Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  There’s nothing really bad here, though, and the anthology also features strong stories by Nnedi Okorafor, Chris Roberson, and Rachel Swirsky, as well as a reprint by Kim Stanley Robinson. Another solid success for Strahan, who’s having a really good year so far.

  The April/May Double Issue of Asimov’s features less science fiction and more slipstream/fantasy than usual for Asimov’s, but there are still some strong stories, of both types. The best story here, bursting with new ideas, is by veteran author Tom Purdom, who was writing stories years (if not decades) before most of the other contributors to the issue were even born; in his “A Response from EST17,” Purdom takes a look at a First Contact scenario, mostly from the perspective of the aliens being contacted, as two competing probes from Earth enter into a complicated series of negotiations with the natives as to whom they’re ultimately going to be in contact with, eventually progressing into open warfare between both Terran camps; there’s a lot at stake here, including possibly the future survival of both the alien and the Terran civilization, and Purdom ratchets up the tension nicely in spite of a minimum of physical action, mostly involving insect-sized robots. Also first-rate is Michael Swanwick’s “An Empty House with Many Doors,” which features a bereft widower grasping desperately at another chance at happiness, thanks to the Many Worlds theory. Mike Resnick’s “The Homecoming” is an affecting story of the prickly relationship between a father and his genetically transformed son as they circle each other in a painful attempt at reconciliation; essentially the same story could have been told with a conservative father and a gay son, but it works fine as science fiction as well, especially as the gulf between father and son is even deeper here than it would have been in the other scenario. Kristine Kathryn Rusch gives us another SF/mystery cross in “Becalmed,” about a woman who must reclaim her memories of traumatic events on a planet’s surface before she can rescue her ship from being “becalmed” in hyperspace; Rusch does her usual workmanlike job here, although the protagonist’s amnesia is a bit too conveniently specific in spots, and the process of her recovering it takes a bit too long. Another crippled spaceship features in Jack Skillingstead’s bleak “The Flow and Dream,” where the guardian of a colony ship must pass the torch on to a younger crew member—seemingly to no real purpose, since the colonization effort has failed, and they’re all doomed anyway.

  Alexander Jablokov gives us what I suppose could be characterized as a steampunk story in “The Day the Wires Came Down”, although there are no zeppelins or clanking steam-driven automatons in evidence, but rather a somewhat Victorian-feeling cable-car system that stretches in an intricate network from rooftop to rooftop across an unnamed city, and which is about to be decommissioned and dismantled. The human story here is a tissue of unlikely coincidences, and actually rather uninteresting, but the rooftop cable-car system is fascinating, and described with convincing detail; it seems such an integral part of the life of the city, though, that I wondered throughout what they were going to replace it with, about which Jablokov says nothing. William Preston’s “Clockworks” is a follow-up of sorts to his earlier “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” also featuring an unnamed crime-fighting pulp hero who is clearly supposed to be Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze; this one is also very well-crafted, but it lacks the autumnal, regretful air that distinguished the earlier story, being pretty much a straightforward adventure of The Hero—although made a bit different by being told from the perspective of the villain (or the former villain, anyway, since, rather distastefully, he’s been “reformed” by kidnapping him and performing brain surgery on him, conveniently giving him amnesia, as in the Rusch story, for long stretches of the plot, as he seeks to help thwart his own now-forgotten Master Plan). Christopher Barzak gives us an elegant slipstream take on the Persephone legend in “Smoke City,” about a woman who lives two separate lives, with two separate families, one in the world above and one in an infernal city Below, where a night can seem to take years to pass. Esther M. Friesner involves a hardheaded King Kong survivor with a group of C’thulhu worshippers to comic effect in “The One That Got Away.” Rudy Rucker indulges in his usual freewheeling cosmic japery in “The Fnoor Hen,” and Nick Mamatas tells an interesting story in what is perhaps an unnecessarily complex way in “North Shore Friday.”

  Angel of Europa is a chapbook novella by Hugo-winning author Allen Steele. It would seem to fit into his Near-Space series, taking place during one of the first expeditions to the moons of Jupiter, and specifically to Europa, where the explorers drill a hole through the thick crust of ice and lower a bathyscaphe into the unknown global ocean below. This is an SF/mystery cross, the bulk of the text devoted to determining whether the subsequent destruction of the bathyscaphe was due to an attack by a mysterious alien creature or was premeditated murder on the part of one of the crew-members. Somewhat unusually, the protagonist and chief investigator is killed on the first page of the book, but eventually perseveres to carry out his investigation anyway. There’ll be no real surprises here for the experienced genre reader (especially as Steele tips his hand with a literary reference early on), but it’s a fast-paced and suspenseful story, solid core science fiction entertainment.

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  Subterranean, Spring 2011.

  Tor.com, 1/11-5-11.

  F&SF, May/June.

  Clarkesworld, May.

  The online magazine Subterranean had an excellent year in 2010, and seems set to have another pretty good one this year. The Spring 2011 issue is another strong one, although it contains almost nothing but fantasy stories of one stripe or another, ranging from mannerist satire to Lovecraftian horror.

  The strongest story here is probably Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Show Trial,” which for much of its length is a straight mainstream story about the elaborate preparations, including finding translators and shoring-up a bomb-damaged Palace of Justice, needed for the Nuremberg trials, which were held to try high-ranking Nazi officials for war crimes in postwar Germany. A fantastic element does show up toward the end, which I can’t say too much about without committing spoilers, but I will say that Rusch fooled me with it—I thought for sure, from the very beginning, that it was going to turn out to be time-travelers. The problem I had with the story is that the “mainstream” elements of the story, showing a war-weary protagonist struggling both with depression and the Herculean task of getting everything ready in time for the trials, with time running out, were so absorbing that the fantastic element, when it showed up, almost came across as an unwelcome distraction; Rusch clearly did a lot of research on the Nuremberg trials, and put all of it into the story, where it’s actually more interesting than the rather weak fantastic element is. This one would have worked better as a straight mainstream historical, I think, not really needing the genre element at all. Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Crawling Sky” is an entertaining cross between the cowboy story and the tale of Lovecraftian horror, made memorable by Lansdale’s deadpan humor and his trademark touches of the grotesque; nobody does ugly better than Lansdale, and the ugly people he describes here are really ugly, as well as being despicable and morally bankrupt lowlifes, and his ramshackle town of Wood Tick is one of the most squalid and apply named in recent fiction. Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Crane Method” is a dryly satirical look at the academic life, written in a deliberately fustian style, in which an ambitious, frustrated academic succeeds in fulfilling his every dream in life—much to his regret. Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Fall of Alacan” seems at first as if it’s going to be a distorted take on fairy tales, with its stronghold magically surrounded by a wall of thorns and its maiden princess living in lonely isolation atop an inaccessible tower, but the maiden turns out to be a ruthless bitch who signally doesn’t reward the adventurer who makes his way up the tower to her side, and the story is actually about redemption, as a lowlife cut-purse and thief assumes, at first reluctantly, the kind of responsibility for another that he’s been ducking all his life; in some ways, then, it actually does rather
resemble a grimmer and grimier version of Disney’s recent Tangled. Mike Resnick provides another of his broadly comic tall tales about Lucifer Jones, Treasure Island: a Lucifer Jones Story. The only science fiction story here is Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Water to Wine,” a transcript from the shared-world podcast anthology about a Green Utopia, Metatropolis: Cascadia, but it’s a substantial one, although, as with the Rusch story, the extensive expertise on wine-making and the tangled interpersonal relationships of the protagonists are more interesting than the minimal genre content.

  Although it remains one of the most eclectic and interesting stops you can make while genre-oriented web-surfing, the fiction at Tor.com has been a bit weak in recent months, with too many novel excerpts and specialized promotional pieces, but three strong stories have recently gone up there. The best of the three is probably Damien Broderick’s “Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order,” a complex and fast-moving time-travel tale, with agents attempting to prevent future catastrophes by eliminating their root-causes in the past. In the last few years, Broderick has done a long series of pastiches of the works of various SF authors such as Cordwainer Smith, Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard, and the title here clearly indicates that this is his Samuel R. Delany pastiche, but I must say that it doesn’t seem to me that he does a particularly good job of replicating Delany’s clotted poetic style, so the piece fails as a pastiche while succeeding as a story. James Patrick Kelly’s “Crazy Me” is written in prose as clear and smoothly running as a mountain stream, but, unusually for Kelly, is a bit cryptic as well, with an explanation never offered for the nature of the dual narrators, who at first seem to be multiple personalities of the same man but who later seem to have independent physical existences as well, and an abrupt ending that left many of the readers at Tor.com scratching their heads and which puzzled me too—although I thought that the story ending with a mention of a raccoon was supposed to refer back to the ominous opening paragraph where Crazy Me talks about raccoons spreading the plague. A bit too subtle overall to be a crowd-pleaser, though, I think. Michael F. Flynn’s hugely entertaining “The Iron Shirts” seems at first to be an authentically detailed historical set in 13th Century Ireland, but ultimately turns out to be a rather complex Alternate History tale, as well as a subtle and complicated story of deadly political gamesmanship, full of betrayals, double-crosses, and double double-crosses. Substantial stories at Tor.com from earlier in the year include another Alternate History, “Shtetl Days,” by Harry Turtledove, a sad and poignant story about generational conflict and culture shock, “Beauty Belongs to the Flowers,” by new writer Matthew Sanborn Smith, a bitter reaffirmation of the saying that prophets are without honor in their own countries, “Our Candidate,” by Robert Reed, and a gonzo tale of alien contact that has a few similarities to the recent movie Paul (although, considering lead times, they could hardly be anything but coincidental, one way or the other), “Making My Entrance Again with My Usual Flair,” by Ken Scholes.

  The May/June issue of F&SF is a bit weak, with even the usually reliable Robert Reed disappointing with two linked and overly enigmatic stories, “Stock Photos” and “The Road Ahead,” and another reliable F&SF regular, Albert E. Cowdrey, contributing a rather routine horror story, “The Black Mountain,” although as usual with Cowdrey, the protagonist is quirkily interesting. The best story here is probably Carter Scholz’s “Signs of Life,” a smart and intricate, although very bleak (initially, at least; there’s a glimmer of hope toward the end), story about a depressed and frustrated scientific researcher investigating junk DNA who struggles to find some kind of redemptive meaning both in the universe and in his own largely ruined life. The next best story here is probably Ken Liu’s “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” an autumnal far-future story about the inevitable changing of generations in a world where most people are downloaded into a Virtual existence. Steven Popkes contributes a joke story about Godzilla, “Agent of Change,” Scott Bradfield another in his long series of comic stories about the super-intelligent dog Dazzle, “Starship Dazzle,” S.L. Gilbow the interesting but overlong “The Old Terrologist’s Tale,” Don Webb a gonzo take on The End of the World As We Know it in “Fine Green Dust,” and Kate Wilhelm a rather sweet study of the lingering legacy of old jazz musicians, with a nearly subliminal ghost story element thrown in, “Music Makers.” The longest story here is a novella by new writer Alexandra Duncan, “Rampion.” This is a well-written and well-characterized straight historical set in Islamic Spain, with no real fantastic element; although witches and witchcraft are mentioned a lot, their magic, mostly offstage anyway, is really just herbology, the knowledge of what potions made from certain plants can do. Although it has many of the elements of an Arabian Nights-like fable, princes in disguise, evil viziers, beautiful princesses held in lonely isolation in towers, and there’s even a forbidden romance at the story’s heart, there’s nothing fairy tale-like in “Rampion,” which is actually rather grim. Squeamish readers should be warned that it also contains some scenes of extreme violence, including rape and mutilation.

  The May issue of online magazine Clarkesworld features a strong SF story by new writer Jason K. Chapman, “The Architect of Heaven.” This one rather reminds me of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” with a rich industrialist devoting every resource he can beg, borrow, or steal, in the face of all odds, to build the spaceship that will make a colonizing space journey possible—although Chapman’s industrialist is driven (in a manner which might seem faintly sappy to the more cynical among us) by True Love and the desire to eventually be reunited with his lost girlfriend, who has fled from him to the stars aboard an earlier colony ship, rather than by the worries about the destiny of the human race and the need to get us off Earth and into the new frontier of space that drives Heinlein’s D.D. Harriman. There’s a nicely done twist at the end, one I didn’t see coming. The other story in the May Clarkesworld is a slipstreamish piece by Cat Rambo, “Whose Face This Is I Don’t Know,” about a protean creature made in a Mad Scientist’s laboratory who must break away from the M.S.’s domination and forge her own path through life. The tone here seesaws uneasily between comicbook implausibility (Mad Scientist, laboratory) and a more somber and bloody kind of grotesquerie, but by the end manages to generate enough sympathy for its bizarre protagonist to achieve a certain poignancy.

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  F&SF, July/August.

  Jesus and the Eightfold Path, Lavie Tidhar. (Immersion Press, 978-0-9563924-3-5. 73 pages.) Cover art by Melissa Gay.

  Asimov’s, June.

  Asimov’s, July.

  The July/August F&SF is a strong issue, after a couple of weak ones. The best story here, the best SF story F&SF has published all year, and perhaps the best story of any sort, is Robert Reed’s complex and inventive novella, “The Ants of Flanders.” This is an Alien Invasion story, but a much more imaginative and conceptually daring one than the standard-issue Alien Invasion story like Independence Day or Battle: Los Angeles, with vast and vastly strange cosmic forces battling it out on an Earth they hardly notice, and where humans are no more important to the outcome, or any more able to change it, than the ants caught in the middle of a World War I battlefield referenced in the title. The protagonist is a boy caught up in the battle and bizarrely transformed by accident—although even before his transformation, he is an most unusual boy with a strange psychological mindset, almost already an alien himself in some ways, and the accidental process that totally remakes his body doesn’t really change that mindset, but only deepens his calm logic and detachment. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this one on award ballots next year.

  Also excellent here is Peter S. Beagle’s loving homage to the late Avram Davidson, “The Way It Works Out and All,” which features a closely-observed and affectionately drawn Davidson as one of the protagonists (the other being Beagle himself), and which draws upon the mythology of one of Davidson’s best n
ovels, Masters of the Maze, where all of time and space is connected by strange subspace tunnels that can be blundered into anywhere, even on a New York City street, even in the Men’s Room at Grand Central Station. Great fun. Fans of Steven Saylor’s long series of historical mysteries about the adventures of Gordianus the Finder, who investigates murder and mayhem in Ancient Rome, will be pleased to see Saylor back in the pages of F&SF for the first time since 1986 with “The Witch of Corinth,” a story sending a young Gordianus to the war-ravaged, haunted ruins of Corinth in 92 B.C. to unravel a deadly mystery; the fantastic element here is almost subliminal, but Saylor fans, among which I number myself, will be pleased enough to see a new Gordianus story to excuse that, especially as the story is suspenseful and thick with historical atmosphere and local color. Rob Chilson contributes an autumnal story, “Less Stately Mansions,” about an embattled farmer who struggles to hold on to his farm and keep it in the family as the world changes around him, especially as his presumptive heirs show no interest in taking it over and clearly will sell it as soon as he’s gone—a story that could easily be taking place right now, but which is made science fictional by Chilson’s effective use of a near-future setting.