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

 
(Analog, December 2009)



Not much big-name hard sf in the novelette category this year, but Baxter is always worth a read.  Unfortunately this story seems to take place within a larger narrative of his Xeelee universe, and I haven't read any of those novels, so at the end it's more than a bit unsatisfying.  This tale concerns itself with the life story of Telni, who grows up on a planet where people living in different areas experience time at different rates, and this protagonist is in the slowest zone, although there are ways to make time go even slower.  What's left of humanity is being watched over by hovering mechanoid spheres called Weapons, which have a human tethered to them for communication purposes.

Neither of these things seems to be the point that Baxter is trying to work with, the title refers to a euphemism for a cosmic event that can threaten humanity.  Apparently they live within a galaxy that is rotating around another galaxy and every so often they pass through each other, with dramatic celestial consequences.  In Telni's zone, he wouldn't normally live to see this because of course it takes so long for each cycle,  but he interacts with people in other zones briefly.  The Weapon sees Telni as a potential savior of humanity, because the next cycle is expected to be particularly bad and Telni seems to have some sort of intellectual gift that will help them come up with a way to beat this cosmic catastrophe.

There's some kind of uplift at the end of the story but it ends abruptly with a creepy "And then - ", sort of like the Hamlet episode of Monty Python.  I expect if you knew more about the details of the Xeelee universe then this would make more sense, up until that point it didn't seem to require any special backstory knowledge, which makes the ending all the more confusing.  Baxter has taken the Vingean concept of different parts of the universe living at different rates and collapsed it down to a single system, and the  biology of planets that cross the paths of planets from another galaxy is also touched on, both ideas big enough for a larger narrative.  This story is fine on its own, I just wish the ending was more conclusive.
posted by Mark at 11:21 AM