Locus, May 2013

by Locus Publications

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  The 2013 Ditmar Awards finalists, for best Australian SF, have been announced. Novel: Suited, Jo Anderton (Angry Robot); The Corpse-Rat King, Lee Battersby (Angry Robot); Bitter Greens, Kate Forsyth (Random House Australia); Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin); Perfections, Kirstyn McDermott (Xoum); Salvage, Jason Nahrung (Twelfth Planet). Novella or Novelette: ‘‘Significant Dust’’, Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape); ‘‘Flight 404’’, Simon Petrie (Flight 404/The Hunt for Red Leicester); ‘‘Sky’’, Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls). Short Story: ‘‘The Bone Chime Song’’, Joanne Anderton (Light Touch Paper Stand Clear); ‘‘Sanaa’s Army’’, Joanne Anderton (Bloodstones); ‘‘The Wisdom of Ants’’, Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld 12/12); ‘‘Oracle’s Tower’’, Faith Mudge (To Spin a Darker Stair). Collected Work: The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011, Liz Grzyb & Talie Helene, eds. (Ticonderoga); Midnight and Moonshine, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga); Light Touch Paper Stand Clear, Edwina Harvey & Simon Petrie, eds. (Peggy Bright Books); Cracklescape, Margo Lanagan (Twelfth Planet); Through Splintered Walls, Kaaron Warren (Twelfth Planet); Epilogue, Tehani Wessely, ed. (FableCroft). Artwork: illustrations, Adam Browne, for Pyrotechnicon (Coeur de Lion); cover art, Kathleen Jennings, for Midnight and Moonshine (Ticonderoga); cover art and illustrations, Kathleen Jennings, for To Spin a Darker Stair (FableCroft); Cover art, Les Petersen, for Light Touch Paper Stand Clear (Peggy Bright Books); cover art, Nick Stathopoulos, for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #56 (ASIM Collective). Fan Writer: Alex Pierce, for body of work including reviews in Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus; Tansy Rayner Roberts, for body of work including reviews in Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth; Grant Watson, for body of work including the ‘‘Who50’’ series in The Angriest; Sean Wright, for body of work including reviews in Adventures of a Bookonaut. Fan Artist: Kathleen Jennings, for body of work including ‘‘The Dalek Game’’ and ‘‘The Tamsyn Webb Sketchbook’’. Fan Publication in Any Medium: Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus, Alisa Krasnostein, Tehani Wessely, et al; Galactic Chat, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts, & Sean Wright; Galactic Suburbia, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts, & Alex Pierce; Snapshot 2012, Alisa Krasnostein, Kathryn Linge, David McDonald, Helen Merrick, Ian Mond, Jason Nahrung, et al; The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott & Ian Mond Antipodean SF, Ion Newcombe; The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe. New Talent: Steve Cameron, Stacey Larner, David McDonald, Faith Mudge. William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review: Rjurik Davidson, for ‘‘An Illusion in the Game for Survival’’, a review of Reamde by Neal Stephenson (The Age); Liz Grzyb & Talie Helene, for ‘‘The Year in Review’’ (The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011); Alisa Krasnostein, Kathryn Linge, David McDonald, & Tehani Wessely, for review of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy (Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus); David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts & Tehani Wessely, for the ‘‘New Who in Conversation’’ series; Tansy Rayner Roberts, for ‘‘Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.’’ (Tor.com). Voting for the Ditmar Awards is open to members and supporting members of Conflux 9 and to members of Continuum 8 who were eligible to vote in the 2011 Awards. For more: .

  The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers announced the nominees for the 2013 Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in licensed tie-in writing. Original Novel: Star Trek: Rings of Time, Greg Cox (Pocket); Tannhäuser: Rising Sun, Falling Shadows, Robert T. Jeschonek (Fantasy Flight Games); Star Trek: The Next Generation: Cold Equations Book 1: The Persistence of Memory, David Mack (Pocket); Darksiders: The Abomination Vault, Ari Marmell (Del Rey); Pathfinder: City of the Fallen Sky, Tim Pratt (Paizo); Dungeons and Dragons Online: Skein of Shadows, Marsheila Rockwell (Wizards of the Coast); Mike Hammer: Lady, Go Die!, Mickey Spillane & Max Collins (Titan). Adapted Novel: Clockwork Angels, Kevin J. Anderson (ECW); Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, Greg Cox (Titan); Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (YA novelization), Stacia Deutsch (Titan); Poptropica: Astroknights Island, Tracey West (Poptropica). Audio: Dark Shadows: The Eternal Actress, Nev Fountain (Big Finish); Dark Shadows: Dress Me in Dark Dreams, Marty Ross (Big Finish); Doctor Who: Companion Chronicles: Project Nirvana, Cavan Scott & Mark Wright (Big Finish). Winners will be announced at Comic-Con International, July 18-21, 2013 in San Diego CA.

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  GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Asimov’s 3/12

  Superheroes, Rich Horton, ed. (Prime Books) February 2013.

  Future Games, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime Books) December 2012.

  Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, Jack Vance (Subterranean) March 2013.

  The March issue of Asimov’s features that magazine’s strongest story so far this year, ‘‘Feral Moon’’ by Alexander Jablokov. This is a superior example of the military SF subgenre, far more sophisticated and inventive than the standard product, following a disgraced officer in the midst of an intra-Solar System war. He must lead troops who despise and distrust him on a campaign to fight their way, corridor by corridor, into the interior of an embattled Phobos that has been honeycombed with tunnels and turned into a fortress. Things are complicated by the need to do as little damage as possible to the non-combatant members of the colony, by military politics, and by the fact that the officer’s estranged ex-wife, head of a relief mission, is trapped somewhere inside; we learn about the reasons for the officer’s disgrace in flashbacks. All of this makes for a chewy and compelling novella. Also excellent, although a very different kind of story, is ‘‘Needlework’’ by Lavie Tidhar. A story set in his complex, evocative, multi-cultural Central Station future, when humanity is spreading through the solar system, it’s almost plotless, a slice-of-life story that follows two Vietnamese kids from the same village who pursue different paths through life with the ultimate goal of getting into space (or the ‘‘Up-And-Out,’’ as it’s called here, in a clear shout-out to Cordwainer Smith). They only meet again in the last few paragraphs, and while this might function better as the first section of a much longer story, the writing is so lyrical and the characters so interesting that it does reach a sort of closure, with the rest of their conjoined story implicit in the text.

  Not quite on the same level, but also good, and solidly entertaining, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ‘‘Uncertainty’’, which shares certain points of similarity with Rick Wilber’s ‘‘Something Real’’ from last year, both being about baseball-player turned spy Moe Berg (a real historical figure), a mission to assassinate physicist Werner Heisenberg before he can reveal information that would enable the Nazis to create an atomic bomb before we do, and lots of time-hopping across a bewildering array of alternate timelines. Apparently, editor Sheila Williams received these two similar stories almost at the same time, and decided to buy both of them, something that does happen; when I was the editor at Asimov’s, I once received two stories within a day of each other about an alternate world where Fidel Castro played professional baseball in the United States instead of becoming the ruler of Cuba, and bought and ran both of them. In spite of their similarities, Rusch’s story reads quite differently from Wilber’s, and brings us to a different place in conclusion.

  Everything else in the issue is weaker. Michael Cassutt tells a sly postmodern joke in ‘‘Pitching Old Mars’’. Jason Sanford mingles Buddhism and nanotechnology in ‘‘Monday’s Monk’’; unfortunately, the use to which the nanotech is put is so far beyond what any real nanotech is ever likely to be able to do that it borders on the silly, and becomes merely a Magic Plot Wand to wave to resolve the story. And new writer Garrett Ashley gives us a rather nasty fable about a man who is reincarnated as a pig (reincarnation seems to be something of a subtheme in this issue, also featuring in Sanford’s story) and ends up being ‘‘reunited’’ with his starving family in ‘‘Brother Swine’’.

  •

  Stories about superheroes – h
andled either straightforwardly or satirically, or that cross the superhero trope with other kinds of story in an interstitial, postmodern fashion – have been slipping into science fiction markets for several years now. Although the powers the superheroes possess are unlikely enough scientifically – if not flat out impossible, by the laws of physics as we understand them – to make it difficult to really justify them as SF, nobody seems to mind them appearing in SF anthologies and magazines (although, interestingly, there are still occasionally complaints about fantasy stories appearing in such places), perhaps because the influence of George R.R. Martin’s long-running Wild Cards anthology series has made them an acceptable part of the mix, or perhaps because superhero movies, often accepted as ‘‘sci-fi movies,’’ have become such a big part of our society. (Many of these postmodern superhero stories deal with the family life and problems of the superheroes, which might indicate a big influence from the animated movie The Incredibles – although Spider-Man has been dealing with such issues in the comics since the early ’60s.)

  Whatever the reason, they’ve been turning up with increasing frequency of late, and now we have an anthology collecting such stories: Superheroes, edited by Rich Horton. The best story here, by a good margin, is Daryl Gregory’s ‘‘The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm’’, a strange mixture of comic book superhero stuff and harrowing political suffering and endurance, set in a rather Eastern European-like country, something like what you might get if you took Doctor Doom’s home country of Latveria seriously as a real country in the real world and got Solzhenitsyn to write the script. The images here are riveting, and the mixture of the two discordant elements is striking and sometimes surprising. Also good here are Kelly Link’s ‘‘Secret Identity’’, Ian McDonald’s ‘‘Tonight We Fly’’, Peter S. Beagle’s ‘‘Dirae’’, Aaron Schutz’s ‘‘Dr. Death vs. The Vampire’’, and James Patrick Kelly’s ‘‘The Biggest’’.

  •

  I did my own version of this anthology back in 2007, Dangerous Games, co-edited with Jack Dann, but the idea has come around again, probably because of the huge popularity of The Hunger Games, so now we have Future Games, edited by Paula Guran.

  The best story here is probably Howard Waldrop’s quirky ‘‘Man-Mountain Gentian’’, but there are also good stories such as ‘‘Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis!’’ by Kate Wilhelm and ‘‘The Survivor’’ by Walter F. Moudy (perhaps the first dangerous game story, from back in 1965, although an argument could also be made for ‘‘Gladiator-At-Law’’, by Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth), both of them published long before either The Hunger Games or TV show Survivor appeared, as well as ‘‘Run to Starlight’’ by George R.R. Martin, ‘‘Diamond Girls’’ by Louise Marley, ‘‘Breakaway’’ by George Alec Effinger, and ‘‘Unsportsmanlike Conduct’’ by Scott Westerfeld. Interestingly, the anthology includes both Orson Scott Card’s famous ‘‘Ender’s Game’’ and the story that satirizes it (or at least uses it for inspiration to spin off in its own direction), ‘‘Anda’s Game’’ by Cory Doctorow.

  •

  Apparently I missed the first two volumes of these, but 2013 brings around Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, by Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan. As the title promises, these are some of the early stories that Jack Vance wrote in his apprentice days of the late ’40s and early ’50s, and which were published in pulp magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Saturn Science Fiction, and Super Science Stories – pretty much the bottom of the SF magazine market of the day. Unsurprisingly, these early stories are nowhere near the level of quality of Vance’s mature work, and some of them are pretty ordinary period fare – ‘‘Planet of the Black Dust’’ may be the weakest of them – but if you can disconnect your 21st century critical faculties, they’re all pretty entertaining, straightforward pulp adventure, and here and there is a hint of the ingenuity, imagination, and verbal playfulness that characterized Vance’s later work shines through. ‘‘The House Lords’’ may come the closest to being the kind of sly and subtle thing that Vance would later deliver in stories like ‘‘The Moon Moth’’, although ‘‘The Ten Books’’ has its points of interest as well.

  The last seven stories of the collection introduce one of Vance’s series characters, the freelance ‘‘effectuator’’ Magnus Ridolph, clearly Vance’s Sherlock Holmes analogue, although Ridolph is as much a con-artist as he is an investigator, and takes on most of his cases not because of any desire to bring about justice or even out of intellectual curiosity or boredom, like Holmes, but because the failure of one of his get-rich-quick schemes has left him short of funds. In fact, he often matches wits with other con men who are trying to defraud him and/or his clients, and the enjoyment comes from seeing how he proves himself smarter than those who think they’re smarter than he is. The best of the Ridolph stories, like ‘‘The Kokod Warriors’’, would appear later, but those here are slyly amusing, although, it must be said, some of them demonstrate the differences in social attitudes between the pulp era and today. In ‘‘The Howling Bounders’’, for instance, Ridolph, who has taken over a farm on an alien planet as a business investment, solves the problem of having his valuable crop of resilian-bearing plants raided and destroyed by the semi-intelligent local natives by devising a cunning trap that captures them, then coolly kills them, and boils them down to extract and sell the resilian from which they themselves are also made, thus recouping his losses. This is unlikely to go over as well with today’s audiences as it did in 1949.

  –Gardner Dozois

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  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  Subterranean Spring ’13

  Clarkesworld 3/13

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/7/13

  Asimov’s 4-5/13

  F&SF 5-6/13

  Lightspeed 4/13

  Trafalgar, Angélica Gorodischer (Small Beer) January 2013.

  Squaring the Circle, Gheorghe Sasarman (Aqueduct) May 2013.

  The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others, Richard Bowes (Aqueduct Press) March 2013.

  Subterranean’s Spring issue includes, as now seems usual for the magazine, a set of longer stories, all of them pretty strong. The best two come from Kat Howard and William Browning Spencer. Spencer’s ‘‘The Indelible Dark’’ opens as a strange SF story, about the future of what appear to be clones, and, just when things get interesting, we realize it’s really about the writer of the story, his ex-wife, his landlord, and suicide: A dark story, full of guilt – good strong stuff.

  Howard’s ‘‘Painted Birds and Shivered Bones’’ tells of a painter in New York, looking for inspiration, who happens across a man who turns into a bird. There’s an old Irish curse involved, and just when the story seems ready to turn a bit predictable, it decides to go its own way. Howard writes wonderfully.