If they can keep up this level of quality, Tor.com may well become one of the best places on the internet to look for quality SF and fantasy.
Best story in the July/August Analog, and one of the best in Analog so far this year, is a novella by veteran writer Dean McLaughlin, “Tenbrook of Mars.” The old-fashioned pacing here may annoy some newer readers—if Charles Stross was writing the story, I suspect that he would have torn through the first ten or twelve pages in a page and a half—but it does lend the story a certain gravitas, and leaves plenty of room for character development—and after all, the slowly emerging characterization of the protagonist, Tenbrook, is what the story is really all about. In other ways, it’s a classic Analog story of the competent, stubbornly honest engineer who must deal with incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt politicians and businessmen in order to get the job done, in this case, to somehow keep the staff of a Mars colony alive for years after a disastrous systems breakdown with no immediate hope of rescue; in that, it’s traditionally satisfying, although I saw the final twist coming a long way ahead, and could have done without it; too neat. The logic of Paul Carlson’s “Shotgun Seat” strikes me as a bit shaky—why bother to build humanoid robots to drive trucks when the AI built into the truck could probably do the job with a little fiddling with control systems?—but the background here, the world of the long-haul, big-rig trucker, is one rarely seen in SF, and makes this an absorbing read. Michael F. Flynn also sets up a classic scenario in “Sand and Iron,” an alien complex of some sort (crashed spaceship? deserted city/building?) uncovered on a desolate alien world by a party of near-castaways, but although the alien artifacts the landing party discovers are nicely enigmatic, somehow the story fails to deliver a lot of heat or suspense, in spite of a life-or-death chase at the end, and the story remains oddly uninvolving.
Clarkesworld is an internet site that, in addition to reviews and other features, publishes two short stories a month. The stories are usually elegant and well-crafted, many of them quite surreal, sometimes a bit perverse—mostly slipstream and fantasy, some horror, the occasional SF story. My favorites here last year were stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Elizabeth Bear. So far, my favorite this year is Jay Lake’s autumnal “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black,” an actual SF piece, although Jeff Ford’s “After Moreau,” a revisionist postmodern take on the Wells’s classic, is quite good too, and there are also good stories here by Tim Pratt, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Stephen Dedman, and others. Ironically for an online magazine that has no real physical existence, the covers are quite striking, some of the best I’ve seen in awhile. I particularly like the cover for Issue 19.
This is what the large-size Asimov’s should look like, but probably won’t.
The most enjoyable story in the September Asimov’s is Stephen Baxter’s “The Ice War,” which plays out an intriguing Alternate History variant of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds scenario, more than a hundred years earlier, peopled with well-drawn portraits of real historical personages such as Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe. The cynically logical, ruthless, and yet somehow endearing voice of the narrator, who reluctantly gets involved in humanity’s defense against his will and against his own better judgment, is a delight. Also good is Mary Rosenblum’s “Horse Racing,” which with its picture of people’s lives being manipulated unbeknownst to them behind the scenes by social engineers who have goals of their own in mind, reminds me strongly of C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Adventurer”—except without Kornbluth’s cynical conclusion that such manipulation must invariably go wrong and produce results that dismay the social engineers themselves. Steven Utley’s “Slug Hell” is an exquisitely written slice-of-life character study, but has no science fiction element other than the fact that it’s taking place in the Silurian Age, and, in fact, could just as well be taking place in a New Jersey saltmarsh or a Louisiana swamp without it making any significant difference to the story—I prefer the Silurian Tales where they engage more directly with the SF subject matter, and feel less like disguised mainstream stories. William Barton’s “In the Age of the Quiet Sun” is bitter and grim, like most of his stuff, and really breaks no new ground for him, but somehow Barton’s passion and love for the dream of space travel and exploration comes through anyway, and helps to cut the grimness in a welcome manner. Ian Creasey’s “Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone” offers an interesting twist on the familiar theme of downloading someone’s personality into a computer, and does generate a sense of how awful it would be to have a nagging, domineering relative living in your pocket forever with no chance of respite—but the daughter in the end comes across as rather whiney and petty, which kind of undercuts the effectiveness; surely it would have been enough for her to just refuse to allow her “mother” access to her home, and stick to that, without going on to effectively “murder” her. Robert R. Chase’s “Soldier of the Singularity” features an abrupt 180-degree-turn surprise plot twist that I for one found unconvincing.
Interesting that there have been two stories within a month (the other being Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “Arkfall”) featuring people feeling guilty that they don’t really like being stuck caring for aging relatives—an indication of the graying of the SF writer population, perhaps, who may now be dealing with that very problem in real life.
Another good anthology, not quite at the top of the heap with the year’s best anthologies to date such as Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift, Lou Anders’s Sideways in Crime, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of Science Fiction II, but still full of solid, enjoyable work, is Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams. Best story here by a substantial margin, and one of the best of the year, is Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words,” which explores the unexpected social consequence of genetic engineering, but there is also good work to be had here from Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Mark Budz, Tobias Buckell, and others
Like last year’s Foundation 100, which was looking for hopeful human futures, and didn’t find many of them, Seeds of Change, which sought stories that would inspire people to plant “Seeds of Change” that would change the future for the better, ends up instead featuring stories whose future scenarios are actually rather glum, with little real prospect that they’re going to change for the better. SF writers in the Oughts seem to have trouble imagining positive futures, unable to look beyond the bleak present that they’re mired in. That doesn’t bode well for either SF or society in general, since it’s always seemed to me that one of the jobs of science fiction was to imagine viable human futures that might actually be good to live in, and hope to conjure them into existence by the imagining, much as the writers of the ‘40s and ‘50s helped conjure up the space program by dreaming it with such fierce intensity that it inspired others to make it real.
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Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders, ed. (Pyr 978-1-59102-692-1. 359pp, tp). Cover by John Picacio.
Eclipse Two, Jonathan Strahan, ed.
F&SF 10/11
Transhuman, Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf, eds. (Baen 1-4165-5523-4, $22.00, 287pp, hc). Cover by Dave Jeely.
Interzone 217
Clockwork Phoenix, Mike Allen, ed. (Norilana Books 978-1-934169-98-8, $10.95, 285pp, tp). Cover by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.
Fast Ships, Black Sails, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-094-5, $14.95, 241pp, tp). Cover by Scott Altmann.
Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, William Schafer, ed. (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-183-5, $40.00, 225pp, hc). June 2008. Cover by Dave McKean.
This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe in the ‘70s. All of the new annual original series launched last year—Lou Anders’s Fast Forward, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction—produced second volumes stronger than the initial volumes had been, a go
od sign.
It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing—none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet, and in fact a few are rumored to not be selling so hot. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies to hand to choose from.
Although they’re all within shouting distance of each other as far as quality is concerned, I’d have to say that the three strongest original SF anthologies of the year were Lou Anders’s Fast Forward 2, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Two, and Strahan’s The Starry Rift (Strahan is having a good year, and deserves to be in at the hunt at Hugo time), with Lou Anders’s Sideways in Crime and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2 only a half-step below. Of these, I think I’d give a very slight edge to Fast Forward 2. The best stories here are probably Paolo Bacigalupi’s savvy look at the power of media in a future not too much further down the line, “The Gambler,” which reads like Bug Jack Barron for the 21st Century, and another of Ian McDonald’s wonderful Future India stories, this one about the intricacies of courtship in McDonald’s future, “An Eligible Boy”; McDonald must surely be working at the top of his powers these days, and these Future India stories are among the best work he’s ever done, which is saying quite a lot. Dominating the book for length, though, at over 32,000 words, and rivaling Bacigalupi and McDonald for quality, is Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow’s novella “True Names,” a Space Opera that manages to feel like a windscreen galaxy-spanner in spite of almost all the action taking place within a small asteroid, worlds within worlds within a grain of sand, and which piles almost too many High Concepts one atop the other to keep up with. Less idea-packed but perhaps more powerful on a human scale is Nancy Kress’s “The Kindness of Strangers,” which details a woman’s struggle to survive through and come to terms with an enigmatic but apocalyptic alien invasion. Jack Skillingstead’s “Alone with an Inconvenient Companion” sweeps you expertly through the story of a lonely man’s one-night-stand, although the Twilight Zoneish ending raises more questions than it settles, as Twilight Zoneish stories often do. Chris Nakashima-Brown’s visit to a future artist colony, “The Sun Also Explodes,” is full of what Bruce Sterling would have referred to as “eyeball clicks,” has a high bit-rate, and, as befits a postcyberpunk story of this sort, is seriously cool (perhaps almost too self-consciously cool, in fact), but ultimately seems rather pointless, less a story than a slice-of-life sketch. Paul Cornell’s “Catherine Drewe” also has a ferociously high bit-rate, the plot hurtling by, to the point where by the end, although I read it twice, I wasn’t entirely sure just what had happened or why. Paul McAuley’s “Adventure” makes the point that a far planet can be just as mundane and drab and unadventurous as the most drab and mundane parts of Earth (and that a loser’s a loser, no matter where he goes), but in the very act of making that point drains all the Sense of Wonder and exoticism out of the story, which seems a Pyretic victory. There are also good stories here by Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kay Kenyon, and others.
Several reviewers, including me, criticized Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse last year for not having enough real science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can be leveled at his Eclipse Two. There are still a couple of fantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, but the bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ core science fiction. My favorite stories are Stephen Baxter’s autumnal look at the dangers of SETI, “Turing’s Apples,” Alastair Reynold’s “Fury,” about a robot prime minister struggling with intrigue and conspiracy in an all-powerful and corrupt future empire, and Karl Schroeder’s “The Hero,” an adventure through Schroeder’s complex “Virga” milieu, one of SF’s oddest cosmologies—although Ted Chiang comes up with an odder cosmology without breaking a sweat in “Exhalation,” which takes place in an all-robot world (lots of robots in Eclipse Two, for some reason!) of surpassing strangeness whose existence or origin is never explained in the slightest. By rights, I shouldn’t like Daryl Gregory’s “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm,” a strange, slipstreamish mixture of comic book superhero stuff and 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 script the comic, but the images here are so riveting, and the mixture of the two discordant elements so striking and sometimes surprising, that I find that I can’t get it out of my mind; this is one of a couple of stories this year (Dominic Green’s “Shining Armour” from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2 is the other) that, to my mind, have been strongly influenced by anime (and they both feature giant robots, come to think of it!). David Moles’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” on the other hand, is clearly influenced by MMORPGs like World of Warcraft rather than by anime; there’s some great stuff here, but after awhile I began to get a bit tired of slogging through the gameworld, and think this would have been better served if it was only half as long as it is. Tony Daniel (who should write more short fiction) tackles the ultimate building project in the inventive “Ex Cathedra,” and Terry Dowling takes us to an alien-dominated future Earth in “Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose,” although the backstory is complex enough here that I was never entirely sure that I completely understood what was going on in the foreground. Paul Cornell puts a clever twist on the old idea of downloading a human mind into a computer, one of several this year, in “Michael Laurtis is Drowning,” a more satisfying turn than his one in Fast Forward 2. And Nancy Kress delivers a predictable and somewhat disappointing tale, much too Twilight Zonish, in “Elevator.” The best of the fantasy stories, by a good margin, is Peter S. Beagle’s bittersweet “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” although Richard Parks turns in a good pseudo-medieval fantasy in “Skin Deep,” and Margo Lanagan tells a curious folksy version of the Biblical story of the first Passover in “Night of the First Lines.”
The best story in the October/November Double Issue of F&SF is Geoff Ryman’s “Days of Wonder,” a tale of strange portmanteau creatures in the far future struggling to reassemble the knowledge of the Ancients, which has been hidden in their genes and distributed among several warring tribes, each with a different piece. It features a traditionally satisfying SF protagonist (not the narrator—the protagonist), a loner and outcast despised because she’s Different, and feared and resented because of the changes she’d like to make in the way Things Have Always Been Done (a nerd, basically, like most SF writers and many fans), and a traditionally satisfying ending where, after many trials and after losing everything she holds dear, she eventually triumphs. Also first-rate is Michael Swanwick’s “The Scarecrow’s Boy,” a rather grim tale told in the deceptively simple tone of a children’s book about an obsolete and abandoned robot who takes it on himself to try to protect a human boy against the consequences of human politics. Albert E. Cowdrey offers us another of his evocative tales about New Orleans, drenched in local color, although “Inside Story” is SF rather than the more usual fantasy. Steven Utley contributes a bleak and airless, but powerful, story about a man trapped inside a rather nasty high-tech hell, “Sleepless Years,” and Terry Bisson tells a tale of online voyeurs watching voyeurs watching, “Private Eye.” Stephen King whips us through a story of telephone calls from the dead with his usual expert ease in “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates,” without taking us to anyplace particularly new, Robert Reed spins a rather dull writer’s fantasy in “The Visionaries,” Scott Bradfield takes too long to tell us how “Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter’s Guild,” although there are some amusing satirical bits along the way, and Tim Sullivan tells an at first somewhat familiar story of survival on an airless planet that spins off in some bizarre and unexpected directions, in “Planetestimal Dawn.”
There are probably no award-winners in Transhuman, edited b
y Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf (title makes the subject matter self-explanatory, surely), but there is a respectable amount of good solid core SF. Best story here is by David D. Levine, but there are also good stories by Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, Sarah A. Hoyt, Wen Spenser, and others.
I liked Interzone 217 more than the previous issue, the Mundane issue. The most striking story here, although I’m not sure that it’s science fiction, is Jason Sanford’s “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain.” Elegantly written, this story dances on the borderline between SF and surrealism, and features one of the more peculiar and intricate cosmologies you’re likely to see, none of which is ever explained or rationalized—which inclines me toward the surrealism side of the scale. In another first-rate story, Paul McAuley entertainingly tells a Beserker story from the Beserker’s point of view, in “Little Lost Robot.” In “Africa,” Karen Fishler gives us an absorbing character study of a man faced with some hard choices, the guardian of an embargoed and quarantined Earth who must decide if anything can justify bending the rules (found the idea that the embargo of Earth would be left to be enforced by only one man a bit hard to believe, though).
Clockwork Phoenix, edited by Mike Allen, is a mixed science fiction/fantasy anthology, with a few slipstream stories thrown in for good measure. In an exceptional year for original anthologies, it doesn’t come in at the top of the heap, but there is a lot of good stuff here, and the cover, an effective use of an old painting, is lovely. The best story in Clockwork Phoenix, by a considerable margin, is Vandana Singh’s “Oblivion: A Journey”—an obsessive, decades-long hunt for revenge through interstellar space that reminds me in a way of Roger Zelazny, although perhaps a bit more somber and less flamboyant—although there are also solid SF stories here by John C. Wright, Cat Sparks, C.S. MacCath, and others. The best of the fantasy stories is “The Woman,” by Tanith Lee, but there is also unusual fantasy work here by Marie Brennan, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Ekaterina Sedia, and others.
Sense of Wonder Page 2