12) ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ by Nalo Hopkinson
This is a story about overcoming guilt.
Dry Bone is a kind of leech, a vampiric demon-like creature that lies in wait for unwary souls already shouldering a burden. Once Dry Bone battens on to you, you can’t get rid of him. It’s like making a deal with the devil at the crossroads, only the deal is all in the devil’s favour:
Dry Bone sit up straight. He lick he lips. A stranger in Duppy Dead Town, one who ain’t know to avoid he. One who can’t see she joy for she sorrow; the favourite meat of the one name Dry Bone. He know she good. Dry Bone know all the souls that feed he. He recognise she so well, he discern she name in the curve of she spine.
The story as it stands has no discernible science fiction element. It has the feel of folklore, of a grandmother’s tale, told to scare the children at night. I was curious about its presence in an anthology of science fiction stories, and so (cheating again!) I searched for information about its background.
I discovered that ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ is one of three tales Hopkinson wrote as an integral part of Midnight Robber, a science fiction novel in which Tan-Tan is the main character. Sessily Watt writes with great articulacy about the relationship between science fiction and fantasy in ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ here:
In Midnight Robber, the science fiction tropes outweigh the fantasy ones, but they are both present. Characters chafe under a high technology, surveillance state and escape it for an alien planet, where legends seem to come alive.
I’m very excited by these ideas, and now find myself eager to read Midnight Robber. In the meantime, the beauty of ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ resides in the musicality and Caribbean cadences of its language, which begs to be read aloud.
13) ‘The Four Generations of Chang E’ by Zen Cho
This is science fiction used as metaphor, a story about being part of a diaspora.
There are four Chang Es, one for each generation. The story also takes the form of a circle,
In the final days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.
For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation Programme. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said: ‘those fucking immigrants’.)
As we see the first Chang E leaving Earth for the moon, selling everything she has – ‘the car, the family heirloom enamel pin collection, her external brain’ – to facilitate her resettlement, so we watch as a fourth generation Chang E returns many decades later to her ancestral homelands on Earth. But the woman who returns is no longer in any sense the woman who left:
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
At a certain point, this stops being sad – but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?
Things do become easier for Chang E – she and her family are assimilated and to some extent accepted as part of the moon people’s community. She has a good life – but it is never a one-way trade, and there is a sense, always, that she cannot afford to ever relax her guard completely, something fourth-generation Chang E is reminded of most forcefully when she visits Earth:
Here, thought Chang E, was what her mother had dreamt of, Earthlings would not be like moon humans, always looking anxiously over their shoulder for the next way in which they would be found wanting.
‘The Four Generations of Chang E’ is deceptively simple – a second reading reveals a brittle edge to the humour, a sadness and sometimes an anger that linger a long time in the heart. There’s a whole world here, if you care to look for it. An accomplished story.
14) ‘Stay Thy Flight’ by Elisabeth Vonarburg
A very beautiful, mysterious story, a riddle befitting the reputation of its protagonist…
The narrator of this story is a bio-sculpture, a piece of art created by renegade artist Angkaar, just before the creation of sentient artworks was outlawed. She is a sphinx, and she stands on – or is chained to – a pedestal in a public park. People may come and ask her questions, and at certain times – on what the sphinx refers to as slow days – she may in her turn ask questions of human beings, if they are willing.
The language of this story is notable for its evocative rhythm, an effect that is almost like hyperventilation, achieved through the unusual placement of commas:
You are immobile, for me, by day, almost, less than I for you, but slow. Everything around me, becomes slow, after dawn, the sun rises, heaves itself up, slows down, crawls, an imperceptible movement, in the sky, the birds’ songs too, in the park, draw out, lowering down, deeper and deeper, to a basso continuo, some modulations, but spaced out, wind, when there is some, leaves, music, solemn, meditating, I like.
Through the course of the story we see the sphinx form particular attachments – first to an artist who comes to paint her, then to a young woman who seems to know more about her than she ought to – and through their questions and actions we learn more about the world beyond the park. The waters are rising, things are changing, a cycle of existence is coming to an end.
The sphinx refers to her thought processes as ‘programming’ but she knows there is more to her than that, even if she is powerless to name it.
Sad, absorbing, subtly unnerving.