Story of the Week: "No Rez" by Jeff Noon

Last week I praised Priya Sharma's short story "Blonde" from Interzone's Sept./Oct. 2015 issue. Well, Interzone must be on a roll because the same issue contains another of the year's best stories, "No Rez" by Jeff Noon.

The rez in the title refers to resolution, as in the number of pixels available for seeing in this futuristic world. Thanks to artificially enhanced eyes humanity can access not only our own limited field of vision but also the countless cameras and devices recording everything in life. This creates an overwhelming range of what you can see, a high-rez view of the world which both overwhelms and subsumes what it means to be human.

The main character in "No Rez" is Aiden, who earns his living bicycling around the city uploading what he sees to the world's ever-flowing net of life. His dream is to actually see in "high rez," a dream impossibly out of reach for poor people like him whose eyes see only low resolution views of reality.

"No Rez" is frakin brilliant. This is what science fiction short stories should be. The closest I can come to describing this story is to say it combines the narrative urgency of Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah..." with the all-encompassing world creation of William Gibson's Neuromancer. But "No Rez" is also totally different than these examples, a story like no other. "No Rez" is a primal scream of a story swallowing the reasoned insanity of today's ever connected world.

Unfortunately, I fear few people will read "No Rez." The story is told in a unique stream of consciousness style which will turn off many readers, not the least among them the editors of the year's best anthologies and some of the people who vote on the various genre awards. If the story is reprinted in any of these anthologies or makes the award shortlists it will be a miracle. But that doesn't change the fact that "No Rez" is a SF story you should immediately seek out and read.

The new issue of Interzone proves that the British magazine remains on the cutting edge of SF/F short fiction. Seek out this issue today. You can purchase it through Amazon for their Kindle or through Weightless for other ebook formats. Print issues are also available in the UK and, in the near future, should be in select US bookstores.

By the gods it's another Jason Sanford ego post

Lots of ego notes in this post, so skip if you need.

Story of the Week: "Blonde" by Priya Sharma

I dislike fairy tales, which long ago lost any worthwhile cultural resonance. Due, no doubt, to the ceaseless commercialization a la Disney princesses and a million other Hollywood sins, all of which removed the bloody edge of birth and death from what were once tales imparting life lessons across generations. When I see a fairy tale these days I run the other way unless convinced otherwise by someone whose judgement I trust.

And I trust the storytelling judgement of Priya Sharma. Which is why I read her new brilliant new short story "Blonde" in the Sept./Oct. 2015 issue of Interzone.

"Blonde" is a retelling of the traditional Rapunzel fairy tale. Yet instead of being trapped in a mythical tower in a forest, here the titular character is thrown into a dystopian modern world of poverty and criminals and starvation and life among the ruins. In Sharma's retelling — which can be read equally as science fiction or fantasy — Rapunzel's ever-growing locks are valuable solely because they're blonde, an almost mystical hair color which has nearly passed from the human gene pool. But humanity's fixatation on blond hair is in no way healthy, as Rapunzel discovers to her horror.

"Blonde" is a gripping, eerie, well-written tale with the most compelling Rapunzel I've ever read. And unlike any Disney reworking of the fairy tale, this story retains its razor-slice edge as it presents a thought-provoking examination of the stereotypes and beliefs which influence the world around us.

I've long loved Sharma's stories — for my money she's one of the most underappreciated short fiction writers in the SF/F genre. She's also one of the few writers who could convince me to take a chance on a fairy tale retelling. In this case I'm glad I did.

Novel recommendations for September 2015

Last month I named my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels for the first part of 2015. As a continuing effort to highlight novels worth reading, I've updated the list by asking people to recommend their own favorite SF/F novels of 2015.

I've arranged the list starting with those novels which received the highest number of recommendations. The people who made the recommendations are listed at the bottom. While a number of authors recommended novels, none of them were allowed to name their own works.

I plan to update this list on a monthly basis through the end of the year, so if you have SF/F novels to recommend send them my way. Please limit recommendations to two novels per month per person. Yes, this means people who already recommended novels can send more recs each month. And before anyone even tries, it's not hard to figure out when people are trying to game my tally system. So don't ask people to flood me with recs for your novel.

In addition, I'm also compiling lists of recommended 2015 short stories, anthologies & story collections. So send those recs to me.

Novels with multiple recommendations

  • Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (5 recs)
  • The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (4 recs)
  • Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (4 recs)
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (4 recs)
  • The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu (4 recs)
  • Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (3 recs)
  • Uprooted by Naomi Novik (3 recs)
  • Updraft by Fran Wilde (3 recs)
  • Court of Fives by Kate Elliott (2 recs)
  • The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins (2 recs)
  • Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2 recs)

Novels with one recommendation

  • The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak
  • Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop
  • Long Black Curl by Alex Bledsoe
  • Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs
  • Tracker by C.J. Cherryh
  • Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
  • Gemini Cell by Myke Cole
  • White City by Seb Doubinsky
  • Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan
  • Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
  • Dead Ice by Laurell K. Hamilton
  • Day Shift by Charlaine Harris
  • Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley
  • Dark Heir by Faith Hunter
  • Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos
  • Cold Iron by Stina Leicht
  • Labyrinthian by Sunny Moraine
  • The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam
  • Touch by Claire North
  • The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
  • Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
  • Windswept by Adam Rakunas
  • Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas by Kazuki Sakuraba
  • All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales
  • Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
  • An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
  • Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp by Molly Tanzer
  • A Headful of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
  • Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig
  • Weathering by Lucy Wood

Many thanks to everyone who shared with me their favorite SF/F novels of 2015: Aliette de Bodard, Richard Bowes, K Tempest Bradford, Maurice Broaddus, Adam Callaway, Shaun Duke, Andy Hedgecock, S.L. Huang, Aidan Moher, J. Oliver, Jeffrey Petersen, Joe Sherry, John H. Stevens, Charles Tan, Jetse de Vries, Eddi Vulić, Sean Wallace, Paul Weimer, Cynthia Wentworth, AC Wise. There were also a handful of people who asked to remain anonymous.

If anyone sees errors on this list (such as novels which weren't first published in 2015), let me know.

Update: I removed Pivot by L.C. Barlow and Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett because they were published in previous years. I also moved The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson to my pending short story post because it is a novella.

Praise for my short story "Duller's Peace"

My short story "Duller's Peace" is now available in the September 2015 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. So far the story is receiving rave reviews.

  • Bob Blough at Tangent calls my story a "moral indictment of other nations trying to control a people or a country" and adds that "This is a powerful story that is extremely relevant in the world today, yet is clearly true SF as well. Well done, Mr. Sanford, well done." 
     
  • Sam Tomaino at SFRevu says "Duller's Peace" is "another well-crafted story from Sanford" with a real chilling ending.
     
  • K. Tempest Bradford calls the story "Highly Recommended" on io9, adding: "An intense distopian world in which a government achieves control through nanotechnology that reaches into everything, including your thoughts. The concept is creepy, mostly because it’s not far fetched. I can see people balking at the ending, I say it’s perfect."
     
  • Author Suzanne Palmer says

The print edition of Asimov's is available in store while the digital edition can be purchased for the Amazon Kindle and many other ebook formats. But don't wait — if you want to read the story you need to do so before single-issue copies disappear from stores and online in the next week or two.