Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Sleight of Hand, by Peter S. Beagle. (Tachyon Publications, 978-1-61696-004-9, $14.95, 326 pages). Cover by Ann Monn.

  Another year begins with the January/February issue of F&SF. The best story here is probably Chris Lawson’s “Canterbury Hollow,” a quietly moving story set on a colony world whose immensely hostile environment has called forth the harsh and inflexible social customs the colony must employ in order to survive, and what complying with those customs means to a young couple in love. Also good is Kate Wilhelm’s “The Bird Cage,” where seemingly harmless experiments by a typically Wilhelm-like ruthless corporation have wide and unexpected consequences. “Long Time,” by Rick Norwood, gives us an unusual take on the Gilgamesh legends, told in an engagingly colloquial and anachronistic voice by someone on the sidelines of the tale, a shrewd and hard-headed ordinary foot soldier who may be a lot more than he seems to be at first. “The Bogle” is an untypically somber tale by Albert E. Cowdrey, who often writes comic fantasies, dealing with the shadow cast over a family by the death of a son, and the sinister problems that arise from a parent’s refusal to let go. Jim Young tells a Virtual Reality story, sort of, in “The Whirlwind,” Pat MacEwen does a variation on the Living House story in “Home Sweet Bi’ome,” and Richard A. Lupoff returns to revisit the story about the man living through the same day over and over again, in “12:02 P.M.”

  Most of the rest of the stories in the issue are somewhat lackluster, including a comic zombie love story, “Paradise Last,” by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, a Paul Bunyan-like tall tale, “Ghost Wind,” by Alan Dean Foster, and a somewhat awkwardly executed sword & sorcery story, “The Ghiling Blade,” by Matthew Corradi.

  The feature story in the January Asimov’s is a strong SF mystery by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Killer Advice,” a sequel of sorts to her story in my anthology with Jonathan Strahan, The New Space Opera 2, “Defect,” featuring the son of the protagonist in that story. This one features a sabotaged spaceship that limps into a rundown second-rate space-station after several murders on board, only to have the killing spree continue on the station. It’s up to the inhabitants of the space-station, including a once-important hotel manager at the end of a ruined career, an alcoholic doctor, and the son from “Defect,” a man on the run from a mysterious and sinister past bequeathed to him by his sinister mother, to overcome their weaknesses and combine what strengths they have in order to track the killer down. It’s an effective combination of SF and mystery by a writer practiced in each form, where the complex character inter-actions are as important, or more so, than the resolution of the mystery itself. SF/mystery hybrids seem to be something of a theme here, since this issue also brings us another strong example, “Dolly,” by Elizabeth Bear. In one way, there’s not really much of a mystery here, since it’s obvious from the opening page of the story that the victim was killed by his robot sex-toy—the question is, why? And the meat of the story lies in investigating the reasons for the attack, and in how those reasons resonate unexpectedly with the investigator’s personal life, as well as having wider implications for society at large. The element of homage to Isaac Asimov’s robot stories here is obvious, and the story also acts as a commentary on the assumptions behind those stories, but “Dolly” will be enjoyable in its own right even to those who’ve never read one of them.

  The Rusch and the Bear stories are probably the strongest pieces in the issue, but there is also good work elsewhere here, with the element of mystery or at least crime running in a minor key through most of them. Chris Beckett—who, to his credit, seems to be exploring new types of story lately, rather than stuff set in his more-typical near-future England—takes us along with the eponymous “Two Thieves,” who have been exiled to an isolated penal colony in a diminished future world built—literally—on the ruins of a more technologically advanced civilization. Although set in the far-future, the story has something of the air of sword & sorcery to it, and its protagonists are unrepentant rogues, unimpressed with the efforts of the prison authorities to morally improve them through Good Works, who soon discover an artifact of the old high-tech civilization, a dimensional gateway, and instantly are off through it on a series of picaresque adventures, eager to resume their thieving ways; although they receive a sobering comeuppance, it’s also pretty clear by the end of the story that they have no intention of letting the experience reform them, either. New writer Gwendolyn Clare introduces us in “Ashes on the Water” to a young girl whose “crime” is to want to scatter the ashes of her dead sister in a river so that they’ll be borne to the sea, something that’s against the law (not unreasonably, actually) in a future India in the grip of a years-long climate-change induced drought, where the water in the rivers is intensely managed and controlled; the girl is a sympathetic and interesting character, but the solution to her problem is obvious practically from the first page, which reduces the story’s impact a bit. The crime is in the past in Steve Rasnic Tem’s melancholy “Visitors,” in which parents visit the criminal, their son, who is kept as punishment in a suspended animation facility, occasionally revived so that scientists can experiment on him. The crime theme breaks down a little in Ian McHugh’s “Interloper,” although a mass-murder is committed in the course of the story by an Interloper who is breaking through into our dimension from some other alien reality, much like an Elder God from an H.P. Lovecraft story; this is vivid and exciting, but so little of the backstory is explained that it’s also occasionally hard to parse.

  The best story in the February Asimov’s is also the best story I’ve seen so far this year, Paul McAuley’s “The Choice.” This is a powerful and deceptively quiet story set in an ingeniously described future England that has been transformed by climate change and a rise in sea-level, a setting that in McAuley’s expert hands has the feel of a real place, both pastoral and shabby, where people get on with their ordinary lives in a world which is both dramatically altered and in some ways nearly the same as our own. Everything here is seen through the close and intimate lens of Family, families of different kinds, related or joined by friendship, families both positive and negative, getting by as best they can—until the Unknown suddenly intrudes into this world in the form of a giant, mournfully bellowing, enigmatic alien ship that grounds itself on the bank of a river, and changes everything forever. The young protagonist and his closest friend are faced with the choice of the title, and what they choose will shape the entire rest of their lives, and affect everyone around them. I would not be at all surprised to see this one on some award ballots next year. The cover this issue, illustrating “The Choice,” is more than usually evocative, too.

  Nothing in the rest of the issue comes up to the quality level of the McAuley, although there’s some nice stuff. The next best story in February is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “Shipbirth,” which shares some elements in common with her story from Interzone last year, “The Shipmaker,” both taking place in the far future of an Alternate World in which China discovered the New World before Columbus and annexed it as a colony, and both dealing with the creation of living starships which are a weird mixture of flesh and machine; in this one, a troubleshooter heads out to deal with the literal birth of a starship, where things have gone terribly wrong. New writer Jeff Carlson gives us Planet of the Sealies, which loses points for giving us a storyline in which the actions of the protagonist do little to affect the outcome, but which gains a lot of points for the nice idea of the survivors of an ecologically ruined future literally mining the strata of discarded diapers laid down by past civilizations for useful genetic material, a perfectly logical idea that I don’t think anybody has ever thought of before. In “Brother Sleep,” new writer Tim McDaniel explores the social pressures and class distinctions faced by a college student in a future where people who can afford it have been genetically altered to need almost no sleep—a story that might have been more affecting if the protagonist wasn’t such an asshat. David Ira Cleary shows us a dysfunctional posthuman family in th
e very far future, in “Out of the Dream Closet,” and in “Water Mercy,” new writer Sara Genge gives us another of her stories about a domed Paris in a post-Apocalyptic Earth, the behind-the-scenes logic of which have never quite made sense to me.

  I was hanging out a lot with Jack Dann when he put together the first anthology of Jewish-themed science fiction and fantasy, Wandering Stars, in 1974. Now, thirty-six years later, there’s another one, The People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace. Unlike Wandering Stars, which was all-original, this is a reprint anthology, and a very strong one. Also unlike Wandering Stars, which leaned toward science fiction, it’s mostly fantasy, except for Matthew Kressel’s “The History Within Us” and the Steampunk classic “Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,”” by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The best story here is probably “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angle,” by Peter S. Beagle, but there’s really little that’s weak, and other highlights include “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” by Theodora Goss, “The Tsar’s Dragons,” by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, “Semaphore,” by Alex Irvine,” “The Problem with Susan,” by Neil Gaiman, and “Golems I Have Known, or, Why my Elder Son’s Middle Name is Napoleon: a Trickster’s Memoir,” by Michael Chabon.

  Speaking of Peter S. Beagle, as I was above, he has a new collection out, Sleight of Hand, which demonstrates yet again why he’s perhaps the finest fantasy writer at short lengths working today. The best story here may be “The Rabbi’s Holiday,” but there’s also wonderful stories such as “What Tune the Enchantress Plays,” “La Lune T’Attend,” “Children of the Shark God,” and six others. There’s also uncollected stories here, published for the first time, including a prequel to Beagle’s famous novel The Last Unicorn, an early tale featuring Schmendrick the Magician called “The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon,” the charming children’s fable “The Best Worst Monster,” and just to show he can be as chilling as anybody in the business when he wants to, the sinister story of “The Bridge Partner.”

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  Engineering Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris, 978-1907519512, 337 pages).

  Asimov’s, 3/11.

  F&SF, 3-4/11.

  Clarkesworld, 1/11.

  Clarkesworld, 2/11.

  Interzone 232.

  The best science fiction anthology of the year to date is certainly Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Admittedly, the year isn’t very old yet, but I’ll be surprised if Engineering Infinity isn’t still among the top three SF anthologies by year’s end, and I suspect that it’ll probably still be Number One. It’s a no-fooling, honest-to-gosh SF anthology, of the sort that have become rare in recent years, with no admixture of fantasy or slipstream, a treat for unreconstructed old fans like me who occasionally get grumpy about trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to find the science fiction stories in a “science fiction anthology.” No such problem here—although there are various sorts of SF here, from hard to soft, near-future to far future, everything can make a legitimate claim for being actual core science fiction.

  With so much good stuff, it’s hard to pick favorites, but I’d say that, for my money, the two best stories here, both award-contender level, are David Moles’s “A Soldier of the City,” featuring a war between spacefaring civilizations in a future where humans serve literal gods, whom they love and worship, and which comes across a bit like an updated version of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and Stephen Baxter’s “The Invasion of Venus,” in which humans are bystanders to an immense cosmic battle between forces that ignore them completely. Also excellent, though, are Gwyneth Jones’s “The Ki-anna,” an intricate game of political and racial intrigue set against the background of her complex “Buonarotti” future, Hannu Rajaniemi’s “The Server and the Dragon,” about the birth and subsequent growth of a godlike intelligence, Karl Schroeder’s “Laika’s Ghost,” a sequel to his earlier “The Dragon of Pripyat,” set in a desolate future Russia haunted by ghosts of the Soviet past, and Peter Watts’s “Malak (or, It’s Not Easy Being Green),” which chronicles the slow growth of something like a conscience in a deadly semi-sentient war machine, with disturbing results. There’s really nothing bad here, though, and the anthology also features strong stories by Charles Stross, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamarr, Robert Reed, John C. Wright, Gregory Benford, and John Barnes, many of which would have been the best story in a lesser anthology.

  So, all you anthologists out there, so far this is the one to beat if you want to claim the title of best SF anthology of 2011.

  A strong March issue of Asimov’s has three award-contender quality stories that I wouldn’t be surprised to see on next year’s ballots. Robert Reed’s “Purple” tells the poignant story of an abused and mutilated boy who is taken to what amounts to an animal shelter for mistreated humans, run by invisible godlike aliens, and follows him in his struggle to somehow get back home to a life on Earth, in spite of the odds against him. John Kessel’s “Clean” introduces us to a troubled family who face the bitter choice of saving one of their own from a life-threatening disease by the expedient of wiping out his memories of them, a story related to Kessel’s earlier “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,” which predates the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in its postulation of memory-altering technology (technology which we seem to be on the brink of actually developing, by the way). New writer Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” echoes Kessel’s story in some ways, in a thoughtful and sensitively written exploration of the question of just how much you should be willing to give up in order to lead “a normal life.”

  Nothing else in the March issue quite reaches this level of quality, but there’s some good stuff. New writer An Owomoyela shows us how human society could be deeply shaken, in different ways, by the appearance of an unexplainable phenomenon, in “God in the Sky.” Veteran writer Neal Barrett, Jr. gives us a robust and funny look at a really strange future (?) world in “Where,” a story that’s like the kind of dream whose dream-logic you understand while you’re dreaming it, but which makes little sense when you awake. In ““I Was Nearly Your Mother,”“ Ian Creasey tells an overlong story of a young girl being visited by a variant of her dead mother from another reality, a story that might have been more effective if the girl, who’s obviously supposed to be a sympathetic figure, wasn’t so petulant, self-pitying, and annoying, new writer Steve Bein spins an unlikely and overcomplicated story about a man who finds a device that enables him to freeze time, and who eventually learns the lesson we were expecting him to learn from the beginning, in “The Most Important Thing in the World,” and Nick Wolven gives us a fast-paced cyberpunk take on memory-altering, clearly the issue’s theme, in “Lost in the Memory Palace, I Found You.”

  There’s more SF than usual in the March/April issue of F&SF, including a long novella in the long-running “lingster” series, “The Evening and the Morning,” by Sheila Finch—Finch has been writing lingster stories for more than twenty years now, and this one, taking place in the far future, could in some ways be considered the capstone of the series—and a satirical, Philip K. Dick-ish look at identity theft taken to an extreme, “A Pocketful of Faces,” by Paul Di Filippo, which demonstrates that there’s no new technology that won’t quickly generate its own crop of fetishists and perverts. The best SF story here, though, and, in fact, the strongest story of any sort in the whole issue, is Karl Bunker’s “Bodyguard.” Bunker made a bit of a splash with his story “Under the Shouting Sky” last year, winning the first Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story contest, and “Bodyguard” reconfirms the impression that he’s a writer to watch, taking a traditional SF theme, a Terran ambassador struggling to deal with alien customs on another world, and treating it with subtlety, compassion, and a good deal of emotional depth.

  The rest of the stories in the March/April issue are all fantasy of one sort or another. The best of them is
probably new writer Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie,” one of several very well-written stories that Liu has published in the last couple of years that deal sensitively with the clash of Chinese and Western culture, and especially the difficulties faced by Chinese immigrants in adapting to American life; like them, “The Paper Menagerie” has a minimal fantastic element, and could easily have been published as a mainstream story with the stuff about the living origami animals omitted by a few surgical cuts.

  Prolific F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey returns with “Scatter My Ashes.” Cowdrey seems to be trying to move beyond his more usual funny supernatural fantasy stories of late, and this story about a family cursed and blighted by a terrible secret is somber if not particularly grim, but you can sense the more lighthearted Cowdrey bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to break out, and indeed, the story abruptly swerves away from the tragic ending it was obviously building toward and ends up with a much more upbeat, sunnier one instead, with everything working out well for the two main characters (who may or may not deserve it). In some ways, James Patrick Kelly’s “Happy Ending” is the inverse of the Cowdrey—the protagonist ends up in a situation that ought to be a Bradburyian wish-fulfillment, getting a chance to start over with his wife, who has magically been made young again, but the ending comes across as faintly sinister instead, and the story registers in the “creepy New England fantasy” category instead of the “hopeful or life-affirming” category (quite a deliberate choice on Kelly’s part, I’m sure). New writer Kali Wallace delivers an absorbing but enigmatic slipstream story with a suggested but not made explicit SF element, “Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls,” James Stoddard delivers a fantasy, “The Ifs of Time,” which contains a nested sequence of other stories, there’s a rather distasteful Arabian Nights-like story in which several women are tortured and mutilated, “The Second Kalandar’s Tale,” by Francis Marion Soty, and a round-robin horror story, “Night Gauntlet,” by too many writers to individually mention.