Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our May 2024 issue (#212) fiction by Alice Towey ("Fishy"), Fiona Moore ("The Portmeirion Road"), Carolyn Zhao ("In Which Caruth is Correct"), Thomas Ha ("The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video"), Samara Auman ("The Texture of Memory, of Light"), Rajeev Prasad ("The Blinding Light of Resurrection"), Carlie St. George ("The Weight of Your Own Ashes"), and K. J. Khan ("Our Father").Non-fiction includes an article by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, interviews with Andrea Hairston and Andrea Kriz, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

My Review:

I came into this story not quite sure what I was getting into. Probably not helped by reading the “St.” in the title as “Saint” instead of “Street”. I think the “Brotherhood” bit led me astray.

But only a bit.

The opening of this story was a bit jarring, when the unnamed narrator goes to the library and picks up what he calls a “dead book” and is so surprised about it. It’s an interesting opening for a story that winds its way around to the idea that “dead books” and any other media that is fixed in time and can’t be “fixed” in content is more alive – or has more life in it – than the reverse.

The way that it gets there is a story about what we remember vs. what really happened, about what we hang onto vs. what we keep, and the idea that stories are not meant to make us comfortable, they are meant to make us think.

But the way that it gets there is through one young man’s grief over the death of his mother, his desire to remember her and their relationship as it really was and not “enhanced” or “improved” or “optimized” to make the “story” come out better than it really happened.

The protagonist’s desire to preserve his true memories is set against his discovery of that supposedly dead book. Just as nearly all the services to preserve his mother’s collection of keepsakes and memorabilia includes optimization whether he wants that service or not, the same is true with books. That’s how he makes his living, by turning dead books into “living” ones.

Meaning that all books are electronic and updated constantly according to formulas about what is popular, comfortable and desirable. Except that dead book he found in the library. It can’t be changed, or altered, or improved. It’s dead ink on dead paper.

But the story lives in his thoughts in a way that no “living book” ever has. He’s intrigued by both the story and the concept. He’s also frightened, very nearly but not quite completely out of his wits, that there’s someone following him and interfering with his digital access to EVERYTHING in order to coerce him to give up the book.

Fortunately for the protagonist, one of the things that his mother taught him, that he needs to remember, is how to get around the ubiquitous electronic surveillance and need for electronic access in order to get himself to the one place that might just take him – and his memories and his dead but still dangerous book – in.

Escape Rating A-: I was able to listen to this as a podcast, read by Kate Baker, and it did help to put me inside the main character’s head – even if said main character wasn’t always sure where his head was at and whether or not he was seeing things. Howsomever, this is a hard story to encapsulate – see above effort – because it’s hitting a lot of different and interesting themes in a relatively short space. Also, the unnamed protagonist just makes describing the story even more awkward.

The story that this reminded me of most turned out to be “The Boy from Elsewhen” by Barlow Crassmont, part of Writers of the Future 41. Both are stories about the value of the unchanging printed word versus the endless mutability of electronic documents although they take that concept in different directions. In the Crassmont story, it starts out as a quirk that is subject to mockery, but ends with a realization that having to deal with material that isn’t homogenized for the reader stimulates intelligence and creativity. In this story, that idea is taken a step further as the villain of the piece actively works to remove the book from circulation because they are afraid of what the thoughts it engenders might lead to.

There’s also a bit of Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman as both are stories about sons trying to preserve the memories of their late parents through the preservation of the materials and artifacts they left behind.

The part of the story that was really difficult to include was the way that the whole society seems to have turned into a culture that preserves nothing and hangs onto very little. It seemed a bit like the result of the societal collapse in Down in the Sea of Angels, but we don’t know how they got there in this story so the characters who are coming from that perspective, the protagonist’s weird girlfriend Elii, feel false and weird.

At the same time, the plot elements, the story that he’s reading, the way it affects him and how much it feels to this reader as if the protagonist of the story is an avatar for the protagonist of the story he’s reading or vice versa, felt, well, real. We do see ourselves in stories, whether our actual selves or a person we might have been or might want to be. The equivocal, uncertain ending of the story within the story is exactly the kind of ending that opens the mind and makes the reader think because it IS disturbing and sometimes we need that even if we don’t want it.

While the mysterious figure chasing after the main character, the clearly dangerous but not-quite-exactly-human Caliper John, adds tension and a chilling sense of danger that moves the story forward even as it further enmeshes the story on the surface with the story inside it.

I have one more novelette to go in this year’s Hugo reading, unless I decide to reread Lake of Souls because it’s been a while. In any case, I’ll be back in a week or two with the next installment!