Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The strongest story in the November/December F&SF, another of the year’s best novellas, probably the strongest SF story F&SF has published all year, and one of the hardest Hard SF stories the magazine has published in a long time, is Carter Scholz’s novella “Gypsy.” This is the nail-bitingly tense story of the race to clandestinely launch a colony ship to Alpha Centauri before an obviously imminent global war destroys civilization and perhaps even wipes out the human race. Most of the story concerns itself with the decades-long flight itself, narrated by a succession of caretakers awakened from hibernation to deal with one crisis or another that has arisen, and their heroic, sometimes fatal, efforts to keep the colony ship, Gypsy, on course to its destination, carrying what is perhaps the last hope for humanity’s survival. The scientific problems the crew faces are ingenious and comprehensively and painstakingly worked out in convincing detail, but, as with the de Bodard novella, the soul of the story is in the people who inhabit it, sharply drawn and psychologically complex characters whose lives and interactions feel very real—and their story is heartbreaking. Look for this one, and probably the de Bodard, to feature prominently on next year’s award ballots.

  As with the October/November Asimov’s, after the lead novella, nothing else in the November/December F&SF is as strong, but there are still some good stories. Robert Reed gives us an odd situation in “The City of Your Soul,” in which only the passengers aboard a certain airplane flight remember a weird disaster happening while they were in the air, with a whole South American city suddenly and mysteriously disappearing...but by the time they land, nobody else on Earth seems to remember it happening, and no record of such an event can be found, and the passengers are left trying to come to terms with this disconnect between their memories and everybody else’s. As no firm explanation for just what happened and why it happened is ever put forth, I suppose this must be considered to be a fantasy rather than SF, but it’s a moody and mysterious one, well worth reading. In “Cleanout,” Naomi Kritzer tells what seems at first to be a straight mainstream story about a somewhat dysfunctional family gathering after the death of the family matriarch to deal with cleaning out her crowded house, which they proceed to do, puzzling over various odd items that they come across in the process. Nothing specific happens on the surface, but there’s an almost subliminal fantastic element below the surface here, with hints that, unbeknownst to the children, their parents might have been aliens, or perhaps refugees from an Alternate World—a possibility that the protagonist gradually comes to recognize, but which the story ends without definitely resolving, so whether you read it as a mainstream story or a stealth SF story is left pretty much up to you. In “Hob’s Choice,” Tim Sullivan offers a well-told offworld adventure that depends a little too much on being the sequel to a story published in 2013. Bruce McAllister explores somewhat familiar territory in “Dreampet,” another of several stories in the last couple of years warning against the moral pitfalls involved in the practice of producing genetically-altered pets or toys. And Jeffrey Ford’s “The Winter Wraith” is a quiet horror story with a seasonal Christmas twist, appropriate, I guess, for the December issue.

  87

  Meeting Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1-78108-380-2, 441 pages.)

  Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired By Microsoft, ed. by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. (Microsoft & Melcher Media, Inc., 978-1-59591-091-3, 239 pages.)

  The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future, ed. by August Cole. (Atlantic Council, 978-1-61977-960-0, 74 pages.) Cover art by Spiros Karkavelas.

  Stories For Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, ed. by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. (Rosarium Publishing, 978-0-9903191-7-7, hardcover $28.95, paperback $19.99. 345 pages.)

  The End Has Come: The Apocalypse Triptych, Volume 3, ed. by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (Broad Reach Publishing, 978-149-748-440-5, 326 pages.) Cover art by Julian Aguilar Faylona.

  Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. by Andrew Leon Hudson. (SFFworld.com)

  As he has managed to do for several years in a row now, Jonathan Strahan has produced the year’s best original SF anthology, Meeting Infinity. This is the fourth in the series of “Infinity” anthologies produced by Strahan, and, like the others, contains only core science fiction, rare in a day when even anthologies that are ostensibly all SF manage to sneak some stories in that are actually unjustifiable as SF, being really stealth fantasies instead. Unlike the other “Infinity” anthologies, which ranged widely through the solar system and beyond to the stars, the stories in Meeting Infinity mostly stick close to home, typically being set on Earth in the relatively near future, and exploring “how humanity might have to change physically and psychologically, to meet the challenges that may be thrown at us in the next fifty, the next hundred, and the next five hundred years and beyond.” I miss the color of the exotic locales to be found in some of the previous anthologies, but Meeting Infinity does an excellent job of exploring its stated theme, producing ingenious and occasionally unsettling visions of how the consensus vision of what it means to “be human” may be changed almost beyond recognition by future technologies and cultural developments, demonstrating the audacity and breath of imagination that was largely lacking in the year’s other major futurology-oriented anthology, Twelve Tomorrows.

  There’s really nothing bad here, almost everything written to a high level of craft, but the best stories include “Emergence,” by Gwyneth Jones, “Rates of Change,” by James S.A. Corey, and “The Falls: A Luna Story,” by Ian McDonald, with the Jones and the Corey doing perhaps the best job in the book of dealing with physical changes in what it mean to be human, and the McDonald dealing with the cultural and psychological changes generated in society by living in a Lunar colony. But the anthology also features first-rate work by Aliette de Bodard, John Barnes, Nancy Kress, Sean Williams, An Owomoyela, and others. If your local bookstore doesn’t have it, it can be ordered through Amazon, or direct from the publisher at www.solaris.com.

  He’s unlikely to get one, as fewer people see the work of anthologists as opposed to the work of magazine editors, but Jonathan Strahan really is overdue for a Hugo, having produced a large proportion of the really strong short core SF of the last five or six years.

  Another of the year’s best science fiction anthologies appeared suddenly, almost without warning, toward the tag-end of 2015, an anthology that has been made available as a free ebook from all major eBook platforms, called Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, edited by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. This is another futurology-oriented anthology, most of the stories taking place in the relatively near-future (although at least one takes us out of the solar system altogether to a distant colony planet), and was created in a rather eccentric way, with Microsoft inviting leading SF writers to make in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, where they talked to scientists and received “inside access to leading-edge work” in fields such as prediction science, quantum computing, machine learning, and real-time translation; then, ostensibly inspired by all this new input, the authors went home and wrote stories about those things. I’ve heard this anthology grumpily dismissed as nothing but a giant commercial for Microsoft, which is hard to deny—but the editors at Microsoft were shrewd in their selection of authors to tap for the project, and without exception the writers invited have done a good job of investing their stories with drama, conflict, and human interest, breathing life into subjects that might have otherwise been somewhat abstract and academic. (And you get an anthology of first-rate stories for free—it’s hard to argue with free, as far as the average reader is concerned. So let Microsoft have their commercial. At least it’s an intelligently planned and executed one.)

  As with Meeting Infinity, there’s nothing here that’s bad or even mediocre, but the best stories are “Another Word for World,” by Ann Leckie, “Machine Learning,” by Na
ncy Kress, “Hello, Hello,” by Seanan McGuire, and “The Machine Starts,” by Greg Bear—but there’s also good work here by Elizabeth Bear, Jack McDevitt, Robert Sawyer, and David Brin, a short graphic story by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, a forward by Harry Shum, and an introduction by Rick Rashid.

  Yet another futurology-oriented original SF anthology, less successful overall than the two above, yet with a couple of good stories in it, is The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future, edited by August Cole. Produced by the Atlantic Council, a self-described “think-tank,” the emphasis here is on future warfare rather than futurology per se, and yet most of the innovations described are either already here or not very far off at all, remote-directed combat operations, drones, cyberattacks, which for the most part makes the stories in War Stories from the Future seem like they’re describing the present rather than the future, a problem shared by some of the stuff in Twelve Tomorrows as well. The best stories here are “A Stopped Clock,” by Madeline Ashby, a poignant look at what happens when the communication systems that tie modern civilization together just stop working, and Ken Liu’s “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11,” although there’s also a good reprint story by Linda Nagata, “Codename: Delphi,” and a novel excerpt from David Brin. This is available through Amazon, and probably other eBook platforms, or you could try going to the Atlantic Council site, www.atlanticcouncil.com.

  Much more eclectic than these futurology-oriented anthologies, containing fantasy stories, mainstream stories, and critical articles about Delany’s work and its effect on the arts and on society, and yet still containing several of the year’s strongest science fiction stories, a few of which handle the future with as much flair and audacious imagination as the best of the stories from the anthologies above, is Stories For Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. The strongest stories here are the hard-edged “Capitalism in the 22nd Century,” by Geoff Ryman, the very strange coming-of-age story “The First Gate of Logic,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and the flamboyantly pyrotechnic “Billy Tumult,” by Nick Harkaway, but there is also good work by Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl, Chris Brown, Anil Menon, Junot Diaz, Alex Jennings, Sheree Renée Thomas, Fabio Fernandes, and others, critical studies of Delany’s work by Walidah Imarisha, Isiah Caliender, III, L. Timmel Duchamp, Michael Swanwick, and Kathryn Cramer, a reprint of Eileen Gunn’s droll “Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005,” other strong reprint stories by Ellen Kushner and Thomas M. Disch, and an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson.

  There were a fair number of stories this year in magazines, anthologies, and online markets about the Apocalypse, generally caused by catastrophic climate change (not surprising considering the headlines on the nightly news and the extreme weather the globe suffered this year), but there was also a dedicated anthology of Apocalyptic and post-Apocalyptic stories that was another of the year’s good SF anthologies, The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, the concluding volume in the Apocalypse Triptych, a three-anthology series that started with The End Is Nigh and The End Is Now last year. This volume, which focuses on the aftermaths of various sorts of Apocalypses, is not quite as strong overall as Meeting Infinity or Future Visions, but there’s still a good deal of strong work in it, making it a good reading value for the money. The best story here is probably “Bannerless,” by Carrie Vaughn, a believable look at a society struggling to put itself back together, in a better and more just form, after a climate-driven catastrophe that almost wipes out the human race. Also first-rate is “Goodnight Earth,” by Annie Bellet, a sort of harder-edged version of Huck Finn’s river raft trip down the Mississippi, through a war-ravaged and dangerous landscape. The book also contains good stuff by Nancy Kress, Tananarive Due, Ken Liu, Sarah Langan, Elizabeth Bear, Jake Kerr, and others.

  There was another, less successful, anthology dedicated to the exploring the aftermaths of climate-change generated disasters this year, Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Andrew Leon Hudson, a Kickstarter-funded project that is only available in eBook form. This one makes the rather odd choice to publish fantasy stories about extreme climate-change, but rising sea levels and elves make for an uneasy mixture, in my opinion. There are good SF reprint stories here, though, by Lauren Beukes and Tobias S. Buckell.

  2016

  88

  Asimov’s, December.

  Clarkesworld, August.

  Clarkesworld, September.

  Clarkesworld, October.

  Clarkesworld, November.

  Clarkesworld, December.

  Mission: Tomorrow, ed. by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Baen, 978-1-47678-094-8, $15.00, 336 pages.) Cover art by Stephan Martiniere.

  Operation Arcana, ed. by John Joseph Adams. (Baen, 978-1476780368, 320 pages.) Cover art by Dominic Harman.

  Pwing Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier, ed. by The Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 978-0-9966686-1-3).

  Asimov’s heads out of 2015 with one of its strongest issues of the year, its December issue. The lead story here, “The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred,” by Greg Egan, can be thanked for much of the issue’s strength, being certainly one of the best novellas of the year; reprint rights were encumbered by an upcoming appearance as a novella chapbook, but I can assure you from insider knowledge that it would otherwise have been reprinted in most of the year’s Best of the Year collections. Here Egan takes us to a society on the asteroid Vesta that is being torn apart by racially based discrimination and systematic oppression generated by a regime that has singled out a minority as no longer being welcomed as full citizens of the polity, bringing about what amounts to a civil war, with refugees fleeing arrest and prosecution willing to risk the incredibly dangerous chance of stowing aboard rocks being slingshoted to the outer Solar System in order to seek refuge with the more-progressive asteroid-city of Ceres. This creates a major problem for the Port Director of Ceres, who finds herself dealing with a constant stream of stowaway refugees—a problem that becomes critical when Vesta sends a warship to overtake them before they can reach Ceres, and leads to a fatal situation where there is no easy answer, and she must choose who’s to live and who’s to die. I suspect that Australia’s ongoing refugee crisis, which this Australian author has written about before, was the original inspiration for this story, but it hit newsstands here at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, which lends this deeply moral and ethically questioning story an even-greater and more sobering impact, as how to deal with (and treat) refugees is clearly going to be an increasing part of the problems we’re going to have to deal with as the 21st Century progresses and war and catastrophic climate change shakes them loose by the millions. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this novella turn up on next year’s Hugo and Nebula ballots.

  Also first-rate in the December Asimov’s is “Of Apricots and Dying,” by Amanda Forrest, a sad and heart-wrenching study of a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in a future Pakistan, who must ultimately face the choice of leaving to carve out a new future for herself elsewhere or staying and providing an ever-more-needed support system for her faltering family, at the cost of any kind of satisfying life for herself—another mature and thoughtful work where there are no easy answers, and perhaps not even any good answers at all. Robert Reed continues the sub-theme here of refugees—or at least of people deciding whether or not to flee the life-situation they find themselves in—in “Empty,” in which a group of AIs flee to the Oort Cloud to seek refugee from another group of AIs, in a future in which all the humans have already been exterminated. M. Bennardo takes us along on a desperate rescue mission to a dying space station in “We Jump Down into the Dark”; the story is a suspenseful one, with a personal stake involved for the protagonist, who’s anxious to save his ex-lover, who is aboard the disintegrating station, but an odd feature of it i
s that although the protagonist rushes to the rescue, he doesn’t really do anything of significance once he gets there; his ex-lover more-or-less rescues herself, and everything would have played out pretty much the same whether he was there or not. In “Bidding War,” Rich Larson takes us to an extensively-wired and faintly unpleasant future for the story of a man trying to buy the replica of a prehistoric flute in an online auction as part of an unlikely plan to win back the affections of a woman who’s just broken up with him; this is a broadly satiric tale, and I’m sure that the protagonist has been deliberately crafted as a shallow and superficial little prick whom you are not supposed to like—but because he’s a shallow and superficial little prick, you don’t much care what happens to him, either.

  The electronic magazine Clarkesworld also ends 2015 on a high note, going out with several powerful stories scattered over the last few issues of the year. The best story in the August Clarkesworld was “Today I Am Paul,” by Martin L. Shoemaker, a poignant look at the robotic caretakers who will be gently shepherding us to death in the near future; the issue also features Emily Devenport’s “The Servant,” about a class-war between Executives and “worms” building on an immense generation ship. The September Clarkesworld was somewhat weaker, but did feature good work such as “Cremulator,” by Robert Reed, about an inexplicable (and unexplained) grisly global phenomenon, and “The Algebra of Events,” by Elizabeth Bourne, a story with a Twilight Zone twist about the crew of a spaceship struggling to survive on a hostile planet after their Probability Engine breaks down. The October Clarkesworld features one of the year’s best stories, “Ice,” by Rich Larson. This one has something of a YA feel, but don’t be mistaken, it carries a sting in its tail, introducing us to young brothers who live in a dysfunctional family on a hostile alien world, and whose clandestine expedition to witness an alien wonder just may, if they’re not lucky, turn out to be the last thing they ever do. October also features a translation from the Chinese, “Summer At Grandma’s House,” by Hao Jingfang, about a man who finds out that what goes on in Grandma’s house is nothing like what he initially assumed that it would be, and neither is Grandma. The strong November Clarkesworld, one of the strongest issues of the year, features a quirky and ultimately quite moving story by Naomi Kritzer, “So Much Cooking,” which follows a sprightly “Cooking Blog,” complete with recipes, as a deadly worldwide pandemic begins to take hold; the unfolding catastrophe can mostly be inferred between the lines as the situation in the cook’s household slowly grows worse and worse and more and more extreme substitutions in the recipes need to be called for, but the impressive thing about the story is how the blogger manages to stay chatty and upbeat in a believable manner even in the face of personal tragedy, steadfastly refusing to despair or give up. Also very good in November is “In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer,” by Sara Saab, a harrowing look at an attempt to evacuate as much of the population of Lebanon into the Worldship Munawwer as possible before an immense asteroid destroys the Earth; each of the world’s countries has been assigned a Worldship, that can evacuate only 900.000 people apiece (or, as the protagonist puts it, “two out of every five” citizens), and the considerations that arise as to who should be left behind are heartbreaking. There’s also a story, translated from the Chinese about a secret society dedicated to the work of a dead poet, “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” by Xia Jia. The December Clarkesworld is a bit weaker, but does feature a very strange story by Tamsyn Muir, “Union,” about a shipment of wives (or perhaps “wives,” since they’re clearly of artificial origin) who are shipped to the good crofters of Franckton in some unspecified location (a colony settlement on an alien world? the far future? an alternate reality? Nothing is really explained) as payment on a trade settlement, and the civil unrest that arises as the crofters become convinced they’ve been cheated and had inferior goods palmed off on them; a very odd piece, but strangely compelling. There’s also a fast-paced bit of Military SF by Seth Dickinson, “Morrigan in Shadow,” about a warrior in a cataclysmic interstellar war who risks plunging into a singularity to deliver the decisive blow, at whatever cost to herself.