Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  “A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star,” by Kathleen Ann Goonan, posted on Tor.com on July 20, makes no attempt to disguise itself as science fiction, and, in fact, is listed on the page as “science fiction by association.” I’m not sure this is entirely accurate, since the story of a young woman struggling to overcome the obstacles thrown in the way of her dream of becoming an engineer by a sexist society is really about the space program of the ‘50s and ‘60s, not science fiction, although the science fiction-inspired dream of space travel infuses the story (at one point, the protagonist’s father is reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night). Whether it’s “science fiction by association” or a straight mainstream historical, it’s an excellent story, beautifully crafted and characterized, which will be engrossing to anyone with an interest in the space race of the early 20th Century, which probably includes most SF fans—and which may be encouraging to women who are struggling with the same problems even here in the 21st.

  On the other hand, there’s no doubt at all whether Peter Watt’s “The Colonel,” posted on Tor.com on July 29, is science fiction or not—it is, and strong core science fiction at that, dealing with a military man trying to evaluate and contain the threat to ordinary humans from conjoined hive mentalities who might drive them into obsolescence and extinction, and who may not turn out to be even the worst threat to human civilization. Much of the story turns on the Colonel’s struggle to decide whether he can trust information given him by the Bicamerals, a struggle deepened and complicated by his troubled relationship with his own family, including a wife who has been uploaded into a Virtual Reality Surround and a son who has been lost on an expedition into deep space, an expedition he himself was responsible for launching. One of the year’s best stories to date.

  Twelve Tomorrows is the third volume in a series of annual original SF anthologies in magazine form published by the people who also produce MIT’s Technology Review magazine, this issue edited by Bruce Sterling. Like the first two volumes, the twelve stories in Twelve Tomorrows are all core SF, most of them near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next twenty or thirty years. There are ingenious futurological details by the bucketful here about how our lives will be changed and shaped by those emerging technologies, but there’s also perhaps a bit too high a didactic quotient overall; although there’s still some good stuff here, some of the stories are a bit static, lacking in drama and a compelling human story, and therefore not as involving as fiction as the best stories from previous issues have been.

  This is perhaps best typified by Bruce Sterling’s own story, “The Various Mansions of the Universe,” which is a leisurely tour of a future society (the kind of story we used to call Great Steam Grommet Factory Tour stories—“And here, visitors from the past, is our Great Steam Grommet Factory! And over here...”) which takes the characters to observe many interesting future locales and lifestyles, without generating much heat or human interest in the process, and during the course of which little seems to be at stake for the protagonists. Several of the stories—Christopher Brown’s “Countermeasures,” Pat Cadigan’s “Business As Usual,” Cory Doctorow’s “Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts”—deal with the kind of Constant Intense Surveillance future where your every slightest move is spied upon, you’re manipulated by social media and more subtle means into doing things without even knowing you’re being manipulated into doing them, drones zip constantly around you, society tells you what you can and cannot do “for your own good,” and your refrigerator won’t let you open it if you’re over your daily allotment of calories (something predicted years back by Philip K. Dick, who’s looking more prescient all the time, whose characters used to have to argue with their coffeepots and toasters to get them to serve them). This is quite a likely future (some elements of it are already here), but it’s a dispiriting one, and one that’s hard to make look as though you’d enjoy living in it. As a result, rather than inspiring you with the wonders of the future, making you look forward to living there, these stories make it seem like the future is a place you’d be better off avoiding. Since you know you can’t, that’s rather unsettling.

  Warren Ellis’s “The Shipping Forecast” features much the same future, but adds a spy plot to cut the gloom somewhat, and William Gibson is too savvy to do a Great Steam Grommet Factory Tour story, whipping you through his future in “Death Cookie/Easy Ice” instead in a fast-paced, dramatic, and violent way, and telling it at a high-enough bit-rate with enough compression that many readers may be left puzzled by the end what exactly has happened or why it did; exciting stuff, though.

  The best stories here are Lauren Beukes’s “Slipping” and Paul Graham Raven’s “Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean),” both of which manage to inject human drama into their visions of the future, as well as characters you care about who are faced with situations where they have something to lose and something significant at stake.

  Twelve Tomorrows also features a long and intelligently conducted interview with Gene Wolfe by Jason Pontin, an extensive portfolio of artwork by John Schoenherr, long one of my favorite illustrators, and a review of a book by Stanislaw Lem.

  This may not be available in bookstores, so if you want it, you’ll probably have to mail-order it, either from www.technologyreview.com/sf or from Technology Review, Inc., One Main Street, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142.

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  Asimov’s, October/November.

  F&SF, September/October.

  Subterranean, Summer.

  There’s a couple of strong stories in the October/November Asimov’s, and a lot of minor ones, although little that’s actually bad. The strongest story here is probably Allen M. Steele’s “The Prodigal Son,” a semi-sequel to his “The Legion of Tomorrow” from the July Asimov’s. As did the previous story, which centered around events at a science fiction convention in the ‘30s, this story also has a retro sensibility in a way, concerning the attempt to launch a privately-funded starship (assembled in orbit from separate components) in spite of all the legal and logistical challenges that must be overcome and in the face of picketing and protesting and actual acts of sabotage by anti-space fanatics, not all that different, in fact, from similar stories from an earlier age of science fiction, such as Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo—which I’m sure is not at all an accident. This has a stronger fantastic element than “The Legion of Tomorrow,” which you could have argued was not science fiction at all; no such argument can be made about “The Prodigal Son,” although it won’t be science fiction for long; probably no more than another ten or twenty years, baring a world-wide catastrophe or the collapse of technological civilization, and it will be overtaken by real-world events, just like stories about the first Moon landing that were written before it actually took place were overcome. Steele is a shrewd enough writer, though, to make you believe that this is what it’s going to be like when it does happen, and the story is entertaining and well-characterized, and manages to build a good deal of suspense as to whether the launch is going to be successful or not—although how it all works out won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Steele’s work and attitude about the space program. Also first-rate here, although a very different kind of story, is Gord Sellar’s “Stars Fall on Alabama,” a story about a jazz musician and former slave on the run from the law through 1920’s America, a former slave who found an enigmatic object that fell from the sky during a meteor-shower in 1833 and had his entire life transformed by it—and which he must now try to hide and protect from others while on the lamb, all the while pretending to be a Pullman-car porter on a train to Chicago. The story is told in a flamboyant, loose-limbed, jazzy style, full of the music of the rails, that’s totally appropriate to its jazz-musician protagonist, and is loaded with sharp insights about the relationship of the races in the United States, many of them unfortunately still all too t
rue today.

  Everything else in October/November is minor, to one flavor or another of minor, some more minor than others. Well-known mystery writer Brendan DuBois makes an entertaining Asimov’s debut in “Minutes To the End of the World,” a bleakly satiric portrait of a Post-Apocalyptic small-town America, told in the form of the minutes of various Town Meetings as things get worse and worse, a conceit similar in some ways to Sandra McDonald’s “End of the World Community College,” a Post-Apocalyptic college recruiting brochure, from the July/August F&SF. You know that the Apocalypse is on the minds of writers when they start making uneasy jokes about it. In “What Is Sand But Earth Purified?,” new writer Jason Sanford takes us to a future where the Earth is being slowly eaten by rogue nanomechanisms—and that might not turn out to be all that bad a thing after all. Kate Bachus loads a bit more of a freight of mystic significance than the story can really support into “Pinono Deep,” otherwise a fairly close one-to-one translation of old-time whaling culture to another planet. In “Troop 9,” Dale Bailey tells what, oddly, seems to be a straightforward horror version of Kit Reed’s satirical “The Legend of Troop 33” from the January 2013 Asimov’s. James Patrick Kelly spins a slight and rather familiar sexbot story in “Uncanny.” And in “Playing With Reality,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch whips up a tasty but feather-light confection about people playing golf with fictional characters, who are coyly not named, but whom you are obviously supposed to recognize as Tarzan, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, and others.

  The best story in the September/October F&SF is probably new writer Jérôme Cigut’s “The Rider,” a briskly told post-cyberpunk tale about a human operative who gets caught up in a deadly war between AIs, who use human agents, “riders,” to carry out their bidding in the real world. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, but Cigut handles the materials expertly and entertainingly, and manages to both whip up a good deal of suspense and make the relationship between the AI and its human surprisingly poignant. Also good in September/October are two episodes in ongoing fantasy series, an adventure of Raffalon the Thief (full of sly bleak humor, and as close to a Cugel the Clever story as you’re going to find now that Jack Vance has passed on) by Matthew Hughes, “Avianca’s Bezel,” and a new episode in one of the longest-running fantasy series going (started in 1971), relating the adventures of Alaric the Bard, “The Caravan to Nowhere,” by Phyllis Eisenstein, this one taking Alaric on a dangerous quest across a bleak and seemingly endless dessert, where strange Presences lurk. Robert Reed’s “Will He?” is a quietly suspenseful tale about a bitter and unhappy man who has to make the decision whether or not to release a virus that could wipe out the entire human race. David Gerrold relates the dilemma of a man who has a troll move into his backyard, one that he finds that he can’t get rid of no matter how troublesome it becomes, in “The Thing in the Backyard.” New writer Jay O’Connell tells a wry tale (although one that goes on a bit too long) about a peculiar dating service, in “Other People’s Things.” Dale Bailey tells a quiet childhood horror story in “The Culvert,” about two brothers, twins, who become lost in a mysterious culvert, but only one of them comes out—the question is, which one? Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Wild Ones” starts off looking like it’s going to be one of his rare dramatic SF stories, but soon veers into more familiar comedic ground, becoming something like The Katzenjamer Kids-aboard a generation ship, and ends up becoming an Adam and Eve story; perhaps not the most successful combination of ingredients.

  The Summer issue of Subterranean Online is the last issue of this ezine, which is suspending production after this. This is a real loss to the field, and a decision I mourn, as Subterranean Online has not only been a reliable source for finding first-rate fiction for a number of years now, but is one of the few ezines in the whole of the internet that was willing to run novellas—few other sites will run anything other than short stories or the occasional short novelette, something that has always seemed odd to me, since with pixels you shouldn’t have to worry about the length restrictions that plague print publications—and has run some very fine ones over the years. Its loss will leave a real hole in the electronic publishing world, and I fear will make it more difficult for authors to place novellas online in an environment that seems hostile or at least non-receptive to them.

  The Summer issue is another strong one, and, appropriately for this publication’s swan song, features several strong novellas. The best story here is K.J. Parker’s “The Things We Do For Love,” another of the author’s slyly-satiric, black-humored, sharp-witted tales about a roguish flimflam man himself getting flimflammed, in this case ruefully discovering that there are some marriages that even death does not part. Subterranean Online has been the main market for these K.J. Parker novellas, some of the best and most inventive work being done in fantasy, and I really hope that the loss of this market doesn’t discourage Parker from writing more of them, one of my major fears about the ezine closing down.

  There are also several other good novellas, and a handful of short stories, in this farewell issue. Rachel Swirsky examines the question of identity in “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” as a dying girl has her consciousness downloaded into an artificial body. These are questions we’ve seen examined before, but Swirsky explores the question of whether the “new” girl is the same as the old one or something completely different in satisfying detail, and with considerable depth of feeling. Alastair Reynolds’s “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa” is a Lovecraftian horror story in science fiction disguise, as the crew of a spaceship investigates what amounts to a scientifically rationalized Lovecraftian Incursion on a desolate planet, and meet various unhappy ends; this is suspenseful, atmospheric stuff, and the only real quibble I have is that although the captain is clearly shown to be a dick, perhaps not enough of a dick to deserve the horrible fate the rest of the crew arrange for him, which you’re clearly supposed to think is well-deserved and him getting what’s coming to him; I’d have to see him being more than an unpleasant dick to make me agree, though. Kat Howard’s “The Very Fabric” is a short piece about someone averting a Lovecraftian Incursion by literally sewing up the fabric of reality. Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Pushing the Sky Away,” is another short slice of life, starting after the main action of the piece is over, about a thief who attempted to steal an Object of Power during a war between ghouls and the Djinn, and lets us keep company with the thief during her final dying moments. Lewis Shiner’s “The Black Sun,” about a group of stage magicians waging a war of deception against Hitler, would make a very good movie, and Maria Dahvana Headley’s “What There Was to See,” is about a young girl who can see ghosts, with unexpected consequences. One of the most powerful stories here is what may well turn out to be the late Jay Lake’s last story, “West to East,” a short meditation about the acceptance of inevitable death by the crew of a shuttle ship crashed on an impossibly hostile planet, and the capability of the human spirit to find moments of pure joy even under those circumstances. For those of us who knew Jay, this is almost unbearably poignant—but I think it will have a powerful impact even on those who did not.

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  Upgraded, ed. Neil Clarke. (Wyrm Publishing, 978-1-890464-30-1, $16.95, 368 pages.) Cover art by Julie Dillon.

  Coming Soon Enough, Six Tales of Technology’s Future, ed. Stephen Cass. (IEEE Spectrum). Illustrations by Martin Ansin.

  Hieroglyph, Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. (William Morrow, 978-0-06-220469-1, 532 pages).

  Upgraded, an original SF anthology edited by Neil Clarke, the editor of the Hugo-winning electronic magazine Clarkesworld, was inspired by the editor having a defibrillator implanted in him after a near-fatal heart attack, turning him into a “cyborg,” a mixture of man and machine—which subsequently inspired him to edit this anthology that examines the various roles, positive and negative, that cyborgs play in science fiction. As a cyborg myself, I thoroughly approve. And Clarke does a pretty good job with the antholog
y, although perhaps because Clarkesworld primarily features short stories and usually observes an upper word-limit, he crams a lot of short stories into the book, twenty-six stories in 368 pages, and some of them could have used a little more breathing room; in fact, it may be significant that the best stories here are the longest ones, while most of the weakest tend to be the shortest. Some of the stories here are standard postcyberpunk or Military SF, with the cyborg’s enhancements merely a device to help carry out an espionage or battlefield mission, the kind of stories that can be found by the dozen in any year and which could have appeared in any SF anthology, but others are more appropriate for a specialized cyborg anthology, taking a more thoughtful and more original look the cyborg experience itself, what it means and feels like to be part human and part machine, and how it helps or hinders the protagonists in the course of their lives. Some of the enhancements that turn the protagonists into cyborgs are not gross physical augmentations, but rather subtle methodologies that allow their memories and emotions and thought-processes to be monitored and adjusted, sometimes by the person themselves, sometimes by external control—an idea that’s getting an increased amount of attention in SF these days.