Locus, October 2014

by Locus Publications

  It’s true that sharing certain values with the people you work with would be nice, but at the end of the day, if you write compelling stories that people want to read, folks will work with you, even if you’re a jerk online. I know quite a few jerks online who continue to do very well for themselves. Better, however, are those with strong political opinions who are still deeply gracious, thoughtful, and compassionate human beings whom I can respect despite our differing opinion on social services and tax law.

  As writers, all we have is our unique voices, views of the world, and, importantly, our passion. I write with passion. It powers everything I write. If I fear to give voice to that passion because people disagree with me, then I’m finished before I’ve ever begun, because, let me tell you, new writers – if you cannot endure criticism of your opinions, you will not be able to stand up to the criticism of even one scathing review which calls you a gutless hack. And you will get those reviews. Again and again. No matter how many awards you win or copies you sell or how much or how little you speak honestly about your politics.

  So speak up. Speak loudly. But recognize that when you choose your position, you must choose it wisely. Because there’s a very good chance that we’re all going to be listening.

  What have you got to say?

  –Kameron Hurley

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Asimov’s 9/14

  Interzone 7-8/14

  Tor.com 7/20/14

  Tor.com 7/29/14

  Twelve Tomorrows, Bruce Sterling, ed. (MIT Technology Review) September 2014.

  The September Asimov’s is an uneven issue, with several good stories, but also several substandard ones. The strongest story here, certainly the most entertaining, is probably Tom Purdom’s novelette ‘‘Bogdavi’s Dream’’, the conclusion to a de facto novel serialization – along with 2010’s ‘‘Warfriends’’, 2012’s ‘‘Golva’s Ascent’’, and 2013’s ‘‘Warlord’’ – which continues the story begun in Purdom’s 1966 novel Tree Lord of Imaten. It features a human who somewhat reluctantly ends up leading a struggle between warring races of aliens, and who ultimately ends up commanding a mixed force made up of both alien races against a group of ruthless human renegades. This is intelligent, old-fashioned pulp adventure SF of a sort rarely seen these days, and the final climactic battle works up a good deal of tension and suspense, although, typically, Purdom, who used to be an enthusiastic player of sandbox recreations of historic battles, is more interested in the strategy and tactics employed in the battle than in the bloody details of the combat itself. He does an excellent job of figuring out how all three races – humans and two radically different kinds of aliens adapted to different environments, one arboreal and one ground-dwelling – can combine their different battle-techniques and strategies to maximum effect, and brings the storyline to a satisfactory conclusion. The only problem readers may have is that, like most of these de facto serializations – and there are similar ones running at the moment in F&SF, Analog, and Lightspeed, among other places – you may have trouble fully appreciating what’s happening here if you haven’t read the earlier stories in the sequence. Let’s hope that some book publisher is savvy enough to bring this out as a novel in the not-too-distant future.

  Also good in the September Asimov’s is Rick Wilber’s ‘‘Scouting Report’’, another of his baseball-oriented stories. Experienced genre readers will see what’s happening here long before the somewhat befuddled narrator does, but it’s all well-handled, and makes for an entertaining read. Susan Palwick’s ‘‘Windows’’ tells a bittersweet story about the vagaries of luck, featuring a woman leading a hardscrabble existence on the edge of poverty, who manages to scrape enough money together to visit her son in prison to deliver a birthday message to him, a message made all the more poignant by an unexpected turn of events in the wider world outside the prison walls. The science fiction element is slim here in what otherwise could be easily told as a straight mainstream story, but it is a valid element, and because of it the story takes its place in the ongoing debate in the field this year as to whether it’s a good idea or not to set forth for the stars on a generation ship. It comes down somewhat on the ‘‘not’’ side of the ledger. James Gunn’s ‘‘Patterns’’ concerns a data-analyst’s suspicions as to just who is doing illicit data-gathering, although once he reaches his conclusion, the story doesn’t do much else with the revelation.

  •

  The best story in the July-August Interzone is another near-mainstream story, ‘‘Beside the Damned River’’, this year’s winner of the James White Award writing contest, by new writer D.J. Cockburn. All that really happens here is that an old man helps repair a truck that has broken down on a muddy back-country road in Thailand, but what makes it science fiction are the changes that have occurred to the old man’s homeland over the course of his lifetime, and what makes the story surprisingly powerful are the changes to the old man’s life brought about by those changes, and how he feels about it all.

  Also good is James Van Pelt’s ‘‘My Father and the Martian Moon Maids’’, the poignant and moving story of a boy’s relationship with his eccentric father that actually isn’t science fiction at all, although the author tries to undercut this with an ambiguous ‘‘did it happen? or didn’t it?’’ fantastic element in the very last page. In spite of this, it’s pretty much a straight mainstream story, and a very good one. The fantastic element is stronger in Caren Gussoff’s ‘‘The Bars of Orion’’, about a man and his daughter who have escaped the destruction of their universe and found themselves in ours, a near-parallel to their own; the story mostly concerns itself with the man’s struggle to adjust himself to life in a world which is close to the one he knows but not the same (there is an analogue of his wife here, for instance, although she’s married to a different version of himself), and the questions of how their universe was destroyed and how they escaped its destruction remain unresolved. Neil Williamson’s ‘‘The Golden Nose’’ is disguised as science fiction, with some handwaving about olfactory science, but ultimately is a fantasy about a man destroyed by a cursed magical object.

  •

  ‘‘A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star’’ by Kathleen Ann Goonan, posted on Tor.com on July 20, makes no attempt to disguise itself as science fiction, and, in fact, is listed on the page as ‘‘science fiction by association.’’ I’m not sure this is entirely accurate, since the story of a young woman struggling to overcome the obstacles thrown in the way of her dream of becoming an engineer by a sexist society is really about the space program of the ’50s and ’60s, not science fiction, although the SF-inspired dream of space travel infuses the story (at one point, the protagonist’s father is reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night). Whether it’s ‘‘science fiction by association’’ or a straight mainstream historical, it’s an excellent story, beautifully crafted and characterized, and it will be engrossing to anyone with an interest in the space race of the early 20th century, which probably includes most SF fans – and may be encouraging to women who are struggling with the same problems even here in the 21st.

  •

  On the other hand, there’s no doubt at all whether Peter Watt’s ‘‘The Colonel’’, posted on Tor.com on July 29, is science fiction or not – it is, and strong core science fiction at that, dealing with a military man trying to evaluate and contain the threat to ordinary humans from conjoined hive mentalities who might drive them into obsolescence and extinction, and who may not even turn out to be the worst threat to human civilization. Much of the story turns on the Colonel’s struggle to decide whether he can trust information given him by the Bicamerals, a struggle deepened and complicated by his troubled relationship with his own family, including a wife who has been uploaded into a Virtual Reality Surround and a son who has been lost on an expedition into deep space, an expedition he himself was responsible
for launching. One of the year’s best stories to date.

  •

  Twelve Tomorrows is the third volume in a series of annual original SF anthologies in magazine form published by the people who also produce MIT’s Technology Review magazine. This issue is edited by Bruce Sterling. Like the first two volumes, the 12 stories in Twelve Tomorrows are all core SF, most of them near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next 20 or 30 years. There are ingenious futurological details by the bucketful here about how our lives will be changed and shaped by those emerging technologies, but there’s also perhaps a bit too high a didactic quotient overall; although there’s still some good stuff here, some of the stories are a bit static, lacking in drama and a compelling human story, and therefore not as involving as fiction as the best stories from previous issues have been.

  This trend is perhaps best typified by Bruce Sterling’s own story, ‘‘The Various Mansions of the Universe’’, which is a leisurely tour of a future society (the kind of story we used to call Great Steam Grommet Factory Tour stories – ‘‘And here, visitors from the past, is our Great Steam Grommet Factory! And over here…’’) which takes the characters to observe many interesting future locales and lifestyles, without generating much heat or human interest in the process, and during the course of which little seems to be at stake for the protagonists. Several of the stories – Christopher Brown’s ‘‘Countermeasures’’, Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Business As Usual’’, Cory Doctorow’s ‘‘Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts’’ – deal with the kind of Constant Intense Surveillance future where your every slightest move is spied upon, you’re manipulated by social media and more subtle means into doing things without even knowing you’re being manipulated into doing them, drones zip constantly around you, society tells you what you can and cannot do ‘‘for your own good,’’ and your refrigerator won’t let you open it if you’re over your daily allotment of calories (something predicted years back by Philip K. Dick, who’s looking more prescient all the time, and whose characters used to have to argue with their coffeepots and toasters to get them to serve). This is quite a likely future (some elements of it are already here), but it’s a dispiriting one, and one that’s hard to make look as though you’d enjoy living in it. As a result, rather than inspiring you with the wonders of the future, or making you look forward to living there, these stories make it seem like the future is a place you’d be better off avoiding. Since you know you can’t, that’s rather unsettling.

  Warren Ellis’s ‘‘The Shipping Forecast’’ features much the same future, but adds a spy plot to cut the gloom somewhat, and William Gibson is too savvy to do a Great Steam Grommet Factory Tour story, whipping you through his future in ‘‘Death Cookie/Easy Ice’’ instead in a fast-paced, dramatic, and violent way, and telling the story at a high-enough bit-rate with enough compression that many readers may be left puzzled by the end what exactly has happened or why it did. Exciting stuff, though.

  The best stories here are Lauren Beukes’s ‘‘Slipping’’ and Paul Graham Raven’s ‘‘Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)’’, both of which manage to inject human drama into their visions of the future, as well as characters you care about who are faced with situations where they have something to lose and something significant at stake.

  Twelve Tomorrows also features a long and intelligently conducted interview with Gene Wolfe by Jason Pontin, an extensive portfolio of artwork by John Schoenherr, long one of my favorite illustrators, and a review of a book by Stanislaw Lem.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  Fearsome Magics, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) October 2014.

  Upgraded, Neil Clarke, ed. (Wyrm) August 2014.

  Tor.com 8/14

  F&SF 9-10/14

  Twelve Tomorrows, Bruce Sterling, ed. (MIT Technology Review) September 2014.

  Subterranean Summer ’14

  Let’s begin with two strong new original anthologies, with diametrically opposite themes: one a fairly traditional fantasy anthology, the other a fairly traditional science fiction anthology.

  Fearsome Magics is subtitled The New Solaris Book of Fantasy Volume 2, confirming its status as part of a continuing anthology series (much as Strahan’s Infinity books, also for Solaris, have become a continuing SF series). This is a good thing, as this book demonstrates: from top to bottom the stories are very fine, often quite original, and always entertaining. I liked a couple of authors doing what they do best again, as with Garth Nix’s latest Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz story, ‘‘Home Is the Haunter’’, in which the pair are hauling a cannon across a desolate area when they come across a manor house occupied by the Sisters of Mercantile Fairness, who offer protection from the Hag of the Shallows…. Suffice it to say that the cannon proves useful. K. J. Parker is here as well, with ‘‘Safe House’’, another intelligent and rather cynical look at the pitfalls of magic, as dealt with, in this case, by a none-too-highly placed adept of the Studium, as he searches for a potentially dangerous ‘‘untrained natural’’ magic talent in one of the many countries that don’t approve of sorcery. He finds her in a ‘‘Safe House’’ left behind by the combatants in a previous magical war – but, of course, she may not be exactly what she seems. And Ellen Klages offers a sweet story about a girl who finds herself unexpectedly helping her father, a stage magician, with his act in ‘‘Hey Presto!’’.

  My two favorite stories come from Justina Robson and Genevieve Valentine. Robson’s ‘‘On Skybolt Mountain’’ features a cranky old widow, who is also an illegal magic user, being forced by the local Lord, after her abilities are discovered, to help him in an expedition to reclaim an old dragon’s hoard. The widow’s character dominates the story, to good effect, and there is a well-done sense of time and past injustice and war still affecting things – and a nice turn at the end. Valentine’s ‘‘Aberration’’ could be read as SF, about time travelers who have lost connections with the people in the places (and times) they visit, and who can barely maintain connections with each other – or, in the context of this anthology, perhaps they are something like the Fae – certainly dangerous to those mortals who notice them, and certainly timeless. It’s a powerful story, very well told, sad, dark, disconnected, atmospheric… excellent work.

  •

  Upgraded, the first original anthology from Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke, is inspired by his recent heart attack and the technological improvements to his body to prevent future such problems. It features characters with technological upgrades of numerous sorts. The table of contents is really impressive, and if there’s a weakness it’s that too many of the stories are more or less the same length, and perhaps as a consequence some seem a bit underdeveloped.

  Ken Liu contributes the longest story, ‘‘The Regular’’, and it’s one of the better pieces here. It’s a crime story, about a serial killer of prostitutes. The detective, Ruth, is the ‘‘upgraded’’ person. She has various physical improvements of questionable legality (leg pistons, artificial muscles, etc.), and a ‘‘Regulator,’’ which controls her emotional responses. She also has a personal history that impacts her involvement. The killer has a political motivation – as well as screwed up personal reasons – and there is a Chinese-American angle: Ruth is Chinese-American, as is the woman who hires her to investigate her daughter’s murder, and the killer’s political angle involves blackmail of foreign officials. It’s an interesting stew, and a fast-moving, tense, and involving story.

  Greg Egan is here with ‘‘Seventh Sight’’, which in the best Eganesque fashion proposes a neat SFnal idea and follows the implications steps beyond most writers. In this case, he posits artificial retinas as a cure for certain types of blindness (color-blindness? Something else? I wasn’t sure). These fixes turn out to be hackable, so that people with the treatment can see additional c
olors – and in general see the world more clearly. Egan’s teenaged protagonist meets others his age with the same hack, and shows them first using their abilities to play different games, then to see and create different art, and eventually even as a way to cheat at poker. It’s neat stuff, though as story qua story is a bit flat. And I liked Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘‘Always the Harvest’’, a rather gothic-flavored story about a distant biologically-powered habitat that grows replacement parts for the humans who colonize it.

  The best story is ‘‘Collateral’’ by Peter Watts, as uncompromising as ever for him. A soldier kills a bunch of harmless fishermen on a Pacific island when her ‘‘enhancement’’ deals with the perceived threat before her consciousness can intervene. This causes a PR problem for her (Canadian) government, which they deal with in part by treating her so that she makes emotionless, rigorously ‘‘ethical,’’ decisions… which has chilling, unexpected (and coldly logical) results. (I read this more or less as the terrible shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man killed by white police in Ferguson MO, occurred just a few miles from my home, and the ideas resonated all the more with me as a result.)

  •

  Watts shows up as well on Tor.com, with ‘‘The Colonel’’, which seems an out-take from or a sort of preface to his new novel Echopraxia, which is related to Blindsight (in my opinion one of the best SF novels of this millennium.) Thus, it doesn’t really work as an independent story, but it’s excellent work nonetheless, and it certainly whets my appetite for the coming book. The title character, the father of Blindsight’s Siri Keeton, works at suppressing illegal technology, particularly hive-minds. The story presents the issues as fraught, showing examples of linked minds producing significant technological advances, and of the bodies thereby connected dying of neglect – that sort of thing. It’s all intriguing stuff, intelligent, and dark in its implications.