifies as nonbinary, or even considers zirself “gender free” at all — and it definitely doesn’t mean you should use they/them instead when referring to someone whose pronouns are zie/zir.
4. It draws on traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas about impernanence
The word “wabisabi” is somewhat of a buzzword in English design circles, used to describe a sort of vague “imperfectness” that’s treated as a catch-all for a Japanese-inspired aesthetic.
Actually, though, “wabisabi” is two specific terms mashed together: wabi (侘び) and sabi (寂び). Because these words share similar elements aesthetically, they are often connected into a single word: wabisabi (侘び寂び)
To be fair, judging from the number of Japanese-language articles titled things like “The difference between ‘wabi’ and ‘sabi’,” confusion over this often-paired set of terms is rampant even within Japan. (Which makes sense. How many people can easily rattle off a clear explanation of art nouveau as a design aesthetic?)
However, although these words are often paired, and both have something to do with accepting impermanence, they’re pretty different terms.
So what does wabisabi mean, exactly? According to the article linked above, from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun, wabi is “the emotion you feel when things are calm and quiet,” while sabi is “the emotion you feel when something is old or withered.”
This 16th-century Korean tea bowl was repaired with kintsugi, a Japanese repair aesthetic where “breaks” are an important part of the object’s history — often mentioned as an example of “wabisabi.”
Those definitions match up relatively well with the ones in jisho.org (my favourite Japanese-English dictionary), where wabi is “austere refinement” or “enjoyment of a quiet life,” and sabi is “elegant simplicity.” Taken together, then, wabisabi can be considered a feeling conveyed by something that’s simple, calm, old, and withered. More generally, it’s used as shorthand (at least in English) for “imperfect” things, especially those which were broken and then repaired.
Although life on Phobos in my story isn’t exactly elegant or refined, it’s hard to imagine the life of space-dwelling people to be anything other than simple in the near future. And accepting that — along with the fact of our own inevitable demise — would be pretty important.
On the other hand…
5. Celebratory light show!
A central part of the story is a festival held by those living on Phobos. This festival involves electrostatic charges and corona discharge on the satellite’s surface — which are a real thing, at least according to this Nasa study from 2017.
A plasma globe, one type of corona discharge familiar to many US school children.
In the story, those living on Phobos gather on its surface and sing, holding hands around a crater in a ceremony called The Harmonia (remember Eris? Her Roman equivalent was Discordia, which is Harmonia’s antonym. Levels within levels, man! Levels within levels…).
The narrator of the story finds this uncomfortable at first, but although they don’t admit it in so many words, you can read between the lines and see that their participation in the ceremony is the point at which the story pivots from “I hate this place” to “I’d hate to see this place disappear.”
Do they get to the point of acceptance? Well, you’ll have to read the story yourself to find out.
SFWA just announced that the voting form for the 2021 Nebula Awards is open for business, which means it’s that time of year again: fiction awards season. As usual, I’m here with the stories I’ve had published in 2020 that are eligible for next years Nebulas, Hugos, Otherwise, and so on.
What have I got for you this year? Here are my three favourites from 2020, plus a note about the eligibility of works published in this year’s issues of sub-Q Magazine, which closed up shop in August of 2020.
Of course, you don’t have to be voting for the 2021 Nebula Awards — or any others — to read these. My main goal with sharing the stories is to help them find readers who will enjoy them!
If you don’t want to read about my process, here are just the details!
“How They Name the Ships” is a 750 word sci-fi story with my take on the space opera trope of AI ship names, but it’s really about identity, the power names have, and how to stay true to yourself when the society you live in won’t accept who you are. It was published in Frozen Wavelets in December, and can be read online here.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” is a 3,000 word science fiction story about restorative justice on a future Mars. It was published in No Police = Know Future from Experimenter Press in December of 2020, which can be purchased here.
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is a 950-word science fiction story about love, entropy, and wabisabi (also on Mars). It was published in Nature in December of 2020 and can be read online here.
“At the Edge of a Human Path” is a 5,000 word fantasy story about shape-shifting foxes, politics, and power in ancient Japan. It appeared in the 87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Against the Dying of the Light” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about dementia and caregiving. It appeared in Flash Fiction Online in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Scenes from the End of a World” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about finding a fresh start amidst a disaster. It appeared in All Worlds Wayfarer‘s June 2020 issue, which can be purchased here.
sub-Q Magazine was an online magazine of interactive fiction which published its last issue in August of 2020. The pieces in it from this year can be played online here (the first 9 entries), and while the magazine as a whole isn’t eligible for any categories in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Best Semiprozine category in the Hugos.
New: “How They Name the Ships”
The Somsei Republic name their Ships after important historical figures (usually male). The Ucchou Federation gives Ships use-names like any other citizen, and let them select their own personal names. The philosophical alien Kfuul and the brutal Kháos Empire follow their own rules for ship names, as always. Even the repulsive, symbiotic Brakm have a specific way of naming the Ships they have scavenged.
Aala has scratched out a living for themself as a petty thief and pickpocket in the glittering, turbulent spray cast up by the endless waterfalls of Marineris City, where profit is king and men like Vasilis are its loyal, vicious servants. Kirsi, on the other hand, comes from Maricourt, where community, equity and compassion hold sway.
The most Aala ever hoped for in Marineris was to slip through the cracks, to avoid Vasilis’s wrath and out of the local law enforcement’s damp and dreadful holding cells. But all that’s all behind them, now, as they travel to Maricourt with Kirsi–who, for some reason, doesn’t think they’re scum and wants to spend actual time with them.
Maricourt and Kirsi between them give Aala more hope than they dare to admit, but theft is the only way they know how to survive. Will a change in surroundings lead to a happy ending, or will a slip back into old habits ruin their run in Maricourt before they ever had a chance to start?
If you want to find out, you’ll have to read “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” out now in No Police = Know Future, edited by James Beamon and available here from Experimenter Publishing.
New: “Five Things I Hate about Phobos”
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or something else.
It’s got nonbinary pronouns, romance, wabisabi, and a celebratory lightshow. Also, it’s set on Phobos, Mars’s erratic larger moon, which is doomed to either break apart in the atmosphere or fall to the surface a hundred million years from now.
Image from Tsukiyoka Yoshitoshi’s “100 aspects of the Moon” woodblock series. (PD)
My short story “At the Edge of a Human Path” follows K, a shape-shifting fox living in ancient Japan, as she tries to stop her mother from guiding the Yamato clan toward a culture of war and domination of the kingdoms around them. K finds an unlikely ally in Soga no Yoshitsuki, a Yamato man who suspects her mother, but can the two of them succeed in ousting her?
(87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology, May 26 2020, 5000 words.)
About the story
This story is set in 6th century Yamato Japan (or at least, an approximation of what Yamato Japan was generally presented as being like in medieval Japan), but the core of it actually comes from a medieval French/English folk tale motif called The Loathly Lady.
In Loathly Lady stories, a man (usually a knight) ends up marrying a hag with supernatural powers and a hideous appearance, usually described in excrutiating detail. The stories are generally comedic in nature, especially the one I used as my main model, “The Weddynge Of Sir Gawen And Dame Ragnell,” which sees Gawain tasked with finding out “what women really want” to save King Arthur from having his head removed as the result of Yet Another Stupid Act of Kingly Disregard of Other People’s Property.
Way to go, Arthur.
Charlemagne and Geoffrey of Bouillon are all “Seriously Arthur, can you just stop.” (PD)
Anyway, Gawain spends a year going all over England and getting hundreds of different answers (because, surprise, women are not a monolith!) and ends up with the answer sovereignty after promising to marry the hag, who knows the “correct” answer for reasons. (You can read the original online at TEAMS Middle English Texts, if you like!)
“At the Edge of a Human Path” mashes up the loathly lady motif with one of my favourite shapeshifting yokai: foxes. In Japanese folklore, much like European animal tales, foxes have a reputation for trickers, and in early modern times their reputation was somewhat malicious. But in earlier stories, they could be helpers, guardians, and even the servants of Inari — one of Shinto’s principal gods/spirits.
This story won the Judith Merrill short fiction contest in 2017, but this is its first appearance, so it is eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards, Hugos, and anything else which determines elegibility based on year of publication. More importantly, though, I hope you enjoy reading it!
“Against the Dying of the Light”
In “Against the Dying of the Light” (Flash Fiction Online, May 1 2020, 1000 words), Alyssa takes her aging mother to a facility researching a cure for dementia. Although she doesn’t find one, she finds something almost as important: how not to burn herself out as she helps her mother navigate her end of life as an individual with her own desires and needs.
About the Story
With a title that’s shamelessly lifted from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and a setup that sounds like it’s ripe for yet another SFnal dystopia about the Evils Of Technology As A Cure For Something ™, you might expect this story to be cynical, depressing, and angry—especially since the first words of the line in the poem are “Rage, rage.”
While I can’t deny “depressing,” I tried very hard to work against the cynicism and the tpyical SFnal tropes and come at this from a place of compassion and realism. I also tried to work very hard against the even more pernicious, real-world trend where people with disabilities—whether that’s dementia or any other kind—are treated as problems to solve or as infants to pacify, rather than as actual people. “Science/magical cure” is a bad trope for a number of reasons, okay?
A futuristic hospital imaging system. (PD from pxfuel)
On a lighter note, selling this story to FFO in particular amused me. Why? Because for a couple of years, I read slush for FFO and one of the things that annoyed me the most were all the stories about Alzheimer’s that tried to be “clever” by starting and ending with the character going through the exact same situation, often word for word.
As you might guess by the quotes around “clever,” I did not think they succeeded, and just found these stories immensely frustrating. I’m not casting judgment here, by the way. These stories may have been cathartic experiences written by people trying to process the loss of a loved one to what is a horrible disease.
From a storytelling perspective, though, they featured characters who would grow and change over the course of a thousand words, some in ways that were excellently written. And then the end would appear, and all of it didn’t matter. Argh!
I wrote this partly as a response to those stories, curious if there was a way that I could compellingly tell a story about a dementia sufferer that didn’t follow that pattern. You can be the judge of my success!
At 1,000 words, “Against the Dying of the Light” is eligible for the short story category in the 2021 Nebula Awards and any other award that bases its categories on length.
Scenes from the End of a World
Issue front cover.
“Scenes from the End of a World” follows JT, a survivor of an impending apocalypse, as they struggle to deal with their feelings of guilt for those left behind. As the generation ship they’re now on board departs its doomed planet, will their encounter with a woman their own age start the healing process, or just make them feel worse?
(All Worlds Wayfarer, June 2020, 1,000 words)
About the story
In the long ago and far away, I was part of an online writing group called Liberty Hall. Rather than just being another writing group, the idea behind Liberty Hall was that you would only have 60 minutes to write and submit a complete piece of flash fiction based on a prompt. It was intense, and although I didn’t always get finished stories out of it, the practice definitely helped hone my flash fiction skills!
Although Liberty Hall hasn’t existed for several years now, earlier this year some friends and I tried a similar exercise for a few weekends. This story is one of the results, growing out of prompts that featured the end of the world and finding someone new.
As this was its first appearance in print, “Scenes from the End of a World” is eligible for best short story in the 2021 Nebula Awards, and other awards as well.
sub-Q Magazine
sub-Q was a magazine of interactive fiction (part story, part game) that ran from August of 2015 to August of 2020. I was fortunate enough to be the editor of it from late 2017 through to its final issue this year, and it was a fun thing — if a time-consuming one.
Although it isn’t around any more, it did have a number of releases of new (interactive) fiction this year, many of which are themselves eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards game writing category, the Hugo Awards’ newly announced video game award, and the XYZZY Awards (the annual interactive fiction awards).
“Whatever you want me to be” by Laura De Stefani
If you’re new to interactive fiction, or just want something new to play, go check them out the magazine’s back issues here: https://sub-q.com/back-issues/
I’m especially proud of our 2020 issues, when we really got into our stride as a magazine, with games by Ken Liu, Monica Valentinelli, and a serial by Sharang Biswas. Not to mention our cover art (pictured at the right) by artist and game designer Laura de Stefani, who you should go follow on Twitter right now.
Finally, while sub-Q itself isn’t eligible for anything in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Hugo Best Semiprozine award.
Phew.
That’s a lot of stuff from 2020. Even if you’re not reading for any awards, I hope you’ll take a look at what I’ve written this year, and that you like what you see if you do!
