Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The fantasy stories here are weaker. The best of them is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Where Have All the Young Men Gone?,” an account of a tourist inadvertently caught up in a battle to stop a vengeful ghost, and willing to sacrifice everything to put her to rest (although why his sacrifice should stop the Milkmaid, who, after all, is already dead, is unclear). M. Rickert’s “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece” is strange and elegant, more slipstream than horror, Deborah J. Ross’s “A Borrowed Heart” is an entertaining Victorian fantasy about a Fallen Woman returning to the home from which she’s been exiled to battle a succubus, and “Time and Tide,” by the late Alan Ryan, a creepy story about a guilt-stricken man literally haunted by the drowning death of his brother, which he feels that he didn’t do enough to prevent.

  The August Asimov’s is also a strong issue. Best story here is probably Michael Swanwick’s “For I Have Laid Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again,” the second major story Swanwick has published in less than a month (the other being “The Dala Horse” from Tor.com). In some ways, this comes close to being a disguised mainstream story, since the same basic story could have been told as taking place in Ireland during the Troubles without any major changes of plot, but the SF details that are here are used sparingly but cleverly to establish an even greater potential distance between the protagonist and his lover, and the story is exquisitely written, with a depth of emotion rare in Swanwick’s work; this one clearly spoke to him on a personal level. Also good here is Robert Silverberg’s “The End of the Line,” a major novelette about the origins of the war between the native Shapeshifters and the Terran colonists that raged on the immense planet of Majipoor, the setting for Silverberg’s famous novel Lord Valentine’s Castle and its many sequels. Lisa Goldstein gives us a Steampunk Alternate History tale about espionage and insidious Spanish efforts to sabotage England’s new workforce of mechanical homunculi in “Paradise is a Walled Garden.” New writer Philip Brewer comes up with an ingenious idea, one I don’t remember seeing before, in “Watch Bees,” where the eponymous bees are programmed to guard small family farms by stinging to death anyone who doesn’t match a certain genetic profile; the story seems to be set in the near-future after some sort of severe economic collapse, and my first reaction was that it was a good thing it wasn’t taking place in today’s society, or the watch bee system would last no longer than it took the relatives of the first person to be stung to death to rush into court. Melanie Tem tells us of a human child raised by aliens, with devastating if unintentional psychological effects on the child, in “Corn Teeth.”

  The rest of the issue is less strong, although still interesting. New writer Will Ludwigsen takes us out into the woods in search of strange phenomenon in company with a Boy Scout-like troupe led by Charles Fort, in “We Were Wonder Scouts,” and new writer Zachary Jernigan spins a melodramatic and somewhat confusing tale of humans kept as pets by aliens after the destruction of the Earth, in “Paris.”

  The September Asimov’s is less strong overall than the August issue, although there’s still some good stuff. The best story is probably Allen M. Steele’s “The Observation Post,” a nicely underplayed story about a Navy blimp crewman blundering across a nest of time-travelers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the dreadful choice he has to make as a result. Robert Reed is usually not thought of as a horror writer, but he can produce a really nasty one when he wants to, and does so in the dark and unsettling “Stalker,” about a serial killer’s conflicted AI helpmate. “Shadow Angel” by new writer Erick Melton is a bit confusing and hard to get into, particularly in the opening few pages, but eventually rewards the reader by delivering a lot of intriguing new conceptualization. R. Neube tells the absorbing story of a boy struggling to accept grown-up—and very dangerous—responsibilities in a society haunted by a deadly alien plague, in “Grandma Said.”

  The rest of the stories are somewhat less successful. Neal Barrett, Jr. describes a drastic future form of medical triage in “D.O.C.S,” new writer Alan Wall tells an ultimately rather pointless story with an intriguing character at its core in “Burning Bibles,” and Ian Creasey tells a story that may or may not seem a bit silly to you, depending on how you feel about the existence of “The Odor of Sanctity.”

  Interzone has been making something of a specialty lately of bleak stories set in totalitarian near-future British dystopias, and that description fits the lead story in Interzone 233, “The Silver Wind,” by new writer Nina Allan, a depressing—although brilliantly crafted and sensitively characterized—study of a man trying to find in alternate timelines the happiness that has eluded him (and just about everybody else) in the grim future Britain in which he lives. He sort of succeeds, at least in finding a less-depressing alternate Britain, although the speed with which he gives up his supposedly obsessive search for his lost love once he finds a more tolerable society to live in is somewhat disappointing, and the mechanism for the timeline-shifting is a piece of handwaveium worthy of Star Trek. Most of the rest of the issue is fairly glum too, with Chris Butler contributing “Tell Me Anything,” a story about an unlikely world in which everyone communicates emotions to each other by exuding spores (although surely “spores” is the wrong word; pheromones, perhaps?), and a long, grim, and somewhat muddled story by new writer Ray Cluley, “Tethered to the Cold and Dying,” in which important pieces of the exposition seem to have been left out altogether. Only Tim Lees’s “Crosstown Traffic,” concerning a human messenger who is sent on a mysterious mission by shady alien Damon Ruynan-like underworld characters, musters any kind of energy or elan.

  Interzone 234 is less bleak. The best story here is Lavie Tidhar’s “In the Season of the Mango Rains,” which acts as a sort of sampler of recent themes and locales from Tidhar’s work while also managing to deliver a strong autumnal kick without being, well, bleak. Suzanne Palmer’s “The Ceiling is Sky” starts out in a pretty grim dystopia, but at least lets the protagonist break out of it at the end and achieve a better life for herself. Jon Ingold’s “Sleepers” has an intriguing premise about the last surviving relative of a former colonist on another planet issuing dire warnings while slowly dying in an old age home about how the stargate to that planet, which had been shut down after the colony was abandoned, shouldn’t be re-opened, because it would allow a strange alien menace, which the man’s grandmother had told him about but which the government doesn’t believe ever existed, access to Earth; the story ends with the old man dead and the stargate about to be re-opened without ever establishing definitely if he’d been right in his warnings or not, but I like to imagine that slavering hordes of Lovecraftian monsters are poised to pour in as soon as the gate is reactivated. “Her Scientifiction, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy,” by Jason Sanford, is a game-world story, although the protagonist is embedded as a vital part of the virtual game structure itself rather than being a punter playing through. Sanford works some nice changes on the theme here, and the story is fun to read, but, in the final analysis, it’s still a game-world story, a form I’m growing tired of, perhaps because I’m not a gamer myself, perhaps because the fact that it’s all taking place in a computer game makes it hard to really care what happens to the characters. Will McIntosh’s “Incompatible” is, appropriately enough, a dark fantasy that it seems to me would be more at home in companion magazine Black Static than in Interzone.

  37

  Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente. (WSFA Press, 978-1-936896-00-4, $25.00, 127 pages). Cover art by Aurelien Police.

  Asimov’s, October/November.

  The Urban Fantasy Anthology, Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale, eds. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-018-6, $15.95, 431 pages). Cover art by Elizabeth Story.

  Alien Contact, Marty Halpern, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-281-9, 491 pages). Cover art by Dave Palumbo.

  “Silently and Very Fast,” by Catherynne M. Valente, is a novella released as a stand-alone chapbook by WSFA Press, in honor of the annual Washington
, D.C.-area convention, Capclave, where Valente is a Guest of Honor this year. A couple of months ago, I was discussing stories where SF is disguised as fantasy, and this one, which reads like lyrical mythological fantasy for long stretches, fits that bill well. Exotic and beautiful, it uses evocative fantasy motifs to examine one of science fiction’s most fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? Where’s the line between human consciousness and artificial consciousness, and how can you tell when it’s been crossed? If it’s crossed, from insentience into sentience, does that mean that the machine now has a “soul”? The story makes for a fascinating contrast with this year’s Hugo-winning novella, “The Lifecycle of Softwear Objects,” by Ted Chiang, which examined a similar concept, the incremental growth of Artificial Intelligence into true consciousness as a result of human nurturing and close involvement with human families, but the two stories couldn’t be more different in mood and approach.

  The best story in the October/November Asimov’s, and one of the best to appear in the magazine all year, is Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” a long and compelling novella that also straddles the borderland between fantasy and science fiction. On the surface, it seems at first to be set in one of those milieus reminiscent of an 18th or 19th Century rural England with all the familiar names changed that have become popular in fantasy in the last few years, but certain subtle clues, including the descriptions of the nature of the mist river that the eponymous bridge-builder is attempting to cross (mist which is populated with huge enigmatic monsters who could well be aliens), enables the story to be legitimately read as science fiction as well, perhaps set on a lost colony world where society has had to start over again, losing several centuries worth of technology in the process. The main story involves Kit, an engineer charged with building a bridge between Nearside and Farside across the mysterious and deadly river of mist that separates them, and the fact that the engineering details of the bridge-building are set out as rigorously and completely as anything you could hope for in Analog, with unforseen setbacks encountered and problems solved through human ingenuity, also helps to give the story a science-fictional atmosphere, even though the technology involved for the most part isn’t anything you couldn’t have encountered on Earth in 1880. That the building of the bridge also eventually involves everyone else in the surrounding towns to one degree or another and ends up changing their lives profoundly in unexpected ways is what, along with the vivid, complex, and sympathetically drawn characters, gives the story its larger aspect, and much of its power. It’s a quietly told story, not as flamboyant as the Valente, with few big, melodramatic developments, but it’s as engrossing as anything I’ve read this year.

  Also substantial here is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Stealth,” part of her extensive “Diving” series that started with 2005’s “Diving into the Wreck” and has continued since through a sequence of novellas and novels, most concerned with the dangers involved in trying to salvage now-forgotten high technology from the drifting wrecks of ancient spaceships. This one deals with the attempts of a scientist, once an investigator herself, to sabotage research into the mysterious FTL “stealth tech” taken from the old wrecks, research that she considers too dangerous to be allowed to proceed, and also with her troubled relationship with her ex-husband, a relationship she seems unable to extricate herself from decisively. Nancy Kress’s “A Hundred Hundred Daisies” is a grim and emotionally powerful story of the coming water wars that will be fought over dwindling resources in a near-future that unfortunately doesn’t seem any less-likely now than it did when I first heard the prospect raised, back in the late ‘60s—considering the historic drought of Biblical proportions that Texas is going through at the moment, perhaps even more likely. Eleanor Arnason’s “My Husband Steinn” is a droll troll story, wryly humorous rather than laugh-out-loud funny, even a bit touching toward the end, in which Iceland’s famous trolls are treated like embattled indigenous species rather than mythological beings. Eugene Mirabelli’s “The Pastry Chef, the Nanotechnologist, The Aerobics Instructor, and The Plumber” is that rarity in the genre, a genuinely sweet and good-natured story that manages to be sweet without slopping over into sticky sentimentality—rather reminds me of something by James Thurber or John Collier.

  Jack Skillingstead’s “Free Dog” is an ingenious story about how a virtual copy of a pet dog becomes an item of contention in a bitter divorce, and eventually propagates into a viral internet meme, with everyone wanting one—the story could have been told as mainstream by replacing the viral dog with any other spitefully contested item, and the speculative content here will probably prove to be of no more lasting importance to humanity than Pet Rocks or any other craze, but it allows Skillingstead to let his protagonist work out some of his resentment and anger, and come to something like acceptance and peace in the end. Kit Reed’s “The Outside Event” is a sly satire of reality shows, with a show that’s something like a strange mashup between “The Biggest Loser” and one of those exclusive literary workshops/writers retreats. New writer Dominica Phetteplace’s “The Cult of Whale Worship” is a well-executed but depressingly bleak tale of a well-intentioned ecological terrorist (the only kind you seem to be allowed to portray in an even mildly sympathetic light these days), sort of a less apocalyptic version of James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain.” New writer Jason K. Chapman’s “This Petty Pace” is a competent but rather standard time-paradox tale. New writer Derek Künsken contributes a broad cyberpunk satire done with bonobos and gibbons in “To Live and Die in Gibbontown.”

  These days, no two critics seem to entirely agree on just what the subgenre (or group of related subgenres) known as “Urban Fantasy” consists of, and the anthologies trying to parse and define this inchoate territory are rolling in, with more to come. One such is a big reprint anthology, The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale, two of the most respected figures in fantasy literature (of whatever type) today. This is one of the best reprint anthologies of the year in terms of literary value, and you certainly get more than your money’s worth of good fiction, but having two editors from such radically different aesthetic camps makes the book a bit scattered, and I’m not sure it ever really gels into anything resembling a coherent whole, being instead something of a grab-bag. Beagle and Lansdale divide “Urban Fantasy” up into three sub-categories—“Mythic Fiction,” “Paranormal Romance,” and “Noir Fantasy.”

  “Mythic Fiction” seems to be what I would have called “Urban Fantasy” throughout most of my career, stories—often (but not always) lighthearted—that deal with the intersection of magical realms with the modern world, with the intrusion of fantasy creatures into everyday reality, and, occasionally, with what happens when mortals blunder into enchanted lands where they shouldn’t go—stuff with deep roots in the old Unknown magazine and the works of people like L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, carried up through the final decades of the last century by people like Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Tom Holt, Tim Powers, and Esther Friesner, and by the anthologies of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This is the kind of thing I like best myself. However the big bestseller boom of the last couple of decades has been in “Paranormal Romance,” the explosion in which the editors attribute, probably correctly, to the immense success of the TV show “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” and the desire to produce more stuff like that, either in print or on television. Things get a bit murkier with “Noir Fantasy,” which seems to be sort of like “Paranormal Romance” except with more emphasis on Private Detectives, mean streets, criminals, and other noir elements drawn from Black Mask writers such as Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler and from old black-and-white noir movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s. The distinction between these last two seems rather a fine one, and often a story would seem just as comfortable in one section as in the other, depending on how you arbitrarily decided to categorize it. Much in both categories would just have been called “Horr
or” back in the day.

  Regardless of where you categorize it, there’s some fine fiction here. Drawing from all three categories, the best stories overall here are probably Neil Gaiman’s subtle Hollywood satire “The Goldfish Bowl and Other Stories,” Beagle’s own whimsical “Julie’s Unicorn,” Tim Powers’s “The Bible Repairman,” Thomas M. Disch’s chilling “The White Man,” Bruce McAllister’s metaphysical “Hit,” and Lansdale’s zombie apocalypse extravaganza, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks,” but there are also first-rate stories here by Susan Palwick, Charles de Lint, Suzy McKee Charnas, Carrie Vaughn, Patty Briggs, Emma Bull, and others, and nothing here is really bad.