Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The most entertaining story in the August Asimov’s is new writer Jay O’Connell’s “Of All Possible Worlds,” a story which has some points of similarity with the Allen Steele story in the July issue, evoking the old days of science fiction history, and even using one-time Analog editor John W. Campbell Jr. as an (off-screen) character. This one has a much stronger fantastic element, though, as a hapless tenant slowly becomes embroiled, step by step, in the affairs of his reclusive old landlord, who turns out to be much, much more than the semi-delusional drunken old hoarder he initially seems to be—a figure who, in fact, rewrites the history of multiple Alternate Worlds, and is engaged in a struggle to save our own timeline, which the protagonist of course gets dragged into. For anyone knowledgeable about 20th Century Pseudoscience, particularly of stuff championed by John W. Campbell, this is a delight, presenting us in due course with Orgone Boxes, Hieronymus Machines, and the Dean Drive—there’s even a scene dealing with an attempt to put the Dean Drive into a submarine to transform it into an instant spaceship, a notion ridiculed in a once well-known satirical fannish song rumored to have been written by Damon Knight. The protagonist, and the story, end up neck-deep in metaphysical realms of the most cosmic sort possible, and it gets a little blurry and hard to follow the action toward the end, but the story is exuberant and energetic and a lot of fun. Also good in the August issue is new writer Doug C. Souza’s “Mountain Screamers,” a straightforward YA story about a young boy helping his scientist Grandma (a tough, competent, and no-nonsense old bird, very much a Heinlein character) manage a program to transplant mountain lions to an alien world that’s to serve as a planet-wide Nature Reserve; Grandma’s hidden agenda in all this is also very Heinleinesque, as is the Corrupt Bureaucrat who attempts to foil their plans; familiar territory, but well-handled and entertaining.

  The rest of the stories in the August issue all seem to either have something to do with animals, like the Souza story, or with artificially created companions, two sub-themes that run throughout the issue, but most of them are also less successful than the O’Conell and the Souza. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Wet Fur” gives us an unconvincing tale about dogs who have somehow been absorbed into some sort of nanotech cloud and who thereafter haunt humans who are about to die as benign canine ghosts, waiting to welcome them into the cloud as well, where, it is implied, they will all play some ghostly game of Fetch together. Nick Wolven’s “Placebo” is about a man who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be persuaded to buy an artificially generated pet, with ultimately sad consequences that are easy enough to see coming, similar to the ones in Cat Rambo’s “All the Pretty Little Mermaids” from the March Asimov’s. Sarah Pinsker’s “The Low Hum of Her” is a variant of the Golem story, about a girl whose father builds a robot Grandmother for her to replace the real one who died, and the comfort and emotional support it provides her as the family flees the Holocaust and attempts to settle down in a scary New World; this is the best story of the three, although it tries just a little too hard to be poignant. Nancy Kress’s “Writer’s Block,” a reprint from my audio anthology Rip-Off! from last year, is a playfully metafictional story about a writer struggling to push through writer’s block who ends up with the ability to write the events of his own personal life; minor Kress, but amusing.

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  F&SF, July/August

  Clarkesworld, April.

  Interzone 252.

  Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-175-6, $14.95, 189 pages.) Cover art by Thomas Canty.

  Academic Exercises, K.J. Parker. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-609-0, 536 pages.) Cover art by Vincent Chong.

  The July/August issue of F&SF is a special issue guest-edited by C.C. Finlay. Since it’s widely rumored in the field that publisher/editor Gordon Van Gelder is grooming Finlay to take over as the active acquisitions editor of F&SF, it’s interesting to take a look at what kind of a job he’s done, to get a hint of what future issues of the magazine might be like if the rumor is true. The answer is that he’s done a respectable job, with several good solid stories, even if there’s nothing really outstanding—in other words, a fairly typical issue of F&SF, with only a couple of indications that there’s another editor at the helm. Since one of the weaknesses of F&SF in the last couple of years, in my opinion, has been a relative lack of strong science fiction stories, the fantasy stories here being typically stronger than most of the SF ones, I was hoping that a new editor would redress this balance somewhat, but it turns out, not so much—most of the SF stories here are minor, with the strongest stories being, as usual, the fantasy stories.

  The strongest story in July/August is probably Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawaii,” set in a future where humanity has been totally subjugated and enslaved by vampires; there’s nothing here about the relationship of vampires to humans that hasn’t been foreshadowed in True Blood or Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, but Johnson creates a sober, compelling, psychologically complex narrative that packs a powerful emotional punch. Also good here is “Subduction,” by Paul M. Berger, a strong fantasy in which a mysterious stranger who can’t remember his past drifts into a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and finds himself tugged relentlessly toward a strange destiny. Sandra McDonald’s “End of the World Community College,” a recruiting brochure to potential students in a Post-Apocalyptic future, is intermittently very funny, although she can’t maintain the tone consistently, and the joke goes on a page or two too long. David Erik Nelson’s “The Travelling Salesman Solution,” is the “hardest” of the SF stories here, one which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place in Analog; clever, although the idea’s a bit too abstract to generate the emotional impact that the ending is supposed to have. William Alexander’s “The Only Known Law” is a poignant story about a cosmic Messenger whose Message is delivered too late. The other three SF stories in the issue are weaker: Charlie Jane Anders’s “Palm Strike’s Last Case” is a somewhat uneasy marriage of the superhero story to the generation ship/degenerating-colony-planet story, a mixture that I don’t think really works; Sarina Dorie’s “The Day of the Nuptial Flight” is a bit too literal in its one-to-one translation of bees to aliens; and Annalee Flower Horne’s “Seven Things Cadet Blanchard Learned from the Trade Summit Incident” is pleasant but very minor.

  Finlay seems to have more of a taste for horror than Van Gelder has—in addition to the Johnson, there’s two more strong horror stories here, both of them tending toward the Lovecraftian Incursion story, “The Aerophone,” by Dinesh Rao, and “Testimony of Samuel Frobisher Regarding Events Upon His Majesty’s Ship Confidence, 14-22 June, 1818, with Diagrams,” and a rather unpleasant story that shades toward slipstream/surrealism, Haddayr Copley-Woods’s “Belly.” Finlay seems to have more of a taste for slipstream than Van Gelder too, which I don’t greet with much enthusiasm, as it can be found by the ton-lots in every ezine on the internet: Cat Hansen’s “The Girls Who Go Below” and Spencer Ellsworth’s “Five Tales of the Aqueduct,” although the Spencer shades toward American fable and fabulation, rather reminiscent of the movie Big Fish.

  On the whole, a pretty good job, although if Finlay really is to continue as F&SF editor, then, being who I am, I’d like to see more strong core science fiction here, and more genre fantasy and horror like the Berger and the Johnson, and less slipstream/fabulism/Magic Realism.

  The April Clarkesworld is a strong issue. Best story here, and one of the best stories of the year so far, is “Passage of Earth,” by Michael Swanwick, the harrowing story of one man’s close encounter with an incursion of giant alien worms, an encounter that transforms his world forever; this is dark stuff even for Swanwick, who’s known for his dark stories, but quite powerful. Also good is Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Autodidact,” another grim story, faintly reminiscent of some of Aliette de Bodard’s work, about an effort to train and civilize a sentient starship of immense power. A welcome change of tone in an otherwise somber issue is provided by Sean Willia
ms’s “The Cucoo,” a wry story of some of the unexpected consequences, social and otherwise, of a matter-transportation system. Kali Wallace’s “Water in Springtime” is a somber but lyrical fantasy about a young girl learning how to come to terms with her supernatural origins and abilities.

  A somewhat weak May-June Interzone, Interzone 252, is dominated by stories about odd preternatural invasions of one sort or another. In the best of these, Claire Humphrey’s “A Brief Light,” it’s an invasion of ghosts, but they’re fairly benign ghosts rather than scary ghosts, opening windows, turning lights on and off, many of them seeming to have a family connection, and the mood is of mild wistful regret rather than horror. A similar supernatural invasion takes place in Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “Sleepers,” where modern society is flooded with a visitation of ambiguous supernatural figures that look vaguely like horses or unicorns, called “sleepers” for no particularly convincing reason, which are taken to omens of impending death, but the symbolism is cloudy here, and the story less convincing. Neil Williamson gives us the SF version of the supernatural invasion story in “The Posset Pot,” where the human world has been randomly afflicted by weird alien “bubbles” that make things and people, buildings, parts of buildings, disappear. Two of the few survivors room together in an apartment in London that has so-far been spared from destruction, having tea and arguing quietly about the proper way to prepare a posset (thus the title), which makes this one of those very British stories that might be called Cozy Post-Apocalypses; by the end, things turn harsher, of course, and everyone comes to a bad end. There’s really no more explanation of this unnatural invasion than there is of the ghosts or the sleepers, although some handwaving about branes and dimensional slippage is done. In one of the few stories here that doesn’t stick to the preternatural invasion theme, Val Nolan then takes us “Diving into the Wreck,” as two friends quarrel about whether the wreck of the Lunar Lander Eagle from the Apollo 11 mission should be recovered, with ultimately fatal results; I’d like this better if I agreed with the protagonist, as I think you may be supposed to, rather than with the other guy. In “The Mortuaries,” Katharine E.K. Duckett tells a story set in an unconvincing society which is so impoverished that it’s teetering on the brink of disaster, but which can still afford to spent vast amounts on elaborate and lavish tombs for the rich and powerful.

  Nancy Kress delivers one of the strongest stories of the year to date as a chapbook novella, Yesterday’s Kin. This is an ingenious First Contact story, as technologically advanced aliens come to Earth to warn us about our imminent collision with a deadly spore cloud which will wipe out all human life on the planet in eight months time. They set up a floating Embassy in the harbor of New York City, where human and alien scientists work together day and night to find a defense against the spores or a vaccine against the fatal disease the spores carry, or a cure for it, while the clock is running out, and the Embassy suffers attacks from terrorists and fanatical anti-alien factions who believe that the aliens are Up To No Good, probably in cahoots with the Federal Government. As with all of Kress’s work, this is very nicely crafted, with well-paced prose that carries you through the story, complex human characters, a compelling and conflict-driven human story, a clever twist partway through, and an even cleverer twist at the end. It can be ordered from the publisher at www.tachyonpublications.com, and is also available in ebook form, or via Amazon.

  Not much is known about enigmatic author K.J. Parker, not even Parker’s gender (although I have my suspicions), but with first collection Academic Exercises, Parker has delivered one of the first major fantasy collections of the year, and one that I suspect is going to be in the running for the title of Year’s Best Collection. Nobody else in fantasy is writing anything like the stories collected here: sophisticated, character-driven, often featuring wily rascals trying to outsmart and out-con each other, with the stakes raised at each reversal, told in a sly and knowing Voice that’s instantly addictive and draws you smoothly through the often intricate plots, intelligent and full of cutting wit, deep cynicism toward the institutions of society, and black humor. About the closest parallel I can think of are Jack Vance’s sly tales of the misadventures of Cugel the Clever, although, unlike the Vance stories, there’s little or no swordplay here and few obvert supernatural menaces such as demons or monsters. Everything here is good, but if pressed to name favorites, I would name “A Rich, Full Week,” “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” “Amor Vincit Omnia,” “The Sun and I,” and the World Fantasy Award-winning “Let Maps to Others” as the best of the book, although everything else is well worth reading as well. Some of the stories here (“A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” “Let Maps to Others,” “Purple and Black,” “The Sun and I,” “Blue & Gold”) have no real fantastic element, other than taking place in an imaginary world, while others (“A Rich, Full Week,” “Amor Vincit Omnia,” “Illuminated,” “A Room With A View,” “One Little Room an Everywhere”) deal more directly with magical matters, following the often slyly comic adventures and misadventures of wizards from Parker’s magic school, The Stadium, who will tell you forthrightly upon meeting that they’re not wizards and there’s no such thing as magic—but who nevertheless employ one of the most intricate and original magical systems in modern fantasy. Parker’s work is not generally loaded with the Faux Medieval elements that are so prominent in other fantasies, knights and swordplay and battles, but as a bonus there are three essays included here that show a deeply researched knowledge of such matters, “Cutting Edge Technology” (all about different kinds of swords, and their manufacture), “Rich Men’s Skins” (a history of armor), and “On Sieges,” which is all about, well, sieges, and their effectiveness, or lack of it, throughout history. Fascinating stuff, and you shouldn’t skip them in favor of the fiction, although read the fiction too. This can be ordered from the publisher, Subterranean Press (subterraneanpress.com), or via Amazon.

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  Asimov’s, September.

  Interzone 253.

  Tor.com, July 20.

  Tor.com, July 29.

  Twelve Tomorrows, ed. Bruce Sterling (Technology Review, 230 pages.) Cover art by John Schoenherr.

  The September Asimov’s is an uneven issue, with several good stories, but also several substandard ones. The strongest story here, certainly the most entertaining, is probably Tom Purdom’s novelette “Bogdavi’s Dream,” the conclusion to a de facto novel serialization—along with 2010’s “Warfriends.” 2012’s “Golva’s Ascent,” and 2013’s “Warlord”—which continues the story begun in Purdom’s 1966 novel Tree Lord of Imaten, featuring a human who somewhat reluctantly ends up leading a struggle between warring races of aliens, and who ultimately ends up commanding a mixed force made up of both alien races against a group of ruthless human renegades. This is intelligent, old-fashioned pulp adventure SF of a sort rarely seen these days, and the final climactic battle works up a good deal of tension and suspense, although, typically, Purdom, who used to be an enthusiastic player of sandbox recreations of historic battles, is more interested in the strategy and tactics employed in the battle than in the bloody details of the combat itself. He does an excellent job of figuring out how all three races—humans, and two radically different kinds of aliens, adapted to different environments, one arboreal and one ground-dwelling—can combine their different battle-techniques and strategies to maximum effect, and brings the storyline to a satisfactory conclusion. The only problem readers may have is that like most of these de facto serializations—and there are similar ones running at the moment in F&SF, Analog, and Lightspeed, among other places—you may have trouble fully appreciating what’s happening here if you haven’t read the earlier stories in the sequence. Let’s hope that some book publisher is savvy enough to bring this out as a novel in the not-too-distant future.

  Also good in the September Asimov’s is Rick Wilber’s “Scouting Report,” another of his baseball-oriented stories; experienced genre readers will see what’s happen
ing here long before the somewhat befuddled narrator does, but it’s all well-handled, and makes for an entertaining read. Susan Palwick’s “Windows” tells a bittersweet story about the vagaries of luck, featuring a woman leading a hardscrabble existence on the edge of poverty who manages to scrape enough money together to visit her son in prison to deliver a birthday message to him, a message made all the more poignant by an unexpected turn of events in the wider world outside the prison walls. The science fiction element is slim here in what otherwise could be easily told as a straight mainstream story, but it is a valid one, and because of it the story takes its place in the ongoing debate that seems to be taking place in the field this year as to whether it’s a good idea or not to set forth for the stars on a generation ship, coming down somewhat on the “not” side of the ledger. James Gunn’s “Patterns” concerns a data-analyst’s suspicions as to just who is doing illicit data-gathering, although once he reaches his conclusion, the story doesn’t do much else with the revelation.

  The best story in Interzone 253, the July-August Interzone, is another near-mainstream story, “Besides the Damned River,” this year’s winner of the James White Award writing contest, by new writer D.J. Cockburn. All that really happens here is that an old man helps repair a truck that has broken down on a muddy back-country road in Thailand—but what makes it science fiction are the changes that have occurred to the old man’s homeland over the course of his lifetime, and what makes the story surprisingly powerful are the changes to the old man’s life brought about by those changes, and how he feels about it all. Also good in Interzone 253 is James Van Pelt’s “My Father and the Martian Moon Maids,” the poignant and moving story of a boy’s relationship with his eccentric father that actually isn’t science fiction at all, although the author tries to alibi this with an ambiguous did it happen? or didn’t it? fantastic element in the very last page; in spite of this, it’s pretty much a straight mainstream story, and a very good one. The fantastic element is stronger in Caren Gussoff’s “The Bars of Orion,” about a man and his daughter who have escaped the destruction of their universe and found themselves in ours, a near-parallel to their own; the story mostly concerns itself with the man’s struggle to adjust himself to life in a world which is close to the one he knows but not the same (there is an analogue of his wife here, for instance, although she’s married to a different version of himself), and the questions of how their universe was destroyed and how they escaped its destruction remain unresolved. Neil Williamson’s “The Golden Nose” is disguised as science fiction, with some handwaving about olfactory science, but ultimately is a fantasy about a man destroyed by a cursed magical object.