mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
This story and author both came out of nowhere as a pleasant surprise.  A longish novella by an unfamiliar name would normally not inspire my confidence, but it was liked enough to get nominated, and it turns out with good reason for once.  Melko, who has written a handful of stories prior to this but none that achieved much notoriety, has put forth a well-plotted, well-paced, character driven exploration of a boy caught in an endless progression of parallel universes, actually parallel northwest Ohios.  John Rayburn is a farm boy who one day out of the blue encounters his double, who has somehow come upon a simple device to shift from one quantum universe to another.  Purists will quibble with the fact that the device's provenance is never explained, which then means there is no indication of how it works or how it even came into John's possession.  So maybe it's a fantasy story then, except that when John the farmboy gives it a try he finds that John Prime wasn't completely forthcoming with the machine's limitations.  What follows are then two parallels stories, with John the farmboy trying to figure out how to get back to his own dimension or quantum universe or whatever you want to call it, and John Prime trying to make use of proprietary information gathered from other universes to get rich and hooked up with his childhood sweetheart.

Once John has realized his predicament and starts to focus on the device itself and how to find a way back to his own world, he does the sensible thing and looks up a university physics professor, although it takes several tries to be taken seriously.  The author delves a little bit into the basic idea behind quantum universes to give the story a more science-oriented focus than if it were just written as straight "fabulist" fiction, but it's not enough that John Campbell would have bought it, and the progression from one universe to the next produces huge contrasts when it's convenient to the plot, followed by several nearly identical worlds in a row when that suits the next scene.  But he offers a compelling variety of different versions of John's world, highlighting different variations so that both John and the reader can easily extrapolate just how many variations there could be out there.  Melko has also thought of most of the primary pitfalls of jumps between worlds and how you could end up underground or embedded in cement, fortunately there aren't big enough variations in most of the universes where this becomes a common problem.

What's also interesting are the variations in the same person across universes, particularly John himself.  While farmboy John is fairly meek by nature, he can be a bit of a hothead at times.  This is nicely balanced by John Prime, where the impetuous side of his personality seems dominant, but occasionally he can lapse into a wistful nostalgia for home and family.  In the end both versions find some kind of satisfaction with their chosen surroundings, although not what they initially would have thought or wished for.  There's something to be chewed over after reading this story on the nature of causality and free will, not just for yourself but those around you, and those who came long before, and how it can ultimately affect just the one version of you that you know about.

There's a lot to like about this story, it focuses on a small cast and it doesn't go on too long, and while the story ends satisfactorily there is still plenty more to tell (in fact Melko has since expanded this into a novel).  Parallel universe stories were always thought to be too complicated for Hollywood to handle, but with recent releases like Star Trek having major success, I would have to think there's a screenplay of this being shopped around now.  It doesn't break any new ground stylistically and the premise seems obvious in retrospect, but Melko makes it work with very readable prose that makes this a worthy Hugo nominee.
posted by Mark at 9:18 PM