Every year, we at Fiction Unbound like to gather and discuss the Hugo and Nebula finalists in the short fiction categories in the weeks leading up to the awards. Like George R.R. Martin’s Hugo Losers party and other universally beloved (?) traditions, that didn’t happen this year. If you ask us, anticipation isn’t exactly the most enjoyable emotion of 2020. Instead, let’s honor what we have: incredible stories that have got us still talking about them long after the hype of suspense has faded.
The two stories discussed below examine or challenge the idea of a privileged center. It’s no secret that the Hugos and Nebulas have historically focused on a certain, hmm, profile: white, male, American, sure, but also a kind of implicit self-regard that measures heroism and meaning according to that center. And it’s no accident that as the speculative fiction community diversifies, some of our best stories are going to reorient to a far different center — maybe even one that isn’t human…
Theodore McCombs is still pondering “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing,” by Shiv Ramdas
Allied heroism in World War II is a stubbornly held chord in the triumphalist key of speculative fiction. Sure, science fiction and fantasy are much older than the Greatest Generation, but the Golden Age archetypes of hero scientists, pilots, and engineers who defeat evil through technological invention and grit owe a great deal to them; as do J.K. Rowling’s band of British wizards resisting the racist, fascist Death Eaters. Like every sort of triumphalism, these archetypes are — if they can be considered true in any sense —grotesquely incomplete. Shiv Ramdas’s short story, “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” (Strange Horizons, Sept. 9, 2019) is a thrilling, bracing corrective to this imaginative archive.
Jute dollmaker Sovarani Podder (via Pinterest)
Set during the Bengal famine of 1943, the story follows Apa, a dollmaker who weaves superb figures out of jute, as British “denial” policies — a scorched-earth tactic meant to to cut off food supplies to Japanese forces — force her community into starvation. The form of Apa’s revenge strikes at the heart of this triumphalism, giving voice to an astonished rage that such men could in any sense think themselves heroes. Still, what lingers after the fury is Ramdas’s loving attention to the jute weaver’s intimacy with her material: a deep-seated sense of relation and community that makes the British governors’ callousness the most unnatural invention of all.
In Apa, Ramdas captures the uncanny and crazy-making experience of watching someone live a heroic fantasy of themselves that is divorced from one’s own reality — something we’ve been doing for the last four years, in one notable case — made possible only by power structures that privilege that fantasy. For Apa, it’s the British soldier who imagines he’s in a story about getting a doll for the Governor’s wife from a backward native. By the end, Apa makes damn sure he knows how wrongly he’s judged.
C.S. Peterson can’t get Ted Chiang’s “Omphalos” out of her head
Cornelis van Haarlem, “The Fall of Man” (!592)
Omphalos means center, or navel, more specifically, the center of divine attention. In Greece, the Omphalos is a stone representing the navel of the world, located at Delphi, the center of Apollo’s attention. In Ted Chiang’s story, the first word is “Lord.” We are eavesdropping on the protagonist in prayer, asking for the light of truth to illuminate her mind as she reflects on her day. It is an intimate moment, and we stay with her here, in the most bare and honest places in her mind throughout. It is this intimate honesty that is the power in this story.
Actual navels also figure prominently, or rather, the lack of them in a newly discovered group of mummies. In this world there is incontrovertible evidence of miraculous, spontaneous creation. Our protagonist is a scientist, an archaeologist, thrilled with recent discoveries. In true Ted Chiang style, our protagonist explains, in careful detail, how scientists have pieced together the puzzle of dendrochronology, the study of tree rings, to follow the ebb and flow of summers and winters deep into time. Our protagonist is thrilled to look at a sample of wood that has been precisely dated to eight thousand years ago. But:
That thrill can’t compare to that inspired by examining samples of wood a few centuries older. Because in those tree trunks, there's a point at which the growth rings stop. Counting back from the present, the oldest growth ring was formed eight thousand nine hundred and twelve years ago. There are no growth rings before that.
The mummies with no navels are on a world tour of museums. These were the first of humanity, those who were created. No umbilical chords for them.
Our protagonist prays to see the presence and purpose of the divine in her life and in creation. She is certain of her place, and her world’s place at the center of God’s attention, the object of divine grace, the apple of the divine eye. But… is her certainty justified?
In fact, her prayer for truth is unexpectedly answered. The unpublished paper of a respected astronomer reveals a discovery about God’s purpose that rocks her world. Chiang keeps us close to the protagonist as she navigates a reality profoundly different from the one she thought she was living in. It’s a story that could easily slide into despair, or turn into a preachy fable. But in Chiang’s deft hands, the archeologist, still in a one sided conversation with the Lord, ends on a note of hope, and faith in human choices.
Still thinking about Shiv Ramdas and Ted Chiang’s Hugo/Nebula-nominated stories, “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing,” and “Omphalos”