Asimov's SF, February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  For a moment, I was unable to speak. Feeling my knees giving way beneath me, I hobbled over to the bench. “Easy, now,” Rain murmured, reaching up to help me find a seat. “Deep breaths ... thataboy..."

  “I thought ... I thought...” For the second time in the last hour, I didn't know quite what to say. I took Rain's advice, and once my head stopped spinning, I tried again. “I thought the chaaz'braan ... well, that I'd blown it."

  “Blown it?” Jas's helmet cocked to one side. “I fail to understand."

  “That I'd said too much. Or said the wrong thing."

  “No. What you said to the chaaz'braan and the High Council was correct. Humankind has the right to exist on its own terms, without being subservient to others. Your race has met its obligations. There will be no others."

  “In other words, they've decided to trust us.” Rain smiled at me.

  “She's right.” Ash nodded. “I've heard about what you said to them. They didn't like hearing it, but it went a long way toward redeeming us.” Another pause. “That took a lot of guts, man ... but it paid off."

  Now that was a lot to absorb. At the very least, it wasn't what I'd expected to hear. Another deep breath, then I sat up a little straighter. “So ... well, that's great. Glad to hear everything's going to work out for the..."

  “I have not yet finished.” Jas held up a hand. “Once the Talus has completed negotiations with your race, the hjadd will resume trade with Coyote. Morgan Goldstein has already expressed his desire to continue transporting consumer goods to Talus qua'spah, although I understand that he wants a more equitable arrangement."

  I couldn't help but grin. Couldn't blame Morgan for desiring something more useful than two thousand paperweights. And if I never saw another gnosh again, it would be too soon. “Sounds reasonable. Of course, he's going to have to get another ship."

  Rain nodded. “Another ship, yeah ... the Pride is pretty much shot. Doc's gone back up there to see what can be salvaged before she's scuttled."

  I grimaced. That wouldn't be a pleasant task; the Pride was Doc's ship, and she'd brought us home alive. Maybe Morgan didn't consider it cost-effective to have her refitted again, but it would still be painful for Doc to let her go. “I hope he doesn't plan to retire after this,” I said. “He's a good man."

  “I hope not either. I'd like to work with him again.” Rain hesitated. “I hope you will, too ... once we get the new ship."

  “Huh?” I gave her a sharp look. “But Morgan..."

  “Morgan fired you, yes ... and now he wants to rehire you.” She shrugged. “Or maybe he just decided not to fire you in the first place. At any rate, I've been told to tell you that he'd like to offer you a permanent contract, once the new ship is delivered."

  “Same job?"

  “No.” She smiled at me again. “This time, you've got the helm ... unless, of course, you'd really rather be a shuttle jockey.” She paused, then quietly added, “Don't say no. Please."

  I wasn't about to refuse, even if it meant having Morgan as my boss again. “I take it that Ted and Emily still have their jobs, too,” I asked, and she nodded. “And you?"

  “The only person who isn't being offered a contract renewal is Ali,” Ash said. “Or at least not until he learns to manage his temper a little better."

  “Do I assume correctly that you are willing to accept this position?” Jas stepped toward me. “Or should I wait until you've made a final decision?"

  I didn't reply at once. Instead, I looked at Rain. She said nothing, but something in her eyes told me she'd make it worthwhile. And I still had a room at the inn...

  “Sure. I'm in.” I grinned. “Why not?"

  She moved closer to me. Before I knew what was happening, she'd given me a kiss. For someone whom I'd once considered a prude, she knew how to do that pretty damn well. I was about to put my arms around her when Ash cleared his throat. Damn telepath. I was about to tell him to get out of my head and go take a cold shower when I felt something prod my shoulder. Looking around, I saw what it was.

  A hjadd navigation key. Jas held out hisher hand and offered it to me.

  “You will need this,” heshe said.

  * * * *

  XV

  All this happened many years ago. I was a younger man then, immature and a little too full of myself. Looking back at it now, I realize that perhaps there were things I should have done in a different way. On the other hand, if I hadn't been so young and stupid, would I have been so fortunate to be where I am now?

  I don't know. Perhaps it's human nature to second-guess ourselves. What I do know is that I've got a woman who loves me, a ship to fly, and the key to the galaxy. We've been out here for quite a while, and there are still plenty of stars left for us to see.

  And I also know Ash was right. If all you want is a normal life, then it takes nothing to stay home. But once you've been to the Great Beyond, nothing is ever the same again.

  Trust me.

  Trust yourself.

  Copyright (c) 2007 by Allen M. Steele

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: CHESS PEOPLE

  by Bruce Boston

  If chess people were

  the world, everything

  would be checkered.

  —

  We would ride checkered

  cabs down checkered

  streets to arrive at our

  checkered assignations.

  —

  Maps of our cities

  would be truly rectilinear,

  numbered and lettered so

  there would be no mistakes.

  —

  According to your stature,

  you could only trave

  such rigid grids

  in prescribed fashion.

  —

  If chess people were

  the world, we would be

  forever trying to mate

  one another with logic

  and spurious device,

  winning and losing

  or calling it a draw.

  —

  Some women would be queens,

  both swift and extreme

  in their power.

  —

  Certain men, in kingly repose,

  would expect nothing less

  than royal dedication.

  —

  Most of us would be pawns,

  immured in the fray,

  with slight hope

  of transformation.

  —

  Each of us searching

  for that perfect combination.

  —Bruce Boston

  Copyright (c) 2007 by Bruce Boston

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  Introduction

  Although each of these fine small-press volumes could support my usual interminable exegesis at greater lengths than they're given here, I feel that even just a short, sharp, sincere boost is valuable for alerting you to their existence, and allows me to spread the press-coverage wealth, such as it is, amongst as many titles as possible. So without further ado...

  * * * *

  Poetry

  The preponderance of the poems in G. O. Clark's 25 cent Rocket Ship to the Stars (Dark Regions Press, chapbook, $6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 978-1-888993-43-1) concern themselves with astronomical tropes: abandoned patio furniture on the Moon; an enigmatic celestial smile that frustrates telescopes; Spot the Dog, of children's book fame, orbiting the Earth. As such, these poems read like enchanting, nostalgic fables of the Space Age. And every now and then, Clark tosses in a surreal bombshell like “Sunday at the Virtual Beach,” with its “honeybees with the facial features of cherubs,” just to loft your pleasures to a new realm of imagination.

  A very handsome cover and interior illos by Matt Taggart are the icing on the tasty cake that is Corrine De Winter's demi-gothic Tango in the Ninth Circle (Dark Regions Press, chapbook,
$6.95, 43 pages, ISBN 1-888993-42-1). De Winter's poems are like Tori Amos's songs: piercing, melancholy, reflective; unlike Amos, De Winter relies fruitfully on the supernatural as metaphor and talisman. She namechecks Leonard Cohen in “Enter Valentine” and that old bard's mournful yet hopeful and ruminative tone is another apt comparison. In a poem like “The Body in Love,” De Winter perfectly fuses the corporeal limitations and exaltations of our material forms with the spiritual longings and imaginings of our souls.

  Darrell Schweitzer is surely “tetched” in the head. I mean this in the most complimentary manner. Only one who had slept too long outside under the full moon and basked in infernal influences could have written The Arkham Alphabet Book (Zadok Allen: Publisher, chapbook, $4.00, 28 pages, ISBN unavailable). This is a Lovecraftian primer that lurches grimly and gleefully through the alphabet of madness, each page illumined in ghastly fashion by Allen Koszowski. If you wish to raise your children as anything other than fodder for the return of the Old Ones, send your useless human money to Darrell at 6644 Rutland Street, Philadelphia, PA 19149.

  Readers of this magazine will certainly recall Bruce Boston's excellent poem “Heavy Weather,” which took an Asimov's Readers’ Award for 2005. It's to be found nowadays in Shades Fantastic (Gromagon Press, chapbook, $6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 0-9776665-3-0), along with a wealth of other rich material, including several hitherto-unpublished items. Only from the mind of Boston could we learn, for instance, that the dogs of Atlantis have stolen their barks “from the heady dialogues of Philosopher-Kings.” Such startling imagery, as well as keen observations of life, loss, and love, are delivered in succinct and meaty lines. Like the multifarious women who fill “Visions of the Blue Clone,” Boston's poems are easy to embrace and never twice the same.

  Somewhat similar to Bruce Bos-ton's sensibilities, but with threads of Steve Aylett's gonzoness, we discover Jason Christie with his i-ROBOT Poetry (EDGE, trade paper, $19.95, 112 pages, ISBN 978-1-894063-24-1). Together, these scores of poems build up a surreal cybernetic future where the problems of machine intelligence assume positively Asimovian dimensions. A poem like “Merciless,” with its presentation of a suffering robot who wishes nothing more than the release of sleep, expertly walks the tightrope between pathos and sentimentality. Whether full narratives ("Everybody Do the Robot") or only composed of single lines ("Robota!": “Was the holographic turkey hot-looking enough when we had our paid friends over for a pretend dinner party on act-like-a-human day"), Christie's poems achieve startling insights into non-human humanity.

  Fittingly enough, given its title, Bobbi Sinha-Morley's mammoth compilation, Songs of a Sorceress (Cambridge Books, trade paperback, $15.95, 328 pages, ISBN 1-59431-319-9) is suffused with powerful women. Dryads, goddesses, nymphs, mothers, sorceresses, of course, and many other emblematic females. They move through quiet moments and epic trials of courage with equal grace. Sinha-Morley favors very short lines, which gives her poems an incantatory edge. She blends Wiccan, Greek, Hindu, and Native American religious motifs into a luminescent theology of the individual questing soul. I particularly enjoyed her “Café” poems, in which fanciful menus of wonders are evoked. From “At the Silver Creek Café": “where autumn/comes in a jar/and sarsaparilla is/served in a stein."

  * * * *

  Nonfiction

  Anything connected with the enigmatic and perilous SF writer named Jeff Lint (see Steve Aylett's Lint [2005] for a biographical map of the crime scene) is subject to ambiguity. But I think that I can safely report this much: with And Your Point Is? (Raw Dog Screaming Press, trade paperback, $10.95, 109 pages, ISBN 978-933293-17-2), Steve Aylett has assembled a “Lint Companion,” so to speak, that is fit to live on in infamy next to Lint's own mighty non-linear screeds. These mini-essays explicating “Scorn & Meaning in Jeff Lint's fiction” all bear the true and accurate stamp of gleeful derangement so characteristic of Lint the man, Lint the books, and Lint the monster from the fourth dimension.

  The newish firm of Payseur & Schmidt specializes in books that are also limited-run and signed art objects. But this is not to say these publishers neglect content. Far from it! Their recent offering should prove just how invalid such a notion is. John Clute's lexicon of critical terms for the horror field, The Darkening Garden (hardcover, $45.00, 162 pages, ISBN 978-0-9789114-0-9) has enough intellectual heft to make your brain expand like the Scarecrow's once Oz rewarded him. Translating his “four season” schematic for fantasy novels to a similar circuitry for horror novels, Clute imposes brilliant rigor on a sprawling canon, and illuminates its darkest corners. Also, check out the accompanying postcard set done by thirty very talented artists.

  Anyone lucky enough to have heard John Crowley read aloud—or actually, even those who have intuited his mesmeric natural speaking voice from his fine fictions—will once more hear his distinctive tones and will encounter the same mix of keen intelligence, quirky affections and wry wisdom that they have come to expect from the man in person through the pages of In Other Words (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $35.00, 206 pages, ISBN 1-59606-062-X), a collection of his non-fiction. Whether writing about the craft of writing, the deep structures of narrative, or simply (never simply!) reviewing novels and nonfictions, Crowley's essays convey his perpetual fascination with and amazement at the “labyrinth of the world and the paradise of the heart.” Just the piece on Walt Kelly's Pogo alone is worth the cost of this volume.

  With his new book of essays, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Betweeen Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Duke University Press, trade paper, $22.95, 272 pages, ISBN 0-8223-3774-6), Japanese master critic Takayuki Tatsumi provides an invaluable window into the complex cross-cultural flow of ideas between two countries arguably at the bleeding edge of futurism and SF. Not only will the lucky reader be exposed to a myriad Japanese works of fabulism probably little known to most of us Westerners—such as Shozo Numa's Yapoo the Human Cattle (1956-1999) and Kunio Yanagita's Tono Monogatari (1910)—but that reader will have his head rewired in terms of understanding literary landmarks of the English language, such as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990). And all of this will be accomplished through Tatsumi's spark-filled, spunky, spontaneous bop prosody.

  Just as rude and graphically assaultive as any classic punk fanzine, but infinitely more sophisticated, Jon Farmer's Sieg Heil, Iconographers (Savoy Books, trade paper, 25.00, 608 pages, ISBN 0861301161) continues—after D.M. Mitchell's A Serious Life (2004)—to tell the history of Britton & Butterworth's Savoy empire. More a survey of the personalities and individual publishing landmarks than a linear chronicle, the book makes a bold case for locating Savoy closer to the heart of SF publishing than the fringes. With Michael Moorcock looming like a deity over the whole thirty years of the scandalous firm, Farmer paints a vibrant picture of a cabal of free-speech-crazed creators delivering harsh truths.

  Mark Finn, biographer, is, in his literary fashion, as large a hero as Conan, the most famous creation of Robert E. Howard, who happens to be the subject of Blood & Thunder (Monkey Brain Books, trade paper, $15.95, 272 pages, ISBN 1-932265-21-X). Battling manfully through the hordes of lies and legends surrounding REH, Finn delivers a clear-eyed, sympathetic yet objective portrait of this seminal writer. Depicting the man, his place and times, and his story-telling accomplishments vividly and discerningly, Finn shows that journalistic accuracy is actually more powerful than sleazy mythologizing. This book will be enjoyed by veteran fan and newbie alike.

  * * * *

  Novels and Novellas

  Remember Harvey comics? Casper, Hot Stuff, Richie Rich, et al.? There's something about Richard Sala's fluid linework that evokes those icons for me, without precisely resembling them. The teenage villain in his latest graphic novel, The Grave Robber's Daughter (Fantagraphics, trade paperback, $9.95, 96 pages, ISBN 978-1-56097-773-5) reminds me of Little Audrey's pal Melvin, gone bad. Of course, Sala does not purvey the wholesome saccharine sweetness of Baby Huey and company, but rather the wonderfully twisted perversity of
a Charles Burns. When Nancy-Drew-alike Judy Drood ends up in the deserted town of Obidiah's Glen, she encounters enough sacrilegious shenanigans to satisfy any lover of the supernatural. Judy's main assets are a foul temper and a mean right hook. She's my kind of girl sleuth.

  If Mickey Spillane had collaborated with both Fred Pohl and Phil Dick, he might have produced Bruce Golden's Better Than Chocolate (Zumaya Publications, trade paperback, $15.99, 292 pages, ISBN 978-1-934135-46-4). In the middle of the twenty-first century, Inspector Noah Dane of the San Francisco police has to overcome the replacement of his murdered partner with a “celebudroid” in the form of Marilyn Monroe, while dealing with his runaway daughter and the machinations of aliens known as “Trolls.” And how does “America's favorite virgin,” media superstar Chastity Blume, fit into the picture? You'll only learn by racing gleefully through gonzo chapters with such titles as “Bubble Gum, Bug Poison, and the Spirituality of Key Lime Pie."

  Jonathan Lethem, in his cogent introduction to the latest reprinting of John Franklin Bardin's cult classic, The Deadly Percheron (Millipede Press, trade paperback, $15.00, 224 pages, ISBN 1-933618-10-8), beautifully establishes the “amnesia novel” lineage of this fiendishly clever and surreal psychological mystery. I'll simply add that it's the best Unknown-style novel never to appear in Unknown, and that if Preston Sturges and David Lynch ever had the chance to collaborate, this would be the project for them. Dr. George Matthews, psychiatrist, runs afoul of a patient with delusions of leprechauns, and is swiftly drawn into a murderous scheme that results in Phildickian identity shifts. Add in some Ashcan Realism, and you get a novel that's at once a perfect expression of its period, and also eternally weird.

  There's a ghost at the center of Tim Powers's novella A Soul in a Bottle (Subterranean, hardcover, $22.00, 82 pages, ISBN 1-59606-075-1), but to reveal this much is not to spoil anything, since the reader learns early on the truth about the mysterious woman met by the loner protagonist outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. The secrets and surprises come hot and heavy (this is an erotic tale, after all) in her identity, how she died, and what she wants. Powers, as ever, writes with immense sensitivity, delicacy, and immediacy. The poignancy of this tale rivals Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie (1940). Additionally, killer artwork from J.K. Potter syncs perfectly with the text.