Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Nothing else in the issue is of this level of quality, but there is some solid stuff. Richard Bowes takes us inside the enchanted realm where King Arthur sleeps, waiting to wake again, in “Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things,” Michael Alexander tells a competent but somewhat routine time-travel story in “Someone Like You,” and KJ Kabza threads a similar kind of interdimensional maze to the one in the Beagle’s story in “The Ramshead Algorithm,” although the Kabza is occasionally confusing and is hard to really get into until at least a third of the way through. There’s also a posthumous story by Joan Aiken, “Hair,” which is creepy but has an even more subliminal fantastic element than some of the other stories here with subliminal fantastic elements.

  Lavie Tidhar is one of the most interesting new writers to enter the genre in some time, and his chapbook novella “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” is another major work by him, although even harder to pin down by genre than is his usual work. A vivid and gonzo reimagining of the life of Jesus, it’s less sacrilegious and more respectful than you would think a story whose working title was “Kung Fu Jesus” would be, although Jesus does indeed get to use his martial arts skills, learned under the tutelage of the Eastern Masters who taught him to follow the Eightfold Path, to beat up the moneylenders as he casts them from the Temple, defeat some attacking mummies, and so forth. Although all this would probably have been enough to get Tidhar burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages, he actually treats Jesus with a fair degree of reverence, as a man who really has been touched by the Divine (although what Divine remains open to question) and possesses immense preternatural abilities. Much of the gonzo humor, and much of the entertainment value, is carried by the Three Wise Men, here reimagined as former kings, wizards, and minor gods impressed into service by a superior supernatural force, and called Sandy, Monkey, and Pigsy; they get many of the best lines. There’s also a supporting role for the slippery Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius. Perhaps what this reminds me the most of is the movie Big Trouble in Little China, if the filmmakers had decided to tackle the Gospels as well as Chinese mythology. Although some of the more pious may be offended, most readers will probably find this hugely entertaining.

  Asimov’s has been having a good year so far, and the June Asimov’s is another strong issue. The best stories here, although very different in tone, are both fundamentally similar in premise, both being stories about the persistence of identity and what really makes a human a human, beyond the mere physical hardware. Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Cold Step Beyond” takes us to a far, far future where, in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous phrase, the technology is so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, for an SF story that reads like High Fantasy, a rather melancholy study of a bioengineered warrior sent to fight a monster who ultimately turns out to be not at all what she expected it to be. Mary Robinette Kowal’s novella “Kiss Me Twice” follows a detective in a high-tech future who is trying to solve a grisly murder with the aid of his AI partner Metta, a case complicated by the kidnapping (AInapping?) of the AI by persons unknown, and by the subsequent creation of an emergency backup AI, which soon raises the question of which is the “real” Metta. Although the Kowal, a futuristic police procedural, couldn’t be more different in tone from the MacLeod, they both raise similar questions of identity—how do you determine who’s a “real” person and who isn’t in a world where humans co-exist with equally intelligent AIs and with sentient but artificially created beings of all sorts, even ones with whom you share memories? How do you draw the line between the real and the unreal?

  Similar questions are raised in the incisive but powerful “Fighter,” by Colin P. Davies, and in a somewhat different key by Felicity Shoulders’s “Apocalypse Daily,” which suggests that the ruthless back-stabbing and betrayal and double-dealing needed to win some computer games could indoctrinate people toward similar behavior in real life, the unreal world affecting the real, so I guess that the identity thing can be officially identified as the issue’s subtheme. It’s hard to tell what’s “real” in Alan DeNiro’s “Walking Stick Fires,” an Alien Invasion story set in a surreal post-apocalyptic world that’s so gonzo and computer game-like, like Neal Barrett, Jr. on acid, that it’s hard to take it seriously enough on any level while you read it to invest any emotion in it.

  The July Asimov’s is another fairly strong issue. The best story here is Paul Cornell’s “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” one of a series of fast-paced and rather strange stories (including Hugo finalist “One of Our Bastards Is Missing”) that Cornell has been writing about the exploits of spy Jonathan Hamilton in the Great Game between nations in a Nineteenth Century Europe where technology has followed a very different path from that of our own timeline, stories that read, as I once said, like Ruritanian romances written by Charles Stross. In this adventure, Hamilton must deal with the consequences of having an old girlfriend pop up in very peculiar circumstances, initiating a chain of consequences that might bring about the end of the world, something Hamilton battles to prevent in a flamboyantly entertaining fashion reminiscent of the adventures of James Bond, or, better, Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry, whom I think is his direct ancestor. Also good in July is Chris Beckett’s “Day 29,” a substantial novelette about an interstellar teleportation system which wipes out the user’s memory of the weeks just prior to its use, and the misgivings of one man as the ominous date approaches when he’ll be sent back to Earth and lose the memories of the days that he’s currently living through; there’s some intriguing stuff here, but the story feels unresolved somehow, with plotlines like those about the alien planet’s mysterious indigenes more or less left hanging, as though Beckett had originally intended to write a much longer piece. In “Pug,” Theodora Goss contributes a rather sad but lyrical take on The Secret Garden, Bruce McAllister tells a poignant time-travel story centered around one man’s family, in “The Messenger,” and Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows us a woman in a hopeless situation, trapped on a space station slowly being filled past capacity by refugees from some unspecified cosmic catastrophe, growing grimly resigned to the fact that things are going to get even more hopeless soon, in “Dunyon.” New writer Josh Roseman takes us on a doomed and violent excursion across an unlikely future Earth that might well be called No-Waterworld, in “Bring on the Rain,” new writer Leah Cypess shows us how exacerbated bullying in high school might be an unintended social consequence of genetic engineering, in “Twelvers,” and Norman Spinrad taps into whale song to learn “The Music of the Sphere.”

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  Eclipse Four, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade, 978-1-59780-197-3, $14.99, 230 pages).

  Tor.com, 7/13.

  Tor.com, 6/22.

  Tor.com, 6/8.

  Panverse Three: Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dario Ciriello, ed. (Panverse Publishing, 978-0-9837313-1-3, 284 pages). Cover art by Aurelia Shaw.

  Jonathan Strahan is having a very good year so far. Strahan’s Eclipse Four is another excellent original anthology, the third first-rate anthology he’s edited this year, joining his earlier Engineering Infinity and Life on Mars. Being an unregenerate SF fan, it didn’t strike me as being as quite as strong as Engineering Infinity, an all-SF anthology, because Eclipse Four deliberately sets out to offers a mix of SF and fantasy, and even some metafiction and slipstream, but, considerations of genre classification aside, everything here is of high literary quality, and although some of the selections are more to my taste than others, there’s nothing here that’s bad; in fact, everything here is a first-rate, successful example of the kind of thing that it is.

  One interesting thing about Eclipse Four is that it not only mixes SF and fantasy stories, but that many of the stories mix SF and fantasy tropes within themselves, or sometimes disguise SF as fantasy. Probably the strongest story here, for example, Damien Broderick’s “The Beancounter’s Cat,” starts out reading like fantasy, even like a fairy tale, and gradually turns into very far-future SF, with the w
orld of the protagonist constantly widening out and becoming richer and stranger with every step of the journey that she takes. Gwyneth Jones’s “The Vicar of Mars,” one of her “Buonarotti” stories, tells what turns out to essentially be a Vengeful Ghost story set on a realistically described colonized Mars (which made me wonder if it was a story written for Strahan’s all-Mars anthology, Life on Mars, which missed the turn-in date), mixing hard SF content with what at least seems to be a supernatural element (although there is some suggestion that having gone through the “Buonarotti” process is what gives the woman the ability to change the reality surrounding her to reflect her dreams and fears). “Dying Young,” by new writer Peter M. Ball, starts out seeming like a Weird Western, a mix of fantasy and Spaghetti Western, something like Stephen King’s early “Gunslinger” stories, but by the end it is possible to discern a rationalization for it being SF instead (although perhaps somewhat unlikely SF), with the presence of “dragons” and portmanteau people assembled out of spare body parts explainable as genetic superscience in the wake of some apocalyptic future war. Caitlin R. Kiernan tells a creepy horror story in “Tidal Forces,” but although it’s not explicitly stated, the cause of the horror is pretty clearly a natural rather than a supernatural phenomenon, a mini black-hole perhaps.

  Not all of the SF here has an admixture of fantasy tropes or atmosphere, though, of course. James Patrick Kelly’s “Tourists,” a sequel to his earlier stories about young Mariska Volochkova, “Going Deep” and the current Hugo finalist “Plus or Minus,” is about as unambiguously and straightforward an SF story as you can get, set on another well-imagined colonized Mars (another outtake from Life on Mars?); this one moves Mariska a little further along in her efforts to come to terms with her life, and a bit further away from the YA tone of the initial story, “Going Deep,” although you may not fully appreciate all the implications of her situation if you haven’t read the earlier stories. Jo Walton reworks in SF terms the old story of a dollar bill being passed from hand to hand, the viewpoint narration shifting with each exchange, in “The Panda Coin”; the value here is from the incisively described and well-worked out looks at different social strata in the life of a future space colony, and the equally incisive and effective characterization of each person who momentarily possess the coin, although it’s a nicely science fictional touch that Walton also works in a section from the viewpoint of the coin itself. Eileen Gunn brings her formidable wit to bear on the time-paradox story, in “Thought Experiment.”

  My tastes being what they are, I generally preferred the SF or hybrid SF/fantasy stories here to the fantasy stories, although the single most entertaining story of any genre in the anthology is probably Andy Duncan’s “Slow as a Bullet,” a funny and folksy Tall Tale that will be appreciated by all those who enjoy Howard Waldrop or R.A. Lafferty in a similar mode. Michael Swanwick draws aside the curtain of reality to reveal the stage machinery behind it in “The Man in Grey,” a story that reminds an old fan like me of a cross between Theodore Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “They,” but which will probably remind most younger readers of the recent movie Inception. There are several stories about the afterlife, the most interesting of which is Rachel Swirsky’s “Fields of Gold,” and an intricate and very well-crafted metafictional/mainstream story about a writer writing a story about betrayal and loss, using the legend of Dido and Aeneas as a metaphor, “Story Kit,” by Kij Johnson.

  Like “The Beancounter’s Cat,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Dala Horse,” from Tor.com, July 13th, is another SF story disguised as a fantasy, something I’m seeing more and more frequently of late, which starts out reading like a fairy tale—perhaps a reworking of “Hansel and Gretel” or “Little Red Riding Hood”—but widens out to reveal itself as a far-future SF story instead, as the young girl protagonist finds herself gradually caught up in a war between Entities wielding immensely powerful superscience technologies on a ruined post-Apocalyptic Earth, with her only hope of survival being a toy, the seeming innocuous Dala Horse of the title. Ken MacLeod provides another conflict between high-tech antagonists, in “Earth Hour,” in Tor.com on June 22nd, this one a straightforward post-cyberpunk adventure, although an ingenious, exciting, and highly inventive one, as a politician dodges attempts to kill him by a technologically sophisticated assassin; the politician’s method of rendering emergency aid to two innocent victims caught in the crossfire is particularly clever, and took me by surprise, although it’s perfectly logical in retrospect. Charlie Jane Anders serves up another kind of conflict, a philosophical one with potentially profound implications, in “Six Months, Three Days,” from Tor.com on June 8th, a melancholy study of two lovers with precognitive abilities who differ sharply on the question of whether the future they see in their visions can be changed, or is set inflexibly in place.

  Just out from ultra-small press Panverse Publishing is Panverse Three: Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Dario Ciriello. As the title states, this is an all-novella anthology, a format I like, although a pretty rare one these days, and I also like the fact that most of the novellas are science fiction of one sort or another. The literary quality is pretty good here, too—perhaps no award-contenders or winners, but a lot of good, solid, entertaining reading, and a good value for your money. The best story here is probably new writer Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” a time-viewer story of sorts, although the not-so-hidden agenda seems to be to call attention to an actual historical atrocity, a controversial and disputed one in some circles, although there’s little doubt that the author believes that it actually took place, and makes a convincing case for that. Presented as a sequence of articles, scholarly essays, Senate testimony, and interviews, the story may initially feel a bit dry to some readers, but the events that it graphically describes are anything but—in fact, they’re harrowing, as hard to read as the most grotesque horror, and so be warned, this story is probably not for the squeamish. Liu’s story also benefits from his expert prose, and his usual subtle characterization of a modern Chinese-American struggling to reconcile her everyday life with her cultural heritage. Also good is Don D’Ammassa’s “Martyrs,” a somewhat old-fashioned story of Terran archeologists exploring enigmatic alien ruins that delivers a traditionally satisfying kick; the solution to the biological mystery here is fairly obvious from the start, but D’Ammassa comes up with a nice twist at the end anyway, in the manner in which the philosophical differences between the two explorers, who have a very prickly relationship, is resolved.

  Jason Stoddard’s entertaining “Orion Rising” is set in a future where the Orion atomic-powered spaceship project came to fruition, which led to the colonization of Mars, which in turn led to an atomic war on Mars, using the bombs that fuel the Orion ships for weapons, which in turn (in a rather unlikely scenario) led to the governments of Earth banding together into a One-World organization called International Unity which subsequently bans all space travel, for fear that the Orion ships will return to spread the atomic war to Earth (seems to me like this is the worst possible way to prevent this, scuttling your own space-going technology, and indeed it turns out that it is, but I’m willing to allow the author the premise; as we can testify, governments do do stupid things). The protagonist of the story is a colonist from the now-starving Martian colonies who steals an Orion ship and returns to Earth to beg the Earth government for aid, with unexpected (to him) results. He’s an appealing character, probably the story’s greatest strength, a passive but ethical unofficial ambassador who bravely pushes his people’s cause, trying to awaken the conscience of Earth society, in the face of great personal suffering and danger, reminiscent of an Ursula K. Le Guin character, although his transformation into an action hero in the story’s last few pages is unconvincing. New writer Gavin Salisbury’s “Junction 5” is set on a rather unlikely world divided between nomadic tribes who constantly circle the world on living alien trains and the settled or “s
tatic” Junction-living folk who trade with them. The story follows one of the train people, or Gliders, who is betrayed into exile in Junction 5; he spends much of the story hiding in the basement of a huge temple, but eventually emerges to perform one of those single decisive acts beloved of SF stories (that somehow nobody had ever thought of doing before) that instantly overthrows and transforms the entire society worldwide. A bit silly, but Salisbury does a nice job of distinguishing the psychological different between nomads and settled folk, and the customs that they have generated. The only story here I didn’t care for, perhaps not co-incidentally, is the anthology’s only fantasy, “Dust to Dust,” by new writer Tochi Onyebuchi, a well-crafted but grim Cold War fantasy with overtones of the Golem legend that goes on much too long; this would have worked better as a novelette, or even a short story.

  If you want Panverse Three, you’ll never find it in bookstores (at the moment, it’s not even available through Amazon), so your best bet is probably to order it directly from the publisher, Panverse Publishing, at www.panversepublishing.com.

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  F&SF, September/October

  Asimov’s, August.

  Asimov’s, September.

  Interzone 233.

  Interzone 234.

  There’s more SF than usual in the September/October issue of F&SF, and most of the strongest stories in the issue are the SF ones. The best story in September/October is probably Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found”; the speculative element here is a bit unlikely, but Ryman is one of the best in the genre at telling stories set in evocatively described Third World milieus, rivaled only by Ian McDonald and Paolo Bacigalupi, and the vivid Nigerian setting, showing a nation caught between the modern world and the old world of tribal superstitions, is one of the story’s strengths—along with the complex, completely believable characterization, and the emotionally powerful, almost grueling, interactions between those characters. If not for the speculative element, and the fact that it’s appearing in F&SF, it wouldn’t be surprising to see “What We Found” show up in mainstream Best of the Year collections. Also good is Karl Bunker’s “Overtaken”; like most of Bunker’s work to date, there’s a faintly old-fashioned, retro sensibility to this, but he does a good job of putting a modern twist on an old theme, the slow colonization ship overtaken by a faster, more technologically advanced one, and provides a sharp, unexpected twist at the end. Much the same could be said of Daniel Marcus’s “Bright Moment,” which marks a welcome return to the genre by Marcus, a good writer who has been silent for some years—the basic set-up is familiar, a corporation in the midst of terraforming an alien planet makes the unwanted discovery that there are sentient beings already living there, but Marcus does a first-rate job of taking it in an unexpected direction, quite movingly by the end. Sarah Langan’s “The Man Inside Black Betty” is a suspenseful story about at a future Earth (one set rather close to the present, though, in 2012, which means the story will be obsolete before it’s likely to be reprinted) threatened by a black hole—exciting, although the science is questionable at best. Chris De Vito’s “Anise” is a rather icky look at Cyborg Love in the near future.