Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

Science fiction has a history of glamourising science to a certain extent - for centuries stories have focused on that one big culminating moment in an experiment, and dealing with the fallout of those BCMs. On a dramatic level that's understandable, of course, but it leaves one with the impression that big dramatic moments are what science is about.

Kelly Robson's Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach veers strongly away from that tradition, to interesting effect. It's one of the few stories I've read in the genre that looks at things like responding to a RFP, data collection, and discussing funding sources, and a lot of the day-to-day stuff that keeps real scientists occupied but never seems to be a concern to fictional ones. It's a refreshing change, and one that's balanced nicely with more traditional sci-fi elements like time travel,dystopia, and body modification.

In this novella Robson manages to tell a story that's both mundane and fantastic, while giving hints of a larger and more complex world that the story is existing in. Reading it, it's clear that she's someone with a deep love and passion for sci-fi as a genre, and has thought long and hard about both what makes time travel stories work, and where they sometimes don't. I look forward to seeing more work from her in this setting in the future.