Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The strongest story in the July-August Interzone, Interzone 235, is Mercurio D. Rivera’s “For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind,” another in the series that Rivera has been writing about the Wergen, aliens who have become obsessed with the “beauty” of humans and who trade advanced technology for the right to follow them worshipfully around in a manner that always reminds me of Al Capp’s Shmoos, creatures who would obligingly fall over dead for you to eat if you looked even the slightest bit hungry. This one shows us more of how the Wergen obsession is an actual physical addiction, one with a high and ever-increasing cost for Wergen society, and introducing the idea that there are Wergen radicals fighting to free their fellows from their obsession with humans, by acts of terrorism if necessary. The only thing I didn’t like about the story was that the first-person narrator dies at the end of the story (“and then I died!”), something that editors used to discourage new writers from doing when I was young, but which happens twice in this issue, with the first-person narrator also dying at the end of Jon Wallace’s messy and muddled “The Walrus and the Icebreaker.” Matthew Cook’s “Insha’Allah” is better crafted, with some nice characterization, but could have been set in modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan with almost no changes necessary. Al Robertson’s “Of Dawn” is a moody and evocative fantasy about a grieving woman who encounters a Pan-like mythic figure in the remote English backcountry. Gareth L. Powell’s “Eleven Minutes” is a rather slight Alternate World story.

  Another Wergen story by Mercurio D. Rivera, “Tethered,” features in the September/October Interzone, Interzone 236; this one examines the peculiar mating dynamics of the Wergen through the lens of a friendship between a young Wergen girl and a young human girl, a friendship doomed when the Wergen girl comes of age, and manages to generate a strong emotional charge by the end. Jason Sanford’s “The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues” is another of his “plague birds” stories, set in a strange post-Apocalyptic world; entertaining, but the backstory may be becoming a little hard to follow by now for those unfamiliar with the earlier stories. Fiona Moore’s “The Metaphor” is another Virtual World story, Jon Ingold’s “The Fall of the City of Silver” is a fantasy, Stephen Kotowych’s “A Time for Raven” is a well-crafted near-fantasy with an almost subliminal fantastic element.

  The November/December Interzone, Interzone 237, is a strong issue after a couple of relatively weak ones. The best story here, and one of the strongest stories Interzone has published all year, is “Digital Rites,” by Jim Hawkins, another story, like “All About Emily” and “Real Artists,” about how human creativity is being supplanted, or at least intensively and intrusively “supplemented,” by artificial means, in this case a massive computer system that allows filmmakers to more or less experience a performance through the eyes of the actors, and subjectively control it. This is a vividly written and strongly characterized story, with a tense murder/espionage plot running through it, highly entertaining. (I’d like to believe in the hopeful conclusion about human nature and the viewing audience that Hawkins comes to at the end—but, alas, I’m not sure that I do.) Lavie Tidhar’s “The Last Osama” is also vividly written, almost lurid, in fact, but somehow Tidhar is skilled enough to make the story work, although it takes us on a melodramatic journey into the Heart of Darkness through a world mystically transformed by the death of Osama Bin Laden into something like a weird Spaghetti Western. This is much too surreal to be considered to be legitimate science fiction, but, whatever it is, it’s a lot of fun, and will stick with you after you turn the last page. Douglas Lain’s “Erasing the Concept of Sex from a Photobooth” is also surreal, but a good deal less fun, in spite of a fair splattering of erotica. Caspian Gray’s “Insect Joy” is a glum and rather implausible story about a miracle cure caused by crickets; since no explanation for this is ever advanced, I’m not sure I’d call this one science fiction either.

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  The Book of Cthulhu, ed. Ross E. Lockhart. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-232-1, $15.99, 529 pages.) Cover art by Obrotowy.

  New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, ed. Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1607012894, $15.95, 528 pages.)

  Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman. (Wildside Press, 978-1434430793, $49.99, 992 pages.)

  Clarkesworld 62, November.

  Tor.com, December 13.

  Tor.com, December 14.

  The stories of H.P. Lovecraft, especially the stories in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle, have been influencing other writers for almost a hundred years now, starting with writers such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch, and continuing on through writers such as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, William Browning Spencer, China Mieville, and dozens of others; by now, here in the 21st Century, there are third and even fourth generations of writers influenced either directly by Lovecraft or by authors who were influenced by him, and Lovecraft’s work can be demonstrated to have had a major impact on the development of horror, fantasy, and even science fiction.

  The question is, why?

  By modern standards, Lovecraft is a mediocre to terrible writer line-by-line, his fustian prose overloaded with adjectives, sometimes to the point of near-impenetrability, his dialog stilted, his characters one-dimensional (and often difficult to distinguish one from the other), his plots repetitive, and his racism undeniable.

  The only reason I can think of for his continuing influence is his vision. Lovecraft was one of the earliest writers to shake off a 19th Century world which was dominated by the idea of sin and redemption, heaven and hell, devils and angels, and instead to show us a cosmos ruled by vast, impersonal, implacable forces that humans not only didn’t understand but probably couldn’t understand. As the narrator says in Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu,” “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”

  In Lovecraft’s cosmos, Good and Evil don’t enter into the equation. If one of those implacable, unknowable cosmic forces decides to destroy the Earth, perhaps without even noticing or caring that it was doing so, the good people praying to Jesus in a church would be as helpless and doomed as the blackest sinners in a tavern or brothel. God couldn’t save you—as radical a notion as the 20th Century would produce, and one antithetical to almost everything written in the 19th. As Lovecraft himself said, “I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the…cosmos…gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”

  As the 20th Century has progressed into the 21st Century, and as our picture of the universe has gotten deeper, more complex, and far, far stranger than anyone could have imagined in the 1930s, it’s become clear that we’re living in a Lovecraftian cosmos, one where the Earth could be destroyed—or at least human life wiped from it—without warning at any moment by an asteroid strike, a nearby supernova, a burst of hard gamma radiation from the galactic core, a supervolcano explosion, or any of a dozen other menaces, and that God couldn’t (or wouldn’t) save us either. No wonder Lovecraft’s work continues to resonate with young writers today, in spite of his literary shortcomings.

  Lovecraft’s own work has been canonized in H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, part of the prestigious series from New American Library, which firmly establishes his place in literature as a Significant American Writer (something that no doubt would have astounded Lovecraft himself as much as it would have dismayed my old mentor Damon Knight, who despised his work), but 2011 also brought us two reprint anthologies that give us an interesting overview of the recent work of younger
writers who have been influenced by Lovecraft enough to want to play in his Cthulhu Mythos universe, The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran.

  Both anthologies are solid values, particularly if you have a taste for Lovecraftian horror (if you don’t, as many people do not, stay away from both). The best stories in The Book of Cthulhu include “Fat Face,” by Michael Shea, “Lord of the Land,” by Gene Wolfe, “Black Man With a Horn,” by T.E.D. Klein, “The Unthinkable,” by Bruce Sterling, and “The Man from Porlock,” by Laird Barron. The best stories in New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird include “A Study in Emerald,” by Neil Gaiman, “Mongoose,” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, “Pickman’s Other Model (1929),” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Old Virginia,” by Laird Barron, and “Take Me To the River,” by Paul McAuley.

  Stories that appear in both volumes, and which are among the very best in either, are “A Colder War,” by Charles Stross, “Shoggoths in Bloom,” by Elizabeth Bear, and “Bad Sushi,” by Cherie Priest. “Shoggoths in Bloom,” of course, won a Hugo, but the story that strikes me as the most significant here is “A Colder War,” originally published in 2000, which established a relationship between Lovecraftian horror and Cold War politics that I’ve seen echoed subsequently in many other stories, including this year’s “The Vorkuta Event,” by Ken Macleod.

  A discussion of reprint anthologies published in 2011 wouldn’t be complete without mention of Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, which earns the odd distinction of being perhaps the largest SF anthology ever published: almost a thousand pages, roughly the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory, weighing five pounds, containing 148 stories and 62 specialized essays about various authors and categories of science fiction. At almost fifty bucks, this will probably be too expensive for most casual readers (there is an ebook version available for forty bucks), but it’s a great choice for libraries and serious collectors, practically being a one-volume library in itself. The literary quality of the stories is on the whole quite high as well. There are too many good stories contained here to do anything like a complete list, but among the best are “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight, “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” by Cordwainer Smith, “Fondly Fahrenheit,” by Alfred Bester, “The Green Hills of Earth,” by Robert A. Heinlein, “Souls,” by Joanna Russ, “Driftglass,” by Samuel R. Delany, “Bloodchild,” by Octavia Butler, “The Golden Horn,” by Edgar Pangborn, “Bears Discover Fire,” by Terry Bisson, “Rachel in Love,” by Pat Murphy, “Think Like a Dinosaur,” by James Patrick Kelly, “Seven American Nights,” by Gene Wolfe, “The Ugly Chickens,” by Howard Waldrop, “The Lincoln Train,” by Maureen McHugh, and “Blood Music,” by Greg Bear, as well as stories by Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many others.

  One cavet: the type here is very small, so you may have trouble reading this if your eyes are weak, or if you don’t own a magnifying glass. You won’t find this in most bookstores, so if you want it, either order it direct from Wildside Press or order it from Amazon.

  The November Clarkesworld, Clarkesworld 62, is perhaps their strongest issue this year, with two very good stories: “The Smell of Orange Groves,” by Lavie Tidhar, a study of the machine-augmented persistence of memory across generations, set against a bizarre, vividly portrayed future Tel Aviv, and “A Militant Peace,” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, a compelling look at an unusual high-tech, non-violent invasion of North Korea.

  Tor.com closes out 2011 with two relatively minor but entertaining stories: the Damon Runyon pastiche “A Clean Sweep with All the Trimmings,” by James Alan Gardner, and the vaguely Holiday-themed “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear,” by Ken Scholes.

  2012

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  F&SF, January/February

  Asimov’s, January

  Asimov’s, February

  Clarkesworld, January

  There are several good fantasy stories in January/February F&SF, but not much science fiction. The best story in the issue, by a good margin, is “The Color Least Used by Nature,” by Ted Kosmatka. The fantastic element here is miniscule—walking trees whose especially supple wood is used by a shipwright to build particularly desirable ships—but the story is really about family relationships, and does a marvelous job of describing life on an remote South Sea Island as one world slowly fades away and a new world takes shape as colonialism takes hold, as the old ways die, replaced by the changes brought by “progress,” which do not by any means always change things for the better. This is quite different from Kosmatka’s usual work, which has tended toward high-tech thrillers about science, skating on the edge of cyberpunk, but this is no less absorbing, and actually quite moving by the end. It joins a couple of recent SF stories by Lavie Tidhar in using a South Seas setting, an atypical one for the genre, very well indeed. Although not quite as emotionally affecting as the Kosmatka, a similar fantasy, also very well-written and characterized with a miniscule fantastic element, is John G. McDaid’s “Umbrella Men,” marking one of McDaid’s few returns to print since his “Jigoku no Mokushiroku,” his first sale, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1996. Both stories are very close to mainstream, and either could easily have been told without any fantastic element at all (and would probably be appearing in mainstream Best of the Year anthologies if they had been, and appeared in a non-genre market). At core, both stories are really about the passing of the torch from one generation to the next, from father to son (with, in the Kosmatka, an element of the sins of the father coming back to haunt him in the guise of his own child). The major weakness of the McDaid, and the main reason I rate the Kosmatka a bit higher, is that the fantastic element seems pretty arbitrary, even more so than walking trees—why a magic umbrella as opposed to a magic anything else? (The author’s story-ending note tells us why an umbrella—and it does turn out to be pretty arbitrary).

  Also good in January/February is a more straightforward genre fantasy, with a touch of metafiction, “Scrap Dragon,” by Naomi Kritzer, an amusing story of a narrator telling a tale about a dragon and a princess to someone, constantly interrupted by questions and complaints from whoever they’re telling it to, and adjusting the tale to suit as they go along. “Small Towns,” by Felicity Shoulders, set in a village in France being rebuilt after it was destroyed in World War I, puts a modern spin on the Thumbelina story; it would be listed as a fantasy, I guess, although there’s no real fantastic element other than the initial conceit that a woman small enough to be mailed in a box and live in a dollhouse could exist in the first place (and no magic is evoked to explain that—it just happens). The best SF story in the issue is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s post Cold-War spy comedy, “Mindbender,” concerning a clash between agents who possess remote-sensing and mind-controlling abilities, rather like The Men Who Stare at Goats with a higher body-count. Lewis Shiner tells an almost subliminal dystopian future/Earth-ruined-by-climate-change (except for the very rich) story in “Canto MCML”—effective when you think about it afterward, although if you let your attention wander for a second, you’ll miss the SF element altogether.

  Everything below this point in the issue is a bit weaker. Alexander Jablokov tells the not-terribly-serious (although somewhat icky) story of a future sex-worker who must radically adjust herself to accommodate the bizarre genitalia of alien customers, in “The Comfort of Strangers.” Ken Liu tells a story somewhat similar to the Cowdrey, “Maxwell’s Demon,” in which a Japanese-American woman with psychic abilities (in this case, the ability to communicate with ghosts) is forced to become a spy for the Allies during World War II, although, unlike Cowdrey’s, Liu’s story is not at all lighthearted—rather harrowing and grim, in fact, with a much higher body-count, and lots of rape and atrocities. K.D. Wentworth depicts a peculiar kind of alien invasion in
“Alien Land,” a story clearly in part inspired by the current mortgage crisis. Michael Alexander takes us to the trenches of World War I for a rather unlikely fantasy, one whose whimsical tone doesn’t match well with the slaughter going on overhead, in “In the Trenches.” And Ron Goulart offers us a typical Goulartish knock-about farce in “The Secret of the City of Gold.”

  The January Asimov’s is a strong issue, and contains one of the best stories I’ve read so far this year, one I wouldn’t be surprised to see on next year’s award ballots, “In the House of Aryaman, A Lonely Signal Burns,” by Elizabeth Bear. This novella is set in a future India that will inevitably draw comparisons with Ian McDonald’s stories set in a similar milieu, but Bear manages to evoke a different feeling and mood while also dealing evocatively with a society caught part-way between the modern world and traditions thousands of years old, and adapting, sometimes radically, to the problems generated by global climate change. She uses this setting as a place in which to tell a complex and ingenious murder mystery which couldn’t take place in our current-day world, concerning cutting-edge genetic science and physics, AIs, parrot-cats, cosmology, and the search for alien intelligence. Nice work. Also excellent in January is another strong novella, the curiously titled “Bruce Springsteen,” by Paul McAuley. One of his “Jackaroo” stories, taking place on an alien planet recently colonized by humans, First Foot, this is not so much a murder mystery as a grim crime story, starting out as a caper story and evolving into the story of a Charley Starkweather-like killing spree, with the dreams and doomed ambitions of the main characters as inevitable and bleakly ironic as those who feature in the Springstein songs the story references.