Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Such is the case with War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. Most military SF stories have points of similarity, which gives the anthology a certain overall sameness of tone, although the editors have done a good job of varying the tone as much as possible, giving us, in addition to the expected battlefield and combat-in-space stuff, looks at the aftermaths of war and at the cyber battlefields of the future where most of the important action takes place in sealed rooms far away from the actual front lines. Most of the best stories here fall into one or the other of those categories. Rich Larson’s “Ghost Girl” gives us an intriguing look at the troubled aftermath of a war that had featured robot fighting machines, some of which refused to shut down after the war was over, and in “In the Loop,” Ken Liu issues a warning, similar to that delivered by Peter Watts in his “Collateral” from the Upgraded anthology, about the folly of giving our machines the authority to decide for themselves who and when to kill, without human supervision (something Philip K. Dick has been warning us about for decades—but nobody in the military is listening to any of these writers); the cyber battlefield, where drones and robots and even human soldiers are directed and maneuvered from remote-control centers behind the scenes, gets examined in Linda Nagata’s “Light and Shadow” and a few other stories, and cyber hacking attacks of the sort that was recently made against Sony Pictures decide the outcome of the whole war in Keith Brooke’s “War 3.01.” There are also good stories here by James L. Cambias, Yoon Ha Lee, Jake Kerr, Karin Lowachee, and others.

  A similar sameness of tone pervades The End Is Nigh, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey—naturally enough, since this is an anthology of stories about impending disaster and apocalypse, and a similarity of tone is a problem that many original themed anthologies share. The literary quality of the stories here is pretty high, but this is grim, bleak stuff, and I would recommend reading it one story at a time rather than going through the whole anthology at one setting; to avoid depression, I would also advise not reading it just after watching the evening news, which clearly shows several of these possible disasters hurtling toward us in the real world. The best stories here are “Shooting the Apocalypse,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, which shows us a near-future world teetering on the brink of an ecological catastrophe that is closer than they think (and probably closer than we think, too), “Removal Order,” by Tananarive Due, a close personal look at the human consequences that must be faced and the hard choices that must be made during a disaster in progress, and “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” by Ken Liu shows the unexpected and apocalyptic effects that follow that oft-used trope of modern science fiction, uploading a human’s consciousness to a computer. There are also good stories here by Nancy Kress, Tobias S. Buckell, Jack McDevitt, and others. This can be order from Amazon.com, or directly from the editors/publishers at www.johnjosephadams.com.

  Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction, an anthology of, what else?, Hard Science Fiction (ostensibly, anyway, although some of it really isn’t all Hard), edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi, isn’t as successful overall as the two anthologies above, with a number of stories that feel extremely dated and a bit clunky, but there is still good material to be had. Best stories here are “A Slow Unfurling of Truth,” by Aliette de Bodard, another in her long sequence of far-future of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires, all of which have been reliably of high-quality, and “Recollection,” by Nancy Fulda, tells the compassionate story of a man struggling to regain his old life after a high-tech treatment for Alzheimer’s. There’s also good stuff by Robert Reed, Jean-Louis Trudel, Gregory Benford, and others.

  I doubt that baseball is really “the national pastime” any more, having long since been outstripped in popularity by things like football, basketball, and NASCAR racing. But the SF and fantasy genres seem to have an odd affinity with baseball, and there have probably been more SF and fantasy stories about baseball over the decades than any other kind of sport. Some of them are collected in the reprint anthology, Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural, edited by Rick Wilber. Wilber does a good job here of balancing the kind of baseball stories that he uses; among the best of them we have science fiction baseball stories like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” and Louise Marley’s “Diamond Girls” (the Robinson is even a fairly hard science fiction baseball story), Alternate History baseball stories such as John Kessel’s “The Franchise,” Bruce McAllister’s “The Southpaw,” and Harry Turtledove’s “The House That George Built,” and supernatural baseball stories such Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s “A Face in the Crowd” and Wilber’s own “Stephen to Cora to Joe.” There’s also good stories here by Karen Joy Fowler, T.C. Boyle, Cecilia Tan, W.P. Kinsella, and others.

  The late Jay Lake was a highly talented and highly prolific writer who during his tragically short career seems to have managed to sell to nearly every market in the business, producing enough short fiction to fill four previous collections; and now there’s a fifth, the posthumously released Last Plane to Heaven—The Final Collection. Although he was also a prolific novelist, producing acclaimed novels such as Green and The Madness of Flowers, I always thought that he did his best work at shorter lengths, and this hefty collection, thirty-six stories, gathers some of the best of it, spanning SF, fantasy, and slipstream, all of which he was equally fluid and proficient in, including stories such as “Permanent Fatal Errors,” “West to East,” “The Starship Mechanic” (with Ken Scholes), “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable,” “The Face of the Moon,” and “Jefferson’s West,” among many others. And these are just a few of Lake’s stories—I can easily think of a dozen other stories not collected here as good as the stories that are. He was truly an impressive talent, and a great loss to all the genres he worked in.

  One of the most flamboyantly entertaining collections of the year you’re unlikely to have ever heard of or read, Black Gods Kiss, by Lavie Tidhar. This is a collection of five long tales of “guns & sorcery” (including a previously unpublished novella) featuring the bizarre and often ultraviolent adventures of Gorel of Goliris, a “gunslinger and addict” in a world full of evil sorcery and monstrous creatures, a character who starred in an earlier Tidhar chapbook, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God. The influence of Stephen King’s “Gunslinger” stories is clear here, although there’s more than a trace of C.L. Moore evident, as well as definite hints of Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. These stories tend to be rawer and more grotesque, and have a lot more sex in them, than most of what those authors wrote (although C.L. Moore, in stories such as “Shambleau,” could deliver a considerable—and considerably twisted—erotic charge, considering the publishing constraints of the day). What they are is almost the pure essence of pulp—violent, action-packed, paced like a runaway freight train, politically incorrect and socially unredeemable, in your face. They’re also a lot of fun—although they won’t be to the taste of every reader.

  A different kind of flamboyance, less raw and violent (although there are occasional surprisingly rich nuggets of murder and mayhem) and more lyrical and whimsical, eccentric, baroquely ornamented, and often very funny, is to be found in Ysabeau S. Wilce’s first collection, Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories. Here you’ll find stories set in Wilce’s strange and strangely appealing fantasy world of the Republic of Califa, something like Gold Rush California might have been if it had been drenched with magick, and, according to a blurb (for once entirely accurate), peopled by “rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three year old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig.” Wilce’s plots are intricate and her characters engaging in a ruthless, cold-blooded way, but what really makes these stories shine is the Voice they’re told in—flamboyant, over-the-top verbal p
yrotechnics that somehow almost always pay off even when the author is addressing the reader as “my little waffles,” as she does in “Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror.” These are as much fun as Tidhar’s “Guns & Sorcery” stories, although in an entirely different way.

  As eccentric in a different way still, quieter, with less violence and verbal pyrotechnics, although still deeply strange, is the work of Eileen Gunn, to be found in her new collection, Questionable Practices. Nobody sees the world quite like Gunn does, who puts her own unique spin on everything, transforming even the mundane into something rich and wonderful, and leading the reader to speculate that her head must be a terrific—although occasionally unsettling—place to live in. All this is on display in the sixteen stories here, including a couple of stories in collaboration with Michael Swanwick, and two stories published in this collection for the first time, “Phantom Pain” and the richly-textured variant on the Golem story, “Chop Wood, Carry Water.” Both the Gunn and the Wilce are available through Amazon, or directly from the publisher at smallbeerpress.com.

  2015

  77

  F&SF, January/February.

  Asimov’s, January.

  Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, ed. Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-710-3, $45.00, 472 pages.) Cover art by Tom Kidd.

  F&SF starts 2015 with a January/February issue featuring several good stories and a bunch of weaker ones; once again, the best stories are all fantasy, there’s little science fiction here, and most of what there is is minor. The best story here is Eleanor Arnason’s lyrical and quirky fantasy, “Telling Stories to the Sky,” about a girl who wants to be a storyteller but can’t be, because of the repressive society in which she lives—vaguely reminiscent of an Arabian Nights setting, a city “long since gone and forgotten”—and the inventive and ultimately life-changing ways she comes up with to get around those roadblocks and become a storyteller after all, including becoming court storyteller to the North Wind himself. Matthew Hughes offers us another highly entertaining adventure of Raffalon the Thief, “Prisoner of Pandarius.” The major influence on Hughes was clearly Jack Vance, and these Raffalon tales are about as close as you’re going to get these days, now that Vance is gone, to one of Vance’s stories about the misadventures of Cugel the Clever, although, unlike Cugel, who was nowhere near as clever as he believed himself to be, Raffalon actually is clever and highly competent as a thief—but is consistently dogged by terrible luck, which continues to hamper him here as he struggles to pull off a complicated and dangerous heist.

  Bud Webster offers us an unusual Cajun-flavored fantasy, a background not used much in modern fantasy, in his novella “Farewell Blues,” set in 1930’s Louisiana, featuring an itinerant Jazz musician and his possibly magical trumpet who have a tendency to blunder into supernatural situations, including, here, a confrontation with Elder Gods (or at least Forces) where the dead coming back from the dead is a good thing, because they’re on your side. The story, which I assume is the beginning of a series, is vaguely reminiscent of Manly Wade Wellman’s stories about wandering balladeer Silver John, but with enough unique flavor of its own to make it engaging. “Portrait of a Witch” is one of Albert E. Cowdrey’s more satisfying stories of late. Like his “Out of the Deeps,” in the January/February 2014 F&SF, this is more autumnal, more solemn and less comic, than the typical Cowdrey story, and, like that earlier story, it could easily have been told as a straight mystery story and sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s or Ellery Queen’s magazine with the rather perfunctory supernatural element excised—it wouldn’t have been that difficult to rewrite this as about a clever female serial killer rather than a clever female serial killer who uses supernatural means to kill. The story manages to generate a good deal of suspense, and the villain is compellingly nasty.

  There’s also an installment of Naomi Kritzer’s de facto novel serialization here, “Jubilee: A Seastead Story,” but the backstory has become complicated enough that you’re unlikely to fully appreciate this if you haven’t already read the earlier stories—and if you haven’t, you might be better off waiting for the inevitable novel version instead. Most of the rest of the stories in January/February are minor. Nik Houser tells a jokey time-travel paradox story that goes on for much too long in “History’s Best Places to Kiss,” Francis Marion Soty retells an Arabian Knights story with considerably less imagination than Eleanor Arnason did in “The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life,” Eric Schwitzgebel tells a Shaggy God story in “Out of the Jar,” and Alan Baxter offers a Pirates-Have-a-Lovecraftian-Encounter story, not the first to appear in the magazine this year, “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner,” which reads as if the author sat down at the keyboard after an all-night Pirates of the Caribbean marathon. The best of the stories covered in this paragraph (excepting the Kritzer, which is well-crafted, but too obviously a fragment of a longer work), is Gregor Hartmann’s “The Man from X,” a minor but pleasant SF story with, for once, a somewhat optimistic message.

  Just as I was sitting down to write his column, it was announced that writer Charles Coleman Finlay will (as many genre insiders speculated that he’d be) be taking over as the active acquisitions editor of F&SF, although former editor Gordon Van Gelder will remain as publisher and owner. Best of luck to him—and, being who I am, it’s my hope that he gets some more strong core science fiction into the magazine, something that’s been lacking there for a couple of years now.

  Much like F&SF, Asimov’s starts its year with a January issue that features a couple of strong stories and a raft of more minor ones, the main difference being that all of the stories in the January Asimov’s are science fiction (to one degree or another of rigor and plausibility), not fantasy—probably just as well, as F&SF is usually better at fantasy than Asimov’s usually is anyway.

  The best story in the January issue is probably Allen M. Steele’s novella “The Long Wait,” a semi-sequel to earlier stories “The Legion of Tomorrow,” in the July 2014 issue, and “The Prodigal Son,” in the October/November 2014 issue, all of which details the construction and launch of the first (unmanned) starship, starting with the formation of a group of like-minded futurists and SF fans in the ‘30 who lay the groundwork for a foundation that eventually funds the problem-plagued launch of the starship itself, which takes place in “The Prodigal Son.” This story deals with the aftermath of the events in the previous story, as the anxious scientists wait, for decades, to see if the starship is going to reach its destination and be able to send messages back to their monitoring station on Earth. Some readers may feel that this story is aptly named “The Long Wait,” since not much of a SFnal nature happens throughout most of its length, but Steele fills in the waiting time in a satisfactory fashion with a compelling and complicated family drama involving the people who are waiting for a message to return from the stars to prove that the technology worked after all, and there is an SFnal payoff at the end. Also good in January is “The Unveiling,” by Christopher Rowe. This is something by Rowe unlike the stuff I’ve seen from him before, which usually features a posthuman future strange enough to be just this side of surrealism; “The Unveiling,” though, is an old-fashioned colony planet story, set on a colony world with a highly repressive government, where one man’s self-sacrificing actions serve as the unlikely basis for an eventual revolution; an absorbing read, which makes you care about its protagonist in a short amount of time.

  Everything else here is more minor, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t entertaining. Best of the remaining stories is probably Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Ninety-Five Percent Safe,” about one dissatisfied young girl taking an impulsive action that changes her life and the lives of the rest of her family forever. The action that she takes is so self-centered, short-sighted, and stupid, and so obviously not a good idea, that it’s annoying and makes you want to yell at her—but hey, young people in real life do make impulsive decisions that are self-centered, short-sighte
d, and stupid, and which irrevocably change the rest of their lives, so I suppose they should be allowed to make them in fiction as well. Jay O’Connell tells a twisted and faintly distasteful story of desire, obsession, and perversion in “Candy From Strangers.” Rudy Rucker’s collaboration with Marc Laidlaw, “Watergirl,” is full of gonzo pyrotechnics, and reads much like all of Rucker’s collaborations have, regardless of who he’s collaborating with. Peter Wood blithely ignores the limitations of the cube-squared law in “Butterflies,” a tale about illegal genetic manipulation producing huge insects in the backwoods of North Carolina with the help of a handy-dandy nuclear reactor kept in a toolshed. Sarah Pinsker’s “Songs in the Key of You” is basically a YA High School story about an artistic nerd attempting to deal with the Mean Girls who torment her, with a very minimal fantastic element added.

  Grand Crusades, The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, is a collection of five of Jack Vance’s early “novels,” most of which would be considered to be novellas by the word-counting protocols in use today, “The Rapparee,” “Crusade to Maxus,” “Gold and Iron,” “The Houses of Iszm,” and “Space Opera.” This is old-fashioned pulp adventure stuff, turned out originally in the ‘50s and early ‘60s for unabashed pulp markets such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, with only hints here and there of the sophistication of his later work, and there’s little doubt that some modern readers may have trouble getting beyond what they will react to as the racism, sexism, and colonialism common to pulp adventure of the day—if you can make allowances for the period in which they were written, though, these are a lot of fun. And Vance was never a stock pulp writer, even in his early days. In “The Rapparee,” published as a book as The Five Gold Bands, the protagonist Paddy is a comic stage Irishman of a sort that might be considered offensive today, but he’s also shrewd, resourceful, and honorable in his own way, and while his romantic relationship with stowaway Fay will certainly raise sexism flags, Fay is clearly far more intelligent than Paddy, and effortlessly manipulates and controls him throughout, and in a sense is the actor whose actions drive the plot in a far more significant way than the protagonist’s do. There’s little other conventional racism here, unless you consider Vance’s attitude toward aliens and the human-descended races who have diverged radically from norm due to different planetary environments to be racism. (Colonialism is more difficult to deny, since colonialism is one of the fundamental assumptions of the pulp writing of the day—but even here, it should be noted that it’s the aliens who are often in control, and the Earthmen who are underdogs.) The best story here is probably “The Houses of Iszm,” which gets into some of the sophisticated conceptualization and evocative world-building that Vance’s later work is noted for. The weakest story is probably “Space Opera,” perhaps written just to work in the title pun, about a touring opera company from Earth playing to unappreciative alien audiences across the Galaxy, some of whom turn out to prefer Jug Band Music.