Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  After two strong SF stories, most of the rest of the stories in the Spring issue are fantasy stories, although there’s still some good material. The best of the fantasy stories is probably Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Bus Stop,” which describes a dangerous encounter in the life of an ordinary-seeming little girl who has been charged by an angel with the mission of traveling across the United States to kill monsters of various kinds; this has the feeling of a sequence in a continuing series to it, although if it is I’m not familiar with the other stories in it, and if it’s not, it perhaps should be, as the little girl is an intriguing and engaging character. Also entertaining is Kat Howard’s “Hath No Fury,” which follows the exploits of a Fury (the kind from Classical Greek Mythology, with the snakes in the hair, although, since she seems only to avenge misdeeds against women by men, she actually reminds me more of the Vengeance Demons from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which prompts me to ask, as did Buffy: Are there no great misdeeds against men that need to be avenged?) in a magic-haunted modern New York City where the Cosmic Forces are slipping disastrously out-of-balance; the anachronistic bits, like a Hungarian pastry shop being the local hangout for New York City’s wizards, are quite funny, and suggest the kind of thing that Unknown Worlds magazine might have been publishing by now if it had survived to the current day. The issue’s lead story, “The Screams of Dragons,” by Kelley Armstrong, is also entertaining, although much too long, the account of a young boy’s gradual seduction by Evil that might have worked better as a short story and perhaps set in a real place rather than in an imaginary town inhabited by people with mystic abilities, Ian R. Macleod’s “The Traveller and the Book” is also longer than it needs to be, a tail-swallower that turns out to actually be something of an exquisitely well-written Shaggy Dog Joke. Stephen Gallagher’s “One Dove” is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but rather a well-done Victorian mystery about a man becoming inveigled, somewhat reluctantly, into an investigation of a mental patient’s mysterious suicide. All in all, a strong issue, which again makes me regret that Subterranean Online is being shut down, and hope that editor William Schafer changes his mind.

  The March/April issue of F&SF is somewhat weak overall. The most accomplished story here may be Rob Chilson’s “Our Vegetable Love,” a fantasy about a little girl with a sentient tree for an uncle; no surprises about where this is going, but it manages to get there and deliver its freight of heart-warmingness in a traditionally satisfying manner. Also good is Oliver Buckram’s “A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly,” a slyly comic SF tale about the difficulties involved in communicating between alien races, and a translator who cleverly manipulates the translations to her own advantage. Daniel Marcus’s “Albion Upon the Rock” sets up a familiar SF situation, a slow-traveling generation ship overtaken in transit by waves of later travelers with better technology (here an Entity capable of multi-dimension travel, an ancestor of humanity millions of years removed, rather than the more-typical FTL ship), but the conversation between the Entity and the damaged AI of the ship is amusing, and poignant—although in the end, it all seems not to have made much difference, as the lost ship continues on its way with its cargo of doomed humans while the Entity does its equivalent of shrugging and melts away into the ether. Ted White tells a briskly entertaining time-travel story in “The Uncertain Past,” although it ends up with an unfortunate clichéd situation that doesn’t so much make you gasp in amazement as sigh.

  The rest of the stories in the March/April F&SF are all flawed to one extent or another. The protagonist is the issue’s lead story, Pat MacEwen’s “The Lightness of Movement,” is such a fool, stupidly breaking the Prime Directive-like rules in her mission to observe an alien race, and continuing to break them again and again in an acceleratingly stupid way as the story goes on, that by the end I’d completely lost all sympathy for her, and was rather hoping that she’d get her head ripped off. Plus, the basic set-up here, sending humans disguised as aliens down to entice aliens into mating with them so they can observe the mating behavior, is itself stupid, and dangerous; since right now we have the technological capacity to read a car’s license plate from orbit, you’d think that in this high-tech future they’d be able to closely observe all the mating behavior they wanted to observe from up there too. Sarah Pinsker’s “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide” is well crafted, although the peculiar nature of the malfunction of the cyborg arm seems arbitrary and unlikely. In “Collar,” Leo Vladimirsky sets up an absurd situation, economically distressed Americans having to swim three miles out to sea to Chinese ships to find employment, one that I was unable to take seriously. Both Michael Libling’s “Draft 31” and Gordon Eklund’s “I Said I Was Sorry Didn’t I” give us variants on the reality-slowly-disappearing-piece-by-piece story, with no explanation for why it’s happening in either; “Draft 31” is the better read of the two, delivering an eerie frisson, even if it ultimately doesn’t make much sense. Jon DeCles’s “Apprentice” is a rather standard High Fantasy, and D.M. Armstrong’s “Butterscotch” is a somewhat silly zombie (sort of) story in which nothing really is explained. This issue’s Albert E. Cowdrey story, “Byzantine History 101,” a sequel to his similarly weak “The Woman in the Moon,” from the May 2013 issue, is mildly entertaining, but far from Cowdrey at the top of his form, having a typical Cowdreyesque plot about conniving lowlifes trying to outmaneuver each other for personal advantage, and, to one degree or another, getting an ironic comeuppance.

  The Time Traveler’s Almanac, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, is an enormous reprint anthology, 960 pages and 65 reprinted stories, that will almost certainly be the standout themed reprint anthology of the year, and that even at $37.99 (the trade paperback may be cheaper) is one of the best reading bargains pound for pound that you’re likely to run into. Time-travel has been one of the mainstay themes of science fiction for more than a hundred years now, and it’s a good indication of just how prevalent this theme has been in the genre, and of just how many time-travel stories there have been, that there are only four stories duplicated between The Time Traveler’s Almanac and the previous big canonical time-travel anthology, Harry Turtledove’s The Best Time Travel Stories of the Twentieth Century, from 2005. Most time travel anthologies tend to concentrate on stories that use physical mechanisms, time machines, to send their characters backward or (more rarely) forward in time, and there are plenty of such stories here, but the VanderMeers widen their scope out to include stories where the time-traveling is accomplished by blundering into a spacetime anomaly or wormhole, by mutant Wild Talent, by drugs, by astral projection or in dreams, or even by magic. They include a few classic stories by Edward Page Mitchell (“The Clock That Went Backwards,” from 1881, which the editors claim is the very first time-travel story), Max Beerbohn, E.F. Benson, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Eric Frank Russell, as well as an excerpt from H.G.Wells’s novel The Time Machine, but the bulk of the stories here are from the late Twentieth Century (mostly the ‘80s and ‘90s) or later, with the most recent being from 2012. With such a huge anthology, it’s impossible to discuss or even mention all the strong stories in the space available to us, but, although almost everything here is worth reading, among the best stories, in my subjective opinion, are “Vintage Season”—still perhaps one of the best time-travel novellas ever—by C.L Moore (usually listed as by Moore alone, although here they have it as by Moore and Henry Kuttner), “Yesterday Was Monday,” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Traveller’s Rest,” by David I. Masson, “Pale Roses,” by Michael Moorcock, “Fire Watch,” by Connie Willis, “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” by Geoffrey Landis, “Under Siege,” by George R.R. Martin, “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Noble Mold,” by Kage Baker, “Where or When,” by Steven Utley, “Triceratops Summer,” by Michael Swanwick, “Delphi,” by Vandana Singh, “Lost Continent,” by Greg Egan, and “Palimpsest,” by Charles Stross. The book also includes non-fictional
“educational palate-cleansers” by Charles Yu, Stan Love, Genevieve Valentine, and Jason Heller.

  68

  Interzone 251.

  Asimov’s, March.

  Tor.com, January 29.

  Tor.com, February 4.

  Tor.com, February 12.

  Tor.com, February 26.

  Space Opera, ed. Rich Horton. (Prime Books, 978-1607014072, $17.45, 576 pages).

  After a weak start to the year with the January-February issue, the mostly disappointing Interzone 250, Interzone rebounds with a stronger March-April issue, Interzone 251. The strongest story in Interzone 251 is the powerful but bleak “Ashes,” by Karl Bunker, set in an airless (emotionally, not literally) future where the human race is slowly dwindling toward extinction and even machine intelligences or AIs can achieve transcendence only at the cost of vanishing forever from existence. This is quietly but effectively grim, and don’t expect any note of hope or any Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card at the end, because there isn’t any. Also good but also bleak (in fact, in usual Interzone fashion, almost everything here is bleak) is “Fly Away Home,” by Suzanne Palmer, which is, oddly, one of the two stories about the labor struggles of asteroid miners I’ve seen so far this year, the other being Derek Künsken’s “Schools of Clay,” from the February Asimov’s. The characters in the Künsken are mechanical beings, not humans, and the story concerns a sort of robot Lenin trying to raise a revolution of sorts among the other robot workers, but the unfortunate human protagonist of “Fly Away Home” is mainly concerned with personal survival, trying to keep herself from being totally degraded and destroyed by the horrifying misogynist society that has enslaved her, and which regards women as things less than human, good only for being raped and impregnated. There’s no happy ending here either, and the only note of hope is that she keeps fighting against the society that oppresses her, and in the end does her best to take as many of them down with her as possible. New writer Tracie Welser’s “A Doll Is Not a Dumpling” also takes place in another repressive society (or a presumptive one anyway, as we never learn much about the issues or what the other side of the story is), as a group of terrorists press an innocent, childlike dumpling-vendor robot into use as a weapon of assassination; the hapless, bewildered robot is a sympathetic character, but since we never learn much about the political issues at stake, we don’t feel the sympathy for the terrorists I think we’re supposed to, especially as their strike kills dozens of innocent people in addition to the intended target. John Grant’s “Ghost Story” is a melancholy story about a man who inexplicably drifts away from his own timeline and can’t get back to it again. Gareth L. Powell’s also melancholy “This Is How You Die” reads like a synopsis of a disaster novel, taking us through its apocalyptic pandemic scenario in only a few pages rather than six hundred of them, but still ending with the protagonist (and, presumably, just about everybody else) dying miserably; with a resurgence of Ebola killing hundreds in Africa as I write these words, only an airliner flight away, it makes for somewhat uneasy reading. And Greg Kurzawa’s “Old Bones” is a horror story, a zombie story of sorts, that would feel more in place in Interzone’s companion magazine, Black Static.

  The March issue of Asimov’s is also somewhat weak—little really awful here, but little that rises much toward the exceptional, either. The best stories here are probably James Patrick Kelly’s “Declaration,” a reprint of a clever story I bought for my audio anthology Rip-Off! last year, in which teenagers get involved in a political movement to gain the right to spend all their time in virtual reality, and “Drink in a Small Town,” by new writer Peter Wood, a time-travel story so understated that it’s almost subliminal. Cat Rambo’s “All the Pretty Little Mermaids” is a sad but predictable story, a bit overlong, of a woman who gets bullied by her ex-husband into breeding bioengineered living mermaids as pets for their daughter; this all goes pretty much where you’d expect it to go, with the author hammering on it a bit too heavily as a metaphor for a number of feminist issues. Genevieve Williams’s “The Redemption of Kip Banjeree” is a fast-paced cyberpunkish tale about a courier using her skills at parkour and computer hacking to deliver an important package across a cityscape, with an adversary attempting to highjack it along the way; mildly reminiscent of a few of William Gibson’s old stories; the speculative element here is minimal, since essentially the same story could be (and has been) told with a bicycle messenger trying to deliver drugs or some other MacGuffin across present-day Manhattan or Los Angeles. New writer Jay O’Connell’s “Solomon’s Little Sister” is a variant of the familiar time-travel story which has alternate versions of the same person hammering on the door. And new writer Sean Monaghan’s “Walking Gear” is a variant of a familiar story about a man struggling with his sister’s drug addiction, with a gimmick about re-growing amputated limbs thrown in to give it a rationalization as science fiction.

  The practice of an editor hiring authors to write stories inspired by an illustration, often several different stories inspired by the same illustration, is an old pulp-magazine trick that goes back for decades, into at least the ‘50s, and probably earlier. Now it’s David G. Hartwell’s turn to practice it, with The Anderson Project, three stories commissioned by Hartwell, inspired by a (somewhat murky, actually) painting by Richard Anderson, and all posted on Tor.com.

  All three of the Anderson Project stories are well-crafted and worth reading, but, truth to tell, none of them is entirely successful, and I doubt that we’ll be seeing any of them on next year’s award ballots. “Reborn,” by Ken Liu, posted on Tor.com on January 29, has a wonderful idea at its core, aliens “whose brains, like the teeth of sharks, never cease growing. New brain tissue is continuously produced at the core while the outer layers are sloughed off periodically like snakeskin”—producing a race of creatures who forget the past almost as soon as they experience it. It would be fascinating to explore the society that aliens such as this would produce, and the social adaptations that living with this curious physiology would force on them, but there’s little of that here, the bulk of the story taken up by twisting the plotline around to justify the scene in the Richard Anderson painting; all of the Anderson stories, in fact, suffer from this to one degree or another. In the case of the Liu, for all of the twisting and turning, I doubt that the identity of the mysterious traitor is going to come as a surprise to many experienced genre readers. Judith Moffett’s “Space Ballet,” posted on Tor.com on February 4th, is perhaps the Anderson Project story that makes the least attempt to literalize the scene in the Anderson painting, using the scene as something that subjects in a psychological experiment see in a series of precognitive dreams; this allows Moffett to discuss the images from the painting in symbolic terms, rather than having to twist the plot around so that the scene actually happens in the course of the story (although the deciphering of the symbols to warn that a tsunami is imminent seems a bit of a stretch to me). This is a clever way to try to get around having to directly employ the events from the painting, which shows spacesuited figures being waved around by tentacles that dangle from what looks like a Flying Saucer, but also has the effect of turning the story into a succession of Talking Heads explaining things to each other, which makes it all a bit static. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” posted on Tor.com on February 12, is perhaps the Anderson Project story that is the most successful on its own terms as an individual story; it’s also the story that’s the most hurt by the necessity of rationalizing the images from Anderson’s painting into the plotline, as its story of a troubled woman’s problematical relationship with a hyper-intelligent sentient parrot would actually work much better on its own without the Anderson Project elements shoehorned into it.

  Much more successful as an individual short story is Karl Schroeder’s “Jubilee,” posted on Tor.com on February 26. This has at its core another fascinating idea, one that I understand is also at the core of Schroeder’s new novel Lockstep—a social system
whereby whole communities go into a synchronized pattern of hibernation and awakening that allows them to wait out the hundreds or even thousands of years it takes for spaceships to travel between the stars (no Faster Than Light travel or wormhole shortcuts in Schroeder’s scenario) without falling hopelessly behind the space travelers, thus making it possible to maintain social continuity even at interstellar distances. “Jubilee” cleverly humanizes this rather abstract concept and gives it immediacy by making it a story of star-crossed love, and using for its protagonists people who aren’t a part of the lockstep system, so it becomes emotionally something like a story about Elf Hill—once your loved one goes in there, you may not see them for decades, you may grow old waiting for them, or you may never see them again...while to the one inside, no time at all will have passed, although their lover may be old and spavined or dead by the time they come out again.