Night Shift

By Eileen Gunn

Wry, dark humor burnishes visionary SF in these often prophetic, sometimes troubling, but always fascinating tales that combine and masterfully conflate the disparate worlds of corporate tech and literary art.

“After the Thaw” is a hi-tech take on an ancient idea: immortality. “Terrible Trudy on the Lam” based on actual events, is a modern fable about a zoo escape, a private eye, a vaudeville act and keeping your mouth shut. “Night Shift at NanoGobblers,” written for a NASA website, is about asteroid-altering AIs and their world-weary earthbound handlers. “Transitions” deals with jet lag when your flight is decades late. Gunn’s long-awaited third collection is rounded out by incisive and affectionate portraits of her SF colleagues, mentors, and friends, beginning with Ursula Le Guin. All illuminated of course by our artfully intimate interview.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781629639567

Eileen Gunn

Eileen Gunn is a science fiction author and editor based in Seattle, Washington, who began publishing in 1978. Her story "Coming to Terms", inspired, in part, by a friendship with Avram Davidson, won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2004. Several others have been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Locus awards. Gunn has a background in high-tech advertising and marketing; she wrote advertising for Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1970s, and was Director of Advertising at Microsoft in the 1980s. A seasoned SF pro, she is on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Book preview

Ursula and the Author

IN 1975, I DECIDED I would get serious about writing science fiction. I quit my job, dumped all my belongings in my car, and drove across the US to Los Angeles, a city I’d never been to before and in which I knew only one person. My goal was to avoid distraction.

Undistracted, I quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. It had been a decade since I had regularly read the science-fiction magazines, and although I still read SF avidly, I really had no idea what was current, where the edge was. In mainstream fiction, the edge, for me, was just the other side of Donald Barthelme. I didn’t aspire to imitate Barthelme, but I was not interested in writing completely linear fiction. I wanted to pack a bit more into it. What could I get away with?

To find out, I bought copies of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, of which there were at that time four volumes. The most recent, #4, contained nine stories by men and one by a woman. I read all the stories—I don’t remember in what order. Of those by men I have no memory. The story by a woman was "The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics," by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The story is composed of three articles from a (future) professional journal of a field called, in the story, therolinguistics: the scientific study of the languages of animals. The first extract examines a poem—perhaps a cry of existential despair, perhaps a call to revolution—written in Ant, scrawled in touch-gland exudation on acacia seeds. In the second extract, a researcher rhapsodizes about the kinetic dialects of Penguin and announces an expedition to Antarctica for further study of the emperor penguin’s thermal poetry. The third extract is an editorial that urges researchers to look beyond the now accessible languages of animals to the unknown art of plants, perhaps even to the slow, opaque poetry of rocks.

In less than 2,600 words, the story addresses all of human aspiration—artistic, scientific, philosophic, and emotional communication—and reveals it as only the first step in understanding the universe. It draws, in miniature, a portrait of the history of science and the psychology of scientists: patiently, in painstaking increments, they build structures of knowledge and ascend those structures to assess their own ignorance and see opportunities for new research. And it sketches three individual researchers, detailing the differences in their personalities: the Ant linguist’s clinically precise yet carefully hedged interpretations of text, the Penguin researcher’s joyous enthusiasm for spending six months on the ice in the dark to further knowledge of the field, and the journal editor’s visionary exhortations to therolinguists everywhere.

The scientists are not the only characters in the story. Within each article is, quickly limned, a tale of nonhuman emotional lives. The first is a murder mystery with political overtones. The body of a savagely murdered worker ant lay near the poem. Was this the poet? Who killed her? Does the poem call for the overthrow of the queen or, as a previous researcher suggested, merely express the desire to be an impregnating male? Women have sometimes been killed if perceived to have either aspiration. The second excerpt, in addition to giving a lightning overview of the past (including shout-outs to Konrad Lorenz and John C. Lilly) and intimations, from a 1974 perspective, of the future study of animal language, conveys the varying emotional lives of different types of penguins and notes that although it was at first thought that they spoke some incomprehensible language related to Dolphin, it was discovered that they in fact speak a perfectly comprehensible avian tongue, because penguins are, after all, birds, not mammals. The third excerpt sets up and amends Tolstoy’s definition of art as communication; it imagines and evokes the uncommunicative languages of plants and rocks. Since this story was published, of course, evidence has been found for extensive quasi-neuronal communication among plants—but 100% predictive accuracy is not an essential criterion for science fiction.

The story interrogates, progressively, the very concepts of language and text. The ant’s poetry, like a Dickinson poem or the translation of a Babylonian fragment, presents the problems of interpreting a conventional text. The Penguin article extends the language/text concept to a kinetic language—one of bodily motion, as in dance— and moves very quickly beyond that idea to the notion that the mind of an aquatic bird must, for evolutionary reasons, work differently from that of a fish or an aquatic mammal. As soon as the reader gets the point—perhaps even before it has sunk in—the essay drills down to the essential differences between species of penguins and the way the concerns of each species influence thought and language. It finishes with a description of poetry offered in the cold and the dark by beings that move very slowly, so as not to dislodge the single egg that sits on each one’s feet—a poetry written only in body heat. The Penguin specialist, after describing an expedition that would sit all winter in the Antarctic night to detect and interpret the poetry of the emperor penguin, cheerily notes that there are still four places available (out of a possible five, perhaps) and suggests that the reader might want to sign up now.

And the whole story is funny. (Did I mention it’s funny? It’s funny.) The voices of the scientists, each so different from one another, are hilarious, but gentle, parodies of human communications—the ways intelligently obsessive people impart information and enthusiasms to others. Even the heartbreaking parts are funny—the doomed ant, a formic Dickinson writing desperate poetry, with her feelers, on one seed after another, is both affecting and wacky, as is the existence of a Freudian interpreter. The ant’s personal story is as unknowable as Sappho’s, and the meaning of her poetry is as dependent as that of the Hittites on a translator’s sincere but questionable extrapolation. How well does anyone know the internal life of another, of whatever species? It’s a question that is both profound and, expressed in this context, extremely funny. In the second section, the emperor penguins, presumably male, crowded together in the dark, cradling eggs, composing poetry by sending whiffs of precious body heat to one another, are touchingly funny—in their parallel with the production of human art from the cave to the present, and (to me anyway) in the implied visual: a bunch of guys standing around in the dark with eggs on their feet, doing their best to keep the species going.

The more I think about this story, the more amused I get: it is endlessly rewarding. Communication in the story, you’ll notice, goes in only one direction. There is no indication that any of the other creatures are at all interested in understanding humans. The implications are that the universe is larger than humans, that yes, we can understand others, albeit not perfectly, and that all life, not just human, is funny and tragic. Even the capitalization of Ant and Penguin, in referring to the languages, strikes me as a comment on nationalism in English-language orthography.

In 1975, The Author of the Acacia Seeds absolutely blew me away, speaking directly to my writerly backbrain. It told me that the telling of complexly layered, multiphasically imaginative stories was possible in genre science fiction. It didn’t tell me how rare they were or how difficult they were to write, but what I needed to know then was how high to set my aspiration.

An attempt at interpreting such a witty tale seems like a typically human effort to explain rather than communicate. Le Guin satirized, in the story itself, this very essay, and I realize now that she was making subtle fun of me before I had even read the story.

Thank you, Ursula, for all the epiphanies.

After the Thaw

WOW. WHAT WAS I doing last night? My head hurts. I can’t feel my hands and feet—anything below my neck. I think I have a fever.

How’d I get here? Twinkling diodes and color-coded wires. Racks of iridescent crystal. Looks like a server farm in a casino—it’s some kind of big computer installation, anyway. There are a few people working in cubicles over there: I can see the tops of their heads.

Welcome, Madam Professor. Your neurocranium has