Another good anthology from an ultra-small press that you’re unlikely to find in bookstores is We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad. The emphasis here is more political than feminist, insomuch as the two can be separated, the idea being to give a voice to the native races who are usually conquered and subjugated by Earthmen in much science fiction, especially Golden Age SF and the SF of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Not all the stories here are science fiction, there are a few Alternate Histories and fantasy stories as well (in both of which, imperialistic Western nations, often Britain, stand in for the “Earthmen” of the SF stories), and the book is a bit more uneven overall in literary quality than The Other Half of the Sky, but there’s still some excellent stuff here, and little that’s really bad. The best stories are “A Heap of Broken Images,” by new writer Sunny Moraine, a moving, unsettling look at the psychological effects of attempted genocide on those surviving, “Fleet,” by Sandra McDonald, which takes us to a post-Apocalyptic Guam abandoned by the Western powers, for a sly lesson in what it takes to survive when those powers become interested in “colonizing” again, and “Dark Continents,” by Lavie Tidhar, a gonzo, kaleidoscopic look at what Africa might be like in a number of rapidly shifting Alternate Worlds (some more likely than others)—but there is also good work here by Rahul Kanakia, J.V. Yang, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Dinesh Rao, and others. Again, it you want this, you’re probably going to have to get it from Amazon, or mail-order it from the publisher at http://futurefire.net.
Another of the year’s good SF anthologies definitely won’t be available at the bookstore; in fact, it’s not even available in print at all, because it’s an audiobook: METAtropolis: Green Space, edited by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes. This is the third of three volumes in the METAtropolis series of audiobook anthologies, dealing with intrigue and conspiracies in a 22nd Century world that has suffered a disastrous ecological crash and been rebuilt to adhere to strict Green principles, producing a relatively stable worldwide society—but one threatened by radical ecoterrorists who will not be satisfied until the Earth is rid of its human population altogether. You may lose a little nuance if you start with this volume rather than listening to the other two audiobook anthologies first, but most of the backstory you can pick up interstitially, on the fly, without having it diminish your enjoyment of the seven novellas here. All of the stories are entertaining and well worth listening to, but the best of them are “Rock of Ages,” by Jay Lake, probably the story here that stands best on its own feet without reference to earlier material, in which a deep-cover agent must surface to try to prevent an asteroid strike on Seattle, “Green and Dying,” by Elizabeth Bear, in which a team of con artists carrying out an elaborate scam against a floating city discover something more profound and disturbing than they’d bargained for, and “The Desire Lines”, by Karl Schroeder, in which a hacker searches desperately for a hidden cache of genetic information that could be used to save a dying rain forest. There’s nothing really bad here or less than entertaining, though, and the anthology also contains novellas by Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Tobias S. Buckell, and Ken Scholes. If you want METAtropolis: Green Space, you’ll have to order it at www.audible.com.
Another desirable book that’s not available in print form is Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Fiction of Ian R. MacLeod, only available, as far as I can tell, as an ebook from Open Road Media (www.openroadmedia.com), or in a Kindle edition from Amazon, where it currently costs $6.15. It’s a real shame that this isn’t also available in a print edition, and seems to have been issued with minimal publicity or promotion even as an ebook, with almost nobody taking notice of it, because it’s one of the best short-story collections of the year, by one of SF’s very best writers, and contains some of the best stories of the past few decades, including “New Light on the Drake Equation,” “The Chop Girl,” “Grownups,” “Nevermore,” “Isabel of the Fall,” the brilliant and subtle Alternate History title story “Snodgrass,” and a number of others. Buy it, if you have the capacity to read ebooks; at six bucks, or even at a higher price, it’s one of the best reading bargains you’re going to find this year.
Another must-buy is Horse of a Different Color: Stories, the most recent collection by Howard Waldrop. Nobody sees the world like Waldrop, who is one of SF’s great Eccentrics, comparable only to writers like R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Andy Duncan, who also follow different drummers to destinations only they would think of going to, and that only they could reach. He’s been called “the resident Weird Mind of our generation” and an author “who writes like a honkytonk angel,” and the rich, quirky, and eccentric stories gathered here, including “The King of Where-I-Go,” “Why Then Ile Fit You,” “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On),” and “Ninieslando,” stories that nobody else would have thought to write, and that nobody else could have written, will demonstrate why. This may be findable in some specialty bookstores, but you can also mail-order it from Small Beer Press at smallbeerpress.com; an ebook version is also available from them.
The Clarion West Writers Workshop has been grooming new writers with an intensive six-week training seminar in Seattle, Washington for over thirty years now, and to honor Clarion West’s 30th Anniversary, editor Ellen Datlow has collected some of the best stories that were criticized and run through the workshop process there in a strong reprint anthology, Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology. The literary quality here is high, and all of the stories are worth reading, so it’s hard to pick out favorites, but among the best stories here are “Beluthahatchie,” by Andy Duncan (a classic, perhaps the single best story in the anthology), “Start the Clock,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, “A Boy in Cathyland,” by David Marusek, “My She,” by Mary Rosenblum, “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” by Kij Johnson, and “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire,” by Ysabeau S. Wilce, although there’s also good work by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Louise Marley, Margo Lanagan, Susan Palwick, Ian McHugh, Daniel Abraham, David D. Levine, Christopher Rowe, Rachel Swirsky, and Nisi Shawl. There are also essays here about the authors and the workshop process itself by Vonda N. McIntyre, Greg Bear, Pat Murphy, Howard Waldrop, Samuel R. Delany, Maureen F. McHugh, Lucy Sussex, Connie Willis, Geoff Ryman, Elizabeth Hand, Terry Bisson, Andy Duncan, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin, Paul Park, and editor Ellen Datlow herself, all of whom have either been instructors at Clarion West, or, in some cases, students there themselves, once upon a time. This is probably available in some bookstores, and can also be ordered through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
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Interzone 249.
Asimov’s, December.
Extreme Planets, ed. David Conyers, David Kernot, Jeff Harris. (Chaosium Inc.) Cover art by Paul Drummond.
Rayguns Over Texas, ed. Richard Klaw. (FACT, Inc., 978-0-9892706-0-1, $16.99, 331). Cover art by Rocky Kelley.
Electric Velocipede 26.
Electric Velocipede 27.
After a couple of weak issues, Interzone ends the year with a strong one, Interzone 249. Best story here is probably John Shirley’s “The Kindest Man in Stormland,” which takes place in a U.S. ravaged by extreme climate change, and follows a private investigator in search of a fugitive murderer to a Charleston, South Carolina swamped by rising seas and battered by perpetual storms. The unending fixed-in-place storms of Stormland are perhaps a bit unlikely, but Shirley evokes this milieu well, especially in showing how the surviving residents of Charleston have of necessity adapted to life under radically changed conditions, and there is some nice suspense and a few surprising twists. Also good here is Lavie Tidhar’s “Filaments,” one of his Central Station stories, set in a dense, evocative, multi-cultural future centered around an immense interplanetary spaceport; this is perhaps one of the more minor stories in the sequence, but does a nice job in describing the crisis of fai
th and eventual epiphany experienced by R. Brother Patch-It, the battered old robot priest in change of the Church of Robot mission in Central Station. In “Trans-Siberia: An Account of a Journey,” new writer Sarah Dodd evocatively describes a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad across a 19th Century Russia that seems to have suffered a Lovecraftian incursion and is now haunted by strange and deadly monsters of various kinds who swirl menacingly around the train; this doesn’t really hold up to rational analysis after the fact—how do they maintain the tracks across such dangerous territory, and how could they have built the line across it in the first place?—but Dodd invokes the scene effectively for the duration of the ride, and I’m not sure you’re suppose to question it rationally in the first place. Jason Sanford’s “Paprika” takes us into the very distant future, almost to the end of time, for the fairytale-like story of an old toymaker and the “time angel” tasked with preserving his life’s memories in a virtual surround. Tim Lees tells an evocative if slipstreamish tale of a man endlessly searching the back roads of America for a small town that doesn’t appear on any map, in “Unknown Cities of America.” And new writer Claire Humphrey, in “Haunts,” a story to me strongly reminiscent of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, gives us a well-handled fantasy story about a female dueling master dedicated to her Art to the point of obsession, but kept prisoner, in a literal fashion, by the ghosts of the past. All in all, a strong issue.
Asimov’s ends its year with an uneven December issue, although one that has some very good stuff in it. The best story in the December Asimov’s, by a substantial margin, is Ian R. MacLeod’s “Entangled,” one of the best stories to appear in Asimov’s this year, and one of the best stories of the year in general. This one takes us to the near-future for the poignant story of a woman who lives alone and isolated, cut off from everyone else—even if they’re in the same room with her. Also good in December is “Bloom,” by new writer Gregory Norman Bossert, which gives us a tense, suspenseful story about explorers on a distant world who blunder into an alien lifeform that will kill them if they move. New writer Henry Lien takes us to an unlikely future society in “Pearl Rehabilitive Colony for Ungrateful Daughters” for the entertaining story of a young girl sent to an academy where they train recalcitrant girls in a peculiar martial art, and her continuing rebellion against Authority even while there. R. Neube’s “Grainers” is another in his long-running series about interplanetary refugees who live a desperate life on grainships that shuffle endlessly around the Solar System. Nancy Kress’s “Frog Watch” is fairly minor Kress, certainly one of the less substantial Kress stories of the several that have appeared this year—but, like all Nancy Kress stories, it is entertaining, professionally crafted, and worth a read.
Extreme Planets, edited by David Conyers, David Kernot, and Jeff Harris is another of the original SF anthologies from ultra-small presses that have come out this year; this one features stories set on “alien worlds that push the limits of what we once believe possible in a planetary environment.” There’s nothing really exceptional here, although the anthology does contain a lot of solid, entertaining, core SF. The best story here, by a good margin, is “Giants,” by Peter Watts, a direct sequel to his well-known story “The Island”—this is full of typical Wattsian invention, intensity, and audacity, but may be difficult to follow if you haven’t read “The Island” first. Also good here are “The Hyphal Layer,” by Meryl Ferguson, about a crisis that hits a harvesting station floating on an algae-rich sea, “The Seventh Generation,” by Brian Stableford (a rare appearance these days by an author who was once one of the most prolific of all SF writers at short lengths), which investigates the final evolution of life on Earth, long after humans are gone, and in “Haumea,” David Nordley retells the story of the Captain Bligh mutiny, recast as a tale of space travelers abandoned on an airless asteroid, and works out a clever way for them to rescue themselves. The anthology also contains interesting work by Jay Caselberg, David Brin and Gregory Benford, Jeff Hecht, Stephen Gaskell, and others. I’ve only seen an ebook of this title; a trade paperback was announced, but I can’t find it on Amazon (or the ebook either, for that matter). For information, try going to www.chaosium.com.
In spite of the title, implying freewheeling Space Opera, there’s only one raygun to be found in Rayguns Over Texas, an original anthology edited by Richard Klaw; most stories here don’t even take us off Earth, and most don’t have anything to do with aliens (attacking or otherwise) or armadas of battling spaceships. That doesn’t mean that the anthology isn’t fun, though. Like Extreme Planets, there’s nothing here that’s going to show up on next year’s award ballots, nothing really exceptional, but there’s lots of enjoyable reading, although only a few of the stories could really be called science fiction by most classical definitions, let alone the hard science fiction aspired to by some of the stories in Extreme Planets. Most of the Big Names of the loosely defined school of Texas SF—Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, Lisa Tuttle, Lewis Shiner—aren’t represented here with fiction (Sterling provides an Introduction), but the writers who are represented here do a decent job of delivering that difficult-to-classify stuff typical of the Texas School of SF, somewhere between Gonzo Fantasy and Horror in tone with occasional touches of Cyberpunk, that was once called “Outlaw Fantasy,” or occasionally “Cowpunk.” The most enjoyable story here is probably Mark Finn’s “Take a Left at the Cretaceous,” in which Good Ole Boy long-distance truckers tangle with dinosaurs, but there’s other fun stuff as well; Lawrence Person contributes a new example of the (rarely seen these days) Psychedelic Drug Story with “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids”; Aaron Allston tells a sly but rousing tale of small-town Texas lawmen fighting off an incursion of alien reptiloids (this is where that raygun appears, although it never leaves the ground), in “Defenders of Belman County”; Derek Austin Johnson details an embarrassing Industrial Accident in “Gray Goo and You”; Chris N. Brown tells a cyberpunkish tale of wheelers-and-dealers outmaneuvering each other in a Climate Change-ravaged Texas in “Sovereign Wealth”; and Jessica Reisman takes us to an even more Climate Change ravaged world for the story of a reluctant seer in “The Chambered Eye.” There are also stories by Neal Barrett, Jr, Joe R. Lansdale, Bradley Denton, Michael Moorcock, Don Webb, and others, plus the aforementioned Introduction by Bruce Sterling, an essay by Scott A. Cupp, and Appendixes of Texas writers and artists.
The long-running fiction semiprozine Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, is shutting down shop, and it went out with two last issues this year, Electric Velocipede 26 and Electric Velocipede 27, each of which contained one of the best stories of the year. The highlight of Electric Velocipede 26 is a subtle and wonderfully lyrical story by Irish writer, about the possibility of going home again even if it’s not your home, something faced by an astronaut performing a melancholy duty, in “The Irish Astronaut.” Also good in Electric Velocipede 26 are stories by Jamie Killen, James Alan Gardner, and E. Catherine Tobler. The best story in Electric Velocipede 27, the magazine’s final issue, is “The Beasts We Want To Be,” by new writer Sam J. Miller, a dark, brutal story of the kind of men produced by harrowing conditioning sessions with Skinner Boxes and electroshock therapy in an Alternate Russia just after the Communist Revolution, and how those men struggle to reconcile what they have become with what they once were. Electric Velocipede 27 also contains good work by Lisa L. Hannett and Geoffrey W. Cole. So farewell, Electric Velocipede; you always maintained a high standard of literary quality, and you’ll be missed.
2014
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Subterranean, Winter.
Asimov’s, January.
F&SF, January/February.
Electronic magazine Subterranean starts the year with a Winter issue guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan. There’s lots of good fantasy stories here, but little SF—something of a disappointment for me, since Strahan is one of today’s active editors with the best understanding of and appreciation for core science fict
ion. Still, with that cavet, he’s produced a strong issue. The best story here is K.J. Parker’s “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There,” a sly and knowing story of characters attempting to outsmart and out-con each other, in typical Parker fashion, and a lesson in the dangers, some unexpected, of trying to get something for nothing. Eleanor Arnason tells another sly story in “The Scrivner,” a retelling of classic fairy tales with deliberate anachronistic elements and a wink-wink breaking of the fourth wall, sort of like a more-intelligent and less cartoonish version of a Fractured Fairy Tale; the voice of the author here, clearly acknowledging that she is the author, in the midst of telling you a tale, is pleasant and persuasive. In “Caligo Lane,” Ellen Klages takes us to San Francisco during World War II for the quiet but ultimately moving story of a woman trying to aid refugees to escape from the danger zone in her own peculiar way. Jeffery Ford spins an elegant fantasy about a young artist reluctantly accepting a commission to paint a portrait of the Devil, with unfortunate consequences, in “The Prelate’s Commission.” Karen Joy Fowler’s chilling, enigmatic “Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story” seems to be about doppelgangers and the difficulty of telling which is the “real” one, narrated from the Point Of View of a child whose baby-sitter is slowly trying to turn herself into her absent mother...but there is a question as to whether the child herself is a doppelganger, or her twin sister is; what’s happening and why is never clearly resolved, but the story generates a palpable feeling of sinister menace. Something terrible is about to happen—or perhaps already has.
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