And we return to Alexander Jablokov.

I came across this when reading the July/August 2017 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

No, I was not diligently keeping up with my magazine subscriptions, there were other stories in this issue which will be covered in some future posts.

Review: “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry”, Alexander Jablokov, 2017.

In some ways, Jablokov’s City of Tempest is a return to the type of setting he and other writers used for the shared world Future Boston.

It’s rife with strange alien races, or “nations” as they are called here, and intrigue.

But whereas Boston is a human city estranged by aliens showing up, Tempest is an ancient city, mysterious in origin, rife with aliens, where humans are just another nation.

As far as the aliens are concerned, humans, Oms as they call us, are natural bureaucrats:

This was how a lot of us Oms made our living in Tempest: we’re known for our ability to sit still for long periods and do work that makes other nations want to rip off parts of their own bodies. It was a known fact in the city that, no matter how simple the initial setup, once humans got hold of it, it became a complex, mind-numbing nightmare.

Our heroine Sere Glagolit isn’t a bureaucrat. She specializes, or did until her boyfriend dumped her and took her business, in finding useful and hidden objects in the terraced City of Tempest.

The plot centers around a real estate deal one woman, Mirquell, wants to make with the mysterious aliens known as the Case. She’s acerbic, impatient, and blunt, and was my favorite character. She’s not as rich as she used to be, but she’s better off than Sere, our narrator. Sere offers to find out who actually owns a piece of land to get a fee from Mirquell.

But the plot that follows feels equal part a detective story and a fantasy quest story.

We meet an Extirpator using some really heavy weaponry to get rid of some seemingly insignificant pests. There’s the aliens who go into undesired sexual heat at the smell of bread and other aliens that like to eat their meals on the fly. There’s a spooky alien pet gone feral, and the hunter trying to track it down in the earth of the City of Storms. There’s the aliens who insist on wearing garments to go out into public, garments decorated with lethal amount of heavy metals – and those aliens need to go to a zoning meeting. There’s also the elevator monopoly.

There aren’t really any villains or heavies or vast conspiracies though.

As you would expect from Jablokov, the plot is intricate and its whole interested me less than some of the scenes and characters. Plot threads are wrapped up, but a whole lot of mysteries about aliens and their motives remain.

Despite myself, I did become rather fond of Sere who admits she’s not as smart as she thinks she is, not as observant as she should be.

Jablokov has said he plans to write more about Tempest and Sere’s adventures.

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

The Alexander Jablokov series continues.

Raw Feed (1993): “Above Ancient Seas”, Alexander Jablokov, 1992.

With his “The Death Artist”, this is probably my least favorite of the Jablokov stories I’ve read.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

The future it depicts on a colonized, metal poor world is interesting though I found the lack of explanation as to how one family supplanted the other in territory and status annoying.

Jablokov says that a failure to properly bury a dead family member would show a weakness that would be exploited by other families. What kind of weakness? While the physical journey to bury the dead seems annoying, it isn’t shown as particularly difficult – even granting that the four member family sticks together even though two could have probably done the job. Jablokov tells us that the funeral is a test of

strength, stamina, and solidarity … an indication that the family could … maintain … its holdings

but he doesn’t show this concept in action. Continue reading →

The Alexander Jablokov series continues with an expansion of an earlier Jablokov work into a novel.

Raw Feed (1993): A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov, 1992.

I didn’t like this novel version as well as the novella version of the same name.

The dolphins – the best part of this novel and the novella – are just as obnoxious, petty, irritating, and sexually perverted as in the original novella. They, in fact, seem more vicious here as do the philosophical orcas: drowning sailors when no one’s around and saving them dramatically when someone is.

But their motives seemed diffused by the novel’s length.

Their religion only comes across has half understood, an unclear motivation for driving whale Clarence on the rocks and for orcas taking an interest in dolphin messiah and God’s Remora Weismuller.

Jablokov does a nice job in evoking the phrases of a dolphin language as well as their obsession with hierarchy, sex, and eating. After all, with no opposable thumbs and no fire, there’s not a lot for them to do. And the idea of a dolphin language that mimics the echoes of real objects is a great idea.  The act of echoing, in dolphin mythology, is an act of creating and describing the world. Continue reading →

The Alexander Jablokov series continues.

Raw Feed (1991): “Living Will”, Alexander Jablokov, 1991.

A very poignant story built around a simple premise: what if you could encode a simulation of your personality into a piece of software and let it make the decision when a disease had changed you so much (here Alzheimers) your old, encoded self wouldn’t want to go on living and burdening others and would tell you to kill yourself?

Jablokov deals with this painful philosophical and emotional issue well and also does a nice job with the relationship between the protagonist and his wife.

Another rendition of one of Jablokov favorite themes: death.

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

The Alexander Jablokov series continues.

I’ll return to this story at another time since it’s part of the Future Boston shared world series Jablokov wrote some stories for.

Raw Feed (1991): “The Place of No Shadows”, Alexander Jablokov, 1990. 

This story’s main flaw is that it’s too short.

Ostensibly, the story’s main conflict is whether Lester Kronenbourg can talk Chris Tolliver, zoologist/student of alien physiology, into joining him in an institute to define man’s place in a strange universe full of aliens. That universe is well symbolized in a stinking Boston that’s become an interstellar port full of strange, sometimes sinister aliens.

As with the cultural conflicts of human’s history, the alien/human meeting has produced poignant, silly, sometimes tragic attempts at human imitation (sometimes even radical surgery) reminiscent of Melanesian Cargo Cults and pathetic American Indians.

This is well portrayed in the subplot of Gavin Mercour, graduate student in Systematic Physiology. Mercour turns on his alien spiritual teacher who promises to let Mercour see the world — via telepathy — as he does. The experience — a view of the universe unorganized by chronological sequence or surface appearances — is senseless. Mercour’s hope that each alien has a unique insight, a light, to illuminate the world,is dashed, and he is murdered (petrified alive by the sinister alien Targive with their obscene technology of twisting living matter to their ends).  Continue reading →