September 2009

Filter House by Nisi Shawl
Aqueduct Press (2008), ISBN 9781933500195
Reviewed by Alan Scott
www.pacifier.com/~ascott/apshome.htm

Alan P. Scott, husband and father, is currently a resident of Portland, Oregon, in the heart of Ecotopia. He helps provide technical support for a nearby school district. He is not related to the Green Lantern, despite their similar secret identities.

Editor's Note: Filter House won the James Tiptree, Jr., award for 2008, presented at WisCon 33 in Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2009. The award recognizes science fiction or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender.

I was very impressed with this short-story collection from Aqueduct Press, a small Seattle publishing house. The title is well-chosen but gives only a hint of what's within. As explained in the foreword, a "filter house" is one small marine creature's strange-but-true adaptation, a set of organic filters that concentrates floating nutrients, helping it survive where sustenance may be thin. This is a neat conceit to use as a unifying theme for these disparate works, and it's indicative both of Shawl's observational powers and her science-fictional bent — though she turns out to be comfortable with all hues of the speculative-fiction spectrum.

Her characters have many different voices, but are always believable. Shawl has, in fact, also collaborated on a tutorial about how to write believably from other perspectives than one's own called Writing the Other (Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, also from Aqueduct Press).

The stories are also geographically diverse — her settings range from undersea bases on a planet being terraformed to a setting far less common in SF: Detroit, Michigan.

Every story is worthwhile in its own way, but here are a few I think are standouts:

• The Pragmatical Princess — a humorous dragon tale worthy of Scheherezade.
• Good Boy — a deft reimagining of Vodoun in terms of the theories of John C. Lilly's influential Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer, a book that's been on my to-read list for quite some time.
• Shiomah's Land — which takes a very clichéd opening (the naive mortal in awe of the "gods" and their shiny machines) and rings some very interesting changes on it. The final paragraph chilled me.
• And the stark, dry world of The Water Museum — no, it'd never happen just that way, but this classically science-fictional "if this goes on" is throat-parchingly plausible nonetheless.

Many of these works were published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, from which I fell away years ago, but I should probably go back if this author is representative of the magazine's current range and entertainment value. Nisi Shawl's strong narrative voice and diverse range are welcome additions to the field of sf.