Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014

by Penny Publications

  And then of course there is the Hollywood enclave, where a new kind of film-making flourishes, whose inventor and prime exponent is the sociopathic director, Val Margolian, of Panoply Studios. Vast spectacles are roughed out, huge sets built, and myriad extras hired from among the desperate proles. The extras are turned loose in the sets, and then attacked by animatronic killing machines of various designs—APPs. Any extra who survives is well paid, especially with bonuses for dramatically trashing an APP (in this case, giant tissue-liquefying spiders). But the mortality rate among the humans, all legal, is immense.

  Blending the action-packed melodrama of Escape from Los Angeles with the video-game rigors of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (although of course it's LARP, not virtual), Shea puts his highly likable troop of characters through a lethal gauntlet that ends with our favorites rich and on their way to a pastoral refuge, and some small but satisfying comeuppances for Margolian and crew.

  To continue the movie template, Assault on Sunrise is a mix of Straw Dogs (for the attack on domesticity), along with The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It hurtles along at breakneck speed.

  Curtis and his pals have relocated to the rural community of Sunrise—portrayed with the gonzo vibe of Pynchon's Vineland —where they are free of want and harm, just trying to lead simple lives. But Margolian has set his vindictive sights on the town. He engineers a deal with corrupt law enforcement agencies whereby he can force the entire town to participate in another of his productions—this time featuring creepy shape-shifting nano-gel APPs. Soon Sunrise is at war, with all its able-bodied inhabitants serving as involuntary extras in a life-or-death battle over the course of several days.

  Shea depicts his familiar protagonists from The Extra as significantly altered by their experiences, both at the start of the book and at the finish. He also introduces a swell bunch of eccentric, colorful newcomers. (Please note that one of the villains is named Mark Millar, after the controversial comics creator infamous for Kick-Ass and other violent series.) The plot twists are never-ending and unpredictable, and Shea's flair for portraying action of both the gruesome and noble sort is admirable, often attaining a kind of poetry. Here's his description of a nano-gel invader.

  "Under its hydrocarbon sheen, lights woke within it—gleams and wisps and nebulae constellated its interior, as if it were a piece of night sky. It looked like the egg of a universe, a necro verse of malignant design, and it made more than a few of them think anew that their world had been stolen, and was now in the hands of aliens."

  At the novel's climax, the reader will be exhausted and bathed in nervous sweat, but pleasantly stoked for the next round of David versus Goliath to come.

  The Twelfth Book of Wonders

  Since 2001, Caitlín Kiernan has been on a roll of high-quality short-story production that rivals such past giants of the field as Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Reed. Poetic, vatic, scary, her tough, jeweled stories exude craft and caring. Her latest book, The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (Subterranean, hardcover, $40.00, 280 pages, ISBN 978-1596065864), constitutes her twelfth collection since that fairly recent starting date. As Kiernan herself promises in the short introduction, it delivers a potent, wide-ranging assortment of tales, illustrating the many modes at which the author plies her hand—and at which she excels.

  The first tale is a steampunk one, "The Steam Dancer (1896)." Not highly plotted, but rather a slice of life, the story introduces us to Missouri Banks, a unique creature. With several cyborg parts, she works as a dancer at the Nine Dragons, a saloon-cum-brothel in a small prairie town. Her sensibility and daily life with her mechanic lover emerge vividly from Kiernan's delicate but robust prose.

  Next up is a tale with one of the best homage titles going, "The Maltese Unicorn." Set in an alternate New York during the 1930s, where magic is prevalent, it follows the exploits of part-time bookseller Natalie Beaumont as she gets swept up in the search for the titular MacGuffin. Kiernan expertly recreates the noir stylings and umwelt of Chandler and Hammett, while adding an erotic Weird Tales vibe.

  "One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)" offers a Lovecraftian or Ramsey Campbellian experience, as we track the intersection of a science journalist with the unnatural doings in a backwater New Hampshire village. Following this comes "The Collier's Venus (1898)," whose title and atmosphere link it with the continuity of the first story. A naturalist and museum-owner named Jeremiah Ogilvy finds himself encountering a "living fossil" of a most disturbingly demiurgic sort.

  "Galápagos" is pure-quill SF in the Tiptree manner, as we listen in to the memories of a hospital-confined woman astronaut whose experiences on Mars left her irreversibly damaged in body and soul. Very briefly, "Tall Bodies" gives us a Fortean experience of otherness. But more substantial is the contemporary vampire tale set in Rhode Island, and concerning colonial-era holdovers being uncovered by a scholar, "As Red as Red." "Hydraguros" deploys Westlake stylings and an underworld setting to evoke an eerie blend of crime and the uncanny.

  Neal Barrett or David Bunch would have been proud to write the surreal Martian adventure with its rampant neologistic style that is "Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins." Time and space warp along strange dimensions in another contemporary tale, "Tidal Forces," while "The Sea Troll's Daughter" shines forth as lusty Robert E. Howard blood and thunder. Shades of Robert Aickman and Algernon Blackwood inhabit "Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash," which involves "a fairytale obsessed artist" named Albert Perrault and his Parisian exploits. And, finally, the title piece is a potent fantasia on one of the twentieth century's greatest myths, King Kong.

  Caitlín Kiernan's fecundity is matched only by her devotion to her art, which provides endless enjoyment for what, in a more just world, should be legions of readers.

  Six Decades of Bob Argentfloe

  This year of 2014 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Robert Silverberg's first published story, "Gorgon Planet." Readers of this magazine don't need to be told that the Grandmaster is alive and well and still writing at the top of his form, albeit not so much in the fiction mode these days. But even those familiar with his work in this venue might have missed the great series of volumes being issued by Subterranean Press that collect the crème de la crème of Silverberg's vast output of stories. Originally projected at eight volumes, the series has now reached that mark while covering only up to the year 1995. It seems likely there will be at least one or two more volumes.

  But meanwhile we have Hot Times in Magma City (hardcover, $35.00, 408 pages, ISBN 978-1596065888), and it's a winner, containing a baker's dozen of tales from 1990 to 1995. Readers will find the many modes and themes of Silverberg on sturdy display. What's most amazing to me is how Silverberg prefigures or anticipates or pioneeringly establishes many of the styles of the current scene. Kelly Link magic realism? Check. Steampunk? Check. Jeff Vander-Meer otherness? Check. "Wherever fantastika goes, Silverberg has been there and left!"

  Here are a few highlights.

  "A Long Night's Vigil at the Temple" is a touching meditation on faith, set in a far-future world that recalls Silverberg's own Nightwings. Silverberg's expertise and fascination with time travel and history get a stimulating workout in the novella "Thebes of the Hundred Gates." Edward Davis, Time Service agent, is sent back to dynastic Egypt in search of two time-castaways. But what if they won't return?

  Kuttneresque doings fill "It Comes and It Goes," as a damaged individual must unriddle the personal meaning in an enigmatic home that is sometimes present, sometime not. Expert pastiche informs the pages of "The Martian Invasion Diaries of Henry James," while "Crossing into the Empire" entertainingly conflates commerce and timeslip topography. And the title story offers a near-term Los Angeles beset by volcanic dangers that are met by a haphazard citizen corps.

  But my favorite story is the magnificent "The Way to Spook City." Our background: ETs, the Spooks, have colonized the middle of the USA, producing a zone of weirdness. One hundred-plus years later, humans
coexist inside and outside the Zone as best they can. Our hero, Nick Demeris, must reluctantly enter the alien dominion to rescue his brother. The odyssey that ensues is humorous, tragic, and utterly palpable.

  Much like the The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, this set of Silverberg's tales delineates not only one man's genius, but also the historical tapestry of a whole field.

  Wolfean Festschrift

  Editors J. E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett have assembled a stellar anthology as tribute to a stellar writer. Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (Tor Books, hardcover, $25.99, 336 pages, ISBN 978-0765334589) features original tales from writers as diverse as Neil Gaiman and Timothy Zahn, Joe Haldeman and Jody Lynn Nye, covering the gamut of Wolfe's productions. Some authors choose to enter one of Wolfe's fictional realms directly, while others take a more oblique thematic or stylistic bow in his direction. But all the stories definitely orbit around the Wolfean primary. And as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Wolfe's first major sale, "The Dead Man," in 1965, such a tribute is timely, if not in fact overdue.

  Let me briefly itemize some of my favorite contributions.

  That list would start with the first story, by Wolfe himself, "Frostfree." Wolfe does Robert Sheckley, featuring a sentient matchmaking refrigerator? Believe it!

  Among the stories that engage directly with Wolfe's past fiction, I enjoyed three in particular. Michael Swanwick's "The She-Wolf 's Hidden Grin" returns to The Fifth Head of Cerberus with the sensitive account of two sisters and their strange upbringing. It provides the nearest emulation of Wolfe's own literary effects. "In the Shadow of the Gate," by William Dietz, features our favorite torturer, Severian, and illuminates the gap between the first two books in The New Sun saga. And Marc Aramini's "Soldier of Mercy" gives a neat contemporary twist to Wolfe's Hellenic series.

  On the more laterally affectionate tip come several fine pieces. Nancy Kress's "... And Other Stories" depicts a young girl subject to imprisonment within great works of literature, and reveals cleverly how she makes her escape. Similarly, Jack Dann's "The Island of Time" finds a young boy in a bad family situation, and his cosmically displacing method of coping. And Steven Savile's "Ashes" maps the tragedy of a love affair cut short, and a magical redemption.

  But perhaps my favorite piece—so hard to choose!—is Aaron Allston's "Epistoleros," whose excellent title brilliantly encapsulates both letters and gunmen. In the Republic of Texas, a journalist and some gunslinger companions encounter existential adventures galore.

  When you think of which other authors have had such tributary celebrations—Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury—you realize the magnitude of the pantheon to which Wolfe has deservedly ascended.

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  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

  591 words

  My picks for March are FogCon, LunaCon (where I'll be), MillenniCon, MidSouthCon, ConDor and LICon (me again). In early April, there's AggieCon and Ad Astra. Next issue, we'll have the big Easter weekend lineup. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of our con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss

  FEBRUARY 2014

  28-Mar. 2—Ring of Fire. For info, write: Box 66042, Virginia Beach VA 23466. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 AM to 10 PM, not collect). (Web) www.rofcon.com. (E-mail) info@rofcon.com. Con will be held in: Virginia Beach VA (if city omitted, same as in address) at a venue to be announced. Guests will include: none announcd. SF, fantasy, anime, gaming, comics, cosplay, literature, art, music, film.

  MARCH 2014

  7-9—FogCon. www.fogcon.org. Marriott, Walnut Creek (San Francisco) CA. S. McGuire, T. Powers, James Tiptree Jr. (IM). Literary focus.

  7-9—OmniCon. www.omnicon.us. Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville (Memphis) TN. A multi-genre convention, with much gaming.

  7-9—CoastCon. www.coastcon.org. MS Coliseum & Quality Inn, Biloxi MS. John de Lancie, Kelley Armstrong, Allen Gilbreath.

  7-9—Wild Wild West Con. www.wildwildwestcon.com. Four Points by Sheraton, Tucson AZ. The eponymous TV show/movie. Steampunk.

  13-16—All-Con, Box 177194, Irving TX 75019. www.all-con.org. Crowne Plaza, Addison (Dallas) TX. Neil Kaplan. Bill Blair, H. Henry.

  14-16—LunaCon, Box 451, Suffern NY 10901. www.lunacon.org. Hilton, Rye Town (NYC) NY. J. Mayberry, R. Gallegos, M. F. Flynn.

  14-16—MillenniCon, 5818 Wilmington Pike #122, Centerville OH 45459. www.millennicon.org. Cincinnati OH. Jim C. Hines.

  14-16—Anime Matsuri. www.animematsuri.com. George R. Brown Convention Center and Hilton Americas, Houston TX.

  19-23—ICFA. http://iafa.highpoint.edu/. Airport Marriott, Orlando FL. Okorafor, Ian McDonald, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. Academic conference.

  21-23—MidSouthCon, Box 17724, Memphis TN 38187. www.midsouthcon.org. K. Armstrong, the Bielaczycs, T. Weisskopf, L. Martindale.

  21-23—ConDor, Box 15771, San Diego CA 92175. www.condorcon.org. Town and Country, San Diego CA. Gail Carriger. SF/fantasy con.

  21-23—VeriCon, H/R SF Assn., 4 Univ. Hall, Cambridge MA 02138. www.vericon.org. Harvard Univ. SF, fantasy, comics, gaming.

  21-23—RevelCon, Box 6924, Houston TX 77265. www.severalunlimited.com. 18+ only. "The Little Con with the Texas Size Heart".

  21-23—FantaSciCon, 395 Stancil Rd., Rossville GA 30741. www.fantascicon.com. Super 8, Dalton GA. Gaming, live music, cosplay.

  21-23—ConTact. www.contact-conference.org. Domain Hotel and SETI Institute, Sunnyvale CA. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

  28-30—ConBust. http://sophia.smith.edu/conbust. Seelye Hall, Smith College, Northampton MA. SF, fantasy, horror with a feminist view.

  28-30—ArmageddiCon. www.animepunch.org/armageddicon. Columbus OH. Anime. 29-30—LICon, c/o ICon SF, Box 550, Stony Brook NY 11790. www.li-con.org. Rockville Centre NY. Nye. Promoting the return of ICon.

  APRIL 2014

  4-6—AggieCon, c/o Cepheid Variable, SOST, TAMU, 125 Koldus, Stop 1236, Slot 780, College Stn. TX 77843. http://aggiecon.tamu.edu/.

  4-6—Ad Astra, Box 7276, Toronto ON M5W 1X9. www.ad-astra.org. Toronto ON. David Weber, Anne. Groell, Patricia Briggs, S. Erikson.

  4-6—A & G Ohio, 3907 Chickadee Ct., Westerville OH 43081. www.aandgohio.com. Cincinnati OH. Anime and gaming ("A & G").

  4-6—Anime Detour. www.animedetour.com. Doubletree by Hilton, Bloomington (Minneapolis) MN. Chris Carson, Tony Oliver, Kyle Hebert.

  4-6—PortmeiriCon, 871 Clover Dr., N. Wales PA 19459. www.sixofone.co.uk. Portmeirion UK. Where cult TV show "The Prisoner" filmed.

  4-6—Chevron, Box 5773, Milton Keynes MKL10 1AS, UK. www.massiveevents.co.uk. Radisson, Heathrow (London) UK. StarGate.

  11-13—JordanCon, c/o Box 767353, Roswell GA 30076. www.jordancon.org. Patrick Rothfuss, L. Elmore. The works of Robert Jordan.

  11-13—NE Conf. on Science & Skepticism. www.necss.org. Fashion Institute of Tech., New York NY. Atheism, debunking superstition.

  JULY 2014

  17-20—DetCon 1, c/o Box 3199, Ann Arbor MI 48106. www.detcon1.org. Detroit MI. No. American SF Con, with WorldCon abroad. $55.

  AUGUST 2014

  14-18—LonCon 3, 379 Myrtle Rd., Sheffield S2 3HQ, UK. www.loncon3.org. Docklands, London UK. The WorldCon. £105/A,C,US$170.

  AUGUST 2015

  19-23—Sasquan, c/o Box 1091, Woodinville WA 98072. www.sasquan.org. Spokane WA. D. Gerrold, V. McIntyre. The WorldCon. $140.

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