The new issue of The New Yorker features "The Invasion From Outer Space" by Steven Millhauser, a slight amuse-bouche of a story about alien invasion. It's very short — you can probably read it on your coffee break — and packs just enough of a punch to justify its length. The first half of the story is the funny part, dealing with people's reactions to the news that aliens are going to land in their town — which are entirely conditioned by exposure to alien-invasion narratives in movies and television:

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn't we seen it all a hundred times?-the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . .

Of course, the alien invasion turns out not to be like a movie at all — in fact, it's something completely different, seemingly harmless at first but ultimately quite terrifying. Anyway, "Invasion" is a fun story, and winds up being very consciously science fictional, even though you think at first it's only going to be commenting on science fiction without actually embracing it. Check it out! [The New Yorker] Thanks Wilson!

The New Yorker used to champion science fiction, back in the Tina Brown era, but of late, it's turned up hits long cartoon nose at the genre. So "Lostronaut" is a good way of dipping back into the inky waters of the genre.

It's really worth checking out "Lostronaut" for yourself, but in a nutshell, it's a story of an astronaut, who we learn is female at some point, writing to her lover, Chase, who's back in New York. The astronaut, and five others, are trapped on a space station where everything is slowly breaking down, and the Chinese have put up mines to keep them from escaping for some reason. There are leaf-cutter bees running wild, from the semi-failed hydroponic garden. ("We're all in denial about the bees," Lethem writes at one point.) And then the narrator gets a tumor on her foot, and has to go through chemotherapy in space, before she finally has it amputated.

The thing I love about the story is the juxtaposition of the grinding realities of life in space with the stuff the narrator imagines her lover is doing, back on Earth. There are some really gorgeous passages, Lethem's best prose, like this one:

We’re soaring atoms, Chase, that’s what orbit consists of, the inhuman hastening of infinitesimal specklike bodies through an awesome indifferent void, yet in our cramped homely craft, its rooms named to evoke childhood comforts, with our blobs of toothpaste drifting between our brushes and the mirror, our farts and halitosis filling the chambers with odor, we’ve defaulted to an illusion of substance. Inside Northern Lights, we’ve managed to kid ourselves that we exist, that we’re curvaceous or lumpy or angular, bristling with hair and snot, taking up a certain amount of room, and that space and time have generously accorded a margin in which we’re invited to operate these sizable greedy bodies of ours, a margin in which to dwell, to hang out and live our pale stinky stories.

Really great, if depressing, stuff. Check it out. [New Yorker, thanks to Heepcak]