Gamer Fantastic, Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, eds. (DAW, 978-0-7564-0563-2, $7.99, 309 pages.) Cover art uncredited.
Man-Kzin Wars XII, no editor credited. (Baen Books, 1-4165-9141-9, $23.00, 266 pages.) Cover art by Stephen Hickman.
Asimov’s, 07/09.
Starfall, Stephen Baxter. (PS Publishing, 978-1-906301-59-0, 89 pages.) Cover art by Tomislav Tikulin.
Analog, 06/09.
Analog, 07-08/09.
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tales of Mystery and the Imagination Detailing the Adventures of the World’s Most Famous Detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, is a mixed reprint (mostly) and original cross-genre anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches by various hands, some of them straight mystery stories, some of them with strong fantastic elements of one sort or another, a few where the ostensible fantastic element is explained in rational terms by the end of the story, like the Scooby gang figuring out that the ghost is really a guy in a glowing sheet. The anthology is in large part put together with stories drawn from previous anthologies of Holmes pastiches—Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and so forth—but since few genre readers will have seen these in the first place, that really doesn’t matter. The best of the original stories is Naomi Novik’s “Commonplaces,” although it has no fantastic element. The best of the reprint stories is certainly Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-winning “A Study in Emerald,” but part of the considerable enjoyment to be had from this volume is seeing what authors not generally thought of as mystery writers like Stephen Baxter, Tanith Lee, Stephen King, Vonda N. McIntyre, Chris Roberson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael Moorcock, Gaiman, and others, do with the familiar Sherlock Holmes story. Good work is also provided here by mystery authors such as Laurie R. King, Sharyn McCrumb, and Peter Tremayne. The last couple of years have seen a flood of stories in magazines and anthologies that are clearly inspired by MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or sim games like Second Life. Jack Dann and I collected some stories of this sort in our Dangerous Games reprint anthology in 2007, and now there’s an original anthology dedicated to them, Gamer Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes. This is a much more typical DAW original anthology than the two by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake and Peter Crowther that we reviewed a few months ago, which means that there’s a lot of pleasant entertainment here, certainly enough to make the book worth your $7.99, but nothing really major. The best stories are by David D. Levine, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Jody Lynn Nye, and S.L. Farrell; the anthology also contains what is probably the last story by the late Brian M. Thomsen.
The Kzinti, often more commonly known by the singular, Kzin, the fierce catlike warrior race invented by Larry Niven in his “Known Space” stories, are one of Niven’s, and SF’s, most appealing creations, and I’ve always suspected that they were one of the inspirations for that even-better-known alien warrior race, the Klingons, whose popularity has continued to spread far and wide after their initial appearance on the original Star Trek television series—to the point where there are now more people who speak Klingon than there are native speakers of some marginalized real languages. Klingons may be better known these days, but I’ve always had a fondness for the Kzinti, whom Niven managed to endow (especially in the early Known Space stories) with a believably quirky alien psychology (and the culture springing from that psychology) that made them more than just Viking berserkers in fur suits. The problem with an anthology like Man-Kzin Wars XII (no editor listed; it just says “created by Larry Niven” on the cover), an anthology of Kzin pastiches by other hands, is that by the time you’ve gone through more than forty years of Man vs. Kzin stories (the Kzinti were first introduced in Niven’s 1966 story “The Warriors”), most of the good stuff you can do with the material has long since been done. The stories in Man-Kzin Wars XII are enjoyable entertainment, particularly for those with fond memories of the Kzinti, but they don’t cover any new ground, mostly retracing familiar territory instead—I suspect that many fans will not care, and perhaps will even relish the comfort of the familiar, like the ease of wearing old, well broken-in shoes. The best story here is by Paul Chafe, although there is also good material by Hal Colebatch and others.
The best story in the July issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is Stephen Baxter’s novella “Earth II,” a solid, substantial center-core SF story, although one perhaps not at the absolute top of Baxter’s standard. The pleasure to be derived here comes more from enjoying Baxter’s painstaking, complexly worked-out worldbuilding than from the picaresque plot, which seems mainly an excuse to give us an extended travelogue across the strange and bleakly evocative landscapes of Earth II, where refugees from Earth had been stranded centuries before. As a lover of history, I also have trouble with the decision that Xaia Windru, the protagonist, makes at the end of the story, and have trouble agreeing with the implied conclusion that it was a wise one, the best thing that she could do for her people; I kept flinching and thinking “No, for God’s sake, don’t do that!” I had some trouble with Xaia herself anyway, something that detracted a bit from my enjoyment of the story. She’s arrogant and headstrong, a leader who high-handedly ignores logic, practicality, and wise council, and throughout the story I kept expecting her to get her comeuppance and Learn Better—but she doesn’t, really, and pretty much ends up getting her own way and winning, with what costs there are being mostly paid by others.
Another good story in July, best next to Baxter, is “Sleepless in the House of Ye,” by new writer Ian McHugh, which does a good job of creating some really alien aliens and yet still keeping them sympathetic as characters, and also of getting across the claustrophobic isolation of being snowbound in a ruined tower in deep winter with monsters at the gates. Michael Cassutt brings all of his considerable expertise about astronauts and the Space Program to bear in “The Last Apostle,” a well-crafted, nicely felt, and largely plausible Alternate version of the Space Age after the first Moon landings—but I just could not believe that they wouldn’t reveal the discovery they make on the Moon, especially as no really convincing reason for not doing so is ever given, and grieving for the scientific knowledge that had been lost diminished my enjoyment of the story a bit; the suppression or deliberate destruction of knowledge seems to be something of a subtext in this issue, in fact. “SinBad the Sand Sailor” is a typically entertaining adventure from R. Garcia y Robertson, full of his usual abductions and hairsbreadth escapes and partially undressed (but tough and competent) young ladies in distress, a bit of fun that doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. Sara Genge tells a coming-of-age tale with a somewhat muddled backstory in “Shoes-to-Run.” And veteran author Kit Reed takes us to “Camp Nowhere” for some ominous goings-on at a summer camp that pulls up short of having a guy in a hockey mask leap out of the bushes, but still generates some tension; I was a bit disconcerted here to see the narrator suddenly manifest a pair of testicles, since I had been reading the story in my head in the voice of a young girl up until then, but that’s the fault of my own preconceptions, not the author’s fault.
A stronger Stephen Baxter novella, “Starfall,” is available as a chapbook from PS Publishing. This is a vigorous and compelling tale of oppressed colony planets launching a massive stealth attack that will take years to come to fruition upon an Earth-based empire, told effectively from the perspectives of both the attackers and the defenders on Earth. This is part of Baxter’s “Xeelee” sequence, one of the largest and most complicated Future Histories in modern-day SF, and readers might appreciate the novella more if they’re already familiar with the Xeelee stories, so when they run across a sudden reference to a character like Lieserl, it’ll mean more to them, knowing her backstory. In fact, the novella bristles with references to events and motifs from other parts of the Xeelee universe, some of them from millions of years in the future from the perspective of “Starfall”’s protagonists, and I wonder if Baxter might not hav
e been better advised to strip those out and just stick to the core story, the story of the attack on Earth, which would work fine on its own as a sophisticated, ingenious, and suspenseful piece of Military SF.
The June issue of Analog is a strong one, and features one of two excellent and offbeat Harry Turtledove stories that have appeared recently, “But It Does Move.” The title will tip all but the dimmest readers that this is an Alternate History story, hardly a surprise considering that Turtledove is one of the major names in that subgenre, but it’s an Alternate History story of an unusual and subtle kind, where more or less the same things end up happening that happened in our timeline, but the attitude and the perspective of the protagonist (do we really need to say that it’s Galileo Galilei?) toward what happens changes. There’s almost no action here, and, in fact, the story rarely moves beyond the confines of a couple of rooms, but it’s one of those rarest of stories where all the excitement of the narrative is carried by the intellectual exchange of ideas between two characters, a back-and-forth cut-and-thrust as two brilliant minds engage with each other in a duel where life-and-death itself may ultimately be at hazard. Some may find this dull, Talking Heads blah-blah-blah, but I found it fascinating, and it’s a tribute to Turtledove’s skill that he could pull it off. (The only problem I have with the story—and I must phrase this carefully to avoid Spoilers—is the identity of Galileo’s antagonist; there’s no way he could be whom he certainly seems to be, since a hundred years exist between the lives of the two men, and no time-travel rationale is ever introduced.) Also excellent in June, one of the best stories to appear in Analog so far this year, in fact, is James Van Pelt’s “Solace,” which generates something of the same mood as Ian McHugh’s story in the July Asimov’s, except even more effectively, as a man snowbound in an old mill in the grip of a savage winter must try to not only survive but somehow keep the mill running in the face of all that winter can throw at him; this is matched in a very nice bit of symmetry with a storyline about a young woman, perhaps a descendant, in a colony ship making the long, long journey between the stars and struggling with the realization that she’ll never see Earth again, and somehow taking the courage to go on across the centuries from the man’s ordeal in the old mill. This is a moving and atmospheric story (and unusually contemplative and even gloomy throughout much of its length for Analog), and first-rate. Also above-average for Analog, although nowhere near the Turtledove and the Van Pelt in quality, is Howard V. Hendrix’s “Monuments of Unageing Intellects,” a story of a future society of immortals that reminds me strongly of Damon Knight’s “The Dying Man”—except with a lot more infodumps. Richard A. Lovett contributes “Attack of the Grub-Eaters,” an amusing jape about chat-room denizens co-operating to frustrate (for the moment) an alien invasion of Earth.
The July/August Analog, although longer, is less impressive, with fewer things rising above the average. It does feature a nicely done and nicely underplayed story about a soldier who blunders into some strange and sinister conspiracy—by invading aliens? by government agencies? by foreign powers? He’s never really sure—in the jungles of Vietnam, “Duck and Cover,” by Don D’Ammassa, and an all-too-probable warning about the well-intentioned abuses of memory manipulation technology once we have it, “The Calculus Plague,” by Marissa K. Lingen.
The other first-rate Harry Turtledove story in recent days is “We Haven’t Got There Yet,” at Tor.com. This isn’t quite as strong as “But It Does Move,” but it’s even quirkier, with a bewildered William Shakespeare finding himself at the Swan Theater watching a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, alternating between rage at the bits that have been “stolen” from his Hamlet and admiration for the plagiarist’s ability as a wordsmith in his own right. Turtledove’s ear for Shakespearian dialog is acute, and this is often quite funny. The only misstep is a feeble attempt late in the story to come up with a time-travel rationale for the events of the story, and, while I might have welcomed one in “But It Does Move,” it doesn’t really fit here, and he should have gone with this as a slipstream story—which it really is anyway—and just left everything nonchalantly unexplained. Also at Tor.com in recent weeks is Steven Gould’s “Bugs in the Arroyo,” which is obviously a chunk from a larger work, but is effective anyway in its depiction of a man trying to save someone from a plague of tiny metal-eating robots that have devastated the Southwest, and manages to build up a good deal of suspense in a short compress. Also at Tor.com: “Eros, Philia, Agape,” by Rachel Swirsky, an eloquent take on the fairly familiar story (see Steven Popkes’s “The Birds of Isla Mujures,” for instance, or Tanith Lee’s Silver Metal Lover) of a lonely woman who buys herself a robot sex toy, with unexpected consequences, “The City Quiet As Death,” a darkly lyrical slipstream story of obsession and madness by Steven Utley and Michael Bishop, and Last Son of Tomorrow, by Greg van Eekhout, which doesn’t add anything particularly new to the Superman mythos, although it does it in a pleasant enough fashion.
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The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, the 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction, Mike Ashley ed. (Running Press Book Publishers, 978-0-76243-723-8, $13.95, 531 pages.) Cover art by Joe Roberts.
F&SF, 8-9/09
Asimov’s, 08/09
Interzone 222
Lone Star Stories, 06/09
Tor.com
Going into a bookstore and ordering aloud The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF must be almost as embarrassing as ordering, say, The Rooty-Tooty-Fresh-and-Fruity Book of SF would be, but in spite of the silly title, this is a substantial and entertaining mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of “mindblowing” SF, the concept being to collect stories large of scope and scale and filled with wild new ideas that will generate the elusive “Sense of Wonder” that is one of the fundamental reasons to read SF in the first place. In that, it largely succeeds, and, at over 500 pages for a relatively cheap cover price, is a good reading bargain besides. The best of the original stories is probably Robert Reed’s “Castle in the Sky,” which starts with an initial fantastic premise that will not be unfamiliar to experienced SF readers, whether you reference Clarke or Budrys, but which takes us in unexpected directions and ultimately ends up rather moving on a personal level. The original story that contains the most “mindblowing” Sense-of-Wonder-generating ideas is Eric Brown’s “The Rest Is Speculation,” which takes place two billion years (!) in the future, although it does tend toward being what we used to call “Great Steam Grommet Works” stories, once popular in the ‘30s and ‘40s in the pages of magazines such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing, where the plot, such as it is, is an excuse for a tour past a parade of futuristic wonders, with the tour-guide pausing to point out the awe-inspiring Great Steam Grommet Works, which the tourists all dutifully admire; large-scale ideas here, but not much emotional impact, although there is a certain somber Wellsian lyricism. Paul Di Filippo’s “Waves and Smart Magma” also contains a lot of “far-out” ideas, as we used to say back in the day when it was obligatory to say things like that, and there’s also interesting conceptualization in the originals by Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts. The reprint stories are, if anything, even stronger, including Gregory Benford’s “A Dance to Strange Musics,” Michael Swanwick’s “Mother Grasshopper,” Terry Bisson’s “The Hole in the Hole,” Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Vacuum States,” Alastair Reynolds’s “Tiger Burning,” and others, including James Blish’s classic “Bridge” from all the way back in 1952.
Dragons, and giant creatures of other sorts, seem to be a subtext in the August/September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sean McMullen starts us off in “The Art of the Dragon” with a visitation by one of the most unusual dragons in recent years, a two-mile long metal dragon who eats art, and swoops around the world gobbling up the Louvre and The National Gallery and the Eiffel Tower and other such places. This is entertaining for most of its length, although it gets a little bogged down in a subtext about cultists
who worship the dragon toward the end, but I found the rationale for the dragon and the explanation for its existence very unconvincing, which detracts from the story a bit. I could also quibble a bit with the dragon’s rather simplistic definition of “art.” The dragon in Melinda M. Snodgrass’s “A Token of a Better Age” is actually a Lovecraftian invader from another dimension or universe, and, although he’s really only on-stage for a few pages, is a much more convincing menace; this is an extremely enjoyable story, especially for the verve and authenticity with which the author handles the Ancient Roman milieu. The reanimated skeletons of giants, one of them possibly a dragon in life, feature as magic versions of Robo-Tech warriors or Heinlein/Haldeman armored battle-suits in Yoon Ha Lee’s creepily atmospheric “The Bones of Giants”—this is a vivid and effective fantasy, although, like her science fiction, she leaves the obviously complex backstory here completely unexplained. Giant dinosaur-like creatures, perhaps a bit too much like T. Rex., chase the human characters back and forth across an alien planet in Lawrence C. Connolly’s “The Others,” to such an extent that I found myself thinking that it was too bad one of the humans hadn’t brought a gun or a blaster so that they could just shoot the damn things and let us get back to the subplot about copies of the same human woman developing intramural conflicts and competitions amongst themselves, which struck me as intrinsically more interesting.
Another subtext in August/September is stories about psychic poker players, which feature in both Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Private Eye” and Matthew Hughes’s “Hunchster.” These are both slob comedies, with the Cowdrey the funnier of the two, and with the more convincing grasp of redneck/trailer trash parlance.
The best story in the issue is probably Bruce Sterling’s “Esoteric City,” a fantasy about a businessman going literally to Hell to try to renegotiate the terms of his damnation, accompanied by his spirit guide, the ghost of an Egyptian mummy. Sterling, the veteran cyberpunk author, is usually thought of as a science fiction author rather than a fantasy author, but the truth is that he’s actually written a fair amount of fantasy at short lengths, and is quite good at it. In spite of the fantasy trappings, this is instantly recognizable as a Bruce Sterling story, suffused with cynical deadpan humor and inventive detail, and with the main characters deeply embroiled with power politics and the art of the double-cross, a game they continue to play even in Hell. Also excellent is Rand B. Lee’s “Three Leaves of Aloe,” a quiet but subtly compelling story about a mother faced with the choice of whether or not to comply with school authorities and get her obstreperous teen daughter, who’s always in trouble, surgically fitted with a “nannychip” to modify her rebellious behavior—a choice I fear many of us will be faced with in reality all too soon; in fact, I wonder how many of our readers would have been fitted with such a chip already if such technology had been available during their high-school years.
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