It's a Jumble

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ―  George Orwell,  1984

  Some wonderful stories that I read in Feb and March.    “ Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.   There have been so many response stories to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” that they practically constitute an entire subgenre in themselves. But Kim’s latest riff stands above the rest: a brilliant, blistering, darkly humorous tale that updates Omelas for our current social media age. And fittingly for this age, the story beco...

  I have loved everything I’ve read from Sofia Samatar, and her latest work, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is no exception. It’s a strange, slippery, mesmerizing tale, a story that can feel like an abstract allegory, but then veer into wrenching intimacy. It’s science fiction, mysticism, fable, and also academic novel (or novella, to be precise).   In the dark Hold of a mining space ship, an unnamed boy is enslaved as part of an entire caste of people who are literally chained. But his artistic talent catches the attention of those above him, and he’s chosen for the recently revived University Scholarship for the Chained. His chain is struck off and replaced with a blue anklet. And he’s literally brought out of the darkness into light, into a world of air and light and campus quads, green lawns and classrooms and a flowing river. His mentor is a professor whose own father was from the Hold, and who was himself a recipient of such a scholarship. The boy’s new mentor...