Sunspot Jungle, Vol. 2

Karen Lord, Tobias S. Buckell, Carmen Maria Machado, Nisi Shawl, Max Gladstone, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Ken Liu, Harkaway Nick

Description

In celebration of Rosarium's fifth anniversary, publisher Bill Campbell has compiled a two-volume collection of over 100 science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories from around the world. Like space and the future, Sunspot Jungle has no boundaries and celebrates the wide varieties and possibilities this genre represents, with some of the most notable names in the field. Featuring the works of: Nick Harkaway, Ken Liu, Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, Max Gladstone, Nisi Shawl, Nick Mamatas, Carmen Maria Machado, Tobias S. Buckell, Karen Lord, and more!

Bill Campbell is the author of Sunshine Patriots, My Booty Novel,Pop Culture: Politics, Puns, "Poohbutt" from a Liberal Stay-at-Home Dad, and Koontown Killing Kaper. Along with Edward Austin Hall, he co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturismand Beyond. Campbell lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his time with his family, helps produce audiobooks for the blind, and helms Rosarium Publishing.

Introduction - Daniel José Older  

Attenuation - Nick Harkaway  

Slippernet - Nisi Shawl  

Terpsichore - Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría  

Straight Lines - Naru Dames Sundar  

The Dragon Star - Pavel Renčín  

The Mouser of Peter the Great - P. Djèlí Clark  

The Little Begum - Indrapramit Das  

The Bearer of the Bone Harp - Emmi Itäranta  

Madame Félidé Elopes - K.A. Teryna  

Waiting for the Flood OR The Bathers - Natalia Theodoridou  

Sin Embargo - Sabrina Vourvoulias  

Copy and Paste - Yoav Rosen  

Onen and His Daughter - Dilman Dila  

The Love Decay Has for the Living - Berit Ellingsen  

Portrait of a Young Zombie in Crisis - Walidah Imarisha  

Typical - Raquel Castro  

Mana Langkah Pelangi Terakhir? (Where is the Rainbow’s Last Step?) - Jaymee Goh  

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ - Rebecca Roanhorse  

Which Treats of Lázaro’s Account of the Friendship He Shared with a Blind Traff icker in Stories and the Misfortunes That Befell Them - Carlos Yushimito  

Tomorrow’s Dictator - Rahul Kanakia  

Geppetto - Carlos Hernandez  

Other Metamorphoses - Fábio Fernandes  

Letters as Sweet as Honey - Foz Meadows  

Consciousness - Zig Zag Claybourne  

Younis in the Belly of the Whale - Yasser Abdel-Latif  

The Churile of Sugarcane Valley - Vashti Bowlah  

Come Tomorrow - Jayaprakash Satyamurthy  

The Soulless - Walter Dinjos  

Simulacrum - Ken Liu  

The Human I No Longer Was - Jeremy Szal  

The Song of the Sky - Sanem Ozdural  

Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight - Sheree Renée Thomas  

Rooting - Isha Karki 

These Constellations Will Be Yours - Elaine Cuyegkeng  

Read Before Use - Chinelo Onwualu  

Soul Case - Nalo Hopkinson  

Big Thrull and the Askin’ Man - Max Gladstone  

The Language of Knives - Haralambi Markov  

The Good Matter - Nene Ormes  

No Other City - Ng Yi-Shen  

Señora Suerte - Tananarive Due  

The Bois - R.S.A. Garcia  

The Spook School - Nick Mamatas  

The Little Dog Ohori - Anatoly Belilovsky 

Sunset - Hiroko Minagawa  

Ghostalker - T.L. Huchu  

I Tell Thee All I Can No More - Sunny Moraine  

Increasing Police Visibility - Bogi Takács  

The House at the End of the World - Carmen Maria Machado  

The Unvanished - Subodhana Wijeyeratne  

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies - Brooke Bolander  

The Memcordist - Lavie Tidhar  

The Mighty Slinger - Karen Lord and Tobias S. Buckell  

Sujets

• Anthologies
• Collections
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Speculative fiction
• Horror
• Hurlements 2
• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Rosarium Publishing
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781495627408
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Other Anthologies from Rosarium Publishing
APB: Artists against Police Brutality
Edited by Bill Campbell, Jason Rodriguez, and John Jennings
Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction
Edited by Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso
Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond
Edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall
The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia
Edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng
Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany
Edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell

Cover art and design by John Jennings
Copyright 2018 Rosarium Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below:
Published by Rosarium Publishing
P.O. Box 544
Greenbelt, MD 20768-0544
www.rosariumpublishing.com
Table of Contents
I NTRODUCTION Daniel Jos Older
A TTENUATION Nick Harkaway
S LIPPERNET Nisi Shawl
T ERPSICHORE Teresa P. Mira de Echeverr a
S TRAIGHT L INES Naru Dames Sundar
T HE D RAGON S TAR Pavel Ren n
T HE M OUSER OF P ETER THE G REAT P. Dj l Clark
T HE L ITTLE B EGUM Indrapramit Das
T HE B EARER OF THE B ONE H ARP Emmi It ranta
M ADAME F LID E LOPES K.A. Teryna
W AITING FOR THE F LOOD OR T HE B ATHERS Natalia Theodoridou
S IN E MBARGO Sabrina Vourvoulias
C OPY AND P ASTE Yoav Rosen
O NEN AND H IS D AUGHTER Dilman Dila
T HE L OVE D ECAY H AS FOR THE L IVING Berit Ellingsen
P ORTRAIT OF A Y OUNG Z OMBIE IN C RISIS Walidah Imarisha
T YPICAL Raquel Castro
M ANA L ANGKAH P ELANGI T ERAKHIR ? (W HERE IS THE R AINBOW S L AST S TEP ?) Jaymee Goh
W ELCOME TO Y OUR A UTHENTIC I NDIAN E XPERIENCE Rebecca Roanhorse
W HICH T REATS OF L ZARO S A CCOUNT OF THE F RIENDSHIP H E S HARED WITH A B LIND T RAFFICKER IN S TORIES AND THE M ISFORTUNES T HAT B EFELL T HEM Carlos Yushimito
T OMORROW S D ICTATOR Rahul Kanakia
G EPPETTO Carlos Hernandez
O THER M ETAMORPHOSES F bio Fernandes
L ETTERS AS S WEET AS H ONEY Foz Meadows
C ONSCIOUSNESS Zig Zag Claybourne
Y OUNIS IN THE B ELLY OF THE W HALE Yasser Abdel-Latif
T HE C HURILE OF S UGARCANE V ALLEY Vashti Bowlah
C OME T OMORROW Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
T HE S OULLESS Walter Dinjos
S IMULACRUM Ken Liu
T HE H UMAN I N O L ONGER W AS Jeremy Szal
T HE S ONG OF THE S KY Sanem Ozdural
T REE OF THE F OREST S EVEN B ELLS T URNS THE W ORLD R OUND M IDNIGHT Sheree Ren e Thomas
R OOTING Isha Karki
T HESE C ONSTELLATIONS W ILL B E Y OURS Elaine Cuyegkeng
R EAD B EFORE U SE Chinelo Onwualu
S OUL C ASE Nalo Hopkinson
B IG T HRULL AND THE A SKIN M AN Max Gladstone
T HE L ANGUAGE OF K NIVES Haralambi Markov
T HE G OOD M ATTER Nene Ormes
N O O THER C ITY Ng Yi-Shen
S E ORA S UERTE Tananarive Due
T HE B OIS R.S.A. Garcia
T HE S POOK S CHOOL Nick Mamatas
T HE L ITTLE D OG O HORI Anatoly Belilovsky
S UNSET Hiroko Minagawa
G HOSTALKER T.L. Huchu
I T ELL T HEE A LL I C AN N O M ORE Sunny Moraine
I NCREASING P OLICE V ISIBILITY Bogi Tak cs
T HE H OUSE AT THE E ND OF THE W ORLD Carmen Maria Machado
T HE U NVANISHED Subodhana Wijeyeratne
O UR T ALONS C AN C RUSH G ALAXIES Brooke Bolander
T HE M EMCORDIST Lavie Tidhar
T HE M IGHTY S LINGER Karen Lord and Tobias S. Buckell
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
A BOUT THE E DITOR
A BOUT THE AUTHORS
for the Kid and Diaper Scientific
Introduction
History teems with monsters. I started writing historical fantasy recently and was only slightly surprised when it turned out an actual once living person was more villainous and horrifying than any bad guy I could ve dreamt up. Treacherous skullduggery of all flavors creeps from the pages of our archives, and of course, the past is alive and well, walks with us, and more than that: we keep it alive, consecrate it with statues enshrined in sacred pillared halls and weathered plaques. We honor our monsters, those authors of devastation, as Baldwin dubbed them, and then pretend we ve only noticed their noble attributes and hope everything else just fades away.
But history holds monsters much bigger than those individuals. They are harder to see-we re so trained to focus on the one and only. But their wingspan crosses oceans, and the destruction they ve caused reaches through the passage of time, curses generations and generations; they leave widening ripples of war and havoc in their wake. Because they don t have single faces, they are even harder to pin down than the singular men and women who rose to the height of power and remained in our memories. These larger monsters become imprinted on our DNA, insidious, and seem to be a part of the very fabric of life, a natural occurrence. And we build great monuments to them, too: huge walls demarcating imaginary lines in the earth, topped with machine guns and patrolled by vast armies of killing technology that are themselves a tribute to the great monsters of history. But more than all those physical tributes, we have honored those monsters with story.
Story, the mechanism of so much of our madness, can be a guiding light or the deepest of shadows. For so long, the gatekeepers of narrative have kept a tight rein on which stories we lift up and which we never hear about. Historical memory, it turns out, is a finite resource, and so a flashpoint of conflict. Story is the hinterlands where mythmakers crash into each other, feed armies wholesale into the mire that then stumble out, changed forever, and change our perception of the world in the process. Story, and the vast industries that package and distribute stories across the world, has lifted us up and shut us down. It has given life and taken it away, time and time again.
And here we stand, once again at the crossroads. This the age of children detention camps and mass deportations, of ongoing state violence and fascism on the march. This is the age of counternarratives, of protest, of fighting back. We ve long needed collections like Sunspot Jungle , anthologies that bring together voices from across the world to sing about impossible, difficult truths through the lens of the imagination. We ve long needed stories about giant robot mausoleums on anticolonial tears across the Indian countryside and sentient, anxiety-ridden spaceships, and Russian house spirits who help a boy from far away discover his own power through storytelling. I am so glad Sunspot Jungle Book 2 is in the world, because the world has been hungry for it for a very long time.
Daniel Jos Older
Attenuation
Nick Harkaway
Sonny Hall, the space traveller, in the darkness of the recovery room, blinks and comes to himself. He can still see the tumbler falling from his hand, the cocktail party lit in a warm yellow haze and the girl from Heidelberg grinning at him like a cat. He can feel the slick surface of the glass slipping between thumb and finger, can pinpoint the moment when the remaining friction is too slight to prevent it surrendering to gravity. The paper umbrella drops end over end, ice cubes skitter across the polished concrete of the apartment s floor.
He opens his mouth to say What?
Hush, the technician says, high and strained, it s okay. You re fine.
Until this moment it had not occurred to Sonny that he might not be fine, but the transparency of the lie causes him to reexamine. He feels ghastly: as if he has grit in the joints and skin and yet is somehow made of jelly. He imagines that his whole body has been transformed, is now made of whatever goes into eyeballs, and all that eyeball stuff is dry and hung over.
You re not fine, another voice says firmly. Tell me exactly what happened in London.
He suspects there may have been Swedish whisky and-he licks dry teeth-potatoes roasted in goose fat. He can taste colours.
Synaesthesia is a temporary companion effect, the second voice says. Ignore it. Did you do this to yourself? Are you making money on it? We get that. People are stupid enough to do that. Are you that stupid? Because it will kill you.
He must have spoken aloud. That s excellent. But this is clearly not Nieuwsterdam, not even close. On the wall, block letters read simply Halfway. So this is the Halfway Station. They must have pulled his signal when they saw something was wrong. Is something wrong?
He s dissociated, the technician says primly. The sheriff-the uniform has a star on it, and Sonny can actually hear the theme from High Chaparral glinting off it-doesn t care about that either. He sings along a bit, then stops.
Did I do wha to m self? a new voice says. It s a good voice. It s catching somewhat as if the speaker has a mouthful of peanut butter, but in the flow it s deep and buttery. A voice for the seduction of valkyries. It resonates in Sonny s chest, plucks at his gut. Oh. That s me.
Your old corpse, the sheriff says. It wasn t burned. It s active. You re in two places at once. You have attenuation sickness.
The umbrella flies upwards, dragging the glass and the ice cubes with it. The smiling girl slips her arms around his chest and buries her face in the crook of his neck. He returns the favour, and all the lights come on at once.
Transit is last decade s new new thing. What once was wondrous is now banal, and instead of taking time to be amazed at what it implies, people complain at the paperwork, at the limited options, at the frequent flier rewards being insufficient. Transit has come of age, become ubiquitous, and now no one cares. But even a few years ago, it was miraculous. A simple enough idea, fiendishly hard to implement-until it was done. Information can be transmitted instantly across distances to boggle the human mind. The human mind itself