Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

  The field has, of course, become increasingly used to the well-presented retrospective view of a writer’s work. It was very good, for instance, to have all of Lucius Shepard’s fantasy sequence The Dragon Griaule collected in one volume, the later stories resonating with earlier ones in unexpected ways. Ursula K. Le Guin’s two-volume Selected Stories gave a useful corrective to those of us who might just think of her as an SF or fantasy writer: the range of approaches in these retrospectives is much wider than many will have expected. One delightful oddity was Shada, completed by Gareth Roberts from an unfinished Doctor Who story by the late Douglas Adams. Roberts captures perfectly Adams’s tone of voice, but weds it to the sort of intricately plotted story that Adams only occasionally managed. Finally, the Library of America’s selection of American Science Fiction: Classic novels of the 1950s, as edited by Gary K Wolfe, is self-recommending when you look at the titles included. They hang together well, too – for instance, the chutzpah of Heinlein, Bester, and Pohl/Kornbluth seems part of a common enterprise to dazzle the reader. It’s difficult to imagine a selection of novels from the last decade having anything like the same degree of commonality – but we’re in a world where there are many versions of SF and fantasy, and many different merits attaching to each of them.

  Half a dozen best books of 2012:

  The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (PS)

  Empty Space, M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

  At The Mouth of the River of Bees,

  Kij Johnson (Small Beer)

  Rituals: A Novel of the Fantastic:

  Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One, Roz Kaveney (Plus One)

  Selected Stories (2 vols), Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)

  American Science Fiction: Classic novels of the 1950s, Gary K Wolfe, ed. (Library of America)

  –Graham Sleight

  2012 IN REVIEW by Adrienne Martini

  Adrienne Martini (2009)

  The view from my reading chair was small this year. Not that the books or the ideas were small in 2012, just that the publishing houses and pre-press buzz was less than large for the titles that stuck with me the longest. While the big, anticipated tomes like Iain M. Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata and Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan book Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance delivered, they weren’t nearly as fun and engaging as a select few less heralded books.

  Like Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman, whose end-of-the-world/police procedural plot was smart and engaging. And, also, despite its harrowing premise, which is that the earth is about to be destroyed by a comet, it was a heck of a lot of fun. It’ll be interesting to see what Winters does with Disasterland, the next book in the saga, due out this summer.

  Two smaller books – one is a collection of short stories, the other a novella – by well known writers Charles Yu and Nancy Kress proved that the number of pages in a story has little to do with its impact. Yu’s Sorry Please Thank You wasn’t quite as trippy as his How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe but each story in this collection had its own delightful and potent quirk that left an impact. Kress’s After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall let this accomplished writer break free from traditional storytelling forms and play a little. Her delight in this freedom is contagious.

  2012 was also the year that smaller titles wondered about the line between humans and machines. Madeline Ashby’s vN: The First Machine Dynasty and Jennifer Pelland’s Machine both concerned women who were marginalized not for their gender but for their non-meat components. Of the two, Ashby’s was better in terms of creating a more forceful story, but both writers asked the same fundamental question: what makes us what we are?

  It’s impossible to consider Libba Bray’s The Diviners or John Scalzi’s Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas ‘‘small books,’’ no matter how you define the term. (Granted, some smart aleck would point out that both are smaller than, like, the OED. Point taken.) Bray is well-known for her young adult works like Going Bovine and Scalzi is, well, Scalzi. Both of their 2012 titles, however, weren’t simply more of what we’ve seen from them before. Bray is mining early 20th century America to craft a multi-part epic about haunted places and xenophobia, while Redshirts takes a perfectly adequate space romp and turns it into a layered examination of how we tell stories.

  It’s hard to say, of course, what this new year will hold. I, for one, will keep looking in the smaller spaces for the most memorable reads.

  –Adrienne Martini

  2012 by Carolyn Cushman

  Carolyn Cushman (2010)

  Not much really grabbed me this year, and I’m not sure if it’s me, or the selection of books I saw, or just a moderate year for the field in general.

  The only actual science fiction of note I read was Lois McMaster Bujold’s lastest novel in the Vorkosigan series, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, a fun romp focusing on Miles’s hapless cousin Ivan, an adventure full of interstellar intrigue, a treasure hunt, and some charmingly quirky romance.

  In fantasy, Naomi Novik’s seventh alternate-history fantasy novel in the Temeraire series, Crucible of Gold took a little too long getting where it was going, but made some interesting stops in the lands of the Incas and this world’s version of colonial Brazil. Mary Robinette Kowal’s Regency fantasy Glamour in Glass is a very strong sequel to Shades of Milk and Honey, with newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Vincent taking a trip to the continent just in time for Napoleon’s escape from Elba.

  Several entertaining new fantasy series started this year. The most substantial is Tad Williams’s new take on urban fantasy, The Dirty Streets of Heaven, the first in a series featuring hardboiled earthbound angel Bobby Dollar, an advocate for the newly deceased who finds himself in hot water when a missing soul threatens to restart war between heaven and hell. A bit less substantial, in a similar vein but with a protagonist working for hell, is Chris F. Holm’s first novel Dead Harvest, the first book in the Collector noir urban fantasy series about a Collector who gathers souls for hell, and runs into problems on a job that could spark, yes, a new war between heaven and hell. Benedict Jacka’s Fated is the start of a new urban fantasy series (with followups Cursed and Taken both out this year) set in London, featuring diviner mage Alex Verus, who battles dark forces while trying to stay out of mage politics. Seanan McGuire’s Discount Armageddeon starts a fun new series about cryptozoologist Verity Price, who polices the monsters of New York while trying to get her ballroom dancing career off the ground. McGuire also had an entertaining collection, the first in a series presenting linked stories about a former teen superheroine facing the corporate marketing crew that once managed her in Velveteen vs. the Junior Super-Patriots. Kate Locke’s God Save the Queen introduces an England ruled by vampires and werewolves, and Alexandra Vardan, a half-blood daughter of a Duke serving in the royal guard and looking for her missing sister. Michelle Sagara’s Silence , the first volume in the Queen of the Dead series, is an exciting tale about a teen who unexpectedly learns she’s a Necromancer, hunted by both slayers and other Necromancers.

  First novels worthy of note include Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling by Michael Boccacino, a tale of a governess working at a country house for a widower and his two boys; at first it seems like an English country mystery, or possibly a gothic romance, but it soon moves into the supernatural and otherworldly, culminating in spectacular weirdness in an almost Lovecraftian vein. Deborah Coates’s Wide Open is a not-so-urban fantasy mystery set in the farmlands of South Dakota, featuring Hallie Michaels, whose near-death experience while serving in Afghanistan has left her with the ability to see ghosts – though they’re generally less-than-helpful as Hallie tries to figure out how her sister died, and stumbles over a supernatural plot.

  Young-adult first novels of interest include Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina. Set in a world where shapeshifting dragons live among humans, but interspecies breeding is strictly forbidden – one halfbreed young woman with special talents finds herself in a tre
acherous position at court during a special visit from a draconic leader. Sarah Fine’s Sanctum is an impressive tale of a young woman who goes to hell to save the soul of a friend who committed suicide – and it’s a fascinatingly appropriate hell. The Peculiar by Stefan Bachman is actually a middle-grade fantasy, a bit young for our audience, but would otherwise have been worth recommending for its quirky mix of steampunk, faeries, and a hapless MP who stumbles on a plot to kill half-fey children (Peculiars).

  Of special interest among other young-adult novels, Lois Lowry wraps up her dystopian fantasy Giver quartet of loosely linked novels with Son, a sequel to the Newbery-winning first book in the series, The Giver; this returns to the dystopian community of that book with a parallel story of the young mother of the boy Gabe, and continues to show him as a young man.

  –Carolyn Cushman

  2012: A YEAR OF OLD FAVORITES by Tim Pratt

  Tim Pratt (2010)

  Looking back over my 2012 reading, it seems last year was more about enjoying old favorite authors than seeking out bold new emerging voices. (This trend joins a mounting body of evidence that suggests I’m getting old.) I’ll try to make a point of pursuing the new a bit more aggressively in 2013, but there’s something to be said for following along with beloved authors, too – and sometimes they manage to take their work in a new direction and thoroughly surprise you.

  Matt Ruff has a reputation as an author who never writes the same thing twice, flitting from contemporary fantasy to gonzo SF to mostly-mainstream to unclassifiably odd. His newest novel, The Mirage, is alternate history (sort of – it’s more complicated than that), positing a world where the Islamic Middle East is culturally dominant and technologically advanced while North America and (to a lesser extent) Europe are the third world, harboring fundamentalist extremist Christians. It’s more than a clever inversion of the War on Terror, though – in my review I called it a modern answer to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and I stand by that.

  I’ve loved Nick Mamatas’s uncompromising, spiky, and often blackly funny fiction for years, but Bullettime is his best work yet. The book had a bumpy road to publication – turns out it’s hard to find a publisher willing to print a book with a school shooter for a protagonist, especially when such events happen in real life with distressing regularity – but this story of a young man who encounters the goddess of discord and watches his life fall apart in various different timelines was worth waiting for. It’s the very definition of thought-provoking. (Full disclosure: I gave Mamatas feedback on an early draft, and am thus mentioned in the acknowledgments.)

  Caitlín R. Kiernan has written her best book yet – quite a feat, given her track record – with The Drowning Girl, ‘‘a memoir’’ by schizophrenic artist India Morgan Phelps (better known as Imp). Imp is the ultimate unreliable narrator; even she isn’t sure which parts of her story are real, and some elements are mutually exclusive. When she meets the mysterious, possibly inhuman Eva Canning (under circumstances that are difficult to pin down), Imp is forced to confront the unstable nature of existence itself, and the fragmentation of her own life. It’s a harrowing and consuming read, and the most ambitious work yet by an author at the top of her form.

  Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce was beautiful and peculiar, about a teenage girl who vanishes into a haunted wood only to reappear many years later, with no good explanation for her disappearance. Joyce expertly explores the impact of her dis-and reappearance on her friends and family, juggling viewpoints with aplomb, and leaves us with the sort of abiding mysteries that are so much more powerful than straightforward answers.

  In the realm of fantasy-without-(much)-magic, I enjoyed Sharps by K.J. Parker and Red Country by Joe Abercrombie. Sharps is the tale of a fencing team sent on a diplomatic exhibition tour to their longtime enemies in a neighboring country, but, of course, there are plots and counter-plots running beneath their ostensible mission. While it’s not my favorite of Parker’s recent standalone novels, it’s still a pleasure to read, from the well-researched and exciting swordfights to the sardonic humor to the flawed, complicated characters; nobody writes absolute bastards as well as Parker. Abercrombie comes close, though, and Red Country – a standalone quasi-Western set in the world of the First Law trilogy (and all the other Abercrombie novels) – is a worthwhile read too. Determined, sharp-tongued heroine Shy South goes in pursuit of her kidnapped siblings, aided by her enigmatic stepfather Lamb, through a war-torn frontier where rebels, Imperial forces, and assorted tribes of natives all try to kill each other. It’s not Abercrombie’s best standalone, but readers of his other books will want to pick it up, if only for the chance to revisit certain beloved characters – including one guy in particular none of us really believed was dead.

  Red Country’s not exactly a sequel, but close, and now that I think of it, I read a couple of others books that could be described the same way. Stephen King’s The Wind Through the Keyhole is a strange book: an interstitial installment of The Dark Tower series, filling a small gap in that vast narrative, with the gunslinger Roland and his fellow travelers holed up to wait out a lethal storm. During the long night, Roland tells a story about his youth, and within that story, young Roland tells a fictional story to another character. The nested narrative works quite well overall, but it’s the short-novel-length tale at the center, a deeply weird fairy tale about a young boy on a quest for magic to save his family, that makes me love this book. It doesn’t add much to the Dark Tower mythos as a whole, but it’s a great story on its own merits, and does shed some new light on the always-enigmatic Roland.

  Tim Powers returns to the world of his Romantic poets/vampire novel The Stress of Her Regard with Hide Me Among the Graves, this time set in London, largely in the 1860s. Powers works his usual magic with secret history, mixing historical figures with characters of his own invention in a twisty, engaging way. Hide Me Among the Graves also functions as a sort-of-sequel to novella A Time to Cast Away Stones, as both feature the historical memoirist, adventurer, and liar Edward Trelawney – who here joins both Christina and Gabriel Dante Rosetti, and of course the undead author John Polidori. (Powers also wrote one of my favorite novellas of the year, Salvage and Demolition, a winning combination of time travel, rare book dealing, Beat poets, and supernatural conspiracy.)

  Other, more traditional, series installments I enjoyed: Sarah Pinborough finished up her Dog-Faced Gods trilogy with The Chosen Seed, another deft blend of supernatural horror and mystery/crime, steeped in grittiness, betrayal, and an atmosphere of dread and economic disaster. The concluding volume ably answers all the big eschatological questions that loomed over the series, and some of Pinborough’s long-suffering characters even make it out alive. The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis continues his Milkweed trilogy, an alternate history with magic and weird science, and for a middle book it’s quite action packed. Set during the Cold War, when the spies and soldiers from the previous WWII-era volume are older and a lot more miserable, it raises the stakes to unimaginable heights before introducing a breathtaking final twist. (Having read an advance copy of the final book in the series, Necessary Evil, I can assure you he pulls off the whole thing beautifully in the end, too.)

  I didn’t read much young-adult fiction this year, but my favorite, Every Day by David Levithan, would have been a standout in any year. It’s the moving tale of a bodiless, genderless psychic entity who calls itself A. Every day, A wakes up in a different body, and mostly tries to live without disrupting the lives of its unwilling hosts… until one day A falls in love with a temporary host body’s girlfriend, and tries to find a way to pursue romance without a body to call its own. A’s situation is a heartbreaking metaphor for alienation and the development of identity – but Every Day is also a well-extrapolated and briskly plotted work of speculative fiction.

  Most of my short story reading last year came in the form of collections – once again, focusing on authors I already knew I loved. First I should mention a
book that might be less familiar to Locus readers. The English translation of Etgar Keret’s collection Suddenly, a Knock at the Door (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) provides a welcome chance for those of us who don’t read Hebrew to sample more of the Israeli author’s inventive, surreal, poignant fiction. In terms of style and approach he reminds me of Aimee Bender or the late Donald Barthelme, authors who excel at the literary values of characterization and beautiful prose, but who often use the imagery of the fantastic to further their artistic goals. Among the 35 mostly-brief stories here, my favorite (and one of the most overtly speculative) is ‘‘Lieland’’, about a young man who habitually tells lies, only to discover a dreamworld where every lie he’s ever told has become reality. Neal Barrett, Jr.’s retrospective collection Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr. showcases the author’s astonishing range, from old-school SF to slipstream to straight crime. The breadth of Jonathan Carroll’s work is similarly shown off in The Woman Who Married a Cloud, a textual banquet providing ample evidence that Carroll is one of our most inventive and emotionally effective fantasists. Andy Duncan’s The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace, Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry, Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees, and Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule were other knockout books by reliably awesome authors in what proved to be a banner year for collections.

  –Tim Pratt