First a few interesting details about Isaac Asimov and The Gods Themselves.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Limitations:

Asimov attributed the lack of romance and sex in his fiction to the “early imprinting” from starting his writing career when he had never been on a date and “didn’t know anything about girls”. He was sometimes criticized for the general absence of sex (and of extraterrestrial life) in his science fiction. He claimed he wrote The Gods Themselves to respond to these criticisms, which often came from New Wave science fiction (and often British) writers. The second part (of three) of the novel is set on an alien world with three sexes, and the sexual behavior of these creatures is extensively depicted.

Read https://www.publicbooks.org/asimovs-empire-asimovs-wall/ for more on Asimov and women.

From http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1861:

Galaxy (mar/apr, 1972), Worlds of If (mar/apr, 1972), Galaxy (may/jun, 1972).

Before we talk about the book: My fandom? So much to mention.

• When I was maybe 7, maybe 10, I watched Raumschiff Enterprise on German television. I also watched some Dr. Who. I have a sneaking suspicion, my father was some sort of fan.
• In school we had some good books and a good librarian. I read Tolkien, Le Guin, Clarke etc. We read Lord of the Flies in the curriculum.
• I started using the real library. When I ran out of horse books, I found the sf shelves. I primarily read short stories, a lot of classics, including I, Robot.
• While in high school, my boyfriend lobbied Foundation. Instant hit. And my breakthrough into novels.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation coincided nicely with my studies at university, ’87-’94.
• I started reading books in English, primarily Discworld. I started buying my own books. Asimov was the first “it would be nice to have everything” author. I love his anecdotes.
• And then it’s just grown. Reading a lot more. Being a member of trekkies.dk. Being a member of Science Fiction Cirklen. Writing about sf. Writing sf. Attending and organizing cons. Attending 3 worldcons so far. Voting for the Hugos a few times.
• I’m co-hosting the Danish podcast Robotter på loftet. (Loosely translated: Robots in the Belfry.)

Count of read Hugo winners. Big dot = read, 35. Dot = tried reading it, 3. Details at the end of the post.

Spoiler free summary/themes:

So. This story has a few ingredients. Such as tungsten impossibly, spontaneously being replaced with plutonium-186, an impossible isotope. And this plutonium driving a pump, producing so called free energy. All this implies the existence of the para-men, in the para-universe, the source of all this impossibleness.

The process of turning tungsten into plutonium is also the process of the net loss of 20 electrons for each atom. So far this has had consequences like our magnetosphere growing. The consensus is, that the future will deal with that problem. 

Professor Hallam is universally accepted as the inventor of the pump. He’s very touchy when people question this. Peter Lamont is writing a history of the pump, and he happens to question what everybody knows, and hey, arch enemy created. Myron Bronowski is trying to decode a message from the para-men. Lamont and Bronowski have reason to believe, that “the future will deal with that problem” isn’t good enough. 

• Chemistry/physics – thiotimolin
• Scientists fighting – Foundation 
• Aliens
• Communication with aliens – Arrival, Contact 
• No women 

Meanwhile, Dua, an emotional, ponders her life and behaves in a strange way. She’s in a relationship with Odeen, a rational, and Tritt, a parental. (1, 2, 3.)

• Aliens! – so much sf; these are truly alien
• What’s going on??? – so much sf

Spoilers after the picture.

Part 2:

• Left, right, mid (gender), melting, triad. People are gas? Arranged “marriage”, eugenics. Sex! And sex makes you smarter.
• Melted = disappeared? Hard ones keep a secret from soft ones. MYSTERY! Having to figure it out yourself (nobody let anything slip?)
• The hard ones. New hard one, Estwald (MYSTERY), the pump, Dua good, Estwald bad, meaning?
• Dua (rational + emotional): but we can’t do that!
• That’s abuse, Tritt.
• Communication with aliens (us), hm, mumbo jumbo.
• Sun = food. Less sun, need new kind of food. These people are simply running out of energy.
• Partners fighting, bringing children up, the right way to do things.

Part 3:

• Selene Lindstrom (young, with breasts!), Barron Neville, mysterious earthling = Ben Denison (not so young).
• On the Moon.
• People on the Moon are super different. They’re a mix of races.
• Use instruments on the Moon to investigate the pump situation. Hey, they have good instruments. And intuition.
• Universe 3. 2 pumps.
• Sex on the Moon is dangerous???
• (Earth had a big crisis, a lot of people died. Now they are careful.)

Oh yeah. And the Danish translation has some, ah, issues. This one I can’t even really explain.

And this translation is…weird. Selv = self. Ene = alone. No, it doesn’t really work in Danish either.

Hugo winners list:

3 til, så har vi haft dem alle sammen.

“Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math” by Aimee Picchi (Daily Science Fiction 1/3/20). Når en piges søgen efter en udvej fra et marginaliseret liv bliver til matematikopgaver. – Selvfølgelig elsker jeg sådan en. *** Sf.

“The Eight-Thousanders” by Jason Sanford (Asimov’s 9-10/20). Nogen bestiger Everest. Nogen dør i forsøget. En vampyr (?) holder sig i nærheden. – Slet ikke mig. Jeg læste ikke det hele. * Fantasy-horror.

“My Country Is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 1-2/20). Ved grænsen siger de ikke noget særligt til folk, der gerne vil flytte til det her land. Men spøgelser bliver stoppet! Og når nu det er min mors spøgelse, der kan alle opskrifterne. – Ih, når en tekst handler om noget, uden at handle om det. Fordi selvfølgelig er emnet i virkeligheden racisme. *** Fantasy.

Det er på tide at kigge på 3 noveller til.

“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson (Uncanny 1-2/20). Det er svært at være noget som helst, når det vrimler med zombier alle vegne. Det er ekstra svært at være mor, fordi zombier bliver tiltrukket af duften af blod og nyt liv. Nogen vælger at tage chancen alligevel. – Intelligent. Muligvis en ny vinkel. *** Horror, men ikke af den mest ulækre slags.

“A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris). Robotter arbejder stort set lige som alle andre: kontrakter, fagforeninger, alt det der. De mere erfarne hjælper de nye. Og der er heldigvis også tid til videoer med nuttede dyr. – Den her er bare charmerende. Verden er ikke perfekt, men den er fuld af gode øjeblikke. *** Sf.

“Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots 6/15/20). Hvordan sælger man et hus med spøgelser? Vil huset gerne sælges? – Det er nok ikke første gang, nogen siger, at et spøgelse kan være venligsindet. Så … ** Fantasy.

Skal vi da ikke lige tage et kig på 3 af de Hugo-relevante noveller?

“Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com). Fortælleren bygger sådan et fuglehus, der er beregnet på, at folk kan bytte bøger. Læg en, tag en. Der sker lynhurtigt det, at en af “lånerne” gør tingene på en usædvanlig måde. – Den her historie er sød. Men ikke totalt banebrydende. ** Jeg tør godt kalde den sf.

“The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020). Lige den her planet er befolket af havfolk. De fleste hygger sig. Men en af dem drømmer om at rejse mellem stjernerne. Og det gør hun så. Efter hun har lavet sin hale om til ben. – Toner af H.C. Andersen. Fin historie, men det er ikke et rigtigt eventyr, så det passer mig ikke så godt, at tingene bare falder på plads for hovedpersonen. Hey, der er et rumskib. Hey, de vil godt tage hende med. Osv. ** Sf med en dråbe fantasy.

“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020). Okay, så ham her byggede 2 robotter, der bl.a. kunne bygge sig selv om. Til gengæld ved de intet om at lyve og sådan noget. Da manden er nødt til at rejse væk et stykke tid, må de lære noget om Livets Barske Realiteter. – Jeg kan ikke rigtig lide begyndelsen. Hvorfor har han ikke bare lært dem alt? Men ellers fin og lidt hjerteskærende. ** Sf.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Sometimes aliens are so alien, nothing works. You just never break through.

ETA: “Face Value”, Karen Joy Fowler. Text. 2 humans on a planet with aliens. And no communication. Why do they come into the house and touch everything? Why do they take stuff and then just drop it again? Who knows? One of the humans is much more affected by the situation than the other, why?

ETA: “Bridge of Silence”, George Zebrowski. A human and an alien meet. The human says and does a lot. There’s no way to interpret what the alien does or doesn’t do. The human goes mad?

Solaris, Stanisław Lem. Wikipedia. Apparently this planet is covered with a sentient being. It does stuff, like create a copy of a person. But what does it all mean? Decades of books contain observations, nothing more.

“Spar”, Kij Johnson. Text. She shares a tiny spaceship with an alien. From her point of view, they have s*x, a lot. She has no idea how the alien experiences this. She’s probably close to losing her mind.

“The Dance of the Changer and the Three”, Terry Carr. Text. This very interesting planet is inhabited by energy beings. In 4 years communication hasn’t become perfect. And that’s inconvenient, when they do something inexplicable and dangerous.

Både Nebula og Hugo har offentliggjort deres stemmesedler, og som sædvanlig er jeg specielt interesseret i novellerne.

Så er der yderligere 2, jeg godt vil nævne, nemlig “Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020) og “The Pill” by Meg Elison (in Big Girl, PM Press) (begge Hugo-finalister, langnovelle). De kan være lidt svære at finde, men de er super-interessante.

Det er tid til at tale om det sære igen!

“Corzo”, Brenna Gomez. Far beder om hjælp til at få skåret sit hjerte ud. Noget her stinker af mænd, der ikke viser følelser, og hvordan det påvirker familien.

“The Unwish”, Claire Dean. Af en eller anden grund samles familien i det gamle hus, hvor de 2 søstre voksede op. Ja. Der er vist ikke nogen af dem, jeg har lyst til at møde i virkeligheden … Hvordan kan der i øvrigt være et værelse, fortælleren helt har glemt. 😪

“Red Hood”, Eric Schaller. Pige skal over til bedstemor med suppe og hostesaft. For en sikkerheds skyld skal hun på vej derover have en speciel dragt på, der bliver smurt ind i blod. Nam nam. Og så skal hun selvfølgelig passe på de smarte fyre.

“The Way She Is with Strangers”, Helen Marshall. Fremmede spørger hende om vej, selv da hun lige er flyttet til byen og det egentlig ikke giver mening, men hun peger alligevel. En dag er det ikke en fremmed, men en bekendt, der døde et par dage tidligere. Aha. – Meget smuk. Ikke uhyggelig. Mere af det.

(Mærkelig, Mærkelig i 30’erne.)