Jo Walton also contributes a strong story to Tor.com, ‘‘Sleeper’’, in which Essie, a biographer in an all too plausible dystopian corporatist future, creates a simulation of her latest subject, Matthew Corley, a fairly famous television director who had a couple of secrets – he was gay, and he was a Soviet ‘‘sleeper’’ agent. The simulation is ostensibly to help Essie understand her subject better, but the story subtly and almost sadly suggests another reason for her creation, in a dark 21st century, of a computer simulation of someone who wanted a better world in the 20th century.
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The September-October F&SF has a well-done story by Jérôme Cigut, who is French by birth, half Central European, lives in Hong Kong, and writes in both French and English. ‘‘The Rider’’ is told by a man who seems to be a special agent of sorts, in constant contact with a mysterious ‘‘handler.’’ We quickly realize that the ‘‘handler’’ is an AI, and that what’s really going on is a struggle between AIs, particularly special ones created by a certain genius. The story is very good at describing the not exactly equal relationship between the AI and his human… helper? Servant? What, exactly? There’s an amorality to the characters here that seems quite appropriate for the AIs shown.
Jay O’Connell’s ‘‘Other People’s Things’’ is also fine, about a special service to help people get dates. The SFnal kick is that the service involves ‘‘empathy pills’’ to make the subjects understand – and care about – other people. And it works. But does it solve all problems? Of course not! A downright wise little story.
I hoped that when MIT Technology Review published TRSF – an original anthology-cum-magazine focused on near-future speculation – in 2011 that this would be an annual event. They skipped 2012 but returned in 2013 with a new outing called Twelve Tomorrows, and Twelve Tomorrows is back this year, this time guest-edited by Bruce Sterling. There’s lots of good stuff here – a neat interview with Gene Wolfe, for one thing, and a portfolio of art by the great John Schoenherr. Sterling himself contributes a pretty good if not great story, ‘‘The Various Mansions of the Universe’’, about a couple who have been in slightly different ways resurrected from death, and who are looking for a new home. Their real estate search also serves as a wry exploration of a post-environmental disaster future. It’s fun and clever, but somehow Sterling doesn’t seem really serious about, well, story.
The best piece, though, is very good and very funny and a bit scary: ‘‘Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts’’ by Cory Doctorow, in which a clever hacker, now at MIT, proposes to use his high school project, Fight the Power, a way of crowd-sourcing outrage that first attacked his terrible high school cafeteria, to battle the screwed up MIT dormitory system. And perhaps he is successful, or perhaps the people in power understand his strategies even better than he does. Sometimes I think one of the central measures of success in SF is ‘‘density’’ – idea density, I suppose – and this story is very dense, with offhand hints at a familiar but original, and also quite believable, future thrown off nearly every paragraph. Plus, as I said, it’s very funny. This is just one sort of SF – near future Comic Inferno stuff (in Kingsley Amis’s phrase) – but of its type it’s about as good as it gets.
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To end on a sadder note, the Summer 2014 issue of Subterranean will be its last. This has been an outstanding online magazine for some years now, particularly notable for excellent longer form work. This issue includes four novellas (one very long) and a very long novelette, and lots of good stuff.
Rachel Swirsky’s ‘‘Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)’’ is perhaps her longest story yet, and very good, about Mara, a girl dying of cancer, and her reactions (and her father’s, and her replacement, called Ruth) to her father’s making an android version of her, into which her personality is downloaded. Seems creepy, but by the end the story – and the characters – come to terms with this. It’s a powerful story of character, interleaving Jewish themes (the golem, Jewish festivals and prayers, the Holocaust) with the ballet (Mara’s mother was a ballet dancer, and the story alludes strongly to Coppélia), with science fiction and AI and identity.
Another strong novella comes from K. J. Parker. ‘‘The Things We Do For Love’’ is told by a man who opens the story by confessing to having killed his wife, and begging to be executed. Doesn’t work, of course – she rescues him. Then we learn why he wants to die, why she forgives him for killing her (unsuccessfully), as well as about their back story, which involves magic and cynicism and a lesson about being careful what you ask for.
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Alastair Reynolds’s novelette, ‘‘The Last Log of the Lachrimosa’’, is fine as well, SF horror in his familiar rather Gothic mode, set in the Revelation Space universe. The Lachrimosa finds an anomaly on a remote planet, and the Captain insists on exploring it, hoping for a score, while his crew, two women and a monkey, get more and more afraid. They are right, of course, as we learn from the beginning: the narrator, one of the crew members, tells the story in two threads, one addressed to the captive and soon to die Captain, the other telling how they got in this position. Good stuff, effectively scary, referencing a particularly scary aspect of this particular universe.
At shorter lengths, I liked Jay Lake’s mordant but clever scientific puzzle story, ‘‘West to East’’, a nice, almost Analog-ish piece about a couple of people marooned without hope of rescue on a planet characterized by an unrelenting west to east wind, and by some life forms that have adapted to this. In traditional SF fashion, they improvise a use for the wind and the life forms – but with limited goals, as rescue is not an option.
Recommended Stories
‘‘The Rider’’, Jérôme Cigut (F&SF 9-10/14)
‘‘Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts’’ Cory Doctorow, (Twelve Tomorrows)
‘‘The Regular’’, Ken Liu (Upgraded)
‘‘Other People’s Things’’, Jay O’Connell (F&SF 9-10/14)
‘‘The Things We Do For Love’’, K.J. Parker (Subterranean Summer ’14)
‘‘On Skybolt Mountain’’, Justina Robson (Fearsome Magics)
‘‘Aberration’’, Genevieve Valentine (Fearsome Magics)
‘‘Sleeper’’, Jo Walton (Tor.com 8/14)
‘‘Collateral’’, Peter Watts (Upgraded)
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, and original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119;
–Rich Horton
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
Bathing the Lion, Jonathan Carroll (St. Martin’s 978-1-250-04826-4, $25.99, 280pp, hc) October 2014.
Lock In, John Scalzi (Tor 978-0765375865, $24.99, 336pp, hc) August 2014.
The Doubt Factory, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown 978-0-316-22075-0, $18.00, 496pp, hc) October 2014.
Field of Fantasies, Rick Wilber, ed. (Night Shade 978-1-59780-548-3, $24.99, 320pp, hc) October 2014.
Jonathan Carroll’s greatest charm as a writer may well be simply that no one has yet been able to pin him down. The blurbs alone on his new novel Bathing the Lion invoke everyone from Philip K. Dick to Kafka, the Brothers Grimm, Michael Chabon, and Garcia Marquez, and while it’s not difficult to find bits here and there that suggest all these writers and more, the full effect of his fiction remains maddeningly elusive. In a key scene in Bathing the Lion, the main characters find themselves sharing a dream in which a giant, bright red elephant named Muba saunters down the road toward them, sporting an oversized wristwatch (how many adult writers would even try to bring that off?), and a mysterious design on his side that may be some sort of map or key to what’s really going on. But each of the characters sees a different map or design, and ascribes a different meaning to it based on their own experiences. They might as well be reading the novel they’re in. As usual, though, Carroll manages to weave his colorful imagery into a su
rreal tapestry which, if not quite seamless, is immensely appealing in its generosity and good humor.
There has been a good deal of discussion lately, some of it from these quarters, about the permeability of genre boundaries, but Carroll has been playing this game since the beginning of his career, and he remains almost unique in his ability to shift codes not only within a story or novel, but sometimes even from one sentence to the next. Dogs, for example, almost a trademark feature of his fiction, show up here in the form of D Train, a ‘‘cheerful screwball’’ of a pit bull who nevertheless doesn’t take well to obedience training; ‘‘D befriended all the other dogs in his class while never learning to obey even one command.’’ A charming detail of domestic realism, to be sure, but only a sentence later we learn the reason: ‘‘In his last life, the pit bull had been a zgloz on Ater, a smelly, dreadful planet,’’ so that ‘‘in this new life on Earth he was just showing how happy he was to be away from such a miasma of misery.’’ Then Carroll yanks us back into domesticity with an anecdote about how the dog was randomly shot (not fatally, as it turns out) during an evening walk.
Carroll does this sort of thing all the time, and practically no one else does it at all. His novels are cluttered with unexpected exit ramps leading to bizarre byways which, more often than not, reveal what the tale is really about. Bathing the Lion begins with a couple discovering that their marriage is failing; the husband, Dean Corbin, who owns a high-end men’s clothing store in the small Vermont town where they live, is acting out his midlife crisis by buying a high-tech sled, while his wife Vanessa, a singer at a local club, has been having a clandestine affair with Dean’s business partner Kaspar Benn. For the first couple of chapters, we might easily be in an Updike or Cheever story – until we meet a mysterious little girl named Josephine, who has a habit of running across the rooftops of the town. When a photographer takes pictures of her, they come out only as beautifully composed shots of vegetables, and when she speaks to Kaspar, it’s to warn him that ‘‘After today I go away forever,’’ and that ‘‘It’s the last day I can help you.’’ Not long after, she appears to the guilt-ridden widower William Edmonds with similarly cryptic messages about ‘‘these things called mechanics,’’ and not long after that, Vanessa and Dean meet at his clothing store to find that it’s disappeared and been replaced by the magazine shop that had been there decades earlier.
Episodes like these are a key to Carroll’s unique approach to the fantastic, and to what makes his novels so consistently surprising. Rather than introducing a succession of clearly linked clues that lead us deeper into the fantasy world – like, say, a lamppost in a wood – he offers apparently random jigsaw pieces that initially seem to leave the assembly to us. Some of these pieces seem to belong to a finely tuned account of a group of troubled but largely sympathetic characters in a realistic Vermont town, while others may involve cosmic mechanics trying to save the universe from, literally, the forces of Chaos. We learn of blips in reality like ‘‘flips,’’ in which people may be returned to any point in their earlier lives, but with all their later memories intact, or ‘‘somersaults,’’ which seem to involve a sudden and drastic reordering of reality itself. The fantastic isn’t something we enter through a familiar portal, but rather a part of the fabric of daily life – or, more accurately, daily life is part of the fabric of it.
It’s not long before we learn that nearly all these main characters, and others, have, in fact, been those very cosmic mechanics – something they learn in that shared dream in which the red elephant appears (along with a talking black lounge chair) – and that their memories of their lives as reality cops have been erased upon their retirement. But now all the retired mechanics in the universe are being called back to service in the face of a resurgent threat from the agents of Chaos, who have informed one of them that – now that Somersault has arrived – they must choose whether to ‘‘bathe their lion or try to fight it.’’ While this clearly seems to evoke the familiar Secret Masters theme we’ve seen everywhere from Chesterton to Dick, Carroll refrains from turning his characters into symbols once they’ve discovered their true identities. Though they may have worked in other eras or even other galaxies, they remain fully themselves, with Vanessa’s spoiled selfishness, her boss Jane’s joyful love for her partner Felice, Edmond’s lingering anguish over his wife’s death from cancer, even the dog’s abiding good nature. Carroll’s familiar themes of love, regret, memory, and – well – dogs, are as fully realized here as in any of his novels, and even when his wisdom sounds disarmingly simple or even sentimental, he seems to genuinely wish well for his characters and for us. Humans, he points out, are neither quite mechanics nor agents of chaos, but by ‘‘using their imaginations they have the ability to keep order, or create, or cause mayhem and confusion. Most importantly, it’s usually a conscious choice which one we do.’’ It’s something of an achievement that the very structure of this intricate and lovely tale serves to remind us of that.
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It’s no surprise to anyone that John Scalzi has long since mastered the lineaments of space opera, and even of space opera parody, as his Hugo-winning Red Shirts cheerfully demonstrated. So it’s intriguing to see him shifting a bit from his comfort zone with the near-future police procedural thriller Lock In, since it involves constructing a world much closer to home, developing a clever and intricate mystery plot that derives from the conditions he has established for that world, and providing a backstory that weaves together the political, economic, and technological themes that give depth to what is essentially a fast-moving and often violent murder mystery. It’s also the most enjoyable robot story I’ve read this year – even though it’s not quite about robots. It’s about threeps and integrators, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
SF mysteries are almost as old as SF, and SF mysteries involving robots became a specialty for Isaac Asimov more than 60 years ago. The R. Daneel Olivaw stories were set in a thoroughly SFnal environment millennia in the future, though, so the robots hardly served as major innovations. Getting closer to home, the electric grandmas of Ray Bradbury never seemed remotely convincing, and the whole idea of humanoid machines, despite what Hollywood or Daniel Wilson thinks, never seemed to have any real economic rationale as anything other than labor or metaphors for racism. But by combining the idea of humanoid mechanisms with the equally venerable tradition of the SF plague tale, Scalzi seems to have thought of such a rationale. Some years before the story takes place, a viral pandemic killed millions, and caused some of the survivors to suffer from ‘‘Haden’s syndrome,’’ meningitis-like symptoms that caused them to ‘‘lock in’’ to their bodies, remaining in a physically comatose state while their minds continued to function normally – rather like the post-encephalitis symptoms described by Oliver Sacks in Awakenings. An even smaller number of victims, called integrators, recovered and gained the ability to ‘‘host’’ the minds of locked-in victims for short-term periods.
This not only sets up some ingenious parameters for a mystery – how do you know who committed a murder when the perpetrator’s body might be controlled remotely? – but also an interesting social structure. Most of the Haden’s victims use mechanical humanoids called threeps (from C3PO) to get around in the world and hold down traditional jobs, though they also share a kind of Second World virtual environment called the Agora, and at least one purist Haden leader makes a point of never using threeps or integrators. Since they are victims of a disease, Hadenism is classed as a disability, supported partly by government subsidies which make the threeps affordable – although wealthy Hadens like the narrator Chris Shane, a rookie FBI agent whose father is a wealthy industrialist, can afford more upscale models (legally, threeps are regarded as vehicles, and are even required to have a VIN). A newly passed Senate bill, in order to support a tax cut, drastically cuts subsidies for Hadens, setting the stage for a civil-rights-style confrontation.
It also sets the stage for the multileveled set of betrayals and co
nspiracies that unfold when Shane and his senior partner Leslie Vann – herself a former integrator – investigate a murder apparently committed by an integrator, but whom the integrator may have been ‘‘hosting’’ is unclear. Shortly afterward, a terrorist bombing at a major pharmaceutical company widens the plot into corporate intrigue, politics, the possible role of Haden ‘‘separatists,’’ and even the involvement of the Navajo nation. There are some convenient coincidences, as when Shane’s new housemate turns out to be a brilliant hacker who comes to play a crucial role in finally trapping the bad guy, but there are also some provocative notions about power, privilege, politics, and even family dynamics that give the novel a surprising and provocative complexity beneath its kinetic and movie-ready exterior.
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It should be noted up front that Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Doubt Factory is not SF, unless you count some imaginary corporations and their products, but it certainly belongs to the speculative/activist mode of YA pioneered by Cory Doctorow and recently visited by Bacigalupi in his pointedly subversive Zombie Baseball Beatdown, which somehow turned a zombie invasion story (and a junior sports novel!) into a gruesome indictment of meatpacking practices worthy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. While many of the current YA bestsellers – The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. – take place in designer dystopias vaguely rationalized by some earlier catastrophe or war, Bacigalupi and Doctorow want to alarm us about the dystopian elements that are falling into place right now, most notably through government abuse of power and unchecked corporate greed. It’s mostly the latter that fuels The Doubt Factory, which is more chilling than Zombie Baseball Beatdown because of its very lack of SF or horror apparatus.
Alix Banks is the privileged daughter of a successful public relations executive – or ‘‘product consultant’’ – with little curiosity about her father’s business dealings. That begins to change when a mysterious, good-looking black kid shows up at her posh private school, first seen punching out the headmaster who’s trying to evict him from the premises. The next morning, Alix finds her school swarming with firefighters and SWAT cops, who suspect a possible bomb threat but instead find themselves confronted with a sea of white rats emerging from the building. The black kid, who we learn calls himself 2.0, somehow appears next to Alix in the crowd, telling her that if she wants to know what this is all about she should ask her father, who ‘‘knows all the secrets.’’ Fearing that she’s the victim of a stalker, Alix’s father engages a private security firm with all the ominous paramilitary appurtenances that such firms always have in thrillers. Alix’s personal bodyguard is a smooth-talking but scary operative named Lisa, whom Alix comes to call Death Barbie, and it quickly becomes apparent that the good guy-bad guy dynamic is going to be more complex than we had first suspected.
Locus, October 2014 Page 12