SENSE OF WONDER
SHORT FICTION REVIEWS (2009-2017)
by
GARDNER DOZOIS
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~~~
For
Damon Knight, James Blish, P. Schyller Miller, Joanna Russ, Algis Budrys, Judith Merrill, Rich Horton, and all the others who have tackled the oft-thankless task of reviewing for a genre publication.
Thanks are due to Jonathan Strahan for shepherding the Locus column all these years, to Charles L. Brown for coming up with the idea in the first place and nagging me until I agreed, and to Sean Swanwick for helping to compile the columns into this book.
~~~
Table of Contents
Introduction
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
About the Author
Index
Index 1 - Real People
Index 2 - Not Real People
Introduction
On August 10th, 2008, toward the end of the Denver Worldcon, Denvention 2, Charles L. Brown, the founder and editor of Locus Magazine, took me and my wife, Susan Casper, out to dinner, along with Jonathan Strahan and Liza Trombli. Turned out, once we'd gotten through the obligatory gossip part of the meal, that Charles wanted to invite me to write a monthly column for Locus, reviewing short fiction.
I was dubious, and said so. I was no critic, and Locus already had fine critics like Gary Wolfe and Russell Letson writing for it, so what did they need me for? Charles explained that he didn't want a critic for this column, he wanted a reviewer, someone who would look over all the short fiction being published that month and make recommendations to the Locus readership as to which stories were worth reading and which were not, and perhaps explain a little about what qualities made one story better or worse than another. I admitted that I might be able to do that—it wasn't that dissimilar to what I did as the editor of an annual Best of the Year anthology, except on a different time-scale: sort through the year's output of short science fiction and decide which stories I wanted to choose to put before the public in my anthology...except for the part where I explained why I liked one story better than another, which sounded like it could be a lot more work.
I remained reluctant to accept the assignment, but Charles kept nagging away at me throughout dinner, and by the time dessert arrived, I had agreed, somewhat hesitantly, that I would try writing a couple of columns and we'd see how they worked out.
By the time we left the restaurant, I was still more than half-convinced that it wouldn't work out—either Charles would find that the columns weren't really what he was looking for after all, or I'd write a few of them and then burn out, considering all the other work I already had on my plate in the first place.
Nine years have gone by since that August night in Denver in 2008, and the number of columns I've produced (every month except for a few missed columns while I was in a prolonged hospital stay) is creeping up on 110 as I write these words in December of 2017, adding up to about 189,000 words worth of columns. People have been asking me when I was going to collect all those columns as a book—so here it is. Be warned: this is a collection of reviews, not, for the most part, in-depth critical analysis or astute generalizations about the SF/fantasy fields. If you want that, you'll have to seek out books by Gary Wolfe or Russell Leston or Ursula K. Le Guin or John Clute or any of a half-dozen other learned critics of the field.
Charles came up with the title “Gardnerspace” for the review column. I never liked it, and don't like it now, but Charles usually got what he wanted, and that's the title the column's run under all these years. I took the opportunity to change the title of this book, though, to something I liked better, although it's still composed of the same reviews that ran in Locus.
—Gardner Dozois
2009
1
Like everyone else in this small, incestuous field, I have conflicts of interest, and it’s only fair to admit to them upfront. I’ve done books, and am in the midst of doing others, in collaboration with Jack Dann, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Strahan, and have collaborated in the past with people such as Mike Resnick and Sheila Williams. I’ve had close decades-long friendships with people like Joe Haldeman, Pat Cadigan, Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, and Ellen Datlow. And in the course of a forty-year career, I’ve worked with almost every writer and editor in the business at one time or another. So feel free to take anything I say with a grain of salt, and, if you’d like, ascribe base motives to it. (I won’t review my own original anthologies; that’s stretching the reader’s willingness to give me the benefit of the doubt in my judgments too far.)
I have no intention of reviewing every issue of every magazine or e-zine—that’s what burns all short-fiction reviewers out sooner or later. I won’t be looking at things in chronological order; I’ll be skipping around and dealing with things as I come to them. Some issues of some publications won’t get reviewed at all. I intend only to mention stories I find exceptional, usually in a positive sense, more rarely in a negative one, and won’t bother to mention the rest of the stories in the issue that are unexceptional or average. I’ll review primarily science fiction stories, some fantasy stories, fewer slipstream stories (unless they’re really standouts), because that’s the way my own interests shake out.
We’ll see how long I last.
Since I’m playing catch-up here, let me start by saying that the stories I’ve been most impressed with this year include, but are not necessarily limited to, “The Ray Gun: A Love Story,” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s); “The Egg Man,” by Mary Rosenblum (Asimov’s); “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled,” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s); “Balancing Accounts,” James L. Cambias (F&SF); “Five Thrillers,” by Robert Reed (F&SF); “The 400-Million-Year Itch,” by Steven Utley (F&SF); “Shoggoths in Bloom,” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s); “Immortal Snake,” by Rachel Pollack (F&SF); “Crystal Nights,” by Greg Bear (Interzone); “The Man in the Mirror,” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Analog); “An Alien Heresy,” by S.P. Somtow (Asimov’s); “The House Left Empty,” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s); “An Almanac For the Alien Invaders,” Merrie Haskell (Asimov’s); and “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues,” by Gord Sellar (Asimov’s). (I haven’t gotten to the electronic magazines yet, but they will come.)
The best story in the June F&SF was “The Art of Alchemy,” by Ted Kosmatka—a cyberpunk/noir piece, not breaking any really new ground, but very well-done—although Rand B. Lee’s quirky fantasy “Litany” was also good. In the July F&SF, my favorite was “Poison Victory,” by Albert E. Cowdrey, a somber and powerful Alternate History story, one of several good ones this year. In the same issue, I also liked James L. Cambias’s “The Dinosaur Train,” although all you had to do was switch the word “dinosaur” for “elephant” and you’d have had a mainstream story, a
nd Michael Blumlein’s novella “The Roberts,” although I thought that it was considerably too long for its weight. Stuff I liked best in the August Asimov’s was Ted Kosmatka’s “Divining Light,” which got a little too complicated really to hold together, Neal Barrett’s “Radio Station St. Jack,” although he’s covered the same Gonzo Apocalypse ground before to better effect, Jack Skillingstead’s “What You Are About to See,” and Carol Emshwiller’s surreal “Wilmer or Wesley”—although none of them knocked me completely over. The best story in the August F&SF, by a good margin, was Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Political Prisoner.” Comes a bit close to being a disguised mainstream gulag story, perhaps, but I thought there were enough speculative details to justify it as SF. And an enthralling, even emotionally grueling, read.
Don’t let the fact that it’s being published as a YA anthology put you off—The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, is one of the best SF anthologies of the year, everything in it fully of adult quality, and almost all of it center-core SF as well. Best stories here are probably Kelly Link’s novella “The Surfer,” which is, unusually for Link, real SF rather than slipstream/fantasy (not hard SF, Link will probably never write that, but genuine real undeniable SF nevertheless) and another of Ian McDonald’s gorgeously colored Future India stories, “The Dust Assassin,” but almost nothing here is really bad, and there are other good stories by Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, and others, including an atypical near-future story by Greg Egan, more openly political than his stuff usually is. The fact that several stories are told in the first person by teenage narrators, usually young girls, may make several of the stories seem a bit familiar if read one after the other (and is also the only real indication that this is a YA anthology), so space them out over time.
Another excellent anthology, one of several we’ve had this year, is Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders. Most Alternate History stories are SF (particularly those that add a time-travel element), but we’ve already seen a fair amount of Alternate History Fantasy in the last few years (it’s an Alternate World, but in it griffins or giants are real, or magic works), and now we’ve got Alternate History Mystery, producing a book that’s a lot of fun; most of the stories would fall under the Alternate History Mystery SF heading, I guess (including one with crosstime travel), rather than the Alternate History Mystery Fantasy heading, since although there’s a couple of fairly wild alternate possibilities here, there’s none with griffins or where magic works. The best stories in the book are Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “G-Men” and Paul Park’s “The Blood of Peter Francisco,” although there’s also first-rate stuff by Kage Baker, Mary Rosenblum, S.M. Stirling, Pat Cadigan, Theodore Judson, Chris Roberson, and others. (Be warned that John Meaney’s “Via Vortex,” although also good, features one of the most horrific modes of travel I’ve ever run across.) The most likely Alternate, as it requires the fewest changes from our own time-line, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s story; the least likely is probably Mike Resnick and Eric Flint’s story, even more so than Chris Roberson’s story with its crosstime-traveling zeppelins.
Several of the basic plotlines here are pretty similar—important man found dead under strange, usually politically charged circumstances—although the settings change radically from story to story, so again I’d recommend that you read these a few at a time rather than all in one sitting.
Some good solid stories in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II, edited by George Mann, which is more even in quality than the first volume—none of the stories are as bad as the worst of the stories in the first one...but then again, none of the stories are as good as the best of the good stories were. The best stories here, in my opinion, were “The Eyes of God,” by Peter Watts, “Sunworld,” by Eric Brown, “Evil Robot Monkey,” by Mary Robinette Kowal, “Book, Theatre, and Wheel,” by Karl Schroeder, and “Shining Armour,” by Dominic Green. If I had to narrow it down to only two picks, it would be “Evil Robot Monkey” and “Shining Armour.” Green’s “Shining Armour” is one of at least two stories this year that are clearly influenced by anime (there were several stories obviously inspired by MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, but that’s not quite the same thing).
Thomas R. Dulski’s “Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink in the Can” is the most interesting story in the April Analog, but....
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
...it’s not a science fiction story. Although it uses SF motifs such as UFOs and aliens and alien abduction, by the end of the story, all of these have proved to be fake, and there’s actually no science fiction content here at all; in the fashion of Dave Truesdale’s bete noir, “What They Didn’t See,” it’s a straight mainstream story that smells a bit like science fiction because it’s had some familiar SF motifs rubbed against it but not actually put in the story, like the drinks they used to sell in McDougal Street clubs in the ‘60s that had been flavored with rum extract to make the tourists think they actually had rum in them.
This is unusual for Analog. In spite of their claim to run nothing but science fiction, I’ve run into a number of stories there before that proved to ultimately be fantasy, but it’s rare to run into a story that isn’t either science fiction or fantasy.
Best story in the September F&SF was Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Arkfall.” It’s a bit claustrophobic, not surprising for a story set under a miles-thick cap of ice in the dark and nearly lifeless waters of an alien planet, and this is quite probably a deliberate choice on the author’s part. The protagonist is also annoyingly passive, drifting through life as she drifts endlessly through the planet’s oceans in her Arkship, making no hard decisions of her own until almost the end of the story, but considering the nature of the society she comes from, that’s quite likely deliberate too. The odd passive society here, where it’s considered much too pushy and self aggrandizing to even refer to yourself in the first person, is interesting, as are the living cellular ships in which they drift aimlessly around the planet, unable even to steer. The issue also contains a sly bit of metafiction by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn about a self-help program for writers that takes things to extremes, “Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!” Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pump Six” takes us to a future so unrelievedly bleak that it’s almost stylized; I preferred 2006’s “Yellow Card Man,” which, while also bleak, seemed to be much more likely as a future that we might actually have waiting somewhere in front of us. Rand B. Lee’s “Picnic on Pentecost” has some interesting imagery, but is overwritten.
Read the much-hyped “Mundane SF” issue of Interzone, and on the whole wasn’t terrifically impressed. The Geoff Ryman, the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and the Anil Menon stories were all good stories, and wouldn’t have looked out-of-place in any other issue of Interzone (best of the three is the Ryman, about the complications of romance in a extremely Plugged In world), but as a canon-forming exercise, or something that would clearly demonstrate the strengths of Mundane SF, overall it was not all that impressive. The major concept in play here is that someday just about everyone will live in total Virtual Reality surrounds—something that was a Startling New Idea in 1983, but today, not so much. Other stories feature the idea that sea-levels will rise to swallow much of what today is dry land—again, not a startlingly new idea. The sea-level-rising idea makes Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s story SF, but not by much; it reads much like a fantasy, with some SF details relating to catastrophic climate change in the background—and the idea of a world that has been knocked back technologically to something that aesthetically feels like a fantasy world is hardly a new one either. Anil Menon’s poignant culture-shock story could just as well be happening today as in the future. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on in Elisabeth Vonarburg’s story, but if it’s a technology that allows someone to be switched from one Alternate Reality to another (it could also be another total Virtual Reality surround whose details are being manipulated; hard to be sure), I fail to see why th
at is any less improbable than a Faster Than Light drive. Lavie Tidhar’s story isn’t SF at all, which I suppose is one way of getting around the problem. Considered just as an issue of the magazine, without the polemical freight loaded on to it, it’s full of pleasant, if unexceptional, reading—but the Mundane boys are going to have to do better than this if they really want to sway anybody.
Ironically, the issue features interviews with Greg Egan and Alastair Reynolds, writers about as far removed from the Mundane aesthetic as it is possible to get.
The much-anticipated Tor website, Tor.com, has opened, and seems to be poised to become a major SF nexus on the internet, part blog, part community meeting ground, with reviews, achieves of art, and comics—as well as what concerns us here, original stories posted free on the site. There are three of them here so far, and Tor.com has put its best foot forward with them; they’re all first-rate stories by major authors. Most substantial of the three is probably Cory Doctorow’s “The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away,” a bleak and emotionally powerful story about the Big Brotherish 24-hour-a-day constant-surveillance society that doesn’t seem all that far away, that is almost here, in fact. This society seems an all-too-plausible future; it’s hard to see what could stop it from arriving, and Cory doesn’t really provide any hopeful tips for keeping it at bay or frustrating it once it arrives. John Scalzi provides a welcome change of pace with the not-bleak-at-all “After the Coup,” a story of a soldier pressed into reluctant service as an interstellar diplomat that is a lot of fun, and that reminds me quite a bit of one of Keith Laumer’s old Retief stories, although perhaps a bit less openly satiric (the boss’s name would probably have been “Windbag” or something similar in the Retief story). Also a lot of fun is Charles Stross’s “Down on the Farm,” one of his Laundry series crossing the spy story with Eldritch Horrors that are much like a Love Child of Len Deighton and H.P. Lovecraft.
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