Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  In “The Golden Age of Story,” Robert Reed shows us that it is possible to have a world with too much imagination in it. New writer David Erik Nelson gives us a rather silly use for time-travel, recruiting low-paid hand-labor, in “The New Guys Always Work Overtime.” And new writer John Chu also tells a time-travel story of sorts, episodes induced by a friendly alien for the reluctant protagonist’s own good, in a somewhat murky story called “Best of All Possible Worlds.”

  Much the same could be said about the January and February issues of Lightspeed: solid entertaining work, but nothing really exceptional. The best story in the January issue, the weaker of the two issues, is Matthew Kressel’s “The Sounds of Old Earth,” an autumnal piece about the fading of one generation as a new generation rises, except that Earth itself is being lost with this old generation, as the population of the planet is being moved to a New Earth, while the ecologically ruined old planet is scheduled to be sliced up for parts; the story deals with an old man reluctant to leave his home. I have some trouble with the idea that the entire population of the world could be moved elsewhere—although with the supertechnology this society possesses, being able to slice planets up like apples, who knows?—but the story is nicely felt and nicely characterized, and the frog pond that the old man has nurtured for decades and is reluctant to abandon to its fate is nicely symbolic of all the things about the Old Earth that are being callously lost in the process. Jonathan Olfert’s “Lifeline” is a near-mainstream story about the danger a Have faces when mingling with Have-Nots that could just as well be taking place in a bad neighborhood in present-day Dakar (or in any of a thousand other places around the world), only made SF by the background detail of the destiny-predicting Lifeline system which sends the rich guy questing into the slums in the first place, which is sketchily explained and not well-integrated with the rest of the story. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s fantasy “Purity Test,” is, as is usual with Rusch, competent and entertaining, although the stereotypical unicorn that shows up at the end is a bit disappointing. A.C. Wise’s “With Tales in Their Teeth, from the Mountain They Came” is a (sort of) retake of Fahrenheit 451, well-crafted with a psychologically complex protagonist, but the method of preserving books threatened with destruction by war, tattooing them on their bodies, is silly and probably leaves them even more vulnerable, something that works better symbolically than it would in reality. There are also reprint stories by Judith Berman, Daniel Abraham, Theodora Goss, Cherie Priest, and Jeffrey Ford.

  The February Lightspeed features another strong story by M. Bennardo, “The Herons of Mer de l’Quest,” told as a series of journal entries by a frontiersman lost in the wilderness of unexplored North America in the Eighteenth Century who encounters and ultimately battles a race of strange and sinister heron-like beings; good fun. Also good fun is Carrie Vaughn’s Steampunk story “Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris,” an Origin Story (to use comic book terminology) of the odd team of Harry and Marlowe (one a swashbuckling aviator, one the Princess of Wales), whose subsequent adventures have been featured in Lightspeed before, and who are shown meeting here for the first time as they scramble to escape an invasion of Paris by killer robots reverse-engineered from alien technology found in a crashed spaceship. C.C. Finlay tells a fast-paced tale of an agent on the run whose consciousness leaps uncontrollably from body to body, in “The Infill Trait.” And Genevieve Valentine tells a tricky slipstreamish version (or versions) of The Little Mermaid in “Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.” There are also reprint stories by Robert Reed, Mary Soon Lee, John Crowley, and Marly Youmans.

  The February issue of Eclipse features two good stories. The best is probably “On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V—,” by Peter M. Ball, a chilly updating of the theme of being abducted to Fairyland, set in a modern-day world where regular visitations by the Fairies are not only an accepted part of life, but even used as a tourist attraction; Ball’s Fairies are especially cold and ruthless, not at all nice creatures, and the story ends well for nobody, especially its bitter and hapless protagonist, who sees everything playing out in advance, but can do nothing to stop it or alter his own fate. The other February story, “Sanctuary,” an all-too-rare appearance by Susan Palwick, takes us to a future where some kind of Rapture has taken place, leaving those not chosen struggling to survive in the ruins of society—similar to the scenario of the Left Behind books, except that Palwick’s Post-Rapture world is more surreal, where mewling, speechless Fallen Angels flutter around, crashing into things, the survivors have developed strange abilities, and reality is fluid and mutable if not continuously watched, with nails turning into caterpillars, radishes into rocks, apples into marbles, and objects tossed in the air as likely to fall up as down. It’s a gripping story, but the only problem with it is that it doesn’t explain what in the world has happened or why, or answer the question, raised in the text, of what criteria was used by Whomever to decide who got Raptured and who didn’t, since conventional notions of good or evil don’t seem to have had anything to do with it; maybe this is the start of a series or part of a larger work, and All will be explained there.

  The strongest story in the March/April F&SF is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Assassin.” This is Cowdrey in his grim mode, as opposed to his more common comic mode, and few writers can be grimmer than Cowdrey is when he sets himself to be so—the story tells the (yes, grim) life journey of a naïve, idealistic, would-be assassin, who, after an attempt on a despotic leader, is captured and thrown into a slave-labor camp even more harrowing than the one in Matthew Hughes’s “And Then Some,” and whom, after suffering years of Dickensian hardship, is brought round by an ironic twist of fate to take another shot at the same target. It’s all quite compelling, and the only minor quibble I have with it is that a random selection of inhabitants of Hilo, relocated to another island after a tsunami destroys their city, is not going to produce Cowdrey’s idyllic group of South Sea Islanders, well-adapted to a primitive lifestyle, but rather a bewildered assortment of modern-day Americans struggling to deal with a life without cellphones, air conditioning, and pizza. Naomi Kritzer’s “Solidarity,” a YA piece about a young girl struggling to survive in a corrupt Libertarian society after being disowned by her powerful and corrupt father, is similarly entertaining, although each story in this sequence becomes harder to fully appreciate without having read the earlier stories, and it’s become clear that this is actually a de facto novel serialization. Sean McMullen’s “The Lost Faces” is a supernatural revenge drama set in Ancient Rome—absorbing, except that the ifryt is so all-powerful that there’s little suspense about whether or not she’ll succeed (and the fact that the Roman Empire, far from being doomed, lasted for centuries after the reign of Caligula). Deborah J. Ross’s “Among Friends” is another historical piece, focusing on a Quaker farmer who is part of the Underground Railroad in an Alternate World where everything seems much the same as in our timeline, except that sophisticated, sentient automatons exist; this kept reminding me, pleasantly, of Friendly Persuasion, although the analogy between slaves seeking freedom and automatons seeking to become self-determining is a little too one-to-one, and I could have done without the portentous Historical Cameo at the end.

  “The Boy Who Drank from Lovely Women,” probably one of the last stories we’ll see, alas, from the late Steven Utley, is also, in part, a historical piece, following the life of a rakish, handsome young cad from a campaign to put down a slave rebellion in Eighteenth Century Haiti through his slowly dawning realization that somewhere along the line he’s become immortal—and then to the present day, where he struggles with the moral implications of his staying eternally young; one of the things I like about the story is that the protagonist is conflicted about whether his immortality is a blessing or a curse, and that he really can’t figure out how it happened in the first place, although several theories are advanced. “What the Red Oaks Knew,” written by Elizabeth Bourne in collaboration with her husba
nd, the late Mark Bourne, is a backwoods lowlife fantasy, complete with sinister spell-casting Augur Men, rundown trailers, and pot-growers, but shot through with moments of surprising lyricism; the overall effect is something like an Andy Duncan story, high praise. Chet Arthur’s “The Trouble with Heaven” is a slyly comic story about labor troubles on a space station inhabited by millionaires who expect great service for their money, and the resourceful semi-retired diplomat (put out to pasture in a “safe posting”) who has to deal with them, all reminding me a bit of a less openly farcical version of one of Keith Laumer’s Retief stories. The rest of the stories in the issue are less successful.

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  Asimov’s, March.

  Superheroes, ed Rich Horton. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-380-8, $15.95, 375 pages). Cover design by Michael King.

  Future Games, ed Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-381-5, $15.95, 371 pages). Cover design by Michael King.

  Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, by Jack Vance, eds Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-560-4, $45.00, 336 pages). Cover art by Tom Kidd.

  The March issue of Asimov’s features that magazine’s strongest story so far this year, “Feral Moon,” by Alexander Jablokov. This is a superior example of the Military SF subgenre, far more sophisticated, and inventive than the standard product, following a disgraced officer in the midst of an intra-Solar System war who must lead troops who despise and distrust him on a campaign to fight their way corridor by corridor into the interior of an embattled Phobos that has been honeycombed with tunnels and turned into a into a fortress. Things are complicated by the need to do as little damage as possible to the non-combatant members of the colony, by military politics, and by the fact that the officer’s estranged ex-wife, head of a relief mission, is trapped somewhere inside; we learn about the reasons for the officer’s disgrace in flashbacks. All of which makes for a chewy and compelling novella. Also excellent, although a very different kind of story, is “Needlework,” by Lavie Tidhar. A story set in his complex, evocative, multi-cultural “Central Station” future, when humanity is spreading through the solar system, “Needlework” is almost plotless, a slice-of-life story that follows two Vietnamese kids from the same village who pursue different paths through life with the ultimate goal of getting into space (or the “Up-And-Out,” as it’s called here, in a clear shout-out to Cordwainer Smith); they only met again in the last few paragraphs, and while this might function better as the first section of a much longer story, the writing here is so lyrical and the characters so interesting that it does reach a sort of closure anyway, with the rest of their conjoined story implicit in the text.

  Not quite on the same level, but also good, and solidly entertaining, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Uncertainty,” which shares certain points of similarity with Rick Wilber’s “Something Real” from last year, both being about baseball-player turned spy Moe Berg (a real historical figure), a mission to assassinate physicist Werner Heisenberg before he can reveal information that would enable the Nazis to create an atomic bomb before we do, and lots of time-hopping across a bewildering array of alternate timelines. Apparently editor Sheila Williams received these two similar stories almost at the same time, and decided to buy both of them, something that does happen; when I was the editor at Asimov’s, I once received two stories within a day of each other about an alternate world where Fidel Castro played professional baseball in the United States instead of becoming the ruler of Cuba, and bought and ran both of them. In spite of similarities, Rusch’s story reads quite differently from Wilber’s, and brings us to a different place in conclusion.

  Everything else in the issue is weaker. Michael Cassutt tells a sly postmodern joke in “Pitching Old Mars.” Jason Sanford mingles Buddhism and nanotechnology in “Monday’s Monk”; unfortunately, the use to which the nanotech is used is so far beyond what any real nanotech is likely to be able to ever do that it borders on the silly, and becomes merely a Magic Plot Wand to wave to resolve the story. And new writer Garrett Ashley gives us a rather nasty fable about a man who is reincarnated as a pig (reincarnation seems to be something of a subtheme in this issue, also featuring in Sanford’s story) and ends up being “reunited” with his starving family.

  Stories about superheroes—handled either straightforwardly or satirically, or that cross the superhero meme with other kinds of story in an interstitial, postmodern fashion—have been slipping into science fiction markets for several years now. Although the powers the superheroes possess are unlikely enough scientifically—if not flatout impossible, by the laws of physics as we understand them—to make it difficult to really justify them as SF, nobody seems to mind them appearing in SF anthologies and magazines (although, interestingly, there are still occasionally complaints about fantasy stories appearing in such places), perhaps because the influence of George R.R. Martin’s long-running Wild Cards anthology series has made them an acceptable part of the mix, or perhaps because superhero movies, often accepted as “sci-fi movies,” have become such a big part of our society. (Many of these postmodern superhero stories deal with the family life and problems of the superheroes, which might indicate a big influence from the animated movie The Incredibles—although Spider-Man has been dealing with such issues in the comics since the early ‘60s.) Whatever the reason, they’ve been turning up with increasing frequency of late, and now we have an anthology collecting such stories, Superheroes, edited by Rich Horton. The best story here, by a good margin, is Daryl Gregory’s “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm,” a strange mixture of comic book superhero stuff and harrowing political suffering and endurance set in a rather Eastern European-like country, something like what you might get if you took Doctor Doom’s home country of Latveria seriously as a real country in the real world and got Solzhenitsyn to write the script; the images here are riveting, and the mixture of the two discordant elements is striking and sometimes surprising. Also good here are Kelly Link’s “Secret Identity,” Ian McDonald’s “Tonight We Fly,” Peter S. Beagle’s “Dirae,” Aaron Schutz’s “Dr. Death vs. The Vampire,” and James Patrick Kelly’s “The Biggest,” and there are also stories in the book by Margaret Ronald, Leah Bobet, Matthew Johnson, Jei D. Marcade, Ian Donald Keeling, Kat Beyer, Joseph Mallozzi, Carol Emshwiller, Elena Fortin, and Gord Sellar.

  I did my own version of this anthology back in 2007, Dangerous Games, co-edited with Jack Dann, but the idea has come around again, probably because of the huge popularity of The Hunger Games, and now we have Future Games, edited by Paula Guran. The best story here is probably Howard Waldrop’s quirky “Man-Mountain Gentian,” but there’s also good stories such as “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis!,” by Kate Wilhelm and “The Survivor,” by Walter F. Moudy (perhaps the first dangerous game story, from back in 1965, although an argument could also be made for Gladiator-At-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth), both of them published long before either The Hunger Games or TV show Survivor appeared, “Run to Starlight,” by George R.R. Martin, “Diamond Girls,” by Louise Marley, “Breakaway,” by George Alec Effinger, and “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” by Scott Westerfeld, as well as stories by John Shirley, James Morrow, Genevieve Williams, Joel Richards, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, and Timons Esaias. Interestingly, the anthology includes both Orson Scott Card’s famous “Ender’s Game” and the story that satirizes it (or at least uses it for inspiration to spin off in its own direction) “Anda’s Game,” by Cory Doctorow.

  Apparently I missed the first two volumes of these, but 2013 brings around Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, by Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. As the title promises, these are some of the early stories that Jack Vance wrote in his apprentice days of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and which were published in pulp magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Saturn Science Fiction, and Super Science Stories, pretty much the bottom of the SF magazine market of the d
ay, of which Astounding was the top, even a cut below Planet Stories in prestige. Unsurprisingly, these early stories are nowhere near the level of quality reached by Vance’s mature work, and some of them are pretty ordinary period fare—“Planet of the Black Dust” may be the weakest of them—but if you can disconnect your 21st Century critical faculties, they’re all pretty entertaining, straightforward pulp adventure, and here and there a hint of the ingenuity, imagination, and verbal playfulness that characterized Vance’s later work shines through. “The House Lords” may come the closest to being the kind of sly and subtle thing that Vance would later deliver in stories like “The Moon Moth,” although “The Ten Books” has its points of interest as well.

  The last seven stories of the collection introduce one of Vance’s series characters, the freelance “effectuator” Magnus Ridolph, clearly Vance’s Sherlock Holmes analogue, although Ridolph is as much a con-artist as he is an investigator, and takes on most of his cases not because of any desire to bring about justice or even out of intellectual curiosity or boredom, like Holmes, but because the failure of one of his get-rich-quick schemes has left him short of funds—in fact, he often matches wits with other con men who are trying to defraud him and/or his clients, and the enjoyment comes from seeing how he proves himself smarter than those who think they’re smarter than he is. The best of the Ridolph stories, like “The Kokod Warriors,” would appear later, but those here are slyly amusing, although, it must be said, some of them demonstrate the differences in social attitudes between the pulp era and today. In “The Howling Bounders,” for instance, Ridolph, who has taken over a farm on an alien planet as a business investment, solves the problem of having his valuable crop of resilian-bearing plants raided and destroyed by the semi-intelligent local natives by devising a cunning trap that captures them, and then coolly kills them, and boils them down to extract and sell the resilian from which they themselves are also made, thus recouping his losses. This is unlikely to go over as well with today’s audiences as it did in 1949.