Next to the Robert Reed novella, the strongest piece in November/December is John Kessel’s “The Closet,” an incisive and sharp-edged little story which, although it was written to commemorate Ursula K. Le Guin, reminds me stylistically much more of a cross between Damon Knight’s “The Handler” and Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Other Celia” than it does of anything by Le Guin.
Over at Asimov’s, their Double Issue, the October/November issue, has a lot of good, solid, entertaining stuff in it, mostly SF, but, I think, no award contenders. The lead story here is “Becoming One with the Ghosts,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of her popular “Diving into the Wreck” stories, this one initially beginning thousands of years before the other stories in the series, although a time-travel twist brings the heroine of those stories into the plot before the end. There’s some interesting stuff here, as usual with Rusch, but this one is rather slow, with nearly a third of the story gone by and days passed by the time the exaggeratedly cautious crew even leaves the spaceship to investigate, even though they can see strangers standing in the hanger outside; almost makes you wish that Captain Kirk was in charge, as he would have gotten things underway in a lot brisker fashion (sending your linguist to bed just after the said strangers show up is probably not the brightest command-decision either). The strongest of the issue’s novellas is “Several Items of Interest,” by Rick Wilber, the most recent (after a gap of several years) of Wilbur’s long “S’huddonni” series, about a future Earth that has been subjugated militarily and economically by a squid-like alien race. This one stands on its own feet pretty well without you needing to have read the other S’huddonni stories, and is a fun read, managing to generate a fair amount of tension with matching stories of sibling rivalry on both the human and the alien sides, although the major interest of the piece is generated by the nicely complicated inter-relationships of the characters.
Most of the rest of the stories in October/November are somewhat weaker, although all are entertaining. In “No Distance Too Great,” Don D’Ammassa takes us on a journey through hyperspace by what amounts to a bus ride; I really enjoyed D’Ammassa’s vision of hyperspace as a physical landscape that must be driven across, but, somewhat disappointingly, the story turns into a rather predictable fantasy by the end. Will McIntosh tells an enjoyable tale of life in a travelling side-show in the Nineteenth Century in “Frankenstein, Frankenstein,” a story that comes very close to mainstream, with only a slight fantastic element added (especially as the protagonist actually existed, although McIntosh pretty much makes up the rest of his life). Mike Resnick does a version of the movie K-Pax in “The Incarceration of Captain Nebula,” in which the question is whether a patient in a mental institution is delusional or really is the space hero that he claims to be (although there’s little doubt from the beginning which side Resnick is going to come down on), and Tanith Lee plays a similar Schroedinger’s Cat game with a immensely valuable sculpture that nobody has ever seen, in “Torhec the Sculptor.” Kate Wilhelm shows us that it’s better not to start something that you don’t know you can stop, in “Changing the World,” Kij Johnson spins a lyrical fabulation in “Names For Water,” R.Neube tells a competent but rather routine adventure story in “Dummy Tricks,” and new writer Felicity Shoulders comes up with an extremely unlikely use for time-travel, in “The Termite Queen of Tallulah County.”
There’s some strong stuff in the December Asimov’s, the year’s final issue. In a sequel to last year’s YA-ish “Going Deep,” James Patrick Kelly’s “Plus or Minus” takes his young heroine into deep space in what amounts to a rusty tramp steamer, one of the more unglamorous and unromantic ships in the corpus of science fiction, where her job mostly consists of scrubbing mold off the walls. Kelly handles the Analog-ish hard science space stuff well (although the motives of the Captain for his strange actions, veering from perverse to heroic, never quite made sense), and the story’s a fast and engrossing read, but the protagonist is rather passive throughout and doesn’t really contribute much to the solving of the overall problem, and the inconclusive ending makes it clear that this is probably a chunk of an upcoming novel. Michael Swanwick takes us to a depopulated future Russia that’s been through a semi-apocalypse in “Libertarian Russia,” a hard-edged look at a young man learning the hard way that his political ideals are unrealistic in the real world. Tom Purdom contributes “Warfriends,” a sequel to his novel from all the way back in 1966, The Tree Lord of Imetan, in which a human forges an unlikely alliance between warring alien races and natural enemies on a distant planet. Fortunately, you don’t have to have read the novel to appreciate the current story (the human protagonist of the novel barely appears here, only for a paragraph or two, with the rest of the story told from the Point of View of representatives from the reluctant alien allies), which is a vigorous and violent straightforward pulp adventure of a type almost never seen anymore, which once would have been called a “sword-and-planet” story—Purdom does an excellent job of giving each alien race a distinct set of psychological traits and characteristics, without succumbing to the temptation to anthropomorphize either of them too much.
Robert Reed gives us “Excellence,” a tricksy story with almost too many double-crosses and double double-crosses to keep track of. In “Freia in the Sunlight,” Gregory Norman Bossert tells the story of the sentient war machine engaged on a deadly mission of self-destruction, a story that goes back at least as far as Murry Leinster’s “The Wabbler” in 1942; Bossert doesn’t do much new with it, although he does update the technology a bit. Ian Creasey also tells a somewhat familiar story, in “The Prize Beyond Gold,” centering around the debate over technological “enhancements” in the sports world—but it’s only a step away from the debate that is going on right now in the newspapers about blood-doping and steroid use. New writer Ian Werkheiser makes an interesting although somber debut in the music-centered “Variations.”
I was less impressed overall by Stories, a big cross-genre anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, than I expected to be, although there were some good bits. It should be said upfront that it was disappointing, to me, at least, that there was little science fiction here, and not even much fantasy. But considerations of genre classification aside, I didn’t think that, on the whole, the book really delivered the kind of page-turning adventurous story stories that it promised it was going to, which I would have been happier with, whatever the genre, even mainstream. Instead, there’s a great deal of tricky metafiction here, slipstream, pastiches, roman a clefs, fabulisms, abstractions, and not that many real page-turners. The best story here, by a good margin, is Neil Gaiman’s own fantasy “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains.” Other good stories, mostly on the edge between mainstream and mystery/horror, are Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Stars Are Falling,” Lawrence Block’s “Catch and Release,” and Jeffrey Deaver’s “The Therapist.” Also excellent, with background hints of SF and fantasy that never quite break all the way through to the story’s surface, is Elizabeth Hand’s long, intricate, and lyrical “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.”
Interzone 231 is a “Jason Sanford Special Issue,” which contains three stories by Jason Sanford, the best of which is “Memoria,” a quirky story in which the protagonist uses the ghost of Andy Kaufman to shield himself against malignant alien ghosts who are attacking the spaceship he’s been set to guard during a voyage through a strange hyperspace, a story that echoes Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” The other two are “Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Beep,” pretty much a Zombie Apocalypse story, except that the zombies are called “trillers” instead, and “Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime,” a peculiar mixture of pseudo-medieval fantasy and economic theory. The best story in the issue, though, is Aliette de Bodard’s “The Shipmaker,” an engrossing SF story in which a scientist is responsible for engineering the literal birth of a sentient starship. Also good is new writer Matthew Cook’s “The Shoe Factory,” a well-executed take on
the story of the man who becomes “unstuck in time,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous phrase.
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The Way of the Wizard, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Prime)
The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Viking)
Fantasy Magazine.
Quartet and Triptych, Matthew Hughes. (PS Publishing)
Cloud Permutations, Lavie Tidhar. (PS Publishing)
Strange Horizons.
Clarkesworld.
Abyss & Apex.
Apex Magazine.
Daily Science Fiction.
Destination: Future, Z.S. Adani & Eric T. Reynolds, eds. (Hadley Rille Books, 978-0-9823140-9-2, $15.95, 313 pages.)
Some quick year-end (as I type these words, with about twelve inches of snow piled up outside my window and New Year’s Eve looming ominously on the horizon) wrap-up stuff.
This has been a pretty good year for fantasy anthologies, especially those that feature what I suppose must be called “genre fantasy,” as opposed to the tricksy slipstream, metafiction, surrealism, and fabulism that often passes for fantasy these days. The best of these was probably Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery, edited by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan, but also very impressive was a mixed original/reprint anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, The Way of the Wizard, which gives us an interestingly varied mix of milieus, beyond the usual faux-Medieval genre fantasy setting. The best story here is probably “End Game,” by Lev Grossman, which is not only set in the modern-day milieu of his bestselling novel The Magicians, but which is one of two stories this year (the other being K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia”, from Subterranean Online) which feature complex and unique (and difficult and tricky to use, with costs for the user—most magic in fantasy is too easy to use, just wave a wand and you can do anything) systems for employing magic that are very different from the usual Harry Potter knockoffs. Simon R. Green returns to his Nightside setting (“the dark heart of London where it’s always 3 a.m.”) to follow a low-level “Street Wizard” who gets his hands dirty doing the minor (but essential) magical jobs that keep things going smoothly, but that more potent wizards don’t want to be bothered with. New writer Rajan Khanna takes us aboard a Mississippi riverboat with an unusual kind of “Card Sharp,” Genevieve Valentine shows us a wizard struggling with the consequences of Global Warming, in “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen,” new wrier Krista Hoeppner Leahy tells us how things look from the perspective of one of Odysseus’s doomed crew who must struggle to deal with “Too Fatal a Poison,” new writer Christie Yant explores the interface of reality and fairy tales in “The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s somewhat unpleasant young protagonist must deal with an enraged were-emu in “The Go-Slow.” There are also good original stories by T.A. Pratt, Charles Coleman Finlay, Wendy N. Wagner, Cinda Williams Chima, John Fultz, Vylar Kaftan, and others.
The Way of the Wizard also features a strong spine of reprints, including “The Word of Unbinding,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “In the Lost Lands,” by George R.R. Martin, “John Uskglass and the Cambrian Charcoal Burner,” by Susanna Clarke, “El Regalo,” by Peter S. Beagle, “How To Sell the Ponti Bridge,” by Neil Gaiman, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” by Robert Silverberg, and others.
Another good fantasy anthology is The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, one of a sequence of YA anthologies on “mythic themes” that have been produced over the last few years by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Don’t be put off by the fact that this is a YA anthology; there’s some good work here, some of it surprisingly dark (as shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with Datlow’s work as one of the field’s major horror editors). The best stories are probably “The Flock,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Children of the Shark God,” by Peter S. Beagle, and “Island Lake,” by E. Catherine Tobler, but also good are “The Puma’s Daughter,” by Tanith Lee, “The Comeuppance of Creegus Maxin,” by Gregory Frost, “The Children of Cadmus,” by Ellen Kushner, and “The Salamander Fire,” by Marly Youmans, and there’s also good work by Shweta Narayan, Christopher Barzak, Richard Bowes, and others, and poetry by Jane Yolen and Delia Sherman.
Unsurprisingly, considering its name, there’s also often good fantasy to be found at ezine Fantasy Magazine. Good stories there in recent months have included “Holdfast,” by Matthew Johnson, “The Gold Silkworm,” by Tony Pi, “Malleus, Incus, Stapes,” by Sarah Totten, and “From the Countries of Her Dreams,” by Jay Lake and Shannon Page.
For a change of pace, let’s switch to consider some science fiction—although it’s that kind of non-rigorous, not-hard SF full of unexplained magic technology (and occasionally actual magic, or something close to it) that used to be called “science-fantasy,” back when anybody other than me gave a crap about these fine distinctions. Two recent novellas published as individual chapbooks do a good job with this kind of stuff. Matthew Hughes’s Quartet and Triptych, from PS Publishing, is a novella set in a milieu heavily (and acknowledgedly) influenced by the works of Jack Vance (perhaps the master of science-fantasy), one still set untold thousands and thousands of years from now but an era or two before humanity gives up on space travel and retreats to the haunted gloom of Vance’s Dying Earth. This is one of a long sequence of stories that Hughes has written about the misadventures of master thief Luff Imbry, and, like all of them, is great fun, a satisfyingly robust and colorful tale, much as Vance himself might have written it, in which Imbry matches wits with some sinister and powerful high-tech “ghosts” from ages past for the possession of the ultimate prize (until the next adventure, anyway). Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations, also from PS Publishing, is another Vance-flavored almost novel-length novella (although the writer specifically referenced in the text, in what TV fans would call a “shout out,” is Cordwainer Smith)—this is also an entertaining picaresque adventure, across the face of a largely aquatic planet whose culture has been shaped by immigrants from the South Sea Islands of old Earth, although this one is somewhat more serious in tone and deeper in ambition, full of mystic elements drawn from Island mythology, and concerning a young outcast fighting through desperate trials and against all odds to fulfill a destiny larger than himself.
Lavie Tidhar shows up again with perhaps the best story in the last few months of ezine Strange Horizons, “Aphrodisia,” a postcyberpunk story about spacers who have been altered by high-tech modifications on a spree in Vientiene while on vacation on Old Earth. The main plotline here, about someone whose former girlfriend has uploaded herself into fame and virtual immortality and is now lost to him forever (although forever present), is a tip of the hat to William Gibson’s “The Winter Market,” but the story also has strong echoes of Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gommorah”—all updated a bit for 21st Century sensibilities. Other good stories in Strange Horizons for the last few months of the year include “Iteration,” by John Kessel, the oddly-titled “Zookrollers Winkelden Ook,” by Tracy Chapman, “Blood, Blood,” by Abbey Mei Otis, and “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots,” by Sandra McDonald.
Over at the ezine Clarkesworld, the last few months have given us strong stories such as the wistfully autumnal “My Father’s Singularity,” by Brenda Cooper, “the space adventure “Laying the Ghost,” by Eric Brown, and the sad, postapocalyptic “The Cull,” by Robert Reed, one of their most powerful stories of the year. Ezine Abyss & Apex has in the last few months run good stuff such as “Talking to Elephants,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, “High Art,” by Alan Smale,” “The Torturous Path,” by Bud Sparhawk, and “Anything Chocolate,” by Caren Gussoff, while Apex Magazine, back after a brief hiatus, has provided “The Faithful Soldier, Preempted,” by Saladin Ahmed, “The Green Book,” by Amal El-Mohtar, and “L’Esprit de L’Escaller,” by Peter M. Ball.
New website Daily Science Fiction (http://dailysciencefiction.com) has the ambitious—perhaps too ambitious—goal of publishing a new SF or fantasy story every single day of the year. Prob
ably unsurprisingly, most of them are not terribly good, although some interesting stuff pops up occasionally. The best story there so far is by the ubiquitous Lavie Tidhar, who contributed “Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World”—another story set on a planet settled by South Sea Islanders, which to me is reminiscent in some ways of James Tiptree, Jr.’s “On the Last Afternoon” with its depiction of human colonists threatened by inexorable alien processes—but there has also been decent stuff there by Tim Pratt, Jeff Hecht, Matthew Johnson, and others.
Destination: Future, edited by Z.S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds, is an anthology of stories, mostly about human/alien relations, from ultra-small press Hadley Rille Books. There are no award-winners here, I don’t think, or even contenders, but there is solid and interesting work by Elizabeth Bear, Caren Gussoff, K.D. Wentworth, Sandra McDonald, Simon Petrie, and others. (This will be extremely difficult to find on bookshelves, even in SF specialty bookstores, so I would recommend that if you want it, you order it directly from the publisher’s website, at www.hadleyrillebooks.com.)
2011
29
F&SF, 1-2/11.
Asimov’s, 1/11.
Asimov’s, 2/11.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, eds. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-238-2, 318 pages.)
Sense of Wonder Page 19