Eyes of the Crocodile

"“Eyes of the Crocodile” grabs you from the first sentence to the last. Short stories are written in all languages. Often, our most important folkloric stories are passed down verbally. Everything is oral in the West Indies, for example, because so much of our culture had to be kept in that manner; the enslaved were not allowed to read or write or congregate. If it’s oral, it’s necessarily short. In SFF in the American sphere, a lot of the short stories are coming out of North America, Australia, Canada, and England – while huge countries like China and Russia and the whole of East Asia and the entire Caribbean and Latin America having strong, long literary traditions, which include their own take on short stories. I mean, the entire continent of Africa! – so much in that literary tradition in particular, which I was taught when I was growing up in school. So it’s really pleased me to see the efforts pick up over the last few years, with certain magazines trying to have regular translations. In Samovar , and Clarkesworld… Coming from a different culture, the short stories have different ideas, and a necessarily fresh outlook. “Eyes of the Crocodile” was one of these. Malena Salazar Maciá is very well known in Cuba, and has produced many well regarded novels there. She presents a vision of humanity’s future, through indigenous peoples; and of course it’s fraught, because it’s a vision of massive displacement. Things go wrong, and they have to adapt – and I think indigenous persons understand having to adapt to a world that is entirely hostile, that doesn’t even record your death amongst all the many other deaths that are happening. So it’s not only incredibly beautifully written, but it’s also stark, really terrifying imagery. Even at the heart of all this scary reality, this planet that is trying to kill you, there’s beauty as our protagonist reconnects with her ancestors – as she is dying. She reconnects to the mission that they had given themselves to carry humanity forward. She is on her own mission, in what she believes are her last hours, to try and preserve that as much as possible – understanding that she’s preserving not just humanity, but her slice of humanity, her past, her ancestors, her stories. It packs so much into less than 2500 words. It’s a beautiful mix of nature and technology and religion and ritual, which is something that I love, and that I did some work on with some of my novellas. I love the intersection of biology and technology. To my mind, all technology is really mankind trying to control natural and biological processes, and science is our attempt to figure out how to do it. And the reality is, we’re trying to reproduce things that already exist in nature: nature already knows how to do these incredible, fabulous, insane things. I really enjoyed the transformation the protagonist is undergoing throughout the story, both the terror of it and the brutality of it – because that’s nature for you as well. It’s unforgiving, it’s terrifying. It doesn’t see you as an individual, but you open yourself up to the fact that you’re part of a food chain, a world – you have value, but the whole is important. Yes, that’s something that I’m always going for in my own work – I want you to feel mythic, like this is an epic story, and then I want to slide science fiction in there. I don’t really see much of a disconnect between them."