Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  This is a substantial anthology, good value for the money, seventeen stories from top authors, the bulk of them original (although one of the reprints, David Brin’s “Shoresteading,” takes up almost a fourth of the book!). The stories are almost all solidly entertaining, although, with one or two possible exceptions, I don’t think there are any award-winners here. The best story in the book, by a good margin, and also the one that gives the strongest impression of also having been centrally influenced by and in dialog with Pohl’s own work, is Cory Doctorow’s novella “Chicken Little,” which does an excellent job of updating and commenting on some of the themes that informed Pohl and Kornbluth’s classic novel The Space Merchants; Doctorow’s updated high-tech take on Pohl’s take on Jonathan Swift’s “struldbrugs,” creatures who have immortality but not eternal youth, continuing to age through their extended lives, is particularly ingenious; I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one show up on an award ballot next year. Also good is Joe Haldeman’s “Sleeping Dogs,” a deeply cynical study of ways in which future governments could manipulate the flow of information reaching their citizens even more effectively than they do today. Frank M. Robinson tells a grittier variant of James Tiptree, Jr’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” in a hard-eyed look at “The Errand Boy,” Vernor Vinge grapples with the Fermi Paradox in “A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee,” and Gene Wolfe takes us to an unusual setting for a compelling (although, as usual, somewhat enigmatic; I still don’t understand why there was a parade of elephants going into the spaceship in the first place) tale of what you may have to do to survive under extreme circumstances, in “King Rat.” Plus a “Stainless Steel Rat” story by Harry Harrison, and work by Ben Bova, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, and others. In addition to Afterwords about their relationships with Pohl contributed by each story author, the anthology also features Appreciations by Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, Robert Silverberg, Brian W. Aldiss, and others, plus poems by Neil Gaiman and David Lunde.

  The rest (presumably) of the Summer 2010 issue of the online magazine Subterranean, guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan, has gone up, and there’s some excellent stuff there, such as Damien Broderick’s “Under the Moons of Venus.” Broderick has done homages in the last couple of years to Cordwainer Smith, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick, and although those stories each had much to recommend them, I think that “Under the Moons of Venus,” Broderick’s homage to J.G. Ballard, is by a fair margin the best one yet. Here, Broderick has managed to internalize Ballard’s influence on him and make this into its own story with its own strengths and an organic voice and sensibility of its own, rather than just being a pastiche of Ballard. Ballard would not have written this—but it’s clear that Broderick wouldn’t have written it without reading Ballard. The story also does a good job of walking the tightrope between the view that the events of the story are “real” and that they’re all the delusions of a disturbed mind, even-handedly scattering clues in support of either proposition through the text.

  Also first-rate in the Summer issue is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Elegy for a Young Elk.” Rajamiemi is a writer who cranks the bit-rate up about as high as it can go and still remain comprehensible (although there will almost certainly be some who think that this doesn’t remain comprehensible), said by some to out-Charles Stross Charles Stross, and this slender story, set in a post-Apocalyptic future society where posthumans with godlike powers are at war, manages to jam enough high-concept into a few pages to fuel a 400-page novel. Another high-bit-rate, high-concept story, although not quite as jam-packed as the Rajaniemi, is new writer Gord Sellar’s “The Bodhisattvas,” in which an order of monks, care-takers of an Earth devastated by ecological disasters (such as the one taking place along the Gulf Coast as I type these words), debate the morality of risky experiments designed to create entire new universes. For a change of pace, Peter S. Beagle’s “Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story” takes us to an evocative fantasy world of sinister magic where implacable assassins chase their victims down no matter how far away they run or how long it takes—and your one chance of escape is to face them down on their own home ground. The one story here I didn’t warm to was new writer Daryl Gregory’s “What We Take When We Take What We Need,” an unsettling rural horror story that was a bit too icky for my taste—although really, there’s nothing bad in this issue, and readers who like horror better than I do will no doubt respond positively to Gregory’s piece, which is very well-executed.

  Considering that the issue also features Maureen McHugh’s “The Naturalist” and Tim Holt’s “Brownian Emotion,” reviewed here last month, I’d have to say that the Summer issue of Subterranean is the strongest single issue of any magazine, print or electronic, that I’ve seen so far this year.

  The ubiquitous Jonathan Strahan, in collaboration with co-editor Marianne S. Jablon, also brings us Wings of Fire, a mixed original and reprint (mostly) fantasy anthology of stories about dragons. The two original stories, “Sobek,” by Holly Black and “The Miracle Aquilina,” by Margo Lanagan, are good, but the real strength of the anthology lies in its reprints, which include such classics as “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Rule of Names,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Draco, Draco,” by Tanith Lee, “King Dragon,” by Michael Swanwick, “Paper Dragons,” by James P. Blaylock, and nineteen other stories by the likes of George R.R. Martin, Roger Zelazny, Elizabeth Bear, Anne McCaffrey, Naomi Novik, and others—all of which makes this a strong anthology, and well worth the money.

  Also on the shelves is Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, edited by Mike Allen, a mixed slipstream/fantasy/science fiction anthology of original stories. The stories here are elegantly written, as usual, but, somewhat disappointingly for me, the ratio of SF to slipstream/fantasy continues to slip; the original Clockwork Phoenix was divided almost equally between SF and the other genres, but, as was also true of Clockwork Phoenix 2, there’s not much science fiction here anymore, and not even really that much fantasy, slipstream having pretty much taken over. The three SF stories include John C. Wright’s “Murder in Metachronopolis,” a hugely complex time-paradox tale, the best SF story in the book, a stealth far-future story, John Grant’s “Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight,” and Cat Rambo’s “Surrogates,” a satirical piece about the mores of the future that reminds me a bit of the “Urban Monad” stories that Robert Silverberg used to write in the ‘70s. The best of the fantasy stories are “Hell Friend,” by Gemma Files, and “Braiding the Ghosts,” by C.S. E. Cooney. The strongest story in the anthology overall is Gregory Frost’s “Lucyna’s Gaze,” a disquieting story of future genocide that dances on the razor-edge between science fiction and fantasy.

  Recent stories posted on Tor.com include a surreal joke story by Terry Bisson, “The Cockroach Hat,” a literally Post-Apocalyptic metaphysical fantasy by Richard Parks, “Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure,” a beautifully crafted and sensitively characterized borderline mainstream story about a young boy’s peculiar obsession, “The Courtship of the Queen,” by Bruce McAllister, and an ingenious Alternate World War II piece, “What Doctor Gottlieb Saw,” by Ian Tregillis. The best of these is probably the Tregillis, which takes place in a facility that suggests what Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children would be like if it was run by brutal Nazis who got the X-Men to refine their abilities by torturing them, and killing them if they ddn’t develop at sufficient speed. Tregillis somehow manages to generate suspense about the looming fate of his at least somewhat-reluctant Mengele, Dr. Gottlieb, who is in danger of being shot for failure at any moment throughout the story, even though Gottlieb, if looked at closely, isn’t really a very sympathetic character and we probably shouldn’t care whether he gets a bullet in the back of the head or not. The most interesting character here, though, and one whose presence elevates the story as a whole, is the sinister girl-child Gretel, one of the “talented” prisoners, who turns out
to be far more intelligent than anyone else involved, and at least as dangerous and scary as the Nazis. This story apparently shares the same background and at least some of the same characters with Tregillis’s first novel, Bitter Seeds, so if you like one, you might like the other.

  23

  Strange Horizons

  Fantasy Magazine

  F&SF, 7/8.

  Mammoths of the Great Plains, Eleanor Arnason. (PM Press, 978-1-60486-075-7, $12.00, 145 pages). Cover art by John Yates.

  The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 3: The Saturn Game, Poul Anderson. (NESFA Press, 13: 978-1-886778-89-4, $29.00, 511 pages). Cover art by Bob Eggleton.

  Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, Peter S. Beagle. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-291-7, $40.00, 454 pages). Cover art by Michael William Kaluta.

  The Secret History of Fantasy, Peter S. Beagle, ed. (Tachyon Publications,978-1-892391-99-5, $15.95, 432 pages).

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, Walter Jon Williams. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-177-5, $24.95, 306 pages). Cover art by Andrew Kim.

  The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-184-3, $27.95, 387 pages). Cover art by Eugene Wang.

  New(ish) writer Lavie Tidhar is red-hot these days, and has perhaps the best stories of the year in two of the field’s major online venues. He has the best story to appear so far this year in Strange Horizons, somewhat atypically for this market an SF story, “The Night Train,” from the June 14th issue, a violent and vivid post-cyberpunk story that reads like a mix of Lucius Shepard and early Greg Egan, with perhaps a dash of Bruce Sterling thrown in. Tidhar has an even-better story in Fantasy Magazine, again SF in spite of the magazine’s title, and again perhaps the best story they’ve published this year, “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” in the May 17th issue—this is a quieter, more lyrical, deeply compassionate story, reminiscent perhaps of some of Ian McDonald’s Future India stories in its vision of how high-tech gadgets interact with ancient cultures and traditions, each modifying the other. Tidhar has been producing good work for several years now, mostly for online magazines and small-press anthologies, but this stuff is a quantum jump better than anything he’s done before.

  Other good stories in Strange Horizons so far this year include two enjoyable metafiction pieces, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” by Theodora Goss, from the January 18th through January 25th issues and “Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions,” by Saladin Ahmed, from the February 15th issue; the borderline SF/fabulations “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” by Vandana Singh, in the March 29th issue and “The Red Bride,” by Samantha Henderson, in the May 7th issue; a clever story on the borderline between mainstream and fantasy, depending on how you interpret events, “We Heart Vampires!!!,” by Meghan McCarron, in the May 3rd through May 10th issues; a steampunk tale, “Small Burdens,” by Paul M. Berger, in the March 11th issue; slipstreamish superhero stories, “Merrythoughts,” by Bill Kte’pi, in the March 3rd issue and “The Blue Wonder,” by Chris Kammerud, in the January 11th issue; and more traditional fantasies such as “Worlds Apart,” by Marlaina Gray, in the May 17th issue, “Waiting,” by Eilis O’Neal, from the May 31st issue, and “The Duke of Vertumn’s Fingerling,” by Elizabeth Carroll, from the April 5th issue.

  Fantasy Magazine, appropriately enough, tends to run more traditional fantasy and less slipstream than Strange Horizons, and there’s been other good stories there this year such as “Enter the Dragon,” by Sarah Monette, from the January 25th issue; “In the Emperor’s Gardens,” by Jay Lake and Shannon Page, from the March 15th issue; “The Sometimes Child,” by Caroline Yoachim, from the May 3rd issue; “Wishes and Feathers,” by Patricia Russo, from the May 18th issue; “Sterogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory,” by Paul M. Berger, from the June 21st issue; “The Seal of Sulaymaan,” by Tracy Canfield, in the July 12th issue, and “The Stable Master’s Tale,” by Rachel Swirsky, in the July 5th issue. There was also another good SF story, “Abandonware,” by An Owomoyela, in the June 28th issue.

  The best story in the July/August F&SF, by a good margin, is Ian R. MacLeod’s “Recrossing the Styx,” yet another good zombie story (will wonders never cease?), although this time there’s a strong scientific rationale for the zombieism, in a future where the rich are making ever-greater and more extreme attempts to avoid their own mortality—a depressingly convincing scenario in spite of the fact that their efforts result in only partial success at best. Grim and ultimately rather sad, the story concerns the efforts of a social climber to claw and scramble his way into the privileged class, no matter what he has to do. Much as I hate to admit it, the other really good story in July/August is also a zombie story, a funny one this time, with traditional supernatural zombies, Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Mister Sweetpants and the Living Dead”—a mixture of zombies with the comic lowlife crime tale that reads much like a zombie story might if Carl Hiaasen had taken a crack at one.

  Most of the rest of the stories in the issue are weak to one degree or another. Sean McMullen’s “The Precedent” is a Galaxy-style social satire about a future controlled by environmental extremists bent on revenge for even the most trivial of ecological offenses, like buying their kid a battery-powered Buzz Lightyear toy. John Langan’s “The Revel” is an interesting but ultimately over-elaborate werewolf story. Ken Atabef’s “The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha” tries for a twist ending that it can’t quite pull off. The fantastic element in Michael Alexander’s “Advances in Modern Chemotherapy” is a bit slight, but the story does a convincing job of effectively conveying what the life of a terminal cancer patient on chemotherapy might be like.

  Eleanor Arnason is a grossly underappreciated author who has more or less been frozen out of the book market since the early ‘90s, so it’s good to see her back, even if it’s with a chapbook from a small press rather than a trade book. The chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, features the eponymous novella, “Mammoths of the Great Plains,” a sequence of embedded narratives covering the lives of three generations of Native American women, told by a grandmother to her grandchild on a hot summer’s day, and relayed to us across time by that child grown up. Set in an Alternate History not dissimilar to our own timeline except that mammoths survived in the American West into historical times before finally being wiped out by white hunters, the main plotline deals with efforts across several generations to first preserve the mammoths and then bring them back from extinction after the last one has been killed; very well-crafted, as is usually the case with Arnason, it’s contemplative and autumnal in tone, although there is a steely core of anger at the treatment of the Indians and of the continuing destruction of the environment that we can see in progress around us as I write these words in the shadow of the Gulf oil-spill disaster. The chapbook also contains an essay by Arnason, “Writing Science Fiction During World War Three,” an interview with her, “At the Edge of the Future,” and a bibliography.

  2009 was a good year for single-author collections, and so far 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year as well. Poul Anderson was one of the giants of the field, unparalleled in his ability to deliver intelligent, colorful, science-based, center-core adventure SF, and the year sees the latest volume in a projected series designed to gather together all of Anderson’s short fiction, The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 3: The Saturn Game. This volume contains eighteen stories and a number of short poems, ranging in publication date from all the way back in 1953 to 1981. Readers are most likely to be familiar with the award-winners here, such as “The Saturn Game” and “No Truce with Kings,” although my favorite of the book is “The Only Game in Town,” one of the best of Anderson’s famous Time Patrol stories, and the volume also contains excellent work such as “Supernova,” “Sunjammer,” and “Hiding Place.”

  Another master, this time of fantasy, Peter S. Beagle’s career, which started in the early ‘60s, hasn’t quite been as long as Anderson’s yet
, but he’s in his seventies and still going strong; in fact, in some ways, he’s more prolific than ever, particularly at shorter lengths—which fact is demonstrated in Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, where most of the stories were written in the last twenty years…many of them in the last five. The book includes early stories that have become recognized staples of modern fantasy, such as “Come Lady Death” and “Lila the Werewolf,” although the best-known story here is probably the Hugo and Nebula-winning “Two Hearts,” a sequel to the classic fantasy novel The Last Unicorn. There’s lots of other strong work on hand, though, including stories set in the evocative milieu of Beagle’s 1993 novel The Innkeeper’s Song such as “The Last Song of Sirit Byar” and the powerful novella “Giant Bones.” My favorite stuff here, though, are the recent stories where the fantastic mixes with a contemporary, often Jewish, milieu that is quite probably autobiographical to one extent or another—“Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel,” “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,” “We Never Talk About My Brother,” and, especially, “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” which may be the best story here. Beagle comes across in these stories like an updated Isaac Bashevis Singer, or perhaps, even more so, a less flamboyant and discursive Avram Davidson—high praise, in my book. Beagle is also on hand as the editor of the reprint anthology The Secret History of Fantasy. This is a good collection, but although there’s a dragon on the cover, it leans heavily toward the slipstream end of the fantasy spectrum, and it would have been nice to see some other types of fantasy as well, some more Secondary World stuff, or perhaps even some sword & sorcery. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of good work here. My favorites are Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood,” Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” Maureen McHugh’s “Ancestor Money,” T.C. Boyle’s “We Are Norsemen,” and Stephen King’s “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” but there’s also good stories by Kij Johnson, Patricia A. McKillip, Michael Swanwick, Neil Gaiman, Beagle himself, and others. The anthology also contains two major critical essays about fantasy, David Hartwell’s “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists.”