Ken Liu’s “The Oracle” is a variant on the idea behind Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” about precognition allowing authorities to punish crimes before they happen; here, the question becomes, do you dare to allow yourself to fall in love, knowing that one day a lover (exact identity unknown) will kill you? Linda Nagata’s “Through Your Eyes” is the story of a privileged but politically unaware young man who gets inadvertently caught up in the reaction of a Surveillance Society to a political demonstration—so close to the situation today, unfortunately, that it’s SF only by the thinnest of margins. Leah Cypess’s “Distant Like the Stars” is about a young woman so resentful of the fact that she can never get away from her dominating mother in a society where cheap and easy teleportation Doorways are commonplace that she flees to the ends of the universe to find a place where the teleportation network hasn’t yet reached—it never seems to occur to her that it would be a lot easier to say, “Fuck off, Mom!” instead. Naomi Kritzer’s “The Wall” is a clever time-travel story where the time-travel turns out to be motivated by the most personal of reasons rather than for vast political or social ones. Joel Davis’s “Writing in the Margins” give us an unlikely society where reincarnation has been proven to be a fact, and people kill themselves to get out of unpleasant situations and on to the next life. And Alan Wall’s “Spider God and the Periodic Table” starts out like a high-tech mystery, but turns out to be a Stealth Fantasy about a Lovecraftian Incursion instead.
There were a rush of good stories at Tor.com in July. Perhaps the best of these, and one of the best things published by Tor.com this year, is “The Best We Can,” by Carrie Vaughn, from July 17, a quiet but moving story about an all-too-plausible reaction to the age-old dream of First Contact. Also excellent is Nancy Kress’s novella “One,” also from July 17, about a battered and embittered professional boxer who finds, initially to his chagrin, that he’s developing what amounts to a superpower, a sort of super-empathy that allows him to read body-language with such pinpoint accuracy that it’s almost like being able to read minds; and that’s only the beginning of his journey, for both better and worse. Also good, from July 11, is Ken Liu’s “The Plague,” reprinted from Nature magazine’s Futures series, a short, sharp shocker demonstrating how people are kept apart as much by their preconceptions as by the mutual incompatibilities of their environments. Susan Palwick’s “Homecoming,” from July 10, is a smart, well-crafted fantasy that merges the story of the sirens and their supernaturally alluring calls with the story of the girl who disguises herself as a boy and follows her man to sea, with some intriguing twists along the way. Marissa K. Lingen’s “The Ministry of Changes,” from July 3, depicts an embattled society that is slowly losing an endless war in spite of its ability to peer into the future. Ben Burgis’s “Contains Multitudes,” also from July 17, deals with teenagers who play host to alien invaders and who find it hard to resist the ultimate temptation. Lavie Tidhar’s vivid and unusual fantasy, “Dragonkin,” also from July 17, is, like Eleanor Arnason’s “Kormac the Lucky,” one of the best fantasy stories published so far this year. Also good, and different from the ordinary run of fantasy stories, is Veronica Schanoes’s dark fantasy novella about a witch struggling to survive in 19th Century Poland, “Burning Girls,” from June 19.
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Subterranean Online, Summer.
Subterranean Online, Spring.
Asimov’s, June.
Lightspeed, March.
Lightspeed, April.
Beyond the Sun, ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Fairwood Press, 978-1-933846-38-5, $17.99, 296 pages.) Cover art by Mitchell Davidson Bentley.
Super Stories of Heroes and Villains, ed. Claude Lalumière. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-103-9, $15.95, 432 pages.) Cover art by Elizabeth Story.
The Apes of Wrath, ed. Richard Klaw. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-085-8, $15.95, 384 pages.) Cover art by Alex Solis.
K.J. Parker is one of the best fantasy writers working today, so it’s a pleasure to see that the Summer issue of Subterranean Online is a Special K.J. Parker issue, featuring two long stories by Parker. Both are excellent, but the better of the two is probably “The Sun and I,” a novella about a gang of reprobates and con artists who decide to cynically create a religion for profit—with unexpected results. This is smart, edgy, and slyly amusing stuff that reminds me strongly of a classic story by Fritz Leiber with a similar plot, “Lean Times in Lankhmar.” The other Parker story, “Illuminated,” is also first-rate, taking us along with a wizard and a young apprentice to a sinister and abandoned ancient tower to investigate books of arcane knowledge that have been lost and forgotten for generations—this scenario would play out in a familiar fashion in the hands of most other fantasy writers, but not Parker’s, whose version is full of surprises. There’s also a fascinating and erudite non-fiction essay by Parker, “Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour.” The Summer issue also contains a slipstream fantasy, “The Shoot-Out At Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World,” by Catherynne Valente, a horror/military SF story by Bruce McAllister and W.S. Adams, and horror stories by Joe R. Lansdale and Kat Howard. The best issue of Subterranean so far this year.
The Spring issue of Subterranean Online is not as strong, but does feature elegant fantasy stories by Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, and Kat Howard, horror stories by Brian Francis Slattery and Caitlin R. Kiernan, and a long, strange mix of metafiction and apocalyptic futuristic horror, “The Indelible Dark,” by William Browning Spencer.
The best story in the June Asimov’s, by a good margin, is “Precious Mental,” by Robert Reed, another in his long-running “Great Ship” series, about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. This one takes us far from the Great Ship, as an immortal Captain who has lived under an assumed identity for centuries is shanghaied along on a desperate mission to find and salvage a derelict ship that’s been lost for millions of years and where a secret of immense importance is hidden. This is another Reed story where the characters endure a grueling and protracted ordeal, suffering unimaginable hardships over a period of years, including dying and slowly being re-grown from scratch while agonizingly aware of the process the whole time. Reed is very good at describing this kind of prolonged physical ordeal, and I can’t help but wonder if this can be attributed to his passion for long-distance running.
Also good in June is Skylight, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a story about a young girl being trained to join the Assassin’s Guild who realizes, inconveniently, that she doesn’t want to kill anybody, and “The Fountain,” by G. David Nordley, a slow and rather talky, but interesting, story about aliens trying to convince humans that it’s in their own best interest to become involved in a space war to save another race of aliens from yet another race of aliens. Eric Del Carlo’s “Hypervigilant” is a somewhat unconvincing tale of empaths who have been recruited to guard public places like hospitals by spotting people who come in with the intention of shooting everybody, and with Megan Arkenberg’s “A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard,” I just couldn’t get by the premise that anybody would think it would be a commercially viable idea to make wine on Mars and ship it to Earth.
The March Lightspeed contains an interesting and offbeat SF story, “Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince,” by Jake Kerr, which is just what it says it is—a collection of Wikipedia articles and other essays and news pieces about an author who becomes famous some years after an asteroid crashes into the Earth and obliterates most of North America, along with book reviews and critical analysis of his work. This sounds dry, and there’s no actual “plot,” but the picture of life in the Post-Impact society that gradually forms piecemeal fashion is fascinating. The March issue also contains two good fantasy stories, “The Dream Detective,” by Lisa Tuttle, and “The Bolt Tightener,” by Sarona Ulibarri, which is reminiscent of the old tale about The Little Dutch Boy who had to keep the dike from breaking. The April Lightspeed
offers another story about people waiting for a dinosaur-killer meteor or asteroid—this one deliberately directed by aliens—to strike the Earth, “Deep Blood Kettle,” by Hugh Howey—this is well-crafted, and the characters have psychological depth, but less interesting than the Kerr, since it basically just depicts people waiting around in the everyday present-day world for the meteor to strike, and thus lacks the intriguing backstory of the other. “Deus Ex Arca,” by Desirina Boskovich, in which a young boy finds a magic box that can do anything but is extremely unpredictable and dangerous to everybody but him, making those who touch it disappear or turn into celery stalks or toasters—this is listed as “SF,” but is really a fantasy. The two admitted fantasies are Karin Tidbeck’s slipstreamish and somewhat surreal “A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain,” and Anaea Lay’s “The Visited,” which actually has more of the flavor of SF in spite of being listed as a fantasy, in which a Jim Morrison-like performer draws the inspiration for his music from a mysterious Visitation in which enigmatic creatures appeared to everyone in the world.
There’s nothing really exceptional in Beyond the Sun, a mixed original/reprint anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, but it is a fun read, with some solid core SF work, although a similar concept was explored better last year by Jonathan Strahan’s Edge of Infinity. The theme appeals to me, as stories of exploration and adventure in space beyond the bounds of Earth remain one of the foundation stones of SF, in my opinion, but don’t expect to find hard science and rigorously worked-out physics here, as this isn’t that kind of book; instead, it belongs to the old Pulp Adventure school, where spaceships flit between planets in days and sometimes even hours, and there are lots of exotic alien races to interact with and/or battle with. The best of the original stories here is probably Nancy Kress’s “Migration,” a compelling look at the power instinct can hold over even the most rational minds, but also good are Brad R. Torgersen’s “The Bricks of Eta Cassiopeiae,” Jaleta Clegg’s “One-Way Ticket to Paradise,” and Nancy Fulda’s “A Soaring Pillar Of Brightness,” and there is also solid work by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Cat Rambo, Mike Resnick, and others, as well as good reprint stories by Robert Silverberg and Jason Sanford.
A few months back I reviewed Rich Horton’s superhero anthology Superheroes here, and now here’s another one, Super Stories of Heroes and Villains, a reprint anthology edited by Claude Lalumière. Like the Horton anthology, the stories here divide roughly into stories that handle the superhero idea straightforwardly, taking the premise seriously, as superhero comic books do, or satirically, pointing out the absurdities of the mode, or that cross the superhero meme with other kinds of story in an interstitial, postmodern fashion. The balance here tips more toward the satirical/postmodern side of the scale, which may make Horton’s anthology a bit more satisfying for superhero fans than Lalumière’s, but there is some good material of either sort in the book. The best stories here are Kelly Link’s sly and deliciously postmodern “Origin Story” and Kim Newman’s somber and even moving “Übermensch!”, but also good are “The Biggest,” by James Patrick Kelly, “The Detective of Dreams,” by Gene Wolfe, “The Super Man and the Bugout,” by Cory Doctorow, and “Grandma,” by Carol Emshwiller, as well as good work by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Rachel Pollack, Leah Bobet, Tim Pratt, and others. The anthology also features a fascinating “Prologue” and some “Interludes” by George R.R. Martin from the first volume in the long-running Wild Cards series of superhero anthologies (perhaps the first anthology of prose superhero stories, from all the way back in 1987), and a Wild Cards story by Carrie Vaughn.
Another offbeat and interesting reprint anthology is The Apes of Wrath, edited by Richard Klaw, SF/fantasy stories about gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and other sorts of apes, many of whom have been raised to human intelligence by scientific means or whose bodies have had human brains (or at least human minds) transferred into them, some about apes who remain apes and their interactions with humanity, and, inevitably, a couple of stories about King Kong. The anthology has a spine of classical ape stories by writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and even out-of-genre writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Aesop, but the best stories here are the more recently-published ones, such as Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” about a little girl who has her consciousness transferred into the body of a chimpanzee, Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face,” an unsettling story about a scientist’s ill-advised attempt to take his affectionate relationship with an orangutan he’s studying a bit too far, and Philip Jose Farmer’s “After King Kong Fell,” which retells the rampage of King Kong and its aftermath from the perspective of an old man looking back on the night of terror he experienced as a child. There are also good stories here by Karen Joy Fowler, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Waldrop, and others, and non-fiction articles by Jess Nevins, Scott A. Cupp, and Rick Klaw, examining the role of the ape in, respectively, literature, comics, and the movies, and one by Mark Finn about performers and stuntmen who have worn the “gorilla suit” onstage and on the screen. (I’m mildly disappointed that the editors didn’t include Robert Silverberg’s “The Pope of the Chimps,” one of the best modern ape stories; this would have been a perfect opportunity to reprint it.)
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Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, eds. David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Tor, 9780765326003, $34.99, 576 pages.)
Twelve Tomorrows, ed. Stephen Cass. (Technology Review, Inc., $12.95, 189 pages.) Cover art by Richard Powers.
F&SF, September/October.
In my more than forty years working in the science fiction publishing industry, I’ve learned to expect a meme that crops up every ten years or so: “Science fiction has exhausted itself. There are no good new writers coming along anymore. The genre is finished!”
This time, it’s the turn of David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielson Hayden to refute this, with their new anthology, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, a huge reprint anthology featuring 34 stories published between 2003 and 2011 by writers “that came to prominence since the Twentieth Century changed into the Twenty-First,” stories that clearly give the lie to the idea that there are no good new science fiction writers coming along anymore. Here in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, some of these “new” writers, such as Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow, are already recognized as Big Name writers, others such as Elizabeth Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, and Hannu Rajaniemi, are well along in the process of establishing themselves as such, with multiple novels and major awards to their credit, and some, such as Ken Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias S. Buckell, and Vandana Singh, are just starting out, but will almost certainly be among the most recognizable names of the next decade.
This anthology clearly shows the continuing evolution of science fiction in the Twenty-First Century, as new types of people with new perspectives and new approaches continue to come into it, people who might not have fit comfortably into John W. Campbell’s largely white, male, middle-class, American stable of writers at the Astounding/Analog magazine of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. In addition to the usual flock of British and Canadian writers—Peter Watts, Charles Stross, Paul Cornell, Liz Williams, Ian Creasey, Karl Schroeder—the volume contains work by Indian writers such as Vandana Singh, Finnish writers like Hannu Rajaniemi, Caribbean writers such as Tobias S. Buckell, writers of Chinese-American ancestry such as Ken Liu and Yoon Ha Lee, and more women writers than you’d have probably seen in a book like this in the ‘40s and ‘50s, including, in addition to the ones already named, Rachel Swirsky, Marissa Lingen, Madeline Ashby, Jo Walton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Brenda Cooper, and Genevieve Valentine.
Such an anthology put together in Campbell’s day would certainly have had more stories in it about space travel and the exploration and colonization of other worlds, space warfare, contact with aliens, tales of the far future, and stories set on exotic alien planets than this one does (although that may say
as much about the personal taste of the editors as it does about the current state of science fiction, since it would be perfectly possible to comb through stories published in the same period and find plenty of stuff dealing with those subjects). There are a few space-travel oriented stories here, notably the stories by David Moles, John Scalzi, James Cambias, and Peter Watts, and a few that involve contact with aliens, notably the stories by Watts, Neal Asher, and David D. Levine, but many of the stories stay closer to the present and many of them don’t leave Earth at all. Instead, we get a lot of stories about genetically engineered people, some so radically changed that we’d hardly recognize them as people at all (stories by Charles Stross, Liz Williams, Ian Creasey, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Cory Doctorow), a few that interrogate the nature of human consciousness itself and sometimes question whether it even exists (Daryl Gregory, Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow, Vandana Singh), some that deal with the exponentially expanding possibilities of information-processing and Virtual Surround technologies (Paolo Bacigalupi, Karl Schroeder), a few Alternate History tales (Jo Walton, Ted Kosmatka), and lots of stories about robots and sentient Artificial Intelligences of one sort or another—from Elizabeth Bear’s ancient, wearily compassionate war machine to the intelligent spaceships of John Scalzi and James Cambias to the human-mimicing dolls or companions or sexbots found in Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, Genevieve Valentine, and Madeline Ashby.
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