#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

Printed in the a Nebula Awards Showcase, this piece was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy stories of 2013. It is a political science lesson played out in apiary terms. A colony of wasps are forced from their home, so they strike out for new territory. Once they found it, they looked to conquer:

“Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

And expand they did, taking control of the indigenous bee population, one that far outnumbered the wasps but were less sophisticated or practiced in the arts of war and aggression.

One day “By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchists.” The mutation stuck and slowly took root among the oppressed colony of bees.

“Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy…A perfect society needs no rulers…knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the new unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nest.”

What followed is chaos, death, insurrection, and revolution, not in that order. Mistakes are made, but among the smart, they are only made once, pass it along!

Rating: 8-10-10-9 Total= 37

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30