Asimov's and Analog, January 2009

As usual, there are some great stories in Asimov's this month. Most interesting for our purposes here is Robert R. Chase's "Five Thousand Light Years From Birdland," which explores some of the difficulties of interspecies communication.The narrator is on his way to the alien planet of the title to serve as an ambassador to its avian inhabitants, the Rahnee'ah. But first he needs to figure out how to communicate with Screet, his Rahnee'ah shipmate, who may determine that humankind isn't worth communicating with and eat him. There's a translator that can figure out the vocabulary, but rarely conveys a statement's real meaning. His best tool for learning the meaning beneath the language is Eutik Si Euban, an enormous history book that is the Rahnee'ah's equivalent of the Bible. It's the source of all of Screet's mysterious allusions, so figuring it out the alien's religion is essential to learning how to communicate with them without being eaten. The other standout story this month is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle," which packs an emotional punch—it describes a future in which standard insurance covers your cryogenic freezing but not necessarily your revival.

Analog's January/February double issue is pretty strong, too, and there's little question that the best story this month is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Recovery Man's Bargain." The title refers to Hadad Yu, a shady businessman who specializes in "recovering" lost merchandise, which puts him somewhere between a private eye and a thief. When a group of aliens hires him to recover a human being, he pushes his sense of ethics to the limit and beyond. Rusch's story is a powerful and engaging exploration of the pitfalls of moral compromise. By the story's end, Yu has undergone an ethical transformation:

For the first time in years, the universe was open to him. But he was no longer thinking of it as a place full of things. It was a place full of creatures—sentient beings with lives of their own, problems of their own, loves of their own. Creatures he had never gotten to know. 

Yu has taken an unpleasant path from Martin Buber's "Ich-Es" (I-It) to "Ich-Du" (I-You). He no longer views people as things. Buber's idea has seen expression elsewhere in SF: in particular, it's reflected in Philip K. Dick's discussion of the android mind and schizophrenia, which influenced his career-long exploration of the question, "What is human?" In Dick's terms, Rusch's antihero becomes truly human over the course of the story—but that progression requires doing some pretty inhumane things. 

Comments

[Martin LaBar]

Thanks for the tip. Rusch sounds good.