Most of the stories in this issue are fairly light, not meant to be taken terribly seriously; the exception is Michael Blumlein’s “Twenty-Two and You,” a somber story of a young woman faced with the near-certainty that getting pregnant will give her cancer, and the lengths to which she’s willing to go to avoid that fate—there’s an ironic twist at the end, one that reminds me of John Kessel’s “Clean” from the March 2011 Asimov’s, and which asks, just how much are you willing to give up for a cure? Tim Sullivan’s “Repairman” begins with a fairly bleak setup, a distraught woman whose lover has just committed suicide, but things are not as they seem, and this turns out to be hopeful rather than depressing. We’re back to light-hearted with Richard Bowes’s “The Queen and the Cambion,” in which Queen Victoria meets Merlin, and with Geoffrey Landis’s “Demiurge,” which is basically a Shaggy God joke. C.S. Friedman and KJ Kabza tell stories reminiscent of Galaxy-era-style satire from the ‘50s, which makes them feel rather dated to me, and Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg tell a familiar but enjoyable story about time-travelers going back and messing around with Mozart.
The best story in the March Asimov’s is probably Tom Purdom’s “Golva’s Ascent,” which is an old-fashioned off-planet adventure of a sort rarely seen these days, when many writers prefer instead to write apocalyptic future dystopias where ragged survivors live in abandoned cars while toasting dogs over a campfire for their supper. This is a sequel to Purdom’s novel The Tree Lord of Imetan from all the way back in 1966, and also to a recent Asimov’s story, “Warfriends,” from the December 2010 issue, although you don’t have to have read either to appreciate this story. It takes place on a distant planet which humans are making the first tentative efforts to colonize, and where a human refugee from the politically oppressive colony has escaped into the planet-girdling forest and forged an unlikely alliance between warring alien races and natural enemies, the cat-like, ground-dwelling, and linguistically sophisticated itiji, who are handless and possess no technology, and the warlike, arboreal tree people, who possess both hands and moderately sophisticated technology. “Golva’s Ascent” tells the story of an adventurous itiji who dares to climb up the fearsome cliffs that separate the human colony from the rest of the planet below and is captured and held prisoner by the humans, who have no idea that he’s a sentient being. How he forges a relationship and eventually an uneasy alliance with one of his human captors, with a canny insight into the psychological mindset and motivations of both species, and his subsequent hairsbreadth attempts to escape, make for a vigorous and suspenseful tale, a straightforward adventure story of a sort that we could use more of in a genre that sometimes seems to have forgotten that reading is supposed to be fun.
Also good here is “Patagonia,” by new writer Joel Richards, where a man journeys to one of the most remote places on Earth, only to discover that he might have been there before—in another life. “Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation,” by James Van Pelt, is mostly a thinly-disguised excuse for a critique of what’s wrong with modern education, a subject Van Pelt, a teacher himself, knows well, as an administrator looking for cuts to make tries to figure out why a teacher who does everything wrong according to modern educational theory is the most effective teacher in the school; turns out the teacher has some minor and never explained supernatural help, but this could have as easily been told as a mainstream story about a history teacher who really made the past come alive, in a figurative rather than a literal sense, for her students. New writer Benjamin Crowell’s “The Pass” does a fairly good job of handling a future I’ve already grown tired of, the one where almost everybody on Earth has been uploaded into a Virtual Reality surround, leaving the planet largely empty of human life, with the cities crumbling into decay and hold-outs forced to make a living by scavenging and hunting, although it does no better than most of them in rationalizing how such a system could possibly work, or survive for long with the physical support infrastructure of civilization collapsed behind it. In “Nanny’s Day,” new writer Leah Cypess takes a look at a near-future I find extremely unlikely, one in which courts are willing to grant custody of children to their nannies in preference to their parents; not going to happen, I feel, being against basic human nature, no matter how many examples of bad parenting crop up in coming years. In recent columns, I’ve been discussing science fiction stories that are disguised as fantasy; in “The Way of the Needle,” new writer Derek Künsken gives us exactly the opposite, fantasy disguised as science fiction, telling what is essentially a medieval court intrigue which here is being played out by “prickly metal creatures” who somehow, impossibly, have evolved and created a civilization on a planet after its crust and mantle have been stripped away by a supernova.
Throughout March, Tor.com has been running a series of five stories, commissioned by David G. Hartwell, and all inspired by a painting by John Jude Palencar, a practice that was once standard for pulp SF magazines, but which hasn’t been seen much in recent years. The stories are “New World Blues,” by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., posted on February 29th, “Dormanna,” by Gene Wolfe, posted on March 7th, “Thantos Beach,” by James Morrow, posted on March 14th, “The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree,” by Michael Swanwick, posted on March 21st, and “The Sigma Structure Symphony,” by Gregory Benford, posted on March 28th. With only a couple of possible exceptions, there are probably no award-finalists here, but the stories are all entertaining in their own different ways, and, as always with this kind of exercise (John W. Campbell was once quoted as saying that it was no problem giving the same story idea to five different authors, because he knew he’d get back five different stories), it’s interesting to see the different tacks the authors take to rationalize the scene in Palencar’s painting, which shows a woman in old-fashioned dress standing beneath a sky that writhes with huge overarching branches or tentacles.
The attempts to explain the scene in the illustration range from relatively hard SF to science-fantasy to satirical slipstream; naturally enough, considering my preference for core science fiction, I like the core SF stories the best. The best story in the sequence is Michael Swanwick’s “The Woman Who Shook the World Tree,” in which attempts to develop a new theory of what time actually is leads to tragic results; Swanwick’s story of obsessive doomed love is also the one of the group that packs the most emotional impact, by a good margin. Benford’s story takes us to the far-future SETI Library, which stores all the messages from the stars we’ve received over hundreds of years, a setting he’s used before, for a warning that if you stare into the Abyss, or into a virtual structure made up of enigmatic alien messages, the Abyss may also stare back into you. It’s interesting that both Swanwick and Benford chose reclusive (bordering on autistic) and lonely female mathematical geniuses for their protagonists. Gene Wolfe, unsurprisingly, tells a sly, tricksy story which is told in the voice of a child’s fantasy, but which ultimately turns out to be SF, about alien (explorers? scientists? envoys?) investigating (and, it is hinting, evaluating or even judging) our Earth. Benford, Wolfe, and Modesitt put the most effort into including a visualization of the overarching sky-tree of Palencar’s painting, Benford interpreting it as a depiction of streams of alien mathematical data in a Virtual Surround, Wolfe as a glimpse of the scattered units of his alien or aliens reassembling themselves into one entity before vanishing, and Modesitt, less convincingly, as a sort of Flying Spaghetti Monster who is the literal god of an alternate universe. Modesitt and Benford put the most effort into explaining why the woman in Palencar’s painting is wearing old-fashioned clothing, like something a Nineteenth Century frontier woman would wear (rather like, it just strikes me, the clothing worn in Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’s World). Swanwick and Morrow don’t really bother to include a literalization of the scene at all, pretty much, and so the issue of why the woman is wearing old-fashioned clothing never comes up.
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Lightspeed Magazine, January.
Lightspeed Magazine, February.
Lightspeed Magazine, April.
Lightspeed Magazine, May.
The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, by Andy Duncan. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848633-09-4, 325 pages.) Cover art by Chris Roberts.
Tor.com, April 11.
At the end of 2011, it was announced that the online magazines Fantasy and Lightspeed were going to be merged into one magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, that would publish both science fiction and fantasy in each issue. Five issues of the new combined Lightspeed Magazine have come out since then, so let’s take a look at them and see how they’re doing.
For the first several issues of 2012, the fantasy stories were generally stronger than the science fiction stories, although the balance began to be redressed a little as the year progressed. The strongest stories in the January 2012 Lightspeed were definitely the fantasy stories, particularly “On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant),” by Marissa Lingen, which tells a droll, vaguely Wodehouseian story about a circle of magicians who compete with each other in the acquisition of certain magical objects, and one who briefly gains the upper hand, with unexpected results; it’s a low-key story in which nothing terribly large-screen or dramatic happens, but one which is pleasant, charming, and amusing. Also good in January is Sarah Monette’s “Blue Lace Agate,” a Buddy Cop story about members of a police unit that uses clairvoyants to investigate occult crimes; nothing new here, but well-handled. The best of the science fiction stories is probably “The Five Elements of the Heart Mind,” by prolific new writer Ken Liu, in which a human castaway on an alien planet finds himself questioning his own values and way of life after close contact with the indigenous native culture; a bit slow, but interesting. Less successful is new writer Megan Arkenberg’s “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, in which a supposed alien invasion which feels a lot more like a Lovecraftian Incursion has plunged the Earth into a permanent darkness filled with horrible toothy monsters; the story follows a hapless and obviously doomed couple, besieged on all sides, who are fighting their way slowly through the eternal Night toward a refuge that probably doesn’t exist.
Most successful story in the February Lightspeed is probably Genevieve Valentine’s fantasy “The Gravedigger of Kostan Spring,” a sly comedy about a village of people made immortal by the eponymous spring, and their efforts to both keep their secret and add people with useful skills to their community at the same time. Carrie Vaughn spins a rousing Steampunk Extravaganza, complete with a spunky Indiana Jones-like girl adventurer, sinister alien artifacts, zeppelins, aerial dogfights, and a volcano full of degenerate Viking cultists in “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil”; not to be taken too seriously, but fun nevertheless. Keith Brooke’s “War 3.01” is about a cyberwar in a highly networked future, where whether you won or not depends on whether people believe you did. New writer Brooke Bolander’s “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring” is a Weird Western, a bit longer than it needed to be.
The March Lightspeed is a bit weaker overall than either January or February, as far as its original stories are concerned, with nothing here really clicking for me. New writer Kali Wallace’s “The Day They Came” is another post-apocalyptic story about struggling survivors in a world devastated, or at least bizarrely transformed, by an enigmatic alien invasion (Adams must like this sort of thing, since one of the issue’s reprint stories, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Electric Rains,” could be fit into the same category). “Test” is that rare item, an unsuccessful Steven Utley story, this one an overly familiar look at the first Faster Than Light ship and the mysterious sabotage it encounters on its maiden voyage. “Alarms,” by new writer S.L. Gilbow, is an arch postmodern superhero story about a woman whose superpower is the ability to set off alarms of all sorts, and David Barr Kirtley’s “Beauty” adapts the fairytale “Beauty and the Beast” into an unsurprising parable about dating.
The April Lightspeed is the first issue this year in which the science fiction stories are clearly stronger than the fantasy stories. Strongest story here, and perhaps the best story Lightspeed has published all year to date, is Vandana Singh’s “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue,” a complex and emotionally powerful story about a gifted mathematician exploring an enigmatic alien artifact found on another planet, one with the power to move things through space, time, and a tangled skein of alternate-possibility universes; this is an autumnal and contemplative story, as many of Singh’s are, with poignancy added by a doomed time-crossed romance. Also good in April is Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Mother Ship,” the tale of a sentient starship and the lengths to which it is willing to go to protect its inhabitants, which it thinks of as its children. A similar story, published here more-or-less synonymously with its appearance in John Joseph Adams’s anthology Armored, is Karin Lowachee’s “Nomad,” which deals with a sentient suit of power armor, meant to bond symbiosis-fashion with a human operator, who goes through a period of grief and disorientation when the human who has grown up inside it is killed. The original fantasy stories here are somewhat weaker. Eric Gregory’s “The Sympathy” is inventive and highly readable, but somewhat confusing; I’m still not entirely sure what happens at the end, even after the second reading. Marc Laidlaw’s “Forget You” is a nicely crafted modern version of the fairy tale where your lover tells you that you can live together happily forever as long as you don’t open that door or look in that box, but of course, you do anyway; reminiscent in some ways of Neil Gaiman’s story “The Thing About Cassandra,” from last year.
The May Lightspeed also has some strong SF in it. Best story here is probably Linda Nagata’s “Nightside on Callisto,” a fast-paced adventure in which a group of old women (chosen because they’re expendable, being already near the end of their probable lifespans anyway) overseeing a very risky engineering project on one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto, must fight off a robot revolt, an attack on the station by murderous construction machinery, with little more than their own courage and shrewdness to rely on in the battle. C.C. Finlay mixes the time-travel story with the alternate-world story in “The Cross-Time Accountants Fail To Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist,” which is entertaining enough, although it does succumb to one of the great temptations of the alternate worlds story by making nearly everyone you run into a figure of note from our own timeline, so the redneck thug is not just a thug but Elvis Presley living a different life. Melanie Rawn tells an expertly handled near-historical with nice local color, close to a straight historical story except for the faintest touch of magic, about the origins of the Russian nation in “Mother of All Russiya”. Dale Bailey gives us a quiet study of the emotional aftermath of an (unexplained) event not very different from those in the classic fairytale “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in a modern-day variant, “The Children of Hamelin.”
Original fiction is not all Lightspeed has to offer, though. Every issue also features classic reprints, some of them very fine, including “Gene Wars,” by Paul McAuley and “Always True to Thee in My Fashion,” by Nancy Kress, in January; “Not Our Brother,” by Robert Silverberg, “Craters,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and “Dark Sanctuary,” by Gregory Benford in February; “My She,” by Mary Rosenblum, “Electric Rains,” by Kathleen Ann Goonan, “The Legend of XI Cygnus,” by Gene Wolfe, and “Halfway People,” by Karen Joy Fowler in March; “Our Town,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Steam Dancer (1896)”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and “Domovoi,” by M.K. Hobson in April; and “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese,” by Nicola Griffith, “Different Kinds of Darkness,” by David Langford, “A Hole to China,” by Catherynne M. Valente, and “The Ruby Incomparable,” by Kage Baker in May. If you buy the issues in ebook format, you also get, as “ebook exclusives,” novellas by Anne McCaffrey, Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Hand, and C.C. Finlay (the wonderful “The Political Officer”), plus novel excerpts from upcoming novels by Nancy Kress, Holly Black, Jeffrey Ford, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Kim Stanley Robinson. The issues also feature interviews wi
th major authors, and “author profiles” with all the authors and artists involved in each.
On the whole, then, Lightspeed Magazine is doing a good job of making itself a worthwhile, varied, and interesting online venue, although I’d like to see a greater variety of SF used, and I’d like to see some longer stories in the regular magazine; much of the best work in science fiction is done at novelette and novella length, and I don’t see why Lightspeed, who don’t have the length restrictions that plague print magazines, couldn’t use some as well.
Andy Duncan is one of those writers whose work doesn’t quite fit into the main line of development for either science fiction or fantasy, existing a bit off to the side in a unique world of its own, along with the work of other great Eccentrics such as R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, Terry Bisson, and the man whom Duncan is most often compared with, Howard Waldrop. Like Lafferty and Waldrop, Duncan is often most comfortable when working in the rich tradition of the American Folk Tale, crafting shrewd and funny stories of the intersection between the modern world and folk traditions and superstitions, particularly those of Appalachia and the American South, but as his new collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories proves, like them, he also has other strings to his bow, and a surprising depth of range as a stylist. The bulk of the stories here (“The Pottawatomie Giant,” “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” “Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull,” “A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or The Devil’s Ninth Question,” “The Dragaman’s Bride”) fit into the Tall Tale category mentioned above well enough, although even the funniest of them are shot through with moments of surprising poignancy and even melancholy, but the best story here is the lyrical and autumnal “The Chief Designer,” which is set far from the rural South in the Cold War Soviet Union, just as “Zora and the Zombie” is set in Haiti, and “The Night Cache” in the urban environs of Hagerstown, Maryland. Most of the stories here could be categorized as fantasy of one sort or another—although a case could be made for considering “The Chief Designer” and “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” to be mainstream, although both appeared in genre markets—but the collection’s one original story (and it’s a good one), “Close Encounters,” is instead science fiction (sort of), and a treat for anyone who grew up in the Flying Saucer-mad days of the ‘50s and stayed up late, eyes wide, reading battered old paperback copies of Donald E. Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real.
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