Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  85

  F&SF, September/October.

  Asimov’s, September.

  Interzone 259.

  A somewhat lackluster September/October F&SF overall, nothing really bad but little really exciting either, with the exception of a few strong stories, sprinkled throughout the issue like raisins in rice pudding. Best story here is probably “The Bone War,” by Elizabeth Bear, in which her series character, the Wizard Bijou the Artificer from her Eternal Sky series, gets hired by a museum to piece together and ultimately animate by her magic the recently discovered fossil bones of a monstrous creature, and ends up in the middle of a scholarly “war” between fiercely competing scholars with different ideas of what the creature must look like. The story is stylish and elegant, with lots of sly touches that some readers might recognize as echoes from the “Bone War” between 19th Century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh that took place in our own reality. Bear brings it all to an amusing and satisfactory conclusion; the only false step here, in my opinion, is her use of the term “dinosaur” for the creature being assembled, a term which strikes me as anachronistic and jarring in the context of this fantasy world, as if it leaked in from our own timeline. Also strong here is “The Lord of Ragnarök,” by Albert E. Cowdrey, a historical fantasy novella taking place in 12th Century France, detailing a peasant’s long, arduous, and very dangerous social rise from apprentice to knighthood to, eventually, the nobility and the husband of a Queen. The peasant is a ruthless, resourceful, clear-headed, and relentlessly logical character, always ready at a moment’s notice to take advantage of rapidly changing situations and strokes of fortune, and not above doing some pretty dark things to survive and prosper, and so makes an interesting if not terribly likeable or admirable protagonist. The fantasy element here is actually somewhat weak, and the story might have worked better as a straight historical—except that then, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to sell it anywhere. The novella is mostly narrated through the eyes of its peasant protagonist, although there are odd, and somewhat jarring, moments when the author speaks to us in an omniscient mode, mentioning anachronistic things that the protagonist couldn’t possibly know about.

  Also good here are “A Hot Day’s Night,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, a harsh slice-of-life story set in a grim and all-too-likely future Phoenix where the water has finally and irrevocably run out, causing the inhabitants to scrabble for survival any way they can. David Gerrold’s “Monsieur,” apparently postulated as the opening section of a novel that Gerrold is planning to write, gives us an interesting and logical modern take on vampire lore—nothing that I haven’t seen before here or there, in the vast body of vampire stories, but well-reasoned and well laid-out, with both the character of “Monsieur” and the character relating his story of how he himself became a vampire to the story’s narrator psychologically complex and intriguing. Gerrold does a good job of bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion while leaving the door open for more, and I’d be interested in reading the novel that eventually develops. (Apropos of nothing, in forty years of doing writer’s workshops, I myself have met every one of the characters Gerrold describes in the opening Writer’s Workshop section.)

  The rest of the stuff in the issue is weaker. New writer Bo Balder’s “A House of Her Own” starts out as a story about a pleasant pastoral society who grow (or perhaps are grown by) living organic houses that grow larger with their owners as the owners age, eventually providing shelter and nourishment for them, but then what amounts to the storyline for Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” crashes into the story and takes it over as a spaceship full of judgmental, imperialistic, arrogantly meddling Terrans arrive and try to change everything about the society, and the story can’t quite stand up under the weight of that. Nick Wolven’s “We’re So Very Sorry for Your Recent Tragic Loss,” is a satirical piece about a woman in a wired and intensively networked future society whose life is gradually ruined by false information about her supposed “recent tragic loss” that seeps into every aspect of her existence, causing everything, including robots and inanimate objects, to constantly and relentlessly offer her condolences; the story reminds me strongly of a once well-known story from the ‘60s, Gordon R. Dickson’s “Computers Don’t Argue,” that the author very probably has never even heard of. Marissa Lingen’s “Ten Stamps Viewed Under Water” is an overly long and drawn-out story about a community besieged by plague in a vaguely described medieval fantasy world, one where the details of the society aren’t really consistent or logical (they’re quarantined for the plague, but the mail is still being delivered?).

  Much the same could be said about the September Asimov’s—nothing really bad here, but, with the exception of a couple of stronger stories, nothing that really rises all that much above average either. The best story here is new writer Sam J. Miller’s emotionally grueling “Calved,” the story of a man struggling to find work and stay alive in a ruthless society made up of refugees fleeing cities drowned by rising oceans in an all-too-likely climate-change ravaged future, and struggling too to somehow stay in touch with his son, whom he can feel becoming slowly estranged from him and slipping further and further away every time he leaves for a six-month long job carving ice from melting glaciers. The father’s hopeless and ultimately misguided attempts to win his son’s affection back are heartwrenching, and go tragically wrong. I actually saw the twist ending here coming a few pages before it actually did, but it arrives with the slow inexorableness of a Greek tragedy and strikes with brutal force. Grim stuff, but compelling; you can’t look away from the traffic accident unfolding before you, one which ruins the lives of everyone involved. Also good in September, although it won’t be to everyone’s taste, is “The God Year,” by Jim Grimsley. Grimsley popped up in the early Oughts with a handful of excellent stories, mostly in Asimov’s, then fell silent, so it’s good to see him back again with this cruel but slyly humorous tale of how the biter is bit when a god selects a squalid rural village in a medieval-like society as the place to Dwell for a year—the question is, which of the hundreds of gods available are they going to get, a benign one, who’ll spread peace and prosperity, or a malign one who’ll spread ruin and pain? This is ostensibly a fantasy, but a few almost subliminal clues lead me to believe that it’s actually a stealth SF story instead, science fiction disguised as fantasy.

  “The Molenstraat Music Festival,” by Sean Monaghan, is a quiet, low-key character study about a once-famous musician, now crippled and living in retirement on a sparsely inhabited planet, who reluctantly takes on the job of mentoring a prodigally talented but brain-damaged young musician in order to prepare her to participate in the above-mentioned Molenstraat Music Festival. This is a pleasant story to read, with likeable characters, but the science fiction element is very thin; without the brain-repairing implants, it could easily be (and I think has been) told as a straight mainstream story taking place on present-day Earth, with very few real changes required. “The Biology at the End of the World,” by Brenda Cooper, is supposed to face its young protagonist with a hard choice, to suppress illegal biotechnology engineering as is her sworn duty as a novice member of The Bureau of Diversity Protection, protecting the biosphere against the biohacking that had done much damage in the past, or let the technology be used to repair the damage that has already been done to the already severely damaged ecosystem of Earth—something it looks like it might have a very good chance of being able to do. Unfortunately, the deck is stacked so thoroughly here on one side over the other, and it becomes so clear to the reader what the only reasonable choice is, that there’s really not much actual suspense as to what course of action she’s going to pick. Vylar Kaftan gives us a tale of First Contact set in the Arctic, “Last Hunt,” which is more or less what the story of ET might have been like if he’d met tribal hunters on the ice instead of a little white boy in a suburban tract home; not many surprises here, although the story gains interest by being a familiar scenario told t
hrough the eyes of an apprentice shaman completely unfamiliar with the concepts of aliens, spaceships, or life on other planets. In “Duller’s Peace,” Jason Sanford takes us to a nightmarish but fortunately not terribly likely (I hope) dystopia where Thought Police watch everyone’s thoughts every moment of the day and haul you away or kill you if you think the wrong thing. And in “Searching for Commander Parsec,” Peter Wood gives us the story of a troubled young boy tuning in to radio shows that shouldn’t exist on his radio, a story that reminds me strongly of Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffty Is Five,” although it’s considerably less effective.

  The strongest story in an uneven Interzone 259 is undoubtedly Rich Larson’s “Edited.” Larson has been developing interestingly in the last couple of years, with a number of good stories published, and is an author worth keeping an eye on. This one shows us in a poignant way what it’s like to realize that you’re not important enough to make the cut when someone reorganizes the priorities of their life, no matter how central to it you thought you were (and also a reaffirmation that social class always trumps everything else, no matter what); a quiet but compellingly emotional story here, effectively handled. Also good here is Chris Butler’s “The Deep of Winter,” which provides an Origin Story for the race of people who emit spores that enable them to read each other’s emotions, a race featured in several recent Butler stories, and who turn out to have been given this odd ability as part of a scientific experiment. This pleases me, and I find I can accept the Spore People and their society better now that the whole thing turns out to be deliberately and artificially created, as I was never quite able to believe in how such a system could have evolved naturally—how could early tribesmen have hunted game if they’re emitting spores during the hunt that would tip the prey off as to just what their intentions were? Mack Leonard’s “Midnight Funk Association,” this year’s James White Award winner, is written in a jazzier style than typically found in Interzone, has an interesting and atypical protagonist, a black musician who’s involved in a complex dysfunctional relationship with a minion known only as “the white boy,” and makes for an absorbing read. The only problem I have with it is that it’s never explained why the Evil Corporation is spending all this money and going to all this effort to disrupt the “Detroit Sound” and cause local musicians to lose their funk, except maybe they’re doing it just because they’re Evil.

  86

  Twelve Tomorrows, ed. by Bruce Sterling. (Technology Review, 978-0-9910444-3-6, $14.95, 229 pages.) Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

  Asimov’s, October/November.

  F&SF, October/November.

  Twelve Tomorrows is the fourth 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, like last year’s volume, edited by Bruce Sterling. Like the first three volumes, most of the eleven stories (oddly, there are eleven, in spite of the title) in Twelve Tomorrows are near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next ten or twenty years—although there is one Alternate History story that takes place in the distant past rather than the near future, and one that takes place in a more distant future. Overall, I found this volume somewhat disappointing, although there are a few strong stories. As was mostly true of last year’s volume as well, there’s a high didactic quotient to many of the stories, with lots of infodumps and characters explaining things to each other that they should already know; some of the stories eschew traditional narrative altogether and others are a bit static, lacking in drama and a compelling human story to make them involving as fiction. The future depicted in many of the stories seems a bit stale as well, as if they’re describing the present we already live in—social media used for clandestine social manipulation, drones, the Constant Intensive Surveillance Society, fecal transplants, data mining—rather than the future; the volume might have been more compelling if the authors had been able to up the Imagination Ante a bit.

  The two best stories, by a good margin, are “Consolation,” by John Kessel and “It Takes More Than Muscles To Frown,” by Ned Beauman. The Kessel is a fascinating, multi-layered look at an impoverished, Balkanizing future America where the Northeasten and Pacific states have been absorbed by Canada, centering around the unlikely romance between a political activist who allows herself to be talked into becoming a reluctant terrorist and a non-political would-be immortal obsessed with life-extension. The Beauman is a vigorous and violent postcyberpunk tale, whose straightforward plot and headlong action is a relief after a few of the more static stories; there’s not much in the background setting of corporate intrigue and warfare that you couldn’t get from watching a spy movie or a television cop show, but the expression-altering prosthetic technology being used is inventive, and the story does a good job of working out its applications, advantages, and drawbacks. Annalee Newitz’s “All-Natural Organic Microbes” is also told in a straightforward, even jazzy, manner, and is enjoyable up to the point where it simply stops rather than resolving anything (and fecal transplants exist now, so it’s hard to see how they can be legitimized as an innovative future technology). Bruce Sterling’s own “The Ancient Engineer” is one of the more enjoyable stories here, but seems oddly out-of-place in a futurology-oriented anthology called Twelve Tomorrows, being an Alternate History set in the later days of the Roman Empire. It centers around a provincial official who comes into possession of an astronomical calculator, a variant of the Antikythera Mechanism fished up from a shipwreck in our own timeline; you’d think that possession of such a device would be the seed-point from which an alternate technology would evolve, but, oddly, all of the technology shown, bridges, aqueducts, water-powered iron forges, actually existed in the real Roman Empire, and even the Celestial Mechanism itself doesn’t play an important role in either changing technology or in the resolution of the story itself. (One minor point, that could probably be covered by this being an Alternate History, but would a Roman official really refer to his provincial Governor as “sire?”)

  Twelve Tomorrows also features an extensive portfolio of artwork by Virgil Finlay, one of the great illustrators of the Pulp Era.

  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.

  The October/November issue of Asimov’s is a strong one, perhaps the strongest issue of the year to date. Much of that strength is due to the presence in its pages of Aliette de Bodard’s complex and powerful novella, “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls,” another in her long series 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. This one deals with an empire on the verge of being invaded by another empire, and the search for a fabled lost space-station where superweapons that might tip the balance were said to have been developed—but most of the Xuya stories are at their core about Family, and “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” is no exception, centering around an intricate web of dysfunctional family relationships that stretches across generations, and includes family members who have been transformed into immensely powerful living spaceships, and the “ghosts” of long-dead family members who still interact (and squabble) with the living through memory implants that preserved their personalities and experience as past rulers (which experience they’re willing to share with present-day rulers, whether the present-day rulers want it or not). Add time-travel, a skein of plots, counter-plots, and betrayals, and spooky interaction with weird dimensions beyond the space we know, and you end up with a hugely entertaining story that certainly will turn out to be one of the best SF novellas of the year.

  Nothing else in the issue quite lives up to the de Bodard, but there is some other good stuff here as well. Ian McDowell spins an entertaining Weird Western in “The Hard Woman,” featuring a wo
man who can harden her skin at will, making her invulnerable to bullets and knife-thrusts; McDowell does a good job here of logically working out the liabilities and limitations as well as the advantages such a condition would bestow, and showing the ways in which even an “invulnerable” woman would be vulnerable to attack. Rick Wilber tells an autumnal story about an elderly couple experiencing time-slips that make them momentarily young again during their last road trip together in “Walking to Boston,” a road trip that, as one of them knows and the other doesn’t, ends with long-held debts that must be paid no matter the cost. Another road trip features in “English Wildlife,” by Alan Smale, who takes us along with a dysfunctional couple touring England by car who become obsessed with the legend of the Green Man—a quiet horror story, well-told but with a familiar plot, although the author does manage to ring in a few unexpected surprises before the end. Daryl Gregory’s “Begone,” a reprint from the audio anthology Rip-Off! I edited a couple of years back, shows the dilemma of a sitcom character who finds himself replaced when someone else assumes the same role.

  The issue’s short stories are pleasant but minor: Sandra McDonald’s “The Adjunct Professor’s Guide to Life After Death” deals with ghosts trapped in a school, Ian Creasey’s “My Time on Earth” shows a tourist to Earth negotiating with a ghost (or what she thinks is a ghost, anyway), Brooks Peck’s “With Folded RAM” depicts space-station dwellers struggling to escape the “benign” tyranny of the station’s AI, and Timons Esaias’s “Hollywood After 10” takes time-tourists back to the McCarthy hearings that tried to sniff out supposed Communists in the Hollywood film industry.