#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

#217 The Sugar-Tit- Carolyn Cooke

#217 The Sugar-Tit- Carolyn Cooke

Jack and Giddy lived in proper New England society. Right about there is usually where I start to lose interest in such stories. However, this one kept me interested. It wasn’t about the society as much as the strong and noble spirit of Giddy.

She had a healthy and rightful disdain for the men in her life: “Since she could remember, Giddy had washed out handkerchiefs full of stuff from men’s noses. First het father’s nose, then Jack’s”

“Most of the ailanthuses had been chopped down years ago because their blossoms stank and fouled the old cisterns on the roofs. But it turned out the flowers of the female had no scent; the rankness was in the males.”

As for Jack himself, “He was a wild inconsolable, enthusiast.” Always working on some outlandish business scheme like selling crayons to children in England. He wasn’t loveless and like everyone else, adored Giddy, but he was a philanderer and loved someone else. But in society life, you let such things go, unsaid. And so, she was a dutiful wife and he the tragic husband:

“He looked at her tragically, to remind her (she supposed) that he was a tragic man, a failure in business, and unfaithful;  none of his passions were perfectly requited.”

He had a Grecian heart, but he “Lived to suffer.” These qualities that her father believed made him undeserving of his daughter later made him like his son-in-law better than Giddy herself. She outlasts them all, however, stoic, loyal and hopeful.

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