Also strong is the anthology’s only other real SF story (if you count Alternate History as science fiction, as some do not, a can of worms I don’t intend to open here—I think it is, for what that’s worth), a romp centering around cryptozoology’s silliest monster, the Jersey Devil, as well as rains of frogs, teleportation, and other Fortean phenomena, “The Curious Adventure of the Jersey Devil,” by Michael D. Winkle. Like the Smale, this one is also a lot of fun, and is probably more enjoyable the more you know about Charles Fort’s curious life, so that you can have the pleasure of recognizing all the biographical tidbits that Winkle has sprinkled throughout the text. (If you don’t know anything about Charles Fort, I’d recommend reading Damon Knight’s little-known and under-appreciated biography of the man, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, if you can find a copy—which might be difficult.)
The rest of the stories in the book are somewhat weaker, including two fantasies exploring the interaction of Faerie and the mortal world, “Snow Comes to Hawk’s Folly,” by J. Kathleen Cheney, and “Dangerous Creatures,” by J. Michael Shell. The Cheney, which is about the investigation of the kidnapping of a puca, a young were-horse, is notably the better of the two, the Shell being much too twee, for my taste, anyway. There’s also a futuristic comedy by Amy Sterling Casil, “To Love the Difficult,” which tries much too hard to be funny.
The cover is very attractive, featuring a well-rendered Fairy Princess dancing around a campfire with some enchanted mice, and there’s even a subliminal hint of nipple.
The Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online has been posted, and features several first-rate fantasies. Two of them are novellas. Lucius Shepard’s “The Taborin Scale,” is the most recent (and perhaps the final?) in Shepard’s long series of dark and disturbing stories about the Dragon Griaule, an immense mile-long dragon, paralyzed in some wizardly combat so long ago that a city has grown up around and on him; in this one, we get to see both what would be referred to in comics terminology as Griaule’s “origin story” and his cataclysmic and disastrous death—which may in fact be part of the dragon’s hidden, sinister, and immeasurably subtle plan. Rachel Swirsky’s novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” follows a powerful sorceress who is bound by magic to return after her death to offer advice and magical assistance to those who summon her, and whose servitude stretches on for thousands of years, as the world around her and the people she serves grow increasingly alien and strange. Equally impressive is K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia,” a enjoyable tale of an inexperienced wizard who must somehow find a way to defeat a magical opponent who is quite literally undefeatable; the magical system used here is ingenious, and quite different from those usually found in fantasy stories.
The two science fiction stories here are not quite as memorable, but are still substantial. Mike Resnick’s novella “Six Blindmen and an Alien” takes us along with an expedition who stumble upon the frozen body of an alien while searching for Ernest Hemingway’s famous dead leopard on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and offers a Roshamon-like variety of explanations for how it got there. Cory Doctorow’s “Ghosts in my Head” is a Dickian story with a somewhat unconvincing twist ending about technology that allows advertising to be placed inescapably inside your head.
One of the best stories in the issue, though, is a straight mainstream story, “Dream of the Arrow,” by Jay Lake, a look at a troubled boy at boarding school and his painful struggle toward maturity, a story good enough to suggest that Lake’s talents may be wasted working in the genre, as he has the literary chops to make it as a significant mainstream author instead. Another straight mainstream story is “A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed,” by Lawrence Block, a plotless vignette that’s wryly amusing in spite of the fact that it’s not a story so much as the said burglar’s thoughts on the given subject, just as it said it was going to be.
The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and is more substantial than the usual DAW anthology; there are probably no award-contenders here, but the fact that all the stories draw upon “the rich cultural heritage of China” to tell stories of the fantastic makes it interesting, and gives us some milieus not commonly used, making almost all of the stories worth reading. Most of the stories here are fantasy, unsurprisingly enough, with Alternate History stuff perhaps the next most common. Considering what’s been done with Chinese-influenced futures by writers from Cordwainer Smith to Chris Roberson to Yoon Ha Lee, I found the relative scarcity of science fiction to be faintly disappointing, and many of the SF stories here, rather than being lush and exotic and wildly imaginative, are near-future or Alternate History stories that rely for impact on things like the simple reversal of Caucasians being restricted to “Anglotowns.” The best stories here are by Tony Pi, Emily Mah, Brenda Clough, Eugie Foster, Shelly Li, and Eric Choi himself.
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The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, Mike Ashley, ed. (Robinson Publishing, 978-184901305, 5.99 Pounds Sterling, 512 pages.)
The Immersion Book of SF, Carmelo Rafala, ed. (Immersion Press, 978-0-9563924-1-1, 7.99 Pounds Sterling, 121 pages.) Cover art by Charles Harbour.
Legends of Australian Fantasy, Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Harper Voyager, 978 0 7322 8848 8, 548 pages.)
The Company He Keeps, Postscripts 22/23, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848630-49-9, 394 pages.) Cover art by J.K. Potter.
Lightspeed, July-December/2010.
One of the best of the year’s mixed original/reprint anthologies is The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, edited by Mike Ashley, a huge collection of stories about the End of the World (or, occasionally, the End of Absolutely Everything). It would be interesting, if some critic has nothing better to do, to compare this at length with Jeste de Vries’s anthology of “optimistic SF,” Shine, which came out earlier this year (at a quick glance, the Ashley anthology is more dramatic and colorful than the de Vries, perhaps not surprising, since it’s easier to make the End of the World dramatically interesting than it is to make the world not ending dramatically interesting).
The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF features five originals out of its twenty-four stories, a couple of them novellas. The best of the original stories is Alastair Reynolds’s novella “Sleepover,” about a cryogenic sleeper who wakes into an apocalyptic future utterly unlike anything he expected, one so stark—all there is the gray restless ocean, the ceaseless and relentless winds, crying seagulls, and rusting, battered structures similar to oil platforms—that it actually has a bleak beauty all its own…and where he finds a grim purpose in life that he never knew before. Also first-rate is Robert Reed’s novella (one of several excellent novellas he’s had out this year) “Pallbearer,” set in a somewhat less dramatically altered but still severely diminished future where the survivors of an ecological catastrophe mostly scrape by by cannibalizing the ruins of the previous civilizations. Kage Baker’s “The Books” (one of the last stories we’re going to see from this author, alas, who died earlier this year) is a much quieter story set in a similarly diminished future, where children with a travelling theatrical troupe discover the ultimate prize, from their point of view: a library full of books which are full of fascinating stories to be read to them late at night. This story shows us just how much we have lost with Baker’s death—not that it’s one of Baker’s major stories (it’s not, although it’s a charming and pleasant entertainment), but rather that it demonstrates an absolute mastery of that elusive quality known as “voice,” as well as the ability to perfectly control the flow of information, the gifts of a born storyteller who was still maturing into the full extent of her powers when she was cruelly taken from us. Eric Brown contributes a somewhat more melodramatic adventure in “Guardians of the Phoenix,” featuring a chase across dry sea-beds in a somewhat unlikely future where all the world’s oceans have disappeared, and Paul Di Filippo takes us on a frenetic tour through a typically gonzo high-tech high bit-rate future in “Life in the Anth
ropocene,” with occasional nods made to what’s becoming the standard post-ecological disaster/catastrophic radical climate change future.
Good as some of the originals are, though, the bulk of the anthology is made up of reprint stories, and that section adds substantially to the value of the book. Among the many strong reprint stories here are Fritz Leiber’s “A Pail of Air,” practically the prototype for the modern post-apocalyptic story, James Tiptree’s “The Man Who Walked Home,” Frederik Pohl’s “Fermi and Frost,” Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” Dominic Green’s “The Clockwork Atom Bomb,” Stephen Baxter’s “The Children of Time,” and thirteen others, many of them also strong. As of this writing, only the Kindle edition was available on Amazon.com; if you want the hardcopy paperback edition, you’ll have to mail-order it through the publisher or through Amazon UK.
Another mixed original/reprint anthology is The Immersion Book of SF, edited by Carmelo Rafala, from ultra-small British publisher Immersion Press. At only 121 pages and eleven stories, this makes up into a rather slim volume for the price, nowhere near as good a bargain as the much larger and cheaper Ashley book, but the quality of the stories is pretty good. The best story here is “Lode Stars,” by Lavie Tidhar, something of a departure for him—up until now, he’s mostly done post-cyberpunk work, but “Lode Star” is full-dress widescreen New Space Opera, complete with AIs, downloadable intelligences, faster-than-light travel, and civilizations built around massive black holes. Gord Sellar is also here with a change of pace, turning from his more typical near-future SF to write an absorbing fantasy story set in ancient Korea, “The Broken Pathway.” Chris Butler contributes a clever post-cyberpunk story, “Have Guitar, Will Travel,” which takes piracy of a songwriter’s work to a drastic new extreme, and Aliette de Bodard shows us a young girl working out her Daddy Issues with her recently deceased father on an alien planet, in “Father’s Last Ride.” There are also good reprints by Al Robertson, Colin P. Davies, and Jason Erik Lundberg. This is going to be very difficult to find in bookstores on the American side of the Atlantic, so I’d suggest that if you want it, you either order it from Amazon.com or some other online bookseller or go direct to the publisher’s website at www.immersionpress.com and order it there.
The idea behind Legends of Australian Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, in which (for the most part; there are a few exceptions, where the authors come up with new settings, but not many) eleven bestselling Australian fantasy novelists produce “brand-new short novels set in their most popular “signature” universe,” is at the same time both the anthology’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. Its greatest strength because fans of these very popular series will be delighted to see new stories set in those milieus and eager to read them—its greatest weakness because the authors sometimes assume a prior familiarity with the characters and background history of the “universes” that can make it difficult for the stories to really stand on their own feet for readers who haven’t read any of the earlier volumes in the series. The best story here, and the one that does the best job of being satisfying as a story even if you haven’t read any of the prior novels, is Garth Nix’s “To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Story,” which follows a young boy’s struggle to carve out a new life for himself after his old world is destroyed, and takes him up to the point where he must prove his worth by facing a deadly challenge to the new way of life he’s chosen. It would make an excellent start for a novel, something that may not have escaped Nix, but is sufficiently self-contained to stand as an individual story on its own rights. Also good are “The Spark (A Romance in Four Acts): A Tale of the Change,” by Sean Williams, “The Dark Road: An Obernewtyn Story,” by Isobelle Carmody, “The Corser’s Hinge,” by D.M. Cornish, and “The Enchanted: A Tale of Earth,” by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. And, of course, fans of the other series will probably enjoy the new stories drawn from them.
After several strong issues in recent years, particularly 2008’s Postscripts 15, I must admit to being somewhat disappointed in this year’s Postscripts 22/23, which, now that it’s switched from being a magazine to being an anthology, we’re supposed to refer to as The Company He Keeps, Postscripts 22/23, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers. I have my usual complaint about Postscripts, which I’m sure they’re sick of hearing, that it doesn’t have enough science fiction in it—there are a few SF stories here, as well as a few fantasy stories, but the bulk of the issue seems to be made up of slipstream and soft horror, with a fair number of straight mainstream stories. Leaving questions of genre classification aside, though, although there’s little here that is bad, there’s little that’s really outstanding either; like many of this year’s anthologies, the impression you walk away with is that there’s lots of entertaining and worthwhile reading here, but no potential award-contenders, and nothing that really stands out as one of the year’s best in any of the categories covered. The best story here is probably the title story, “The Company He Keeps,” by Lucius Shepard, which explores the ground between horror and Hollywood satire, territory Shepard visited earlier in the year with “Dreamburgers at the Mouth of Hell,” from another Gevers anthology, “The Book of Dreams”—this one, though, is harder-edged and much less surreal than the other, a straightforward and rather brutal story on the edge between mainstream and mystery that might not have been out of place in Hitchcock’s or Ellery Queen’s. Other good stories include a Lovecraftian fantasy, “The Man Who Scared Lovecraft,” by Don Webb, a fantasy set in a hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters,” by Jack Deighton, three other stories on the edge between mystery and mainstream/horror, “Bully,” by Jack Ketchum, “The Farmer’s Wife,” by James Cooper, and “The Rescue,” by Holly Phillips, as well as SF stories by Robert Edric, Richard Parks, Chris Beckett, and Vandana Singh.
The new online emagazine Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, has survived its first six issues, and has proven itself to be an interesting and entertaining place to visit. They run two original stories per issue, plus reprint stories, non-fiction articles, author interviews, and podcasts. Some of their original fiction has been only so-so, but they’ve also published their share of good stuff. The best story here so far is “In-Fall,” by Ted Kosmatka, from the December issue, one of several stories in recent months to center—literally!—around black holes, this one a suspenseful battle of wills taking place on a spaceship about to plunge into one. Also excellent is Yoon Ha Lee’s quirky “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” from the September issue, about an ancient weapon so potent that to fire it is to destroy the universe—and replace it with another one. In the November issue, Alice Sola Kim gives us a poignant introduction to “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters,” and in the August issue, Catherynne M. Valente has a lot of fun advising us “How To Become a Mars Overlord.” Good reprint stories here have included “Patient Zero,” by Tananarive Due, “The Long Chase,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, “Travelers,” by Robert Silverberg, “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” by Joe Haldeman, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” by Joe R. Lansdale, and others. There have also been non-fiction articles by Gregory Benford, Pamela L. Gay, Carol Pinchefsky, and others, and interviews with Robert Silverberg, Cat Rambo, John Scalzi, and others.
I continue to be disappointed that there are no long stories here. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s any real need for length restrictions in an electronic online magazine, where you’re using pixels instead of paper and ink, and shouldn’t have to worry about the length of the issue making it too expensive to produce. I’d like to see them start to use novellas and long novelettes as well as short stories, since that’s where a good deal of the really substantial work in the genre gets done.
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F&SF, November/December.
Asimov’s, October/November.
Asimov’s, December.
Stories, Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, eds. (William Morrow, 978-0-06-1
23092-9, $27.99, 414 pages.)
The best story in the November/December F&SF, and very probably the strongest SF story to appear in this magazine all year, is Robert Reed’s novella “Dead Man’s Run.” Reed does an excellent job of making this simultaneously a murder mystery and a valid core science fiction story where the SF element is essential to both the resolution of the plot and the solving of the mystery; it also functions in a valid way as a sports story, since the sport of running is integral to the plot, and Reed’s obvious familiarity with runners and running—he’s used the sport before in other stories, although this is his most successful utilization of it—shows through to good effect, helping to ground the story in a believable reality. The story overall must be considered one of the best stories of the year and one of Reed’s best, even in a year that has seen several other strong Reed stories. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one show up on next year’s awards ballots.
Ghosts seem to be a theme in this issue of F&SF. A high-tech “ghost” of sorts, a sentient electronic avatar of a dead man that persists after his death, features in “Dead Man’s Run,” and a ghost of another sort, or at least the suggestion of one (it’s never made clear whether there’s a “real” ghost or not) features in Alexander Jablokov’s elegantly written near-mainstream story “Plinth Without Figure”… and old-fashioned no-doubt-about it ghosts of the sort that go bump (or “whoooo!”) in the night show up in Albert E. Cowdrey’s richly amusing “Death Must Die,” about an attempt to fight fire with fire, or at least a haunting with a haunting. New writer Michael Alexander shows us that a good way to destroy civilization is to give everybody everything he wants, in “Ware of the Worlds,” while new writer Alexandra Duncan takes us to a not very well thought-out or logically consistent post-apocalyptic future for a fairy tale-like “Swamp City Lament.” Michaela Roessner gives us a grisly version of Hansel and Gretel in “Crumbs,” Alan Dean Foster spins a tall tale in “Free Elections,” and Richard Bowes relates a bit of metafiction packed with in-jokes in “Venures,” while Bruce Sterling reprints a sly vision of a non-cash based society from the Shareable Futures website, “The Exterminator’s Want Ad.”
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