Volumes Three and Four probably contain fewer of Zelazny’s signature pieces than Volumes One and Two did, being already up to the period where Zelazny switched his career emphasis from short fiction to novels, and although there are many minor stories in the book, there is also still a wealth of good short fiction (some of it not so short, there are several novellas and long novelettes) here, including “This Mortal Mountain,” “The Man Who Loved the Faioli,” “Damnation Alley” (upon which the execrable film was loosely based), “The Game of Blood and Dust,” “The Engine at Heartspring Center,” “The Eve of RUMOKO,” “‘kjwall’kje’koothaill’kje’k,” “Home Is the Hangman,” “Halfjack,” “The Last Defender of Camelot,” and “Unicorn Variation.” The Anderson volume 2 might even be slightly stronger than the strong volume 1, containing “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” “Brave to be a King,” “The Pirate,” “A Little Knowledge,” and what is perhaps my single favorite Anderson story, “The Longest Voyage.”
Ideally, you should buy all of these volumes. The Zelazny volumes may have a slight edge in value—supposing that you like Zelazny, which, of course, not everyone does—because they are much richer in empheria and ancillary material than the Anderson, containing an amazing amount of biographic and autobiographic material, including much stuff that very few readers will have seen: Guest Of Honor speeches by Zelazny, family trees of his fictional characters, outlines of his novels, letters, deleted sex scenes, as well as much critical work about Zelazny by other hands. The stories in the Anderson collection are mostly major stories, but in an exhaustive effort to actually collect almost everything that Zelazny wrote, the Zelazny volumes are also stuffed with stories that have not been reprinted anywhere since their initial appearance, and a good deal of stuff that has never been published before. Most of this is pretty minor, and some of it is downright bad—but Zelazny completists will want to read it all, and a fair amount of it is interesting and entertaining even for the rest of us.
Both the Zelazny and the Anderson collections also contain a lot of their respective author’s poetry—most of it, frankly, pretty bad.
A younger master, not quite in the Zelazny/Anderson league yet, but still one of the most important new writers to come to prominence in SF in the ‘90s, Charles Stross, has had some of his best work collected in Wireless, another collection that is sure to be in at the hunt for the Best Collection of the Year title. The bulk of Stross’s best recent work is here, some marvelously inventive stuff that’s helped to reinvent the genre’s ideas of what the future is going to look like, including “Missile Gap,” “A Colder War,” “Rogue Farm,” “Trunk and Disorderly,” and others. The collection also includes a huge original novella, “Palimpsest,” which is sort of a grittier and more cynical version of one of Poul Anderson’s “Time Patrol” stories, played out across an even larger canvas.
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Asimov’s, 9/09
F&SF, 10-11/09
The Very Best of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Gordon Van Gelder ed. (Tachyon, 978-1892391919, 480 pages.) Cover art by David A. Hardy.
Cosmos, 3/09
New Scientist, September 16
Tor.com
The strongest story in an otherwise moderately weak September issue of Asimov’s is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Broken Windchimes.” This follows the fate of a human castrati who has been extensively trained to sing in the very strictly regimented way that a particular group of aliens like, and what happens to him after he botches a performance and is cast aside, unable to keep practicing his art.
This is an unusual story in several respects, not really going where you’d think it would go, given the description above. For one thing, the story doesn’t go down the Dickensonian path of detailing how the cast-out protagonist must now scrape and scramble to get by, since he seems to have an almost unlimited supply of money, and physical survival is never an issue for him. Nor does the story generate the expected angst over him having been turned into a castrati; he barely gives it a thought, in fact, and later sends other orphaned boys to the same fate without a flicker of hesitation or regret, seeming to feel that he’s doing the best thing for them by securing them steady employment (until they too become “broken windchimes” at least, something he doesn’t dwell on). In fact, there are few problems for the protagonist to solve, and few real choices for him to make, and indeed he makes few of them, other than moving from the alien planet he’s spent most of his life to date on to a space station orbiting around it where many different races, including humans, freely mix and intermingle. What saves the story, and where its interest lies, is in the excellent job that Rusch does in showing us the personal voyage of discovery the protagonist goes on, as his world, and particularly his appreciation of music, widens out step by painful step beyond the crippling artistic and emotional strictures of his youth. By the end, his horizons have been broadened tremendously in an emotionally satisfying way, and we are left with the intuition that not only is there a lot more to learn, but that he’s now equipped to learn it.
Also good in September is Lisa Goldstein’s subtle, understated fantasy “Away From Here,” which leaves unresolved the question of whether a young girl will be able to resist the temptation that has kept her mother tied to running a slightly shabby small hotel for most of her life, waiting for the sporadic visits of traveling magicians who breathe Magic and Glamour into her drab life—a pull that the daughter feels strongly as well, although she knows that she really ought to get away from there and start a new life elsewhere. The “magicians” are clearly creatures of Fairie, although this is never stated explicitly, and we leave the daughter wondering if she can resist their allure, or if she’s fated to waste her own life as well, waiting for them to drop by for a visit, longing for another draught of Enchantment.
The rest of the stories in September are competent but unexceptional. Mike Resnick collaborates with new writer Lezli Robyn to bring us “Soulmates,” one of a number of stories that have been appearing in the field in the last year or so that depict humans and robots feeling out emotional relationships with each other, not that different from Resnick’s own Hugo-finalist from this year, “Article of Faith.” Steve Rasnic Tem delivers a nicely-done time-travel story in “The Day Before the Day Before,” Benjamin Crowell adds to a long line of Sentient Robot House stories (almost all of which suggest that it would be a very bad idea to live in one of those things!) with “Tear-Down,” and Jerry Oltion contributes a standard Little Magic Shop story in “Her Heart’s Desire.”
The October/November issue of F&SF is the magazine’s Sixtieth Anniversary Issue, and it’s appropriate to take a second to salute their accomplishments; for decades, they’ve been the most reliable place in the SF/fantasy short fiction market to find stories of literary quality, and the list of well-known stories they’ve published over that span of years is beyond impressive. October/November is a fat issue, and if there are no classics of the caliber of “Flowers for Algernon” or “All You Zombies” or A Canticle for Leibowitz here, it’s stuffed with plenty of good reading and good entertainment.
The best story in the issue is also one of the most cryptic, Geoff Ryman’s “Blocked,” the story of an Uplifted animal of some sort (just what sort is never really made clear) in a strange future society who is trying to take care of his adopted human family and make the decision as to whether or not to follow them Below to huge underground shelters in the face of some immanent invasion/disaster (the nature of which is also never really made clear)—something he really doesn’t want to do, instinctively disliking the idea of being locked away from the rest of nature, but is willing to do for the others. This could have been, and probably should have been, told as a straight science fiction story, but Ryman chooses to open with the statement that the whole story is a dream that the protagonist is having, giving everything a slipstreamish edge which I find a bit unnecessary, especially as the everything’s-a-dream frame is never referenced again before the end of th
e story.
Robert Reed is also unusually enigmatic in “Mermaid,” where not only is the real nature of the creature the lead character is sheltering in his house never made clear (although it’s obviously not what we usually think of as a mermaid), but his motivation for taking the extreme actions that he later takes are also unclear, and, perhaps because of that, a bit unconvincing. On the other hand, what’s happening in Elizabeth Hand’s elegiac and beautifully written winter fantasy “The Far Shore” is pretty obvious, as a mysterious but beautiful boy lures a tired old dancer across the water to a destination and a condition that very few readers are going to be too dense to recognize. Joe Haldeman’s “Never Blood Enough” also starts off straightforwardly enough, taking us to an alien world for a compelling mystery story that’s paced like it’s going to be two or three times longer than it is—but which then takes a sharp left turn and screeches to a halt within a page or so, as if the author suddenly got tired of writing it.
Robert Silverberg makes a welcome return to his evocative “Majipoor” milieu in “The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar,” in which a traveler makes an arduous journey to the far side of the planet only to find that he doesn’t have the courage to let his unbelief be really put to the test. Charles Oberndorf, popping up again after a long absence, does a good job with “Another Life,” a military SF story that intriguingly keeps the combat stuff way in the background while it concentrates on the identity and relationship problems experienced by a soldier who has been reincarnated after a battle he can’t remember, and who waits endlessly in a recuperation station for a lover from his previous life to cycle through. Albert E.Cowdrey invests “Bandits of the Trace” with his usual rough good humor and sly characterizations, but I found the Monster here somewhat unnecessary, and think I would rather have seen it done as a straight historical; Cowdrey is particularly good at historical detail and atmosphere, especially of periods most people know little about, and this story is loaded with both. Kate Wilhelm’s “Shadows on the Walls of the Cave” is a kinder, gentler Twilight Zone episode, one that ends with everything working out more-or-less okay rather than with a hidden nasty twist or sting in its tail. Lucius Shepard supplies his usual intense, vivid, supple, and emotionally charged prose in good measure in “Halloween Town,” but the story is not really Shepard at the top of his game, taking place in what seems to be an odd offshoot of our own reality, and caught uneasily between horror and slipstream.
While we’re talking about F&SF’s Sixtieth Anniversary, it seems like an appropriate time to mention The Very Best of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, a reprint anthology of stories drawn from the last six decades of the magazine’s existence, also published in honor of F&SF’s Sixtieth Anniversary, and featuring two dozen stories, many of them classics, by authors that include Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, Peter S. Beagle, and others. (A bit confusingly, both the anthology and the October/November issue feature the same cover, by David A. Hardy.)
Cosmos is an Australian science magazine that for a couple of years now has been running a science fiction story in most issues (they also post original fiction up on their website, www.cosmosmagazine.com), the fiction selected by SF writer Damien Broderick. The best story so far this year in Cosmos, and one of the best of the year overall, is “Under the Shouting Sky,” by new writer Karl Bunker, in the March issue. The initial set-up here is one familiar from any number of SF stories, going at least as far back as H.B. Fyfe’s “Moonwalk” in 1952: astronauts crash an exploration vehicle on an airless moon; out of radio contact, and with a limited supply of oxygen, not enough to enable them to walk back to their base, they must struggle to find a way to survive. Bunker adroitly puts this scenario through a sharp 180 degree turn, so that the story becomes not about their struggle to survive, but, quite movingly, about the realization that sometimes duty trumps survival, particularly when the duty is to humanity at large. It’s entirely appropriate that this story just won First Place in the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story Contest, and I think the judges made a fitting choice. Cosmos this year to date has also published worthwhile fiction by Julie Frost, Andy Heizler, Greg Meller, and others—but so far nothing else as good as the Bunker.
For a few years now, the science magazine Nature has been running a sequence of what we used to call “short-shorts” or “vignettes” (thanks to the internet, these are now almost universally referred to as “flash fiction”—a term I dislike, but one which, unfortunately, is probably here to stay) by different authors under the umbrella of a “Futures” section. Now the science magazine New Scientist has gotten into this game, for an issue anyway, hiring noted writer Kim Stanley Robinson to commission “flash fiction” from eight top-level British SF authors, asking them to give us a picture of what the world will be like one hundred years from now; the eight stories ran in the September 16th issue. The best of these, by a good margin, and the one which comes the closest to being an actual story with an actual—if implied—plot (some of the others are just short rants about the future, with little or no attempt made to justify them as fiction), is Ian McDonald’s “A Little School,” which has a wonderfully subversive idea at its heart—in fact, one much too good to waste on a piece of flash fiction, and I hope that he fleshes this one out into a more-realized story one of these days. The other stories, all of which have interesting ideas or philosophical/political nuggets in them, even if they don’t really stand very well on their own feet as self-contained pieces of fiction, are by Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, Nicola Griffith, Geoff Ryman, Paul McAuley, Justina Robson, and Ian Watson. It’s interesting to see how the authors cover the spectrum in their views of what the future will be like, from bleakly pessimistic (Ryman—who invokes a future that will be like “Darfur, Lagos, and Shanghai”—and Nicola Griffith, who describes a world constantly wrapped in acid rain that strips the flesh from your bones) to cautiously optimistic that there will still be a viable human future in spite of troubles and setbacks (McDonald, McAuley). (MacLeod, Robson, Baxter, and Watson work out pretty much neutral on this issue, although you could arbitrarily assign them to one camp or another on the basis of clues in the text; too little evidence is given to be sure, though.)
Tor.com continues to bring us first-rate fiction, one of their recent offerings being a homage/pastiche of Cordwainer Smith by Damien Broderick, called “The Ruined Queen of Harvest World.” This is a very entertaining, very flamboyant Space Opera, deliberately over the top. Broderick does a good job of keeping up a reasonably Smithian level of invention and exoticism (although, of course, he has the advantage of having Smith’s shoulders to stand on as a starting platform—although the story does not take place in Smith’s Instrumentality universe, but in a similar one of Broderick’s devising), and the story is shot through with nicely weird and sometimes richly strange characters and plot-twists and bits of business. I’m less convinced by it on a stylistic level. Sometimes Broderick does a reasonable job of affectionately imitating Cordwainer Smith’s unique voice, a very hard narrative voice to get right—sometimes he does not, as when Queen Gloriana shrills out “Ee-ewwww, gross!”, which immediately dumped me from the far-future back to the early 21st Century. Using “My Darling Clementine” as a poetic template might be going a bit too far over the top as well. (In a few places, he seems to be channeling someone else instead of Smith, probably Samuel R. Delany; when the unseen narrator who has been narrating the story unnamed up until then shyly identifies itself by saying “I’m Death,” the reference that immediately popped up for me was Delany’s “I’m Jewell,” another unintroduced narrator for most of the early going of the book Empire Star, not anything from Smith.) This story is enough fun and well-crafted enough that I almost wish he’d dialed the Smith pastiche down a bit, and let the story find a voice of its own—it’s at its most effective where it does. Also recently in Tor.com is a nostalgic Bradburyesque time-travel story with a last-minut
e paradox hidden in its tale, “First Flight,” by Mary Robinette Kowal.
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F&SF, 12/09
Asimov’s, 10-11/09
Subterranean, Summer
Tor.com
The Push, Dave Hutchinson (NewCon Press)
As Jonathan Strahan and others have mentioned, there’s clearly a new wave of interesting second-generation Sword & Sorcery work building in the field, as demonstrated by the existence of new(ish) markets dedicated to S&S such as print magazine Black Gate and ezine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, occasional anthologies such as last year’s Fast Ships, Black Sails and Strahan and Lou Anders’s upcoming Swords and Dark Magic, by the isolated S&S stories that pop up from time to time in both online and in print mediums, even in markets theoretically dedicated to science fiction, and by novels by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Steve Erikson, and others. One of the biggest influences on this work is obviously the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber (perhaps most clearly seen in Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories and in Michael Swanwick’s ostensible science fiction—really stealth S&S—stories about the adventures of Darger and Surplus), but there are also traces of Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, and even Ursula K. Le Guin there too, as well as influences from a wide spectrum of mainstream authors, as the new Sword & Sorcery stories are noticeably more literary than Conan the Barbarian. One of the strongest examples of this new work to date was Alex Irvine’s “Wizard’s Six,” from the June 2007 issue of F&SF, and the best story in the December 2009 F&SF, by a good margin, is another story by Irvine set in the same milieu, “Dragon’s Teeth.” The story of a shrewd, tough, weatherbeaten old veteran setting off reluctantly on a quest to kill a dragon that he knows is a fool’s errand that will probably cost him his life, the clear-eyed protagonist holds no illusions about life, the nature of society and his place within it, or even of love, giving it a resigned, fatalistic tang, strong, black, and bitter; at the same time, the characterization is deeper and more subtle here, especially in the relationship that grows between the soldier and a peasant woman he meets, than you’d usually expect to find in a Sword & Sorcery tale. I’m looking forward to more of these stories, as I think that Irvine is into a rich vein of material.
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