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Lightspeed’s theme for May seems to be love stories and apocalypses. For example, Maria Dahvana Headley in ‘‘The Traditional’’ follows a couple through several years of a relationship begun during ‘‘the rending,’’ when the world mysteriously (and almost literally) fell apart. The title refers to traditional anniversary gifts, the ways these are not so available after the end of the world, and the rather horrific alternatives these people devise, as stranger and darker things happen.
In ‘‘Leaving the Dead’’ by Dennis Danvers, Darwin and Gabriella meet during an apocalypse, this time at a Target store, when everyone else suddenly, quietly, dies. This is light-hearted apocalypse stuff, a bit on the wish-fulfillment side, as two quite different people fall for each other conveniently when there’s no other choice. Still, it’s sweet stuff, and sweetly funny.
Perhaps, though, the theme is ‘‘love stories forged during world-altering events.’’ At any rate, M. Bennardo’s ‘‘Water Finds Its Level’’, the pick story of the issue, is also about a couple who ‘‘meet’’ due to a somewhat profound change in the world, though in this case it’s not exactly an apocalypse. Rather, it’s ‘‘the Collision,’’ when two parallel universes start to merge. For Jennifer, it starts with voices in her apartment, and later the realization that a man lives in the same space in the other universe, and they can talk…. It’s a nice, bittersweet love story, and a believable meditation on personal identity.
Finally, Damien Walters Grintalis doesn’t deal with apocalypses, or love, in ‘‘Always, They Whisper’’, a story that effectively if a bit diagrammatically retells Medusa’s story in contemporary times, teasing out the sometimes overlooked backstory of sexual abuse, with some striking metaphors for the protagonist’s self-destructive reaction to her victimization, and her eventual move toward taking back her life.
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My favorite story at Beneath Ceaseless Skies in March is ‘‘Armistice Day’’ by Marissa Lingen. This is told by one of a race of creatures created by magic to fight a war for humans, who have no place in society after the war is over. Some of them have made lives as cooks and the like, but few humans are tolerant, and some push for them to be returned to where they came from, to nothingness. Nothing terribly original here, though the central idea is effective, but it’s a well-told morality tale, with anti-colonialist shadings, and a moving resolution.
At Tor.com, March concludes with an amusing (if perhaps overlong for its conceit) novelette from Harry Turtledove, ‘‘Running of the Bulls’’, which is most fun for realizing which famous novel is being pastiched, and just what the SFnal variations are…. Alas, I confess Turtledove’s take on this author’s style reminded me as much of his contemporary Ring Lardner as it did the intended writer.
April at Tor.com is pretty impressive. First we get a fine, pure hard SF piece from Gregory Benford, ‘‘Backscatter’’. No surprises here, but solid deployment of a traditional set of tropes and plot elements: the asteroid explorer crashed and needing an imaginative way to be rescued, her snarky AI companion, and the cool and scientifically plausible discovery. Next is ‘‘Rag and Bone’’ by Priya Sharma, set in an alternate 19th century ruled by ‘‘merchant princes’’ who are rumored to use the bodies of the poor to extend their lives by mysterious means. The hero is a ‘‘rag and bone man,’’ a junk dealer who cooperates with the upper class by helping them find worthwhile (genetically appropriate, it seems) people to ‘‘harvest.’’ He is pressured to ‘‘recruit’’ a couple of candidates, the widow of a heroic sailor, and her sister – but finds himself falling for them, and soon enough is forced into a tangle of love, identity, and betrayal, and a surprising decision. Good stuff. Karin Tidbeck is here too, with ‘‘Sing’’, a weird SF story about a planet where people learn to sing in order to communicate at certain times where speaking doesn’t work. Explaining it is hard, and, perhaps, pointless: the ideas are offbeat and fantastical, despite the SF setting, but they work. The center of the story is an offworld man who befriends the narrator, a mysteriously handicapped woman, and who wants to learn to sing like the natives but doesn’t understand the cost, and the risks, and the ties to the nature of life on this planet.
Surprise (but not unworthy) Hugo-nominee Thomas Olde Heuvelt is here with “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket”, set in a Thai village famed for a festival at which riverborn wishes are read and (sometimes) granted. The story begins with a boy struggling for his life in the river, and goes back to show us why, looking at the villagers with some humor and a lot of cynicism, sweetness and darkness mixed, as the not unexpected real story behind the wish industry is revealed. I quite enjoyed it.
And, finally, Prudence Shen contributes “Do Not Touch”, a quite delightful sweet story riffing on the idea of a painting one can step into. It’s told from the point of view of a museum staffer whose job is to retrieve the occasional child who wanders into a painting. This time he goes again into Seurat’s “Le Cirque”, along with another staff member on whom he has rather a crush. Very light stuff of course (as such a nice contrast to something so dark and serious as Sharma’s story), and just great fun.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘Backscatter’’, Gregory Benford (Tor.com 4/3/13)
‘‘Water Finds Its Level’’, M. Bennardo (Lightspeed 5/13)
‘‘The Ink Readers of Doi Saket’’, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com 4/24/13)
‘‘Armistice Day’’, Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/21/13)
‘‘Out in the Dark’’, Linda Nagata (Analog 6/13)
‘‘The Fountain’’, G. David Nordley (Asimov’s 6/13)
‘‘Town’s End’’, Yukimi Ojawa (Strange Horizons 3/11/13)
‘‘Precious Mental’’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s 6/13)
‘‘Rag and Bone’’, Priya Sharma (Tor.com 4/10/13)
‘‘Do Not Touch’’, Prudence Shen (Tor.com 4/23/13)
‘‘Sing’’, Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com 4/17/13)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119,
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (William Morrow 978-0062255655, $25.00, 192pp, hc) June 2013
Evening’s Empires, Paul McAuley (Gollancz 978-0575100794, £14.99, 400pp, hc) July 2013.
Homeland, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen 978-0765333698, $17.99, 398pp, hc) February 2013.
For all his industrious celebrity, Neil Gaiman has always been a pretty shrewd choreographer of mythologies. From the multiple myth systems incorporated into the Sandman series through the unpacking of American iconography in American Gods to the exploration of Afro-Caribbean myths in Anansi Boys (which even pays brief homage to another tale-telling mythographer, Zora Neale Hurston), Gaiman has shown that he knows where stories come from and where to go to get them. But for the most part, except for a handful of short stories, Gaiman the observer has always remained somewhat distant and sometimes a little arch; a skilled tale-teller who characteristically writes from the outside in – until now. The most remarkable thing about his short new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and what makes it possibly his best, is that for the first time at novel length, he’s writing from the inside out. If his observations on American culture in American Gods sometimes sound like a visitor discovering the flyover states, and his humor in Anansi Boys often derives from bringing a screwball Wodehouse sensibility to old trickster tales, Ocean takes us back, really, to no one but Gaiman himself. Its terrors and longings are felt terrors and longings, and it’s in this sense his most personal novel to date.
The unnamed narrator, a middle-aged artist (‘‘I make art’’ is all he tells us), has returned to his native Sussex for a family funeral, and finds himself driving back to h
is childhood homestead, long since demolished and replaced by a house that itself had been sold decades earlier. What does remain is the neighboring Hempstock farm, which he had first visited at the age of seven, when it was home to the then 11-year-old Lettie Hempstock, her mother, and her grandmother. Remarkably, an old woman still lives there – apparently Lettie’s mother – who claims to remember him, even though his own memories are fragmentary: Lettie had at some point moved away to Australia, and had oddly referred to the duck pond at the back of the house as her ‘‘ocean.’’ He wanders out to the small pond, and immediately memories of what happened to him when he was seven come flooding back, setting up the main action of the novel and cleverly finessing the one central narrative concession Gaiman asks of the reader – namely, that the narrator is recounting events he doesn’t actually quite remember.
Those events begin sadly with the boy’s seventh birthday party, to which no one comes, and with the death of a favorite kitten, run over by a boarder taken in to supplement the family income. When the boarder steals his father’s car and uses it to commit suicide over gambling losses, the lonely and bookish boy is more concerned about the fate of his favorite comic book, which was in the back seat. During the police investigation, Lettie invites him to her nearby house, where he meets her strange family, all of whom seem to have a preternatural kind of second sight. Odd things begin to happen, all of them, like the boarder’s suicide, seeming to have to do with money: an old sixpence coin is found inside a dead fish from Lettie’s pond, the boy wins a small prize in the Premium Bonds (a kind of lottery), he himself coughs up a silver shilling, someone throws coins at his sister and her friends. Lettie seems to recognize what’s going on, and lets him accompany her as she confronts some fairly nightmarish supernatural forces, but during the confrontation he sustains a very foreboding puncture wound on his foot. The real confrontation with dark powers is yet to come: a mysterious new housekeeper named Ursula Monkton arrives, quickly winning over the entire family, except for the boy, who is terrified of her. And Ursula is a piece of work, a relative of the Other Mother from Coraline, but far less cartoonish and more invasive. The terrors she precipitates are among the most viscerally realized in all Gaiman’s work, and one evidence of this is that – without revealing too many details – the most disturbing scene in the novel involves the boy’s father rather than any supernatural monster.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane features an unapologetically noble and heroic character in Lettie Hempstock, but like some of Gaiman’s other heroic characters – Silas in The Graveyard Book comes to mind – the background of her family implies a vast, millennia-long struggle involving the ‘‘Old Country’’ and ancient enemies; the grandmother even says she remembers when the moon was made. In this sense, the small pond which may be an ocean becomes an image of the novel itself – a small, almost classically unified tale which implies a far larger one. That in itself isn’t an unusual Gaiman technique, but what is unusual is the degree to which we are given to understand how these events and figures formed the boy who became the artist, who is warned at one point, ‘‘You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow.’’ It’s that calling which this novel is really about, and while it’s one of the oddest portraits of the artist you’ll see for quite some time, it’s also one of the most powerful and compelling, as deeply felt and deeply honest as anything Gaiman has written.
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Paul McAuley’s Quiet War series (The Quiet War, 2008; Gardens of the Sun, 2009; plus the discontinuous but related In the Mouth of the Whale in 2012, and a bunch of stories) are among the defining works of the notable renascence of solar system fiction in the last decade or so, and McAuley’s evident passion for extrapolating the surface and subsurface details of the various gas-giant moons and myriad artificial habitats he calls ‘‘gardens’’ is a good indicator of the appeal of such settings: we have just enough hard astronomical data to understand the challenges for a hard SF writer, but with plenty of room for narrative tooling around. In Benford’s playing-with-the-net-up metaphor, we at least have a good idea of where the net is, and writing planetary fiction about worlds that we know something about must seem like a kind of formal constraint, a kind of hard-SF version of sonnets or villanelles. At times, McAuley appeared so enamored with working out these settings that the detailed planetology interrupted his already complex, multiviewpoint narratives, but in Evening’s Empires he uses the settings quite effectively as a backdrop for a classic revenge-and-redemption space opera focusing on a single character’s quest, and which pointedly pays tribute to a broad swath of SF history. Part of the fun of reading it is name-checking those homages – section titles borrowed from Asimov, Clarke, Godwin, and Silverberg, locations named Trantor and Tannhauser Gate, a scene of man-apes capering before a giant monolith, even a couple of swooping flying-scooter chases worthy of Star Wars set pieces.
And the plot itself rings a few familiar chimes. Set some 1,500 years after the Quiet War, and after the legendary gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen absconded to the Fomalhaut system and did something to herself there, it begins with the 19-year-old Gajananvihari Pilot, called Hari, crash-landing on a remote asteroid after his spaceship had been hijacked and his family either imprisoned or killed. Hari had escaped in a lifepod, accompanied only by his spacesuit’s AI, but with a rather gruesome prize he hopes to use as leverage with the hijackers: the severed head of a ‘‘tick-tock’’ philosopher named Dr. Gagarian, a passenger who was the possible reason for the hijacking. Locked in the brain, supposedly, are potentially explosive files involving an event that happened some years before Hari’s birth: the ‘‘Bright Moment,’’ when every human everywhere experienced the same vision of a man on a bicycle, looking back at the viewer while heading into a bright light. The vision is generally attributed to something Sri Hong-Owen did out near Fomalhaut, a kind of ‘‘vastening’’ which either transformed her into a kind of god, or which might be explained through rational means. That classic science vs. faith debate proves to be the ideological core of the novel, and the chief motivation behind the various factions and cults that Hari will come up against later.
But at the beginning, for all intents and purposes, he’s a version of Bester’s Gully Foyle, motivated entirely by sheer fury and a desire for revenge. Once he escapes the asteroid, still pursued by his enemies, he arrives on Vesta, where he is promptly arrested for trespassing. Eventually he meets Rav, a giant posthuman from a clade called Arden, another familiar type: the freelance adventurer whose motives aren’t really clear, but whose competence seems to make up for his untrustworthiness. With Rav’s aid, Hari uncovers a pattern of murder and betrayal that goes far beyond the hijacking of his family’s ship, and involves a welter of fearsome special interest groups and cults who all seek the files locked away in Dr. Gagarian’s head. On Ophir – the most spectacular of the artificial habitats in the novel, nicknamed the Caves of Steel – he meets the daughter of one of the murder victims, Riyya lo Minnot, who becomes another ally and nearly a love interest. There’s an almost formulaic set-up to the adventures and battles which follow, with each of Hari’s allies possessing certain tricks (Riyya, for example, is a member of Ophir’s Climate Corps, and can control certain aspects of weather) and the enemies growing more and more implacable. In other words, McAuley is having a good deal of fun laying out what amounts to a tribute to classic space opera, and Evening’s Empires, while not lacking in the snazzy mise-en-scene spectacle or the philosophical debates of the earlier novels, is the most purely enjoyable straight adventure tale in the Quiet War series so far.
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I’m coming a little late to Cory Doctorow’s Homeland, his sequel to the influential 2007 YA hacktivist novel Little Brother, and in the few months since its publication it has gained a tragic dimension, following the suicide in January of Aaron Swartz, the troubled but beloved Internet activist who provided an afterword to the novel, whose ideas of political organizing th
rough social networks were pretty much borrowed in their entirety by Doctorow, and who apparently shared more than a few characteristics in common with Marcus Yallow, the brilliant high school kid from Little Brother, who we now meet again at the age of 19. But there’s another, less obvious figure that lends a post-hoc elegiac feel to Homeland: that of Donald J. Sobol, whose Encyclopedia Brown mysteries appeared for nearly 40 years before his death in 2012. Doctorow’s Marcus may be an idealist committed to changing or improving the system through the shrewd application of information technology, but he’s also a lot like Leroy Brown – the sort of opinionated know-it-all whose endless explanatory asides would be massively annoying if the information in them weren’t so cool to begin with. So, in addition to the political/cultural adventure that takes us from the Burning Man festival, through a foray into California politics, a Wikileaks-type release of massive amounts of highly charged information, and of course another encounter with sinister Black Ops-style organizations, we get tips. Lots of tips: how and why to make cold-brewed coffee, why caramels make excellent wood glue, how to create a Virtual Machine within your computer, how to adapt 3D printers for your own uses, how to mine reliable information from Wikipedia, even how to finesse a polygraph test using your sphincter.
Locus, June 2013 Page 9