Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Also good, although not in the same league as the two above, is Jack McDevitt’s “Maiden Voyage,” an origin story that introduces Priscilla Hutchins, main character of McDevitt’s six popular “Academy” novels, which started with The Engines of God; this shows Hutchins on her, yes, maiden voyage, her first as a starship pilot, where she makes more than one unexpected discovery. C.W. Johnson’s “The Burst” matches a woman’s discovery of a new cosmological phenomenon with her lover’s discovery of an ominous lump in his testicle—low-key but absorbing, although why, in this near-future, it takes weeks and weeks to get the result of a “scan” of his testicle to find out whether or not he has cancer, I don’t really understand, since that could be determined more quickly today.

  Everything below this level is less successful, although none of it is awful. In “Friendlessness,” new writer Eric Del Carlo takes us to one of those Facebook futures where everything’s networked and interconnected and you can rent friends—although it turns out that the best ones are ones that you’ve made on your own. New writer Katherine Marzinsky tells a too-sentimental story, haunted by the ghost of Wall-E, about a garbage-disposal robot who encounters something out of the parameters of its normal operating routine, in “Recyclable Material.” And in “The War is Over and Everyone Wins,” new writer Zachary Jernigan takes us to a Balkanized future America where all the white people have died (what a relief!) but racism persists nevertheless.

  The February Asimov’s is weaker than the January issue, although it does feature another excellent novella, “Murder Born,” by Robert Reed, in which an enigmatic technology ensures that a murderer’s victims come back to life as soon as the killer is executed in a particular high-tech way. This is a compelling study of guilt and responsibility and the ways that families are torn apart and brought together by the murder or disappearance of a child, only slightly marred by the fact that it was possible to see the ending coming a fair way before you actually reached. Still, easily the best story in the issue.

  Also good is “The People of Pele” by Ken Liu, a new writer who seems to be turning up everywhere these days—this is a rather old-fashioned but compassionate and psychologically complex study of the first colonizing voyage to an alien planet, one which reminds me rather strongly in fact of the late Edgar Pangborn’s 1953 novel of a similar expedition, West of the Sun…not inconsiderable praise, in my book. In “The Voodoo Project,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells an absorbing but perhaps a bit too convoluted story about a psychic involved in a vast clandestine war that even she doesn’t understand who has to deal with outliving her usefulness while on what turns out to be her final mission.

  Stuff below this point is a bit weaker, and features several unusual collaborations. Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn join forces to tell the story of the “Hive Mind Man,” which is amusing, with some moments that are genuinely funny, but which also deals with subject matter I’ve seen Rucker cover several times lately: how the world becomes aware that everything is alive and interconnected. “Going Home,” by Bruce McAllister and Barry Malzberg, is a rather bitter bit of metafiction about science fiction and the perception of the future, with a Phil Dickian twist thrown in. New writer D. Thomas Minton’s “Observations on a Clock” is earnest, but also pretentious and a bit dull.

  The January issue of the online magazine Clarkesworld also contains one of the best stories of the year to date, “Scattered Along the River of Heaven,” by Aliette de Bodard. This is the story of a rebellion against a totalitarian interstellar empire and its complicated and contradictory aftermath, told alternately from the points of view of the rebel who engineered the revolution and her granddaughter, who returns for her funeral after the revolution is won and the rebel has been sent into exile by rival political factions among the victors. This is a politically and psychological subtle story, quite intense, and bleakly lyrical in places—what it reminds me of most strongly is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day After the Revolution,” a high complement, but de Bodard puts a cultural spin all her own on it. Also in January is “All the Painted Stars” by new writer Gwendolyn Clare, a pretty good story on its own, about an alien who is forced to throw in his lot with a group of humans and slowly becomes more human himself as he assimilates to them, but one that suffers unfairly in juxtaposition with the de Bodard, and “What Everyone Remembers,” by new writer Rahul Kanakia, about a genetically engineered superintelligent cockroach in a post-apocalyptic world, which suffers even more.

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  Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Simon & Schuster, 978-1-4424-2029-8, $16.99, 368 pages.)

  Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, ed. Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury.

  The Best of Kage Baker, ed. William Schafer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1596064423, $40.00. 496 pages.) Cover art by J.K. Potter.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs’s best-known creation is undoubtedly Tarzan of the Apes, whose adventures long ago spread from the confines of books to infect movies, TV shows, animated features, radio, comic strips, comic books, stage plays, computer games, and practically any other media you can think of, including a million jokes, pastiches, TV comedy skits, and cartoons. Burroughs’s other major series, the Barsoom series, taking place on a richly invented and habitable Mars, is probably less well-known out of the SF genre among the public at large (although with the imminent release—as I type these words—of the John Carter movie, that may be about to change to some degree), but since Burroughs first transported his immortal swashbuckler, John Carter of Virginia, to Mars in “Under the Moons of Mars” in All-Story magazine in 1912 (the serial was later published as a novel, A Princess of Mars, in 1917), the Barsoom books have rarely been out of print for long, and have been influencing the genre’s vision of Mars, and the dreams and the work of other writers, for a hundred years now.

  Burroughs is what I like to call a Window Of Opportunity writer. The perfect age to read him is when you’re about fourteen. If you read him at that age, particularly the Barsoom novels, you’re left with a freight of marvelous images that will last you forever. If you wait to start reading him until you’re an adult, when your critical faculties have had a chance to develop, chances are that you won’t be able to read him at all. This is because, as with H.P. Lovecraft, who I was discussing a couple of months back, Burroughs is actually a mediocre-at-best writer by modern standards line-by-line, with a florid, fustian, and adjective-heavy style (particularly in the Barsoom novels; the first few Tarzan novels were somewhat better crafted), who wrote to a strict formula, with a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, and whose plots were crammed with absurd coincidences and miraculous last-second rescues. Like Lovecraft, however, Burroughs if read early is also a Gateway Author, one who has inducted many a young reader into the genre, and transformed many a casual reader into a fan.

  Unlike Lovecraft, Burroughs had no unique Cosmic Vision to offer as a palliative to his turgid prose—what Burroughs is selling, and very effectively too, is exoticism: color, romance, evocative alien vistas, swashbuckling action and swordplay. His Mars—itself heavily influenced by Percival Lowell’s vision of a dying, drying planet laced with life-giving canals—is chockablock with sword-wielding Red Martians, fourteen-foot-tall four-armed Green Martians, ferocious giant White Apes, beautiful egg-laying princesses, dastardly villains, bone-white ivory cities, Radium rifles, flying cars, sinister alien religions, and numerous Lost Cities and (nearly) Vanished Civilizations dotted across the endless dead sea bottoms like raisins in a pudding. When Donald Wollheim at Ace began bringing all of Burroughs’s books back into print in 1962, the Barsoom novels in particular graced with lush, gorgeous covers by some of the best fantasy artists in the business, I was at a properly receptive age and I gulped them down like salted peanuts; many of my later peers, colleagues, and collaborators, who left Burroughs until their post-college years, when their critical faculties were well-developed and sophisticated, could never read him at all and had no idea what all the fuss was abou
t. (We’ve mainly been talking about fourteen-year-old boys here, that being what I was; it may be somewhat harder for fourteen-year old girls to get into Burroughs—although one way in which Burroughs was years ahead of other writers of the day, particularly in the Barsoom novels, was that many of his woman characters were fierce, fearless warriors, as deadly with the blade as any man, and I know several women who responded to that at a time when dangerous and capable fictional female role-models were difficult to find elsewhere.)

  Which brings us to Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, edited by John Joseph Adams, in which modern writers get to play with Burroughs’s Mars and its characters and generate Barsoom stories of their own, much like the writers in the Lovecraft pastiche anthologies I was discussing here earlier got to create new Cthulhu Mythos stories. There is a noticeable split in approach to the material here. Some authors write straightforward John Carter adventures with lots of swordplay and mayhem, chases, captures, hairsbreadth cliffhangers, and daring escapes, much as Burroughs himself might have (although all of the authors in the book are much better writers line-by-line than Burroughs ever was). The best stories in this mode are probably “The Jarsoom Project,” by S.M. Stirling and “The Metal Men of Mars,” by Joe R. Lansdale. I’m usually not much of a fan of postmodernism, but I must admit that the best stories here are those that take the other approach, and add a dab of playful postmodernism to the mix. Peter S. Beagle transports Tarzan to Barsoom to meet (and clash in combat with) John Carter in “The Ape Man of Mars,” Garth Nix tells a story from the viewpoint of a reluctant sidekick who is not all impressed with John Carter’s quest for warlike glory in “Sidekick of Mars,” Theodora Goss tells a story from the viewpoint of John Carter’s “dog” (a fierce ten-legged creature the size of a Shetland pony) in “Woola’s Song,” and several writers strike into effective material by telling their stories from the viewpoint of the Tharks, the Green Men of Mars, who are often the villains in the Barsoom stories, notably “Coming of Age in Barsoom,” by Catherynne M. Valente, “A Tinker of Warhoon,” by Tobias S. Buckell, and “A Game of Mars,” by Genevieve Valentine.

  Oddly, one thing that comes across quite clearly in many of these stories is that the authors don’t really like John Carter much. I suppose that with his love of combat, war, and slaughter, liking nothing better than to be sword-to-sword with some (soon to be defeated) adversary, John Carter really isn’t a hero much in sympathy with the attitudes of the 21st Century.

  For several years now, the science magazine Cosmos has been publishing the occasional science fiction story, both in the print magazine and on the magazine’s website. Last year, the science magazine MIT Technology Review did a special all-science fiction edition called TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, meant to be the first in an annual series of such issues. Now the makers of New Scientist magazine have launched a similar project, Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins. Let’s hope that this is a trend, and that other science magazines will follow suit.

  Described as “a new digital magazine about the future,” Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, edited by Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury, exists mainly as various downloadable formats for the Kindle, the iPad, iPhones, Windows PC and Mac computers, although they will send you a perfect-bound 152-page print version for $29.95. If you want to read this, Kindle or iPad are probably the way to go (the kindle edition costs $6.99), orderable either from Amazon or from www.newscientist.com/arc. Arc 1.1 is a mix of non-fiction essays and criticism by Adam Roberts, Simon Ings, China Mieville, Bruce Sterling, Paul Graham Raven, and others, and science fiction by Stephen Baxter, M. John Harrison, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Alastair Reynolds, with a novel extract by Margaret Atwood. There’s actually more non-fiction than fiction here, all of it thoughtful and interesting, dealing with such subjects as the intelligence of squids, the logistics of the shipping container business, museums, gaming, mass refugee populations, and social movements that have arisen in the expectation of the imminent collapse of Western Civilization, but all that’s beyond our purview here. Luckily for us, although there’s less fiction than non-fiction, the literary quality of the fiction is quite high, with a couple of the stories among the best to have appeared so far this year.

  The stories in TRSF were pretty straightforwardly optimistic across the board, being concerned as they were with emerging technologies and sustainable futures, but the view of the future that comes across in Arc 1.1 is more complex, running the gauntlet from the relative optimism of Hannu Rajaniemi and Alastair Reynolds, where humanity is going through a rough patch but hanging on and even making progress, to what Brian Aldiss once called “bracing British gloom”—Simon Ings, for instance, when asked What’s Next? for society, glumly replies “Nothing good.” (I found Hannu Rajaniemi’s reply to the same question more interesting: “Things will appear just the same, unless you know how to look.”) The best story here is probably Alastair Reynold’s “The Water Thief,” which manages to find something hopeful and even uplifting to say about the human spirit even when its protagonist is living in a cardboard box in a refugee camp. Also excellent is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Topsight,” a Coming-of-Age story set in a ecologically damaged but culturally diverse future Britain where people continuing dealing with their lives, and even find new opportunities, in spite of conditions that we today would find difficult. Stephen Baxter jumps us from the near-future to a more distant one in “A Journey to Amasia,” which takes us deep into the virtual subconscious of humanity in a future where a de facto war is going on between humans and superpowerful AIs—and where it turns out we have some unexpected enemies, and some unexpected allies. M. John Harrison’s “In Autotelia” is extremely well-crafted, unsurprisingly, but I must admit that I never entirely understood what was supposed to be going on here; as near as I can tell, a mythical Eastern European country seems to have intruded into the reality of modern-day England, with a sharp dividing line, and regular train service between the two worlds.

  Nothing is said here about whether or not we can expect another issue of this digital magazine down the line, although the “Arc 1.1” makes me hopeful that there’ll be an “Arc 2.”

  There’s no way I can be even remotely objective about the collection The Best of Kage Baker. Back when I was the editor of Asimov’s in 1997, I bought Kage Baker’s very first story, “Noble Mold,” and subsequently bought more than thirty-five other stories from her for the magazine, as well as reprinting lots of her stuff in my Best of the Year anthology series; even after I left Asimov’s, I continued to buy stories from her for anthologies such as Wizards and The Dragon Book. So it’s safe to say that I’m a Baker partisan, and you can discount my opinion here if you wish, but for me this is one of the best collections of the year to date, and will almost certainly end up in my top five. The selection is not the same as the one I would have made, and there are a few minor Baker stories here, but the overall quality is quite high, and even the minor stories are absorbing; perhaps the best natural storyteller to enter the field since Poul Anderson, Baker almost never wrote a story that wasn’t at the very least worth reading. For my money, the best stories here are the novellas—Baker was at her best at novella length—“Son, Observe the Time” and “Welcome to Olympos, Mr. Hearst,” but there are other good Baker stories here, such as the aforementioned “Noble Mold,” “Bad Machine,” “The Catch,” “Are You Afflicted With Dragons?,” “The Ruby Incomparable,” “Maelstrom,” and others. If you haven’t read Baker, you don’t know what you’re missing, and this is a good place to start.

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  F&SF, March/April

  Asimov’s, March

  Tor.com, February 29-March 21.

  The March/April F&SF has several pleasant stories in it, although nothing really major. Peter S. Beagle tells us about a larcenous although fairly harmless con man who must flee the sophisticated mercantile city of Utrecht for a life of lonely exile in a remote Puritan village in the New World, where he
has a strange encounter with primal forces in the deep woods, in the leisurely but enjoyable tale of what happens during “Olfert Dapper’s Day.” Sean McMullen whips up a more energetic Steampunk Gothic, set against a background of the Napoleonic Wars, in “Electrica,” which comes complete with dashing Army officers, duels, spies, Semaphore towers flashing coded messages, brooding Gothic mansions, mad scientists, seductresses in filmy gowns, sinister ravens, heads in bottles (sort of), and even the threat of a Lovecraftian Incursion. Albert E. Cowdrey tells one of the gonzo farces he seems to have been specializing in lately in “Greed,” in which an ambitious, venal man reluctantly running a small-town tourist-attraction castle with a real monster (sort of) in it seizes what he sees as his opportunity to make his fortune and get the hell out of Bonaparte, Mississippi for good—it all goes wrong, of course, in a biter-bit sort of way, but there’s a good-natured air to the story, and, with only a couple of exceptions, the consequences are not too dire for anybody, even for the schemer (although, ending up stuck just where he started, he might disagree with me). In “One Year of Fame,” Robert Reed gives us what essentially is a Writer’s Joke, about a reclusive small-town author whose work becomes immensely popular with robots, causing all sorts of comic complications in the life both of the author and of the town. Steven Utley’s “The Tortoise Grows Elate” is the latest in his string of “Silurian Tales,” dealing with time-traveling scientists in a prehistoric era, one of the longest-running series in SF; like them all, this is finely crafted, but like many of them, has a very small fantastic element—except for the fact that it’s taking place in the past, it could just as easily be told as a mainstream story, with little real change needed.