Chains of the sea Book

Three short novellas by guys under 30. I bought this on a whim because I liked the cover, and it had a story by George Alec Effinger (whom I admire) and Gardner Dozois (whom I knew only as an editor, not a writer). I didn't expect much, but all three stories turned out to be very fine.

The story by Dozois, by the way, was just released in a French translation a few months back as Le fini des mers.

1. And Us, Too, I Guess. By George Alec Effinger. 4 stars.

For unknown reasons, species start going extinct one by one, one per day. Except for a few scientists, humans go about their lives like nothing big is happening. They become fairly upset when it is the time for dogs to die, but still don't panic like I'd expect. It is more of a slow, quiet apocalypse.

For unknown reasons, Effinger plays a little game with the setting. While all the place names and other descriptions make it clear that the story is set in New Orleans, he repeatedly states that it is in Cleveland! I have no idea what that was about, but it made me laugh. Maybe the editor forced him to re-locate the story from New Orleans to Cleveland and he slyly did so without changing the place names. Who knows. He was born in Cleveland and moved to New Orleans, so he knew both well.

2. Chains of the Sea. By Gardner Dozois. 4 stars.

This little story has it all. It is my clear favorite. It also won a Nebula award in 1973.

Little Tommy loves playing in the woods and occasionally speaking to the Thants, which nobody else can see. (Think of fairies.) This gets him late for school and into all sorts of trouble with his teachers, therapists, and his nasty, abusive father. Mommy is no help: "she had been defeated for as long as Tommy could remember; her original surrender, her abnegation of herself, had taken place years ago, maybe even before Tommy had been born. She had been beaten spiritually so thouroughly and tirelessly by the more forceful will of her husband that at some point her bones had fallen out, her brains had fallen out, and she had become a jellyfish." What beautiful language! Though it doesn't sound like words Tommy would use.

Meanwhile, aliens come to Earth and don't do anything for a while. When they finally come out of their ships, they are truly alien: morphing from bug-eyed monsters to simple geometric shapes and melding together and splitting apart into separate entities. They have no interest in speaking to humans. It isn't even clear that they notice humans. The AIs are able to make contact, but they have really come to the Thants.

The aliens "regarded humans as parasitic on the [AIs], and reacted in much the same way as a man discovering that a friend was heavily infested with tapeworms and lice or blood ticks -- with shock, distaste, and a puzzled demand to know why he hadn't gone to a doctor and got rid of them a long time ago." Eventually the aliens decide to get rid of the human problem. They explain to Tommy, via the Thants, that they will "increase the entropy". It probably will hurt "just a little, for a little while." (The Thants have a very different sense of time, so this is probably also going to be a very slow apocalypse.)


3. The Shrine of Sebastian. by Gordon Eklund. 4 stars.

The pope has died and she named her brother as her sucessor. (Women can be pope and men can be nuns. Not explained, but just roll with it.) But first he has to carry out her wish to have her body buried at the shrine of Sebastian. This is troublesome because Sebastian was a heretic who is still worshiped, mostly by robots. New Pope Julian takes the robot Andrew (who is writing a new version of the Bible) with him and they head for the shrine with the body. Twice Julian has to have a leg replaced. "The process of amputating a leg or an arm and replacing it with another had never been made wholly painless. When Andrew began to cut he tried not to scream. Soon, he fainted." They only had to do this twice, which was lucky because they only brought two spare legs.

They almost get killed by a group of humans that consider robots to be the work of Satan. Julian escapes by convincing the local priests that he is a human and Andrew survives because the fire wasn't hot enough to melt him. The trip takes quite a while, but the old pope's body doesn't decompose. Hmm, what's up with that? When they finally get to the shrine, Julian discovers a startling truth about himself.

4 stars times 3 = 5 stars. (Math with stars works differently.)