“You,” a new short story by Geoff Ryman

Canadian science fiction, fantasy and slipstream author Geoff Ryman, who currently resides in the United Kingdom, has a new short story set on Mars: “You,” published in When It Changed: Science into Fiction, an Anthology (2009, Comma Press, UK), a volume that strives to put the science back into fiction.

According to a recent review of the anthology printed in the Guardian, Ryman’s story “imagines a future in which people ‘life-blog,’ not merely laying down a diary of their thoughts but actually recording sense impressions from their eyes and ears and touch, so that you can ‘sit with them, read with them, drink with them, hell, even pee with them.’ ‘I bet it's like this for angels,’ one of Ryman's characters observes. It is by means of fragmentary life-blogs that we see things from the point of view of a Mars explorer who has stumbled upon a cache of mysterious metal cylinders buried in the rust-red dust. She spends her life puzzling over whether the strange spiral markings on each cylinder are natural or artificial, the product of an extinct intelligence on the red planet.”

When It Changed: Science into Fiction, an Anthology, which, coincidently, is edited by Ryman, is scheduled to be released in the United States in Spring 2010.