Also good here is Charlotte Ashley’s “Dumas-inspired” (the author is an enthusiast for the works of Alexandre Dumas) fantasy “La Hêron,” set in a 7th Century France where a doughty swordswoman must compete in a dueling contest against a powerful fairy lord. Jay O’Connell takes us to an unlikely near future in “Things Worth Knowing,” about a school security guard who struggles to protect one of his students who’s caught up in a potentially lethal competition for his services by rival corporations; the world-weary security guard, doggedly determined to do his duty even in the face of overwhelming odds, is a likeable and admirable character, but I find the social set-up here to be not particularly plausible (especially as there seems no particular reason why the corporations couldn’t clandestinely snatch the kid from his home or on his way to school rather than fighting it out in a public place where there is a security guard to oppose them). Alice Sola Kim tells a straight horror story about a sinister boarding school in “A Residence for Friendless Ladies,” Sadie Bruce balances between slipstream and horror in the somewhat distasteful “Little Girls in Bone Museums,” Kat Howard spins a fantasy about lovers literally stealing time from each other, in “A User’s Guide to Increments of Time,” Jonathan L. Howard delivers a time-paradox farce in “A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell,” and Henry Lien tells an epistemological story in the form of Twitter tweets, in “Bilingual.”
The lead story here, and by far the longest, is a novella by Chinese writer Bao Shu, translated into English by Ken Liu, “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear.” This is an ambitious but, unfortunately, not entirely successful story, not quite an Alternate History story although it features elements of that form, about a man struggling through life in a China where history seems to be running backwards (although people are still living forward in the ordinary way), so that society abandons computer technology and starts making cathode ray tubes instead, and so on. I could have done without this element, which was hard to take seriously in an otherwise realistic mimetic story, and it might have worked better as a straight mainstream story about a man living through upheavals in Chinese society during the course of a long life. The protagonist is (deliberately, I’m sure) something of an Everyman, whose life was not really in any major way exceptional, duplicating the experiences of thousands of others, and although the details of some of his life’s experiences are fascinating, others are, frankly—a bit dull.
It’s early days yet, only a few months into 2015 as I write these words, but already there’s a strong contender for the title of Best Collection of the Year—The Best of Ian McDonald, a selection of some of Ian McDonald’s best work from 1988 to 2013. McDonald is not exactly an obscure name in the field, probably most core SF readers will recognize him, and he did win a Hugo Award in 2007 for “The Djinn’s Wife” (included here), but I’ve always felt that he doesn’t really get the level of recognition that he deserves, either. For my money, Ian McDonald is one of the best SF writers currently working in the field, perhaps one of the three or four top writers, and although he has written critically acclaimed novels, he does much of his best work at shorter lengths—so you have a treat in store for you with this hefty collection, and perhaps a revelation if you haven’t encountered McDonald’s work before. McDonald’s range is wide and varied, and well represented here, from his “Future India” stories to New Space Opera, from stories of an alien invasion of Africa to stories of the sexual interactions of Terrans with their alien conquerors, from sly superhero stories to Retro SF to YA stories set on a terraformed Mars, from high-tech future sports stories to tales of dangerous encounters with the creatures of Faerie. Nothing is weak here, but the best stories include the aforementioned “The Djinn’s Wife,” “Verthandi’s Ring,” “After Kerry,” “[A Ghost Samba],” “Toward Kilimanjaro,” “Winning,” “Digging,” and “The Queen of Night’s Aria.” McDonald has done some of his best work at novella length, and it’s too bad that practical length restrictions didn’t allow the inclusion of stories such as “The Little Goddess” or “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” but at least two of his best novellas are here, “Tendeleo’s Story” and “The Tear.” In my opinion, “The Tear” was the best SF novella of 2008, and probably worth the price of admission all by itself.
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Asimov’s, April/May.
Frost on Glass, Ian R. MacLeod. (PS Publishing, 978-1-84863-888-4, 306 pages.) Cover art by Jethro Lentle.
Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction, Hannu Rajaniemi. (Tachyon Publications, 978-1-61696-192-3, $25.95, 256 pages.) Cover art by Lius Lasahido.
Romance on Four Worlds: A Casanova Quartet, Tom Purdom. (Fantastic Books, 978-1-62755-635-4. $12.99, 150 pages.)
The April/May Double Issue of Asimov’s is a strong one, perhaps the strongest issue of Asimov’s for the year to date. The most entertaining story here is a freewheeling gonzo fantasy called “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughter—H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town!,” a collaboration between Michael Swanwick and Gregory Frost, who take us along with thinly disguised versions of Howard Waldrop and Andy Duncan as conmen with magical abilities on the prowl for a Big Score through an eccentric version of the Depression-era American South—all of which comes across as something like Paper Moon with Dust Giants and Fish Wizards. There are plenty of in-jokes here, but you don’t have to be familiar with the work of Waldrop and Duncan, or even ever have heard of them, to find this one entertaining and funny. Allen M. Steele wraps up his “Arkwright” sequence of novellas—which started with “The Legion of Tomorrow” in the July 2014 issue and took us through the launch of the first starship in two subsequent stories—in good form with “The Children of Gal,” which takes us ahead generations in time to that starship’s destination for a classic Lost Colony story which doesn’t particularly break any new ground, but which is well-told in a traditionally satisfactory manner. Also good here is Eugene Fischer’s “The New Mother,” a thoughtful look at a fundamental change in the nature of human reproduction spread throughout the population by a sexually transmitted disease, making any babies that women have fundamentally a clone of themselves. The moral, political, and philosophical implications of this are worked out in rigorous detail, and the author leaves it ambiguous whether this is ultimately a good thing or not, giving balanced evidence on both sides, although it does seem to me that if this became the standard reproductive method that that would more-or-less mean the end of human evolution, a potential disadvantage in a world as fragile and changeable, and subject to dramatic (even Apocalyptic) alterations in circumstances and environment as ours is.
April/May also contains an intriguing study of the thin line between fantasy violence and real violence, “Day Job,” by Tom Purdom, a unique and inventive (although, to me, unconvincing) solution to the Fermi Paradox, “What I Intend,” by Robert Reed, a story about the unexpected consequences of following a radical diet, “Willing Flesh,” by Jay O’Connell, a vivid fantasy that seems like a slice from a larger story, “The Marriage of the Sea,” by Liz Williams, and the story of a woman who undergoes a high-tech procedure on her eyes and finds that it gives her the ability to see ghosts, “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age,” by new writer Fran Wilde. Anna Tambour’s “The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers” frankly made little sense to me, even after a couple of attempts to read it, Joe M. McDermontt’s “Paul and His Son” is a sensitively-told story of a father’s difficult relationship with his emotionally disturbed son that could have been told as a straight mainstream story with only a few minor changes, and Frank Smith’s “The Sentry” is set on a terraformed Titan which is just like suburban Ohio, down to well-watered lawns, neat little houses, hound dogs, and bunny rabbits.
This month brings another early contender for the title of Best Collection of the Year, Frost on Glass, by Ian R. MacLeod, a collection of eleven stories and copious interstitial material (forwards, afterwords, autobiographical non-fiction pieces), mixing science fiction, fantasy, and harder-to-c
lassify slipstreamish stuff. It’s hard not to compare this to Ian McDonald’s collection, The Best of Ian McDonald, which I reviewed here last time—like McDonald, MacLeod is another British writer who’s not exactly an unknown name to core genre readers (he’s won two World Fantasy Awards and a Clarke Award), but who tends not to get the kind of appreciation he really deserves, either, especially on the American side of the Atlantic. Probably neither of them pull in the Big Bucks from publishers, and they only occasionally feature on Hugo ballots even in non-Sad Puppy years, but both of them really should be ranked amongst the top SF/fantasy writers producing today.
I think that between the two collections, I give a slight edge to the McDonald, if only because you get more fiction in it. The MacLeod collection devotes a lot of space to the aforementioned forwards, afterwords, and chatty—sometime rambling—autobiographical pieces and non-fiction essays on various topics, and although they’re all interesting and informative, and, full of personal information as they are, help to give us a better picture of MacLeod the man and his life than we may have had before, it’s a shame that room couldn’t have been made here instead for some of the stories from his previous collection, Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best of Ian R. MacLeod, which was practically stealth-published in an ebook edition noticed by just about nobody in the business; stories from that collection such as the title “Snodgrass,” “Grownups,” “New Light on the Drake Equation,” “The Chop Girl,” and “Isabel of the Fall” deserve to be seen by a wider audience than the few who actually saw the ebook, and their inclusion here (to say nothing of his wonderful novella “Breathmoss,” uncollected in either) would have made this a stronger collection, enough so to justify the loss of some of the other material, interesting as it is. Nevertheless, quibbles aside, Frost on Glass is a very strong collection. There are a couple of stories here, on the slipstream side of the spectrum, that I didn’t warm to, like “The Traveller and the Book” and “The Crane Method,” but the majority of the stuff here is strong, vivid, core science fiction, such as “The Discovered Country,” “Entangled,” “Re-Crossing the Styx,” and “The Cold Step Beyond.” I considered “The Discovered Country” to be perhaps the single strongest SF story of 2013, and “Entangled” is very nearly as good. There’s also a previously unpublished novella here, the title story “Frost on Glass,” about a once-famous writer now living in a community for writers in what seems to be an England taken over by a totalitarian Communist Red Guard-style revolution who must somehow break a decades-long writers block and produce something new or face exile or even death. The story is bleak and autumnal, with regret for lost years the dominant emotion, but it is beautifully, even lyrically, crafted, and the character of the writer, who sees his own shortcomings and failures all too clearly, a glum but interestingly complex one.
Another contender, in a year that’s shaping up to be a good one for short-story collections, is Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction, by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi. Unlike McDonald and MacLeod, whose careers go back into the ‘80s, Hannu Rajaniemi is a relatively new writer who only started popping up in the middle Oughts, but who has quickly established a substantial reputation for himself with novels like The Quantum Thief and its sequels, and with a handful of incisive, overclocked, information-dense posthuman stories such as the ones collected here. Rajaniemi could fairly be said to be a second-generation cyberpunk, sort of a Bruce Sterling 2.0, with an even faster bit-rate, higher density of information, and more of what Sterling himself once referred to as “eyeball-clicks.” There are some fantasy stories here, such as “Fisher of Men” and “The Oldest Game,” most drawing upon Finnish mythology, an area rarely touched in fantasy fiction, but the bulk of the best stories are fast-paced hardcore postcyberpunk, set in posthuman futures different enough from today that some readers might have trouble figuring out what in the Hell is going on. The best of these are “Deus Ex Homine,” “Tyche and the Ants,” “His Master’s Voice,” “The Server and the Dragon,” “Shibuya no Love,” and “Topsight.” The collection also features three original stories. Two of these, “Ghost Dogs” and “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB,” are fantasies that show, rather refreshingly, a sentimental and even Bradburyesque streak, surprising for a hard-nosed cyberpunkish New Young Turk on the cutting-edge of things, showing that he can write effectively in more modes than one. The third new story is “Skywalker of Earth,” a gonzo retro-SF adventure, a deliberately over-the-top story which continually raises the outrageousness ante on itself, a sly, affectionate homage to the Superscience days of Doc Smith, “World-Buster” Hamilton, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, all given a faint whitewash of new-science handwaving.
Probably not too many critics will suggest that veteran writer Tom Purdom’s new collection, Romance on Four Worlds: A Casanova Quartet, is the Best Collection of the Year, but it is hugely entertaining, and has some surprising points of similarity with Rajaniemi’s work. Made up of four long stories that originally appeared in Asimov’s (“Romance in Lunar G,” “Romance in Extended Time,” “Romance with Phobic Variations,” and “Romance for Augmented Trio”), the stories follow the adventures and misadventures of Joe Baske, a man in a prosperous, high-tech, multi-planetary future society who has deliberately modeled himself on the famous 18th Century lover, Casanova. Baske is an engaging character, level-headed and aware of his own foibles, even wryly amused by them, whose obsessive pursuit of Love (for, like Casanova, sex alone is never enough for Baske, he must fall deeply in love with the object of his affections—until moving on to the next one) takes him all over the Solar System, from the Moon to the edges of interstellar space, getting into scrapes of varying degrees of deadliness and using his ingenuity to overcome the obstacles and rivals who stand in his way. Entertaining stuff, and although it’s not as frenetically paced or information-dense as Rajaniemi’s work, Purdom does a good job of creating a believable posthuman future (in some ways surprisingly similar to Rajaniemi’s, especially when you consider that Purdom began his career in the ‘50s, decades before Rajaniemi was even born), inhabited by characters who have convincingly been shaped by the changes in their late 21st Century world into people very different from you and me, and yet who still recognizably share common ground with us. Some may even prefer Purdom’s version of that posthuman future, which although kinder and gentler than Rajaniemi’s postcyberpunk world, and with a lower bit-rate, has an authority and conviction all its own.
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F&SF, May/June.
Interzone 256.
Interzone 257.
The Best of Gregory Benford, Gregory Benford, ed by David G. Hartwell. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-686-1, $40.00, 616 pages.) Cover art by John Harris.
The May/June issue of F&SF is overall a somewhat weak one, although there are a few entertaining stories included. The strongest story here is probably “Trapping the Pleistocene,” by James Sarafin. Sarafin popped up in the late ‘90s with a few SF stories, mostly in Asimov’s, and then disappeared; it’s good to see him making a return to writing, or at least to writing SF (I have no idea what he’s been doing in the meantime, and he might have been writing mysteries or non-fiction or romances instead for all I know). “Trapping the Pleistocene” is vigorous and fast-moving, a worthy addition to the long body of stories in which time-travellers go back to prehistoric times to hunt big game, the best-known of which is probably L. Sprague De Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur”—although here they’re trapping the animals rather than hunting them, and they’re after Pleistocene megafauna (in specific, a giant beaver) rather than dinosaurs. The Pleistocene trapping scenes are exciting and authentic-sounding, showing a clear knowledge of both trapping technique and the kind of critters who once inhabited North America, and extrapolating the ways that current-day trapping procedures might have to be adapted on the fly to deal with trapping a beaver the size of a car. What I find really intriguing about the story, though, is that the future scenes are set in a Green Utopia of the sort that many SF writers postula
te and would love to see established in reality—and yet, to the protagonist, it’s a nightmare dystopia, one where you can’t even look at the stars without being subjected to an advertisement, one he can’t wait to get out of and back to his deliberately chosen “primitive” style of life...and Sarafin does a good job of making the reader see that Utopia through the protagonist’s eyes and feel how claustrophobic and oppressive it is, so that you can’t wait to get out of it too.
Also good in May/June is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Laminated Man.” Cowdrey made his reputation writing funny fantasy, often set in New Orleans, but lately he’s been doing better with his grimmer stuff, as here, in what turns out to be a stealth First Contact story with a genuinely nasty and genuinely surprising sting in its tail. Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind” is another First Contact story of sorts, and again, as in the Cowdrey, it’s a First Contact initiated by aliens in hiding whose motives are sinister and malignant; there are no friendly ETs in this issue of F&SF. Sarah Pinsker offers us the amusing, and blessedly short, “Today’s Smarthouse in Love”; one of the biggest mistakes in writing humor, one demonstrated by a few other stories here, is going on too long.
That, being too long for its weight, is one of the drawbacks of Robert Grossbach’s novella “Entrepreneurs,” especially as the humor is broad and farcical; farces only rarely can afford to go on and on, as Grossbach does here, long after we’ve gotten the joke (and gotten tired of it). It did occur to me while reading “Entrepreneurs” that Grossbach’s protagonist—a hapless, bookish loner, diffident and apologetic, unsuccessful with women and usually too embarrassed to even approach them—is a kind of protagonist, basically a Thurber character, that has appeared over and over again in F&SF stories for decades; in years past, he would have been a librarian or an accountant or a clerk; now he has something to do with computers. David Gerrold’s “Entaglements” eventually gets into some interesting and even poignant autobiographical—or “autobiographical”; this is fiction, after all, and who knows how many of these experiences the author actually shared with his protagonist and how many he made up—details about the alternate lives that a character very like David Gerrold himself might have led if things had turned out differently—but the first fourteen or fifteen pages, dealing with a birthday party that eventually gets the McGuffin into the hands of the protagonist are rambling and discursive, told in an overly arch, overly jocular voice that tries too hard to be amusing, and the lazier readers might not stick with the story long enough to get past this to the good parts. “A Turkey With Egg on His Face” is Rob Chilson’s admitted attempt to write an Avram Davidson story—in particular, a rewrite or at least a reworking of Davidson’s “Full Chicken Richness”—but although Chilson has good intentions and works hard and earnestly at the task, he just doesn’t have the chops to pull this off...as indeed, few, if any, do now that Davidson is gone. Davidson managed to tell the same basic tale with much more wit and panache in less than half the length it takes “A Turkey With Egg on His Face” to attempt it.
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