I usually enjoy Chris Roberson’s Alternate History “Celestial Empire” stories, set in a world that’s been ruled by China for thousands of years, but I didn’t warm to his “Wonder House” in the January issue, a rather pointless look at how an equivalent to Superman comics are created in an alternate Chinese-dominated Israel—which raises the question, one probably better not raised at all in this kind of Alternate History story, of how anything even remotely recognizable as even an alternate version of Israel could possibly exist in a world where a Chinese empire had settled North America before the Europeans and all subsequent world history had come out completely different than in the timeline we know. It also raises the unfortunate specter of an endless series of stories in which we discover the origins of alternate-world versions of Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Tarzan, James Bond, Mickey Mouse, and other pop-culture icons. Alternate History ought to do more than that, I think, and Roberson usually does an excellent job of delivering stories that do. The only interesting aspect here is the creation of alternate Israeli superheroes and dime-novel characters, something Lavie Tidhar handles more colorfully in his story “Funny Pages” from Interzone 225.
There’s a lot more Alternate History, some of it rather steampunkish, in the February Asimov’s, which is a bit weaker overall than January. The big story in February is Stephen Baxter’s novella “The Ice Line,” a sequel to Baxter’s “The Ice War” from the September 2009 Asimov’s, depicting a Victorian England that is being invaded by monstrous ice creatures—called “Phoebeans” by the beleaguered Victorians—from the outer reaches of the solar system. Considering these two novellas and other stories Baxter has done with the same background, such as “The Phobean Egg” from Postscripts 20/21, it isn’t a particularly brilliant deduction to surmise that an “Ice War” novel is in the process of being assembled piecemeal here, and will appear in book form somewhere down the line. “The Ice Line” takes place some decades after the initial invasion described in “The Ice War,” when human scientists have had time to experiment on captured Phobeans, and figure out how to use them as a propulsive system—and as weapons. This is still a highly entertaining story, although I miss the headlong narrative drive of the original story, which was essentially one long chase sequence (“The Ice Line” is actually rather slow in the opening section, although it does pick up momentum later on), and I also miss the snarky, impudent voice of the roguish narrator of the original story, a self-involved scoundrel who gets drawn into the battle against the Phobeans totally against his will, a more interesting character than the more earnest and bland narrator of the current piece, whose decision to join a suicide mission never seemed convincingly motivated to me.
Also excellent in February is an evocative ghost story by Bruce McAllister, “The Woman Who Waited Forever,” set in the well-described and convincing milieu of military brats in postwar Italy. Damien Broderick’s “Dead Air,” a Philip K. Dick pastiche, joining pastiches of Cordwainer Smith and Roger Zelazny that Broderick did last year, is also good, full of Dickian conceptualization and weird throwaway bits of business, although it doesn’t get Dick’s tone of voice quite right, and lacks the paranoid narrative drive and hybrid pulp vigor of the best of Dick’s work; it does deliver a suitably unsettling final image, though.
Below this point, the stories in February are weaker. New writer Caroline M. Yoachim delivers a grotesque African-tinged story, “Stone Wall Truth,” whose unexplained fantastic elements seem to make it fantasy, although an unconvincing argument could be made for reading it as science fiction instead. New writer Aliette de Bodard gives us another story set in an Alternate World long dominated by the Chinese, similar to Roberson’s “Celestial Empire” milieu; “The Wind-Blown Man” starts off interesting but gradually loses steam, perhaps because the protagonist doesn’t really have any choices to make that seriously affect the outcome of the story, and little at risk, and remains pretty much a passive observer who ends up where she was at the beginning. New writer David Erik Nelson’s “The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond” is a muddle that tries to pull in too many directions at once.
The big story in the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is Paul Park’s elegantly written, and somewhat enigmatic, “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV),” an intricate structure of nesting narratives told by an Unreliable Narrator who seems meant to be the author himself in an impoverished near-future world, and which ultimately, as far as I can tell (which may not be too far, since this is Park at his trickiest), seems to be about selected people holding the line in dream—and perhaps after death—against sinister creatures from the Other Side. In spite of that description, which makes it sound solidly Lovecraftian, this is much more a slipstream story than a genre fantasy, one with science fiction elements at that, as well as being a memoir and a family history, more slipstreamish than I usually like, but so well-crafted that it’s hard not to admire the skill with which Park has fit the many pieces of this puzzle together to form a mosaic that may be more than the sum of its parts. The thing it reminds me the most closely of in tone is Gene Wolfe’s similarly tricky novel Peace.
Also excellent in January/February is Charles Oberndorf’s wryly titled “Writers of the Future,” which is about just that—writers’s critique groups in a future society where the remnants of humanity live in scattered space habitats under the control and at the sufferance of godlike AIs, one of the only actual SF stories in the issue, and a good one. This is Oberndorf’s second recent story after a silence of some years—the other was last year’s similarly first-rate “Another Life”—and it’s good to see him back and operating on such a high level. Another writer returning after a long absence, Dean Whitlock, contributes “Nanosferatu,” a sly Galaxy-style satire about the pitfalls and unexpected advantages of medical nanotechnology that goes on a little too long.
The rest of the stories in the issue are slipstream or fantasy. Robert Reed’s “The Long Retreat” is more slipstreamish than usual for him, a realistically described story set in an impossible world; Steve Popkes’s “The Secret Lives of Fairy Tales” is a funny demythologizing satire of, naturally, fairy tales; John Langan’s “City of the Dog” is a grim Lovecraftian tale set in the modern world; and Kate Wilhelm’s “The Late Night Train” a bittersweet fantasy about a dysfunctional family that reminds me of the late Manly Wade Wellman’s classic “The Little Black Train.”
Up online on the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean is a compelling and unusual fantasy by Ian R. MacLeod, “Second Journey of the Magus,” about a world where Jesus succumbs to the temptations of Satan and accepts dominion over all the world, with unsettling results. The January 2010 Clarkesworld has a strong story by Peter Watts, “The Things,” which retells the story of John W. Campbell’s classic story “Who Goes There?”—twice filmed as The Thing from Another World and The Thing—from the perspective of the alien “monster” against whom the humans are struggling for survival in an isolated winter encampment in Antarctica. Watts does an excellent job of showing a totally alien way of looking at life, turning our understanding of the alien’s motivations for doing what he does on its head. The only potential weak spot is that that the story seems to be tied specifically to John Carpenter’s 1982 film version; those who have instead seen Christian Nyby’s 1951 version—which scared the piss out of me as a little kid—may be confused. The first story up on Tor.com this year is “Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder,” by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake. Some nice Dickian touches here, like the dapper robot psychiatrist who sports three-fingered white clown gloves and a “plastic grin,” and the story basically is a Phil Dick reality-bending, what-is-real story—but a kinder, gentler one, where the reality-bending drug basically heals the protagonist’s psychological wounds (and leaves a hot willing babe in the formerly empty bed in the next room as a bonus), rather than tearing open the fabric of reality and leaving him plummeting endlessly down into a bottomless well of paranoi
d uncertainty and fear.
18
Subterranean, Winter 2010
The Book of Dreams, Nick Gevers, ed. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-284-9, 117 pages).
Clarkesworld, 2/10
Tor.com
Shine: An Anthology of Near-Future Optimistic Science Fiction, Jeste de Vries, ed. (Solaris, 978-1-906735-66-1, 453 pages).
“The Bohemian Astrobleme,” a novella up on the Winter 2010 issue of online magazine Subterranean, is, alas, one of the last stories we’re going to see from the late Kage Baker, who died only a few weeks ago as I’m typing these words. It’s part of a new sequence of stories she’d started recently, dealing with the adventures of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, the Victorian predecessor of her most-famous fictional creation, the time-travelling Company, and a partial sequel to last year’s “The Women of Neil Gwynne’s,” a novella that’s up on the 2010 Final Nebula Ballot. Like almost all of Baker’s work, it’s a great deal of fun; she was a natural storyteller, and one thing you could count on with a Kage Baker story, no matter what it was about, was that she was going to tell you an engrossing story, one that grabbed you and involved you from the very first page, and this one is no exception. The most intriguing character in “The Bohemian Astrobleme,” although she plays a supporting role here rather than being the main character, is Lady Beatrice, the high-class prostitute and hyper-efficient agent who was the protagonist of “The Women of Neil Gwynne’s,” and I strongly suspect that there would have been more stories about Lady Beatrice, perhaps a book’s worth of them, if Baker had survived to write them. Like most Company stories, the general mood of “The Bohemian Astrobleme” is easy-going, even affable, a Ruritanian travelog, but Company agents are capable of acting with surprisingly cold-blooded ruthlessness when it becomes necessary to do so, and this novella too has a glint of steel buried beneath its near-pastoral surface.
Also up recently on the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean are K.J. Bishop’s “The Heart of a Mouse,” a surreal piece which hints at some bizarre transformational plague without ever actually explaining it, but which does deliver a surface story full of suspense, escapes, and rather bloody violence, and an ingenious slipstream story by Michael Bishop, “The Library of Babble.”
As if to drive home just how much we’ve lost with her death, Kage Baker has the best story, “Rex Nemorensis,” in The Book of Dreams, a collection of five novellas edited by Nick Gevers. The fantastic element in Baker’s story is a bit slender, but the voice is wonderful, supple and colloquial, able to handle lyrical and even mystical passages equally as well as gritty straightforward narrative, and she does an impressive job of making a few acres of swamp and scrubland seem like a fully realized fantasy world. All of the novellas in The Book of Dreams are fantasy or slipstream, no science fiction here, and although Baker’s story impressed me the most, Lucius Shepard delivers a strange mixture of horror and Hollywood satire in “Dreamburgers at the Mouth of Hell,” and Robert Silverberg contributes a long Twilight Zoneish vision of a man participating a little more fully in his dreams than he’s really comfortable with, “The Prisoner”; there are also elegant and intricate slipstream pieces by Jay Lake and Jeffery Ford.
It’s interesting that the genre went for years without a novella anthology, and now, within the last six months or so, we’ve had three of them (X6 and Panverse One last year, The Book of Dreams this year).
The online magazine Clarkesworld has been having a good year so far, with a strong issue last month, and another one this month. The February 2010 Clarkesworld features Jay Lake’s “Torquing Vacuum,” a vivid SF piece, set on a space station busy with the comings and goings of interstellar traffic, in which a lowly drive tech inadvertently gets involved in the internal affairs of the richest and most powerful elements of his society—putting his career and even his life at risk. February also contains Lavie Tidhar’s “The Language of the Whirlwind,” an intense and surreal vision of a nightmarish future Tel Aviv after an unexplained and perhaps unexplainable Apocalypse, a harsh story, full of disturbing images.
Jay Lake is also up on Tor.com with a story in collaboration with Ken Scholes, “The Starship Mechanic,” an inventive but slightly tongue-in-cheek vision of a strange alien visitor and an even stranger alien “invasion” that follows, full of sly Inside Jokes not quite intrusive enough to spoil the story. Harry Turtledove returns to Tor.com with a grim story, with no discernable trace of humor, of an alien invasion of quite a different sort, in “Vilcambamba”; since it’s clearly intended to be symbolic of the dire consequences of the contact between Native American societies and the technologically superior Europeans, which, after all, didn’t turn out very well for the native tribes, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that this is as relentlessly grim and uncompromisingly depressing as it is, but the odds are stacked so heavily against the Earthmen in their struggle with the ruthless godlike aliens, with never a hint that there might be the slightest chance for them to prevail, that it doesn’t have much in the way of tension or suspense as a result.
There’s been some discussion in the field recently, including right here in this column, about how nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future somehow became the default setting in SF during the ‘90s and (especially) the Oughts, and how SF writers at least occasionally ought to devote some ingenuity and energy into coming up with viable human futures that people would actually want to live in, rather than taking the easy way out and portraying yet another desolate and decaying dystopia where all hope has been lost and the future promises nothing but more of the same or worse. The tricky part, of course, is to write “optimistic” SF without becoming superficial, bland, and sappy, to write about viable human futures that are complex enough to still have some darkness and difficulty in them. Utopias are notoriously hard to make dramatically interesting. After all, there’s a reason why the headlines in our newspapers or on CNN don’t say Nothing happened today! there were no plane crashes, no murders, and everybody’s getting along fine! or The Brooklyn bridge didn’t crash into the river again today! Drama to a large extent feeds on things going wrong, not right. Balancing these elements, trying to write believable “optimistic” SF in a near-future world that still wrestles with all the problems we have today (and perhaps even suggests some solutions to the problems), and still keeps the stories dramatic and interesting, is not an easy task.
Jeste de Vries takes a crack at it with his anthology Shine: An Anthology of Near-Future Optimistic Science Fiction, and although not all the stories work, a fair number of them do a credible job of successfully balancing drama and optimism without sacrificing cultural complexity. The stories here that probably do the best job with this complex balancing act are “The Solnet Ascendancy,” by Lavie Tidhar, “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic),” by Gord Sellar, and “The Earth of Yunhe,” by Eric Gregory. The state of society in general gets grimmer and grimmer throughout “Overhead,” by Jason Stoddard, but the main characters remain optimistic and determined to succeed in the face of daunting odds; the story doesn’t tell you whether they succeed and survive or not, but it certainly seems that they’re going to give it their strongest try, without letting setbacks and disappointments discourage them, which seems to qualify the story as “optimistic.” Similarly, circumstances are pretty grim, and get grimmer, throughout Kay Kenyon’s “Castoff World,” but the protagonist maintains a childlike innocence and optimism no matter how bad things get, which is endearing. Alastair Reynolds’s “At Budokan” seems a bit peripheral to the main thrust of the anthology, but since it’s about how biotechnology can be used to produce Art, I suppose it would qualify as upbeat too. The anthology also contains good work by Jacques Barcia, Ken Edgett, Madeline Ashby, and others.
This idea of “optimistic SF” has some points of similarity with the “Mundane SF” movement that surfaced a few years back, both eschewing superscientific gadgets and Space Opera tropes, focused on the near future rather than on the far future, although Mun
dane SF has so far tended to be darker, more concerned with problems than solutions. In a way, then, Shine could be considered to be a Mundane anthology, and so it’s interesting to compare it to last year’s Mundane SF anthology When It Changed, Science into Fiction: An Anthology, edited by Geoff Ryman, a comparison that leads me to wonder if the difference between the two movements is primarily one of mood. Perhaps Optimistic SF is just more upbeat Mundane SF?
March is another strong issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, with several good stories. The best of the lot—although nothing here is really bad—may be Alexander Jablokov’s “Blind Cat Dance,” set in a future society that has developed a novel way of integrating the human and natural worlds, making the animals unable to perceive the human society around them, so that they think they’re in the middle of a forest when actually they’re in the middle of a crowded café; the irony here, of course, is that the protagonist, one of the technicians programming the animals’s selective blindness is herself blind to the ways that she’s being controlled and manipulated. New writer William Preston spins an entertaining pulp homage with unexpectedly somber and serious undertones in “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” although I wonder how many readers below a certain age will have any idea which pulp character, once famous, now obscure, is being drawn upon here for inspiration? New writer Derek Zumsteg delivers a clever look at the roots of rebellion, “Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising”; the backstory here is perhaps a bit superficially sketched in, but is enough to carry a fairly short story.
Sense of Wonder Page 13