Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

  As a practicing anthologist, I can only point out, without further comment, that I myself edited Edge of Infinity and Under My Hat, which came out to quite good reviews. I was impressed by a number of anthologies from other editors that came out during the year, though in the interests of brevity will restrict my recommendations to the highlights. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After is easily the best YA science fiction anthology of recent years, while Gardner Dozois’s audio anthology Rip-Off! stands amongst the best SF anthologies of the year, as does Ian Whates’s Solaris Rising 1.5. This year was strengthened by a number of anthologies that took a broader, international perspective on science fiction and fantasy, bringing us stories from Japan (The Future is Japanese), Mexico (Three Messages and a Warning), Africa (Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers), and India (Breaking the Bow). All are welcome and recommended. I was impressed with and greatly enjoyed Jonathan Oliver’s Magic, which contains some terrific dark stories, not usually my thing. A good year, all in all.

  Finally, something that doesn’t quite fit in any category. This year Locus reviewer, and my partner in podcasting on ‘‘The Coode Street Podcast’’, Gary K. Wolfe, teamed up with the Library of America, editing the gorgeously packaged and intelligently selected American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. While it’s a fascinating argument with the canon of modern American literature, it’s also likely to be the perfect gift for many SF readers for years to come.

  And so, that was the year as I saw it. Part way through the year British critic Paul Kincaid wrote in his essay ‘‘The Widening Gyre’’ about how the SF field may be becoming exhausted, running out of ideas and running out of faith in the future. While Paul’s point was well and intelligently made, and provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion, my own reading in 2012 left me hopeful for SF and for the books that are just around the corner.

  Top 6 Books of the Year

  The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

  Empty Space, M. John Harrison

  Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce

  A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge

  At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson

  Top 10 Short Stories of the Year

  (in alphabetical order by author)

  ‘‘Great-Grandmother in the Cellar’’, Peter S. Beagle

  ‘‘Close Encounters’’, Andy Duncan

  ‘‘Blood Drive’’, Jeffrey Ford

  ‘‘In Autotelia’’, M. John Harrison

  ‘‘The Easthound’’, Nalo Hopkinson

  ‘‘The Education of a Witch’’, Ellen Klages

  ‘‘Significant Dust’’, Margo Lanagan

  ‘‘Mono No Aware’’, Ken Liu

  ‘‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden’’, Paul McAuley

  ‘‘The Contrary Gardener’’, Christopher Rowe

  –Jonathan Strahan

  2012: The Year In Review continues after ad.

  LISTING (BUT NOT YET CAPSIZED) by Russell Letson

  Russell Letson (2008)

  Elsewhere in the Locusverse there is a discussion about lists in general and the All-Time Best Novels list in particular, which has me thinking about, of all things, lists. And recommendations. And rankings and ratings and hierarchies and how they couple to the internal and utterly subjective matter of evaluating works of the imagination. And how much such evaluations are themselves works of imagination.

  Every year in this slot I face the task of somehow characterizing The Year in Science Fiction and making recommendations. And every year I complain that I can’t characterize a year’s worth of an entire genre based on the tiny sample I’ve read. Not only is my brain not big enough, but I’m not even sure that such a complex entity is characterizable at all, short of a description as extensive as the genre itself. (I think Iain R. Banks discussed a similar matter in a novel recently.) My columns since last February constitute my actual recommended-reading list, along with whatever caveats and qualifications and comparative judgments I might have tossed in along the way. Since I don’t really have a short list, the job of this essay is to reaffirm my initial judgments. (I’m not much for second thoughts, given how hard it is to get first thoughts right.)

  My duties here offer me a luxury that few reviewers elsewhere enjoy: I get to write almost exclusively about books that I choose because I think I will enjoy them (or at least find interesting enough to finish). Of course, privileging the familiar diminishes the bird-dog or discoverer-of-new-talent role that is one useful function of the reviewer, and though I do try to respond to editorial nudges in the direction of unexplored territories, adding a new writer (or a seldom-visited subgenre) to the stack of ARCs (advance reading copies) teetering on the dresser is a sometime thing. As a result, the closest thing to a new or unexpected writer I encountered this year was Keith Brooke, who isn’t really a newcomer (I reviewed his first novel more than 20 years ago, but none since), and I found in Harmony a book that pulled me through itself despite some structural and modal problems balanced, thanks to a vividly evoked world of internal exile and monstrous occupiers. The pseudonymous-collaborative James S.A. Corey was the New Guy(s) of 2011, and this year’s middle-volume-of-the-trilogy Caliban’s War assured his/their place on my list of writers to follow: propulsive space-operatic adventure spiced with dollops of Asherian creepy-alien threat and snappy writing. I thought I might be taking a chance with Elizabeth Bear’s ad aeternum, not because of Bear (whose work I have enjoyed since she was a New Guy herself) but because I have developed an aversion to vampire stories written by anyone who’s not named Stoker or Matheson. Nevertheless, Bear’s melancholy bloodsucker and his alt-history New York City struck a chord that made me listen.

  Now on to the no-surprises/well-duh part of the program. I was not so much surprised as relieved that the cluster of high-profile partnerships I encountered all turned out to be functional and successful projects rather than marketing stunts. Gregory Benford & Larry Niven’s Bowl of Heaven really does taste like both writers and delivers the kind of world building and story line that their no-doubt-overlapping audiences should enjoy. And The Rapture of the Nerds is just the kind of food-fight/one-upsmanship mix of antic jokes and serious sciencefictional playfulness that one would expect from Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross. Niven’s other duo gig, with Edward M. Lerner, is now an established and reliable double act, with four volumes that expand, consolidate, and smooth out the Ringworld/Known Space universe back-story. The fifth and (they claim) final book, Fate of Worlds, charges around space and time, resolving puzzles and settling scores and tying up loose ends and generally resetting the board to something resembling stability. (But we know better than to believe in completely happy and stable endings.) The Cassandra Project, expanded by Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick from a short story by McDevitt, represents a different and actually surprising kind of collaborative reworking. You don’t have to have read the short version to enjoy the novel (which has a strong McDevitt vibe), but the contrast might prove instructive.

  When I rummage through my list in search of motifs, tropes, trends, and whatnot that might characterize the year, I note that there was a strong showing in the Department of Extreme and Exotic Mentalities: AIs and aliens and posthumans, oh my! I’ve always had a soft spot for meet-the-aliens stories, and this year there are three dandies. As striking as the Big Smart Object is in Benford & Niven’s Bowl of Heaven, I was even more taken by the book’s classic First Encounter situation, which also turns tables by allowing us to watch the aliens trying to make sense of humans. C.J. Cherryh’s Intruder and Niven & Lerner’s Fate of Worlds are both Nth Contact stories, entries in extended series that keep smashing their humans and non-humans together to see what kinds of exotic entertainment or enlightenment particles might be emitted. Cherryh’s project is particularly impressive, not only because it has gone on for so many years and volumes, but because every
partial mutual understanding gained by humans and atevi opens up new opportunities for misunderstanding (and vice versa). The Known Space cycle has been in operation for even longer, but the stage used by Niven (with and without collaborators) is space-operatic to Cherryh’s chamber music. I wouldn’t want to give up either of them.

  Posthumans and/or more-than-human AIs play large roles in The Hydrogen Sonata and The Rapture of the Nerds, often to comic effect, which is a relief after the direness and mayhem generated by the amped-up antagonists of Neal Asher’s The Departure (see below for this book’s year-assignment ambiguity). Not that the Banks and Doctorow & Stross books lack mayhem – it’s more that Asher avoids his occasional grim humor this time around. The ultra-hegemonic Artificial Nature that drives Karl Schroeder’s Virga series, which wraps up with Ashes of Candesce, is even bigger and scarier than mere posthumanity or artificial intelligence – and is also a major part of the series’ ambitious thematic engine, since it invites dizzying, Eganesque philosophical questions that linger long after the very effective thrill ride has run its course. In fact, in all of these books except for the Asher, the vast and cool intellects are as much Idea-as plot-drivers. Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth isn’t as centrally focused on Big Bad (or Beneficent) Brains, but the novel’s mid-twenty-second century is filled with physically and mentally transformative technologies and sociopolitical movements that point toward a hopeful posthuman civilization. This on-the-brink moment has enough detail and texture that you feel you could move right in – and there’s also a crucial but charmingly un-godlike AI personality construct in the mix.

  Speaking of tropes that point to matters beyond their immediate extrapolative or operational plausibility – John Varley’s Slow Apocalypse joins the long line of novels in which a world-wrecking scenario examines social and psychological effects at least as closely as the details of how disaster can stomp all over our physical infrastructure. Not that Varley short-changes the details-and-plausibility part of the tradition – his construction of the deconstruction of Los Angeles and environs is as meticulous, convincing, and therefore distressing as any worrywart could want. On the other hand, the threat suggested by the title of Charles Stross’s The Apocalypse Codex is a properly supernatural disaster (if invoked and neutralized with rational-technocratic protocols worthy of any SF or spy thriller), with his Laundry operatives once again having to clean up the terminal cosmic mess threatened when mortals start calling up transdimensional nasties. The nasties on the far side of Walter Jon Williams’s The Boolean Gate belong to a material, thoroughly sciencefictional universe, though discovered and dealt with by a Sam Clemens whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century understanding and language are of his time and prescience-fictional (without being the least bit steampunkish).

  Williams’s other book this year, The Fourth Wall, also explores an exotic setting – the world of D-list celebrity and the underbelly of Hollywood – in a comic novel built from the technothriller and the international-intrigue materials of his previous Dagmar Shaw adventures. Williams is one of those writers whose books I review simply because I enjoy them, no matter what vein of the fantastic he is working. Michael Flynn is another. Like Williams, he has a big range: he can produce anything from the spacey-est of space operas to intimate family drama. The braided-story collection Captive Dreams manages to touch both ends of this range while remaining focused on a single suburban neighborhood in the very near future. Allen Steele’s strong suit has always been traditional hard SF, making imagined environments (especially working environments) seem so real you could move right into them. His Apollo’s Outcasts applies this approach to a familiar growing-up story smack in the center of the Heinlein-juvenile tradition. All of the Sons (and Daughters) of Heinlein seem to get around to this sooner or later, and Steele’s take is among the most canonical of the lot.

  I hardly need to recommend the monumental (in both senses of the word) American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe for the Library of America, though I do think that this particular ingathering of novels from more than a half-century ago – and the accompanying biographies, notes, and related impedimenta – are worth a serious plug.

  A couple of calendrical conundra have arisen. I reviewed Allen Steele’s Sex and Violence in Zero-G more than a dozen years ago, and now it has reappeared with a new subtitle, The Complete ‘‘Near Space’’ Stories Expanded Edition, making available again a body of work that emphasizes the sturdiness of some of the genre’s perennial motifs and fascinations – in this case, the exploration and domestication of the solar system. Then there is Neal Asher’s The Departure. It was listed here last year on the basis of the Tor UK first edition, but I note that there was not only a 2012 Tor US edition, but now an advance copy of a Nightshade Books edition has arrived in the mailbox, with a 2013 date – and a ‘‘first edition’’ notation on the copyright page. Well, I recommended it back then, and I suppose I can renew that recommendation now, for whatever edition you can find.

  Okay, I give up. Not only does the field not conveniently arrange itself as a set of tidy trends or breakthroughs or New! Improved! Features, but my own taste is all over the place and devoid of useful patterns. (Unless maybe to my analyst.) Even my dislikes are inconsistent. I don’t much care for fantasy these days. Except Stross and Bear, both commit it on a regular basis and make me like it. I’m not much for military SF – except when it provides crucial machinery in books as unlike as Caliban’s War and The Hydrodgen Sonata. I’m a geezer who actually caught a bunch of the jokes that flew by in The Rapture of the Nerds. If anyone can find a common thread running through the labyrinth of my reading list – aesthetic, ideological, philosophical, tragical, comical, tragical-comical, or whatever – please jot it down on the flyleaf of an ARC of a first novel by an unknown writer and send it along. It will make writing the next one of these annual essays much easier. Meanwhile, the reluctantly pared-down short list of double-secret double recommendations:

  The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks

  Bowl of Heaven, Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

  Intruder, C.J. Cherryh

  Caliban’s War, James S. A. Corey

  The Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross

  Blue Remembered Earth, Alastair Reynolds

  Ashes of Candesce, Karl Schroeder

  The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross

  Slow Apocalypse, John Varley

  The Fourth Wall, Walter Jon Williams

  American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed.

  –Russell Letson

  2012: PLURALISM ’R’ US by Graham Sleight

  Graham Sleight (2010)

  Maybe it’s just encroaching senility, but when I initially sat down to write about the best SF/F books I’d read in 2012, not many titles sprung to mind. So I then looked at the Locus Recommended Reading list and found myself thinking ‘‘Oh yes, well there was that. And that too. And that….’’ So perhaps 2012 was indeed a good year for science fiction and fantasy, but without any big underlying themes to tie all the books together.

  My book of the year, by a good way, was M. John Harrison’s Empty Space, which amplifies and the arguments made in its predecessors Light and Nova Swing about the nature of the world and the difficulty of perceiving it (or making stories out of it). Harrison’s refusal of the more orthodox pleasures of storytelling can seem at times almost wilfully stubborn: this is a book structured by the arbitrary. But even more than Climbers, The Course of the Heart, or Light, it feels like a pure statement of Harrison’s worldview.

  For an antipode to Harrison, you might try Andy Duncan’s long overdue second collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. Duncan does knit the world together into stories, sometimes (as in ‘‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’’) stories that make more sense than the real world could ever do. His control over register and tone of storytelling has become even more nuanced over the year
s, so that even if you’ve never heard him read, Duncan’s voice comes clear into your head. The storytelling strategies in Kij Johnson’s At The Mouth of the River of Bees are extremely diverse, as befits the wide range of material she’s working with. Each new story is a new challenge for the writer and the reader. Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace is also various and surprising. Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry gives us further views of this author’s skill with landscape and place.

  Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 will be, for many, the SF novel of the year. Very visibly paying homage to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar in its mosaic portrait of the future, it stakes its success on the reader’s belief in the central relationship. For me, it worked, but I can understand readers who were more interested in the world than the people. Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway was a far more controlled work than the author’s debut The Gone-Away World, yet still retained its exuberant voice and invention. Kameron Hurley’s Rapture concludes the sequence begun by God’s War: ageing and the passage of time are very much more present here than in the earlier books. Jack Glass by Adam Roberts was as clever as we’ve come to expect from this author: he clearly had great fun playing with the conventions of the murder mystery.

  On the fantasy side of the increasingly nonexistent fence between genres, Roz Kaveney’s Rituals was spiky and sparky – not the first words you expect to describe a book based upon myth. Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, like so much of this author’s work, puts family at the centre of its exploration of the fantastic. Elizabeth Hand’s Radiant Days tackled what may be Hand’s central theme: the job of being an artist in a society that doesn’t have a natural place for the transgressions of art. Tim Powers Hide Me Among The Graves returned to the 19th-century England that seems to be Powers’s favorite venue. It seems to me his most Dickensian novel because of its determination to depict all the strata of class.