Two recent collections from younger masters are The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, by Walter Jon Williams, and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Williams is one of today’s most consistently ingenious and inventive SF writers; the best known story here is probably, “The Green Leopard Plague,” Williams’s Nebula-winning novella about genetic engineering as a tool for social change, but the book also features good stuff, mostly set in intricately worked-out posthuman futures, such as “Incarnation Day,” “Lethe,” “Send Them Flowers,” and “Daddy’s World,” one of the most unsettling Virtual Reality stories ever written. Kim Stanley Robinson writes very little if any short fiction these days, but once he was quite adroit at it, and, appropriately enough, most of his best stories are to be found in The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. Probably his best-known stories here are his award-winners, “Black Air” and “The Blind Geometer,” and his controversial Alternate History piece, “The Lucky Strike,” but my favorites are the aptly-named and moving “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations,” and the little-known “Glacier,” in which an Ice Age comes to a future Boston. A humorous side to the usually somber and serious-minded Robinson is to be found in “Escape from Kathmandu,” in which mountain trekkers in Nepal get involved with Yetis.
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F&SF, 9-10/10.
Asimov’s, 8/10.
Asimov’s, 9/10
Interzone 228.
The September/October F&SF makes up into a somewhat weak “All-Star Anniversary Issue,” although there’s some enjoyable stuff. Several of the stories explore the borders of Bradbury Territory, both light and dark, and a number of the stories here feature child protagonists. The most lyrical story here, and perhaps the best, is Fred Chappell’s “Uncle Moon in Raintree Hills,” in which a young girl and her brother wage a secret war of magic against their sinister Uncle Hobart, who they call “Uncle Moon” (unless everything is a product of the girl’s overactive and somewhat fevered imagination, a possibility always left open). Richard Matheson’s “The Window of Time” is also good, a nostalgic and autumnal fantasy about an old man exploring the landscape of his childhood. Ken Liu’s “The Literomancer” is nicely done, with sharply-drawn characters and an interesting background, but the fantastic element is very thin, and for the most part the story might as well be a well-handled mainstream story about a young American girl struggling to adjust to a foreign culture and making some literally fatal mistakes; even considered as a mainstream story, though, it would work better without quite so many historical infodumps. The fantastic element is even thinner, almost subliminal, in fact, in Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario’s well-crafted baseball-nostalgia story “Blind Spot,” about a man working out his relationship with his father after the father’s death through their shared memories of baseball; definitely in Bradbury Territory here. As we are in new writer Alexandra Duncan’s “The Door in the Earth,” perhaps where the darker edge of the October Country Bradbury shares a border with Manly Wade Wellman, a creepy Appalachian fantasy (again with child protagonists)—although the question of why the sinisterly mumbling Things Behind the Door didn’t manifest themselves and pounce long before the children showed up insists on raising itself, and, once raised, is hard to ignore. Richard Chwedyk contributes “Orfy,” another in a long sequence of stories about the abandoned organic toys called “saurs,” which read kind of like Toy Story done with sentient tiny dinosaurs, and which I’m afraid have always been too sentimental and sticky-sweet for my taste.
Nice changes of pace are provided by James L. Cambias’s briskly told Egyptian fantasy “How Seosiris Lost the Favor of the King,” featuring a duel of magic and wits between Ancient Egypt’s most famous sorcerer and an ambitious foreign magician, and by Michael Swanwick’s clever “Steadfast Castle,” the only real SF story in the issue, an ingenious although essentially minor addition to the long roster of SF stories about Sentient Robot Houses (living in one almost always turns out to be a bad idea!). Terry Bisson and David Gerrold contribute lightweight humorous pieces, “About It” and “F&SF Mailbag,” respectively.
The September issue of Asimov’s is a strong one, the twin themes of which seem to be floating cloud-cities and espionage. The kingpiece here is another major novella in a year that has seen a number of them, “The Sultan of the Clouds,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, which takes us to a convincingly worked-out and visualized high-tech floating cloud city adrift in the atmosphere of Venus, for a fast-paced tale of dynastic intrigue and fomenting rebellion, revolving around a Terran scientist, a woman of great genius, who is quite literally being courted by the superrich heir to an aristocratic Venusian family; if the story has a flaw, it’s that the Earth woman, whose story this by rights ought to be, is mostly kept at a distance and plays no really significant part in solving the story’s major problems, that role falling to her rather feckless (but in the end resourceful) male companion, who narrates the story center stage while we only see occasional glimpses of her—still quite an entertaining read, though, a “page-turner,” as they used to say, and unquestionably core science fiction. Also excellent is new writer Benjamin Crowell’s “Wheat Rust,” which takes us to an immense and elderly space colony (another floating city, of sorts) whose inhabitants have slid down the slope a bit from the technological heights they once occupied into, if not quite barbarism, a simpler sort of society that has forgotten at least some of its own past glories; when outsiders still possessed of some of that half-forgotten high-tech intrude into the colony, intricate webs of espionage and intrigue are spun, quite entertainingly (although the ending seems a bit abrupt). New writer Nancy Fulda also tells a fast and violent tale of intrigue and espionage in “Backlash,” as discorporate time-travelers inhabit their younger selves in order to try to prevent a horrific act of terrorism. Intrigue of a more personal but no less consequential sort informs Mary Robinette Kowal’s “For Want of a Nail,” in which a young woman aboard a generation ship newly in charge of wrangling an AI that stores all of her family’s history faces a sticky ethical/moral dilemma. And floating cloud-cities pop up again in a different key in Eugene Mirabelli’s romantic, nostalgic fantasy “The Palace in the Clouds.”
The best, or at least the cleverest, story in the somewhat weaker August Asimov’s is probably Alexander Jablokov’s “Warning Label,” which, if not quite a sequel, at least seems to be set in the same future society as Jablokov’s “Blind Cat Dance,” from the March Asimov’s, where the real world is intricately overlaid with Virtual Reality surrounds, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. This is more satirical and not as substantial or emotionally effective as the earlier story, although still highly inventive, one of several stories we’ve seen recently which depict an intensely wired and interconnected future, where things like Facebook and Twitter have evolved to the next level and more or less swallowed society, and everybody is sharing all possible information about everything with everybody all the time, commenting on the smallest details of each other’s lives, and every product is plastered with virtual tags warning of even the remotest of hazards associated with using it. This seems like a future that’s very likely to actually come to pass, but I must say that none of the stories about it to date have succeeded in making it seem like an attractive place to live to me; I’m sure I would find it smotheringly claustrophobic and intensely annoying—a feeling that I think Jablokov probably shares to one degree or another, given the satiric edge here, although no doubt he’d handle living there a lot better than would an obsolete old dinosaur like me.
Ian Creasey’s “Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love”—again, not quite a sequel to his “Erosion” from last year’s October/November issue, but set in the same future—shows the sad aftermath of the intensively networked society from the perspective of a diminished but sterner and tougher, no-frills Post-Collapse world that looks back scornfully on the time when “the old-timers preserved every tiny moment of their lives, like electric
slugs secreting a data-trail everywhere they slithered…a billion bloggers fiddling while the world burned,” leaving their descendants buried under a useless legacy of millions of trivial and banal blog entries and Twitter posts. This isn’t as emotionally powerful as “Erosion,” but does conjure up an effective sense of regret for all that has been lost, both the silly and the profound. New writer Gregory Norman Bossert, who made his debut with “The Union of Soil and Sky” in the April/May issue, returns with another strong tale, “Slow Boat,” a traditionally satisfying problem story where a woman wakes from cold sleep aboard a deserted spaceship and must figure out how she got there, where the ship is going, and why she was shanghaied in the first place—as well as some clever ways to turn the tables on those responsible for her plight.
August also contains a well-crafted straight historical piece by J.M. Sidorova, “The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies,” two stories about time-travel (or time-viewing, anyway) whose logical inconsistencies became too large for me to swallow, and a grim dystopia by Nick Wolven, “On the Horizon.”
The best story in the somewhat weak Interzone 228 is Jason Sanford’s “Plague Birds,” set in a future where genetic tampering has produced werewolves, causing civilization to collapse; humanity is under the stewardship of the surviving AIs, who are attempting to breed them back to pure human stock, and who use “plague birds,” people capable of causing killing plagues by releasing the nanomechanisms that infect their blood, to enforce their rules. This isn’t Sanford’s strongest story, reading a bit like a cross between SF and paranormal romance, and I don’t think too many readers will be surprised by the revelation of what ultimately happens when an ailing plague bird comes to a young woman’s remote village, but it’s good solid entertainment, nevertheless. Another Post-Apocalyptic society is featured in Jon Ingold’s Ursula Le Guinish “Over Water,” in which a dramatic rise in sea-level has splintered our world into dozens of separate islands, each with a small village of isolated and often warlike survivors. David D. Levine pretty much recycles A Night at the Museum in “A Passion for Art,” a lightweight story that starts out to be SF but ends up as unrationalized fantasy instead. “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes, set on a spaceship being sent on what may be a suicide mission to interact with some enigmatic aliens, has some vivid stuff in it, but leaves the rationalization for the backstory—just what do the aliens think they’re playing at? To say nothing of the Chinese government, which sends a load of disaffected political prisoners to represent their nation, and humanity at large, to the stars?—largely unexplored, and creates some interesting characters, particularly the novice boy monk Little Tiger, and then doesn’t really do much with them.
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Interzone 229.
Interzone 230
Panverse Two, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dario Ciriello, ed. (Panverse Publishing, 978-0-615-37736-0, $15.95, 302 pages.) Cover art by Susan McGivergan.
Subterranean, Summer 2010.
The Dragon and the Stars, Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, eds. (DAW, 978-0-7564-0618-9. $7.99, 312 pages.) Cover art uncredited.
The strongest story in Interzone 229 is “new writer” (his first sale—this is his second—was forty years ago) Jim Hawkins’s “Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark Matter,” which follows an interstellar orchestral tour by Terran musicians who double as secret agents and assassins, destabilizing and overthrowing local political structures on the planets that the orchestra visits. This is a complex and chewy story, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some readers had trouble parsing it, particularly in the early going; for about the first third of the story, I myself thought that it was about musicians who were fighting a war in a Virtual Reality surround between engagements (a possibility specifically referenced in the text), and only slowly came to realize that that wasn’t really what was going on here at all. Stick with it, though, and you’ll ultimately be rewarded. Alice Sheldon, more widely known as James Tiptree, Jr., once described her “basic narrative instinct” as being “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” Tiptree would have liked this story—in fact, Hawkins’s whole tone and mode of attack reminds me a lot of Tiptree, one of two Interzone authors who have reminded me strongly of Tiptree recently (the other being Dominic Green).
The only other real core science fiction story here is Toby Litt’s “The Melancholy,” which deals with an existential crisis undergone by a robot Application used to remotely explore various locations throughout the solar system where humans could not survive, and who itself eventually loses the will to survive. The rest of the stories in Interzone 229 are less substantial, but do include some worthwhile reading, including a steampunk tale, “Mannikin,” by Paul Evanby, a Philip K. Dickish story about a sinister memory-altering organization, “Candy Moments,” by Antony Mann, and an eloquent slipstream story, “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life,” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.
The strongest story in Interzone 230 is “The Insurance Agent,” by Lavie Tidhar, a writer who’s having a good year so far, with several excellent stories published. “The Insurance Agent” is a vivid and violent post-cyberpunk story, coming across, with its combination of Third World milieus, high-tech gadgetry, and lowlife hustlers, like one of Greg Egan’s early stories such as “Chaff” or “Silver Fire” or “Tap,” or perhaps as a more science-fictional version of one of Lucius Shepard’s haunted voyages through the jungle to a Third World Heart of Darkness. 230 is stronger overall than the previous issue. There are two good near-future stories about a Britain taken over by Orwellian regimes who repress dissent (and, eventually, most art and public discourse that doesn’t hew strictly to Party-line doctrine), probably inspired by Britain’s Draconian censorship law that theoretically makes saying anything that can be taken as “supporting terrorism” a crime: “The Upstairs Window,” by Nina Allan, and “Love and War,” by Tim Lees. Both are good, although the Allan is the better, or at least the more subtle, of the two. Patrick Samphire offers an updated Arthurian fantasy, an elegantly crafted modern-day take on the Matter of Britain, in “Camelot.” And Aliette de Bodard contributes a violent and somewhat lurid fantasy, loaded with sado/masochistic elements, set in an Aztec-flavored world that might be either past or future, in “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders.”
Some good science fiction stories in recent issues, but a lot of fantasy/slipstream/horror is slipping in as well, which I’m less pleased to see, as that’s the default setting for virtually every ezine and semi-prozine in existence, and it would be nice to see Interzone reserved mostly for SF of various sorts.
Ambitious small-press Panverse Publishing has brought out another all-novella anthology, Panverse Two, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Dario Ciriello, the follow-up to last year’s well-received Panverse One.
This one doesn’t strike me as quite as strong as its predecessor, probably no award-winners here, although there’s still a lot of good stuff, and it certainly delivers its money’s worth in entertainment value—especially as all-novella anthologies are still fairly rare. The strongest novella here, by a decent margin, is an ingenious and fast-moving Alternate History story by Alan Smale, “A Clash of Eagles,” in which the author has a lot of fun playing with the idea of Roman Legions fighting American Indians, in a world where the New World was discovered by Romans instead of Norsemen, who—quite believably, considering their track record of conquest in the real world—have sent an expeditionary force across the Atlantic to subdue and colonize it. Smale does a good job of depicting the ruthlessness and almost inhuman discipline and efficiency of the Legions, even as they come to realize that they may have bitten off more than they can chew this time, and there’s enough bloodshed, internal politicking, and cross-cultural contrasts here to make quite an entertaining read. (As a minor quibble, I find it hard to believe that the Romans would call the Indians “redskins”—they’re not really red, after all, being actually brown-skinned, and Smal
e’s Romans would certainly have been quite accustomed to dealing with brown-skinned people by this point, especially as there are many of them in the Legion’s own ranks, which includes auxiliaries from conquered nations such as Magyar and Scythia.)
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