These are three novellas from quite different corners of science fiction that I read over January. One, Matryoshka, is a backlist title that's been on my shelf for some time, while the other two are new releases.
The odd thing is you will see I've given all 3 the same score (give or take a few decimal points; I do think Matryoshka is probably by a small margin the strongest), but that flattens just how diverse in their strengths (and their flaws) these three works are. Suffice to say that I think if any of these is in a niche that is to your taste, you will find it enjoyable and engaging.
Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto
This is, as far as I can tell, Pinto's only longer-form work outside his very good and underappreciated Stone Dance of the Chameleon series of early 2000s grimdark doorstoppers, and it is a very different beast to those. A slim novella clocking in at under 90 generously spaced pages, it opens with our point of view character, Cherenkov, hooking up with a complete stranger in post-World War 2 Venice and then following her through a portal to another world, called Eboreus. So far, so portal fantasy. What follows, though, is something considerably more abstract and more surreal.
Cherenkov and the woman he followed to Eboreus, Septima, are quickly set on a mission across a trackless sea and towards an increasingly fierce white light to find an old man who is probably a Neanderthal. It turns out that the closer one gets to that white light, the slower time moves. By the time the two return (with a third person, who had been lost in time), years have passed in Eboreus and decades in the real world. The plot, such as it is, plays out the consequences of this time dilation.
Matryoshka is probably best described as science fantasy. The story is played out like a fairy tale, but the time dilation at the plot's core seems pretty clearly to be a matter of physics (if not understood as such by most of the characters) rather than magic. The plot is sketched lightly and its logic deliberately surreal and disorientating. Through this choice of narrative voice, the themes Pinto seeks to explore—dislocation in the face of the Holocaust and in the face of modernity more generally—are also sheeted onto the reader trying to make sense of the action. This is in general very effective and quite clearly deliberate, but in a few places the generally elegant prose clunks or is missing just one more plot breadcrumb to pull the reader along. Those quibbles aside, this is a bold and creative work by an author whose work deserves more attention. Recommended if you enjoy surrealist approaches to speculative fiction.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.
Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald
McDonald is a science fiction luminary, with works across a wide range of subgenres to great effect, from the sweep of centuries on Mars in Desolation Road to near-future brilliance in The Dervish House and River of Gods to cartel wars on the moon in the Luna trilogy. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur explores yet another corner of the genre in a near-future post-political-collapse America. The point of departure from our timeline to the one of the book is the existence of the B2T2: "A place where two times lay up against each other, close as kittens, separated only by the finest layer of space-time fur, that could be stroked, and parted." This hole in time caused religious and political upheaval and, related to the anomaly or not, significant civil war within the former United States. It also allows for the rise of a truly idiosyncratic new form of entertaiment across these shattered states: dinosaur rodeo.
McDonald's masterstroke is to tell the story of this world from the perspective of someone deeply shaped by its differences from ours but with no understand of, or agency over, it. Tif is an orphan in his (late, as I read it) teens, his parents killed in early exchanges in the early battles which shaped the geopolitical present of the book. From a young age he is obsessed with dinosaur rodeo and aroused by the buckaroos; he's gay with little drama about that fact (and Arabic with a fair bit more drama in the Christian theocracy of the future USA). He runs away from the orphanage he ended up at after his parents' death and begs, borrows, and blowjobs his way across the American southwest to get a job mucking out stalls at a dinosaur rodeo. The book opens with him being fired from that job for letting a dinosaur escape. Shortly after, he acquires the titular accidental dinosaur, and the rest of the book is a road trip where Tif attempts to find a home and send his dinosaur back to the past (mandatory under time travel rules to minimise the risk of paradox).
There is a lot to like about this book. McDonald has frequently brilliant turns of phrase, tuned precisely to the register of the under-educated, dinosaur-obsessed, working class teenager who is our point of view character ("Tif folds himself into the big chair and all the sleep that hid in the night creeps up and settles in his lap"). The character work, if briefly sketched (appropriate for a novella), is well done and convincing. As an idiosyncratic, working class view of trying to make a life in a pretty grim future, it is generally successful. The thing that holds a good book back from being great is that it seems to have precisely the wrong amount of plot for a novella. There's too much plot and too wide a sweep for a short story, but it includes so much that it feels overcooked for a novella. The plot races at breakneck pace when it feels like it should proceed more sedately, and some scenes are over almost before they begin. The overall impression is that the story could have done with another 10 or 15,000 words of breathing room. As it stands, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur feels just a little bit more like a genuinely excellent penultimate draft than a fully realised finished article.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.
The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel
The Rainseekers is The Canterbury Tales on Mars, or (perhaps a more genre-appropriate comparison) a condensed Hyperion in mundane SF mode. Terraforming on Mars has proceeded far enough that there has been snow for some years, and the book focuses on a group of 40-odd people trekking out from the safety of Martian dome cities in an attempt to be the first to experience rain. Our narrator, Sakunja Salazar, is a former future!Tiktok star who since making more money than she knows what to do with in that career has turned to photography and journalism and is along for the ride. The book is about equally split between her frame narrative and the stories told to her by several of her fellow pilgrims (it's barely expressed as such; the trek is definitely a pilgrimmage) about their lives and what brought them to be out here, seeking Martian rain.
These pilgrims come from a wide range of backgrounds, from the descendant of the genius scientist who designed the orbital mirrors which have over decades warmed Mars and melted ice to the talented engineer brought low by trauma and addiction. Kressel has a deft touch with these nested stories, bringing depth to their subjects in a short word count. We get Sakunja's story as well, both through the narration of the frame story and her own background as narrated to one of the other pilgrims, and the emotional beats are equally well done.
I have two quibbles with the novella, one structural and one genre-related. Structurally, the balance of frame narrative to nested stories seems off. There is more to the frame narrative than an excuse for the stories, but there isn't quite enough to it to stand alone either. And for a party of 40-odd pilgrims, it feels weird that the story only gives us the stories of a handful of them. The balance is just slightly off in a way that means you finish the book feeling like you've missed something. In terms of genre complaints, there is a fair bit of "as you know, we realised [x thing happening in the 2020s] was bad" backfilling of the timeline between now and the novel's setting, and some of this is quite clumsy. The pilgrims and the Mars they inhabit are believably and authentically sketched; the history of the Earth they left behind to come there, not so much. It detracts only slightly from the narrative, but I do think it's worth noting when some of the SFnal elements of a SF narrative are one of the story's weaknesses.
Overall these are quibbles, though, and this is a nuanced, emotionally resonant set of stories that I think a lot of readers will enjoy.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.
