Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The best word to describe most of the stories in Interzone 256, as it often is with Interzone, is “glum.” The exception is T.R. Napper’s “An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets,” which is loose, jazzy, and jaunty in a way that Interzone stories only occasionally are—quite entertaining, although the imaginative premise, aliens who bet on things like which steps a human will step on while going up or down the stairs or how many steps it will take to cross a room, is unlikely at best and hard to take seriously as science fiction. Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “Nostalgia” is a sensitively told (if, yes, somewhat glum) story of a woman struggling to shake off the deleterious hold of the past in her post-college years and get on with her life rather than losing herself in old memories and regrets, although other than the thin fantastic element of the nostalgia-inducing drug named, (appropriately enough) Nostalgia, the story could have been told as straight mainstream with nothing of importance really changed. Christien Gholson’s “Tribute” goes beyond glum to bleak and hopeless, with few of the vital elements of the plot explained (why can’t the protagonist spin a “journey shell” for herself? How and why did she and her mother get there in the first place? Didn’t her mother tell her anything about any of this, even the most basic answers to the most basic questions? Apparently not, since the protagonist asks herself those basic questions over and over again in the course of the story.). Neil Williamson’s “Fish on Friday” is a broadly satiric piece that, like James Sarafin’s “Trapping the Pleistocene,” reviewed above, paints a Green Utopia as an oppressive, unpleasant place you wouldn’t want to live in. (Does this represent the beginnings of a backlash against the Green Utopias that have been put forth as desirable—even yearned for—futures by many writers in the last few years?) Pandora Hope’s “The Ferry Man” is a goulash of oddly matched horror and fantasy tropes, none of which ever seem to quite gell.

  Interzone 257 is a considerably stronger issue. Best story here is probably “A Murmuration,” by Alastair Reynolds. This is ostensibly about a scientist observing and then experimenting with those huge flocks of thousands of starlings who swoop about in intricate, instantly-changing patterns (“murmurations”), but it’s a tricky piece where nothing is really what it initially seems, and what’s really going on is not spelled out, but left as an inference to the reader to be pieced together by the end. Not a typical Reynolds story, but oddly compelling even from the start for a story where the protagonist spends all his time in an isolated camp watching birds and scribbling notes in a notebook. (It’s nice to see Reynolds back in the pages of Interzone, the magazine where he made his start back in the ‘80s, and where he hasn’t appeared much in recent years.) Also good in Interzone 257 is “Brainwhales Are Stoners, Too,” by Rich Larson, a postcyberpunk story which follows a young girl whose desire for a would-be lover allows him to talk her into an ill-conceived incursion into a retooled warehouse now used as a “computation factory”. What they find there is truly horrifying—captive whales forced to use their huge brain capacity as organic computers—and has a profound effect on the girl that will stick with her for the rest of her life, and perhaps even give her life a purpose. “Songbird,” by Fadzlishah Johanabas, has a similar, and similarly horrifying, theme—a captive woman being used by ruthless drug-trafficers as a living drug factory to produce drugs that reproduce in others the emotions that she’s feeling during the process: sadness, determination, rage, lust. The story is emotionally powerful, although I found the abrupt turn-around of her fortunes unconvincing, as was the sudden intrusion of a complicated backstory near the end that probably should have been established much earlier. Aliva Whiteley’s “Blossoms Falling Down” has an interesting backstory—aboard what I assume is an interstellar generation ship, although the story never specifically states this—but doesn’t really do much with it once it’s established. This is a slice-of-life story rather than a strongly plotted one—but considering that haikus are the ruling metaphor of the story, perhaps this is deliberate.

  The scientist who also writes SF, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, has been a tradition in the field for generations, although there aren’t too many authors left who fit that definition any more. Geoffrey A. Landis is one. Gregory Benford is another. Gregory Benford, a working scientist, has been one of the most respected practitioners of the Hard Science story for decades now, and The Best of Gregory Benford, edited by David G. Hartwell, is a huge collection of some of Benford’s best short work, from the beginning of his career in 1970 through to 2013, demonstrating the variety of his palate and the sweep and scope of his imagination. Best stories here are probably “In Alien Flesh,” “Redeemer,” “Exposures,” “Of Space/Time and the River,” “Matter’s End,” “Centigrade 233,” “A Desperate Calculus,” “A Dance to Strange Musics,” and “Bow Shock,” but there are thirty other distinguished stories in this hefty collection as well, making this a good reading bargain even at the also-hefty cover price. My only regret is that they didn’t have room for more of Benford’s novellas, a form in which he’s done some of his best work (although the book does include “Matter’s End,” one of my favorite Benford stories), but there’s plenty here to keep you reading for some days to come. If you’re not familiar with Benford’s work—although he’s perhaps better known for his novels, such as the classic Timescape and the Galactic Center books—his collected short work makes a good place to start.

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  Asimov’s, June.

  Asimov’s, July.

  Interzone 258.

  The June Asimov’s is a strong issue. Best story here is probably Indrapramit Das’s “The Muses of Shuyedan-18,” a story of the once-passionate but then gradually deteriorating love affair between two scientific researchers on a strange alien world. The best thing about this story is that the alien life-forms the researchers are studying are really alien, mysterious and vast, like living mountains, a nice change from the aliens in all-too-many stories by lazy writers, where the aliens are just humans with odd bumps on their foreheads. The passion of the human lovers has an effect on the aliens, and the aliens in turn have an effect on their evolving relationship, so everything is nicely interconnected here; a good core SF story, which brings us into contact with something numinous and strange, as good SF should do. Also good in June is “The End of the War,” by new writer Django Wexler, a vigorous piece of Military SF that conceals a strong anti-war message at its core, with scavenging parties fighting it out for possession of ruined spaceships to be used for scrap and to salvage the “exotic materials” they contain that can no longer be produced by societies depleted and diminished by a long and bitterly fought space war which has destroyed both home planets of the combatants. The only quibble I have here is that both sides destroy a lot of robot machinery in the battle over the derelict spaceships, perhaps too much of it to make the whole thing cost-effective, especially as the small prospecting spaceships themselves are often destroyed—in a situation where nobody can make “fusion bottles,” the secret of spaceflight, any more, destroying one of the few remaining ones seems too high a price to pay for the worth of the salvage.

  Sarah Pinsker’s “Our Lady of the Open Road” is also enjoyable, the tale of a travelling band in a deteriorating beat-up old van grimly trying to hang on and make a diminishing living in a society where taped performances have largely replaced live concerts. The main character, stubbornly hanging on to a lifestyle and a kind of freedom she loves in the face of ever-increasing difficulties, is an interesting one, and her relationships with the other band members well-handled. There’s a hint here that concerts and other mass gatherings of people have been discouraged due to fear of contagion, as if there’s been a worldwide plague of some sort, explaining the difficulty the band has finding venues to play—and yet people still seem to gather together in bars, so that doesn’t quite make sense to me. The band passes through one deserted, boarded-up little town after another, and a “Superwally” that employs everyone “
within an hour’s drive,” but I kept thinking, if everyone works at the Superwally, where do they get their customers from? So the background here’s a little fuzzy. M. Bennardo’s “Ghosts of the Savannah” is a worthy addition to the long roster of stories about the lives of prehistoric tribespeople, a subtheme that goes almost all the way back to the beginning of the genre and includes such substantial work as William Golden’s The Inheritors. No time-travel element or other fantastic element here, but such stories have been grandfathered into the genre by long tradition, and Bennardo gives us instead of time-travel a well-handled study of prehistoric people making a precarious living on the savannah by running down game on foot—and what happens to one of those fleet hunters when she injures her leg; can her best friend save her, or is she doomed? As in Das’s “The Muses of Shuyedan-18,” there is a thread in this story about a woman who doesn’t want to be forced to have babies, much to the disapproval of her society, which is pressuring her to do so, a sub-theme that turns up here and there throughout the issue. Henry Lien’s “The Ladies’ Aquatic Gardening Society” is an archly satiric piece told in a faux-19th Century style that goes on much too long for my taste, and which, other than the silly trope of the sea-roses that bring about the End of the World in the last page, has no fantastic element and could have been told as a mainstream Comedy of Manners with little significant change. Ray Nayler’s “Mutability” is a well-crafted if enigmatic story that raises a number of mysteries about the protagonists and the society they live in that it never really gets around to answering. I think you’re supposed to recognize the book that has played a significant part in the now mostly forgotten past lives of the two protagonists, and perhaps if I had I would have understood more about what was going on.

  The July Asimov’s is a bit weaker overall, although there’s still some strong stuff here. The best story is probably new writer Derek Künsken’s novella “Pollen from a Future Harvest.” This is more of a Hard Science story than is typical for Asimov’s, sprinkled with crunchy nuggets of science infodumps, about an interstellar Expedition that has discovered a bizarre alien world that contains two ancient “time gates” allowing communication from the future to the past over a span of eleven years. The Expedition quickly revolts against the parent society that had sent it out, and much of the plot revolves around the difficulties involved in figuring out who the sleeper agents are who are still loyal to the parent society and might figure out a way to tip them off about their location, prompting a reprisal strike, and also with figuring out methods to avoid the “grandfather paradoxes” inherent in the future being able to communicate with the past. This is not always a fast or easy read, being somewhat chewy in places, but it ultimately rewards the effort to stick with it to the end. Like the Das story, the novella also gets high marks from me for featuring another set of really alien aliens; they’re more in the background than they are in the Das story, not getting a lot of screen-time, but they do feature satisfactorily in the resolution of the plot.

  David Gerrold has a great deal of fun in “The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley,” set in an Alternate World where Nikola Tesla’s inventions have permitted safe and effective zeppelin travel to have been developed rather than the harder-than-air aircraft of our own timeline (the Hindenburg never crashed in this reality), and takes us along on the maiden voyage of the most luxurious, up-to-date, and biggest airship launched to date, the Liberty, three times larger than the Hindenberg. Gerrold’s affection for airships—one I share—is clear here, informing the loving descriptions of the Liberty, although he has the most fun describing the interactions of the famous Broadway and Hollywood celebrities who make up the passenger list, so we get to hear Jack Benny and Fred Allen trading quips and the Gershwins and Oscar Levant playing piano accompaniment for George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, and George Jessel, and so on. Since the story is being narrated by a would-be writer working the cruise as a waiter, the most time, naturally enough, is spent eavesdropping on the conversations of the members of the Algonquin Round Table who are aboard—Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman—none of whom really come off very well when seen through the narrator’s eyes, and who spend most of the trip arguing in a drunken and dissolute fashion about writer’s block while ideally plotting out a murder mystery featuring one of the Round Table as a victim that they know they’ll never actually write. The twist ending, saved for the very last paragraph, doesn’t convince me, but the voyage that Gerrold takes us along on here is an entertaining one. Mary Robinette Kowal in “Like Native Things” harks back to an idea I first remember encountering in Andre Norton’s The Beast Master many years ago, that of controlling an animal’s actions and seeing the world through its eyes, in this case, a scientist who “rides” dolphins, bears, cougars, and so forth to study them, and who must fight back as well as she can when control of some of her animals is wrested from her by saboteurs who use them against her. It’s exciting stuff, although the characterization of the saboteurs is paper-thin, and it’s never entirely clear why they’re doing what they’re doing. Will Ludwigsen in “Acres of Perhaps” gives us a Twilight Zoneish story about the making of a low-budget Twilight Zone-style television show, the second story this issue to revolve around writer’s block as a key plot-point; the character of the crazed genius who writes the show and the frustrated protagonist who’d like to emulate his passion are interesting, but the story goes on longer than it should.

  Interzone 258, the May-June issue, is somewhat weak, with some decent stuff, but nothing really outstanding. Best story here is probably T.R. Napper’s “A Shout Is a Prayer for the Waiting Centuries,” the bleak main storyline being about a former professional fighter trying to somehow survive and keep his family alive without having to be forced into fighting again. I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to say that it’s obvious from the start that he has no chance of winning, with everything in his society stacked against him, in a dismal but all-too-likely future where the divide between rich and poor has grown even greater than it is today, with the poor having no recourse against the superrich who use them as toys and then toss them aside when they’re broken; there’s a counterpoint plotline about Vietnamese refugees struggling, mostly unsuccessfully, to escape from the murderous Chinese forces chasing them, but it doesn’t really seem to have much point except to emphasize how bleak and hopeless the world has become. Also good is Malcolm Devlin’s “Her First Harvest,” about a barren world, devoid of vegetation, where the colonists are forced to grow mushrooms and fungus on their own bodies in order to have anything to eat. I find the science here dubious, but the author does a good job of showing how the values, manners, and traditions of the whole society have been built around this peculiar necessity, with the natives seeing it as beneficial and positive rather than something horrifying or distasteful. “Doors,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, is a story about a beleaguered young woman seeking for a better life by searching through a succession of alternate worlds where her family situation is different; this is couched as science fiction, but since no explanation at all is ever given of why the people who allow her to do this are doing it, or what their origins are, or why they would set the whole thing up as a carnival ride, or what they hope to get out of doing it, I’ll have to consider it a stealth fantasy. “Angel Fire,” by Christien Gholson, is about a rich man slowly having a nervous breakdown in a future where society seems to be having a mass nervous breakdown of its own to match. “The Re’em Song,” by Julie C. Day, is a silly fantasy about mining unicorn bones that, in my opinion, doesn’t really belong in Interzone in the first place.

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  F&SF, July/August.

  Asimov’s, August.

  The Best of Nancy Kress, Nancy Kress. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-721, $45.00, 560 pages.) Cover art by Tom Canty.

  The July/August issue of F&SF is a strong one, due largely to the presence of two superior and quirky fantasy stories, “Johnny Rev,” by
Rachel Pollack and “The Deepwater Bride,” by new writer Tamsyn Muir. The Pollack is one of a series of stories she’s been writing, starting with “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls” in the July/August 2012 issue, about Jack Shade, a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed. In this one, he’s hired by himself to destroy himself—or rather, by a duplicate created by Jack who has avoided dissolution, and now wants to dispose of Jack in order to take his place. Since the unbreakable geass under which Jack operates forces him to take the commission of anyone who brings him his business card, he’s forced to take on the mission of doing away with himself, and most of the story is involved with his elaborate efforts to figure a way out of the dilemma, a problem that looks unsolvable through most of the text. The best thing about the Jack Shade stories is Pollack’s invented mythology, which is rich and lush and strange, and which is superimposed fascinatingly on the everyday mundane details of life in modern-day Manhattan, the supernatural and the familiar worlds wrapped intricately around each other like something from an Escher print. A similar offbeat and unusual mystical system, with elaborate magical rules, features in Tamsyn Muir’s “The Deepwater Bride,” about a young girl from a family with a long tradition of being chroniclers of supernatural events observing the start of something very like a Lovecraftian Incursion (Muir’s mythology is not quite that of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, although there are obvious points of similarity) that threatens to obliterate a small town. Of course, against her own better judgment and her family’s long tradition of non-interference, she ends up trying to intervene, with unexpected results.