Since they started posting new stories on January 6th, the first nine stories posted on Tor.com were fantasy stories of one sort or another, listed as Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, and Epic Fantasy. Some of these were good stories, such as “The Glass Galago,” by A.M. Dellamonica, posted on January 6, “Two’s Company,” by Joe Abercrombie (reviewed here a couple of months back), posted on January 12, “The Maiden Thief,” by Melissa Marr, posted on January 27, and “Breaking Water,” by Indrapramit Das, posted on February 10, but the lack of science fiction stories was beginning to worry me, as SF had been somewhat light on the ground at Tor.com in 2015 as well, and I didn’t want to see it disappear from the site for good. Other than a pleasant steampunk Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The Great Detective,” by Delia Sherman, posted on February 17, the first stories on Tor.com that could reasonably be called core science fiction stories didn’t begin to show up until toward the end of March—but at least they were good ones when they did appear. An argument could be made that “Listen,” by Karin Tidbeck, a sequel to her previous story “Sing,” is science fantasy rather than science fiction per se; as with the previous story, it’s expertly crafted and features psychologically complex characters, but I find the science here—a moon that emits “radiations” that in some unexplained way cause human beings to lose the ability to speak when it’s in the sky—dubious at best, more a poetic conceit than something that would actually be able to happen in the real world. There’s no doubt about the classification of “That Game We Played During the War,” by Carrie Vaughn, though, which was posted on March 16—undoubtedly SF, and a good example of the form, taking us to a planet where a debilitating war between two races, one telepathic and the other not, has just ended, and the playing of a simple game of chess becomes a bridge between the two races, strengthening the still-uneasy peace, as it’s played by two individuals who had once been Prisoners of War, each held captive by the other’s people. Even stronger is “Terminal,” by Lavie Tidhar, posted on April 17, a touching portrait of the ordinary people (some of whom have terminal illnesses, some who do not) who accept the government’s offer of a one-way trip to Mars; this is beautifully written and beautifully felt, deeply emotional, certainly one of the best stories of the year to date.
Carrie Vaughn, in a less serious mode, also provides the best story in the April Lightspeed, “Origin Story,” concerning a woman who discovers that her old high-school boyfriend has become a bank-robbing supervillain, in a comicbook-inspired world where superheroes and supervillains, and the epic battles between them, are common; good fun. Also in April, Patricia Strand does a good job in “The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel” in working out the implications, complications, and unexpected political consequences of the birth of a child with a human mother and an alien father—but never deals with the issue of how such a pregnancy could be possible in the first place, a subject that’s never even raised in the course of the story.
An example of a first-rate SF story popping up unexpectedly in an unusual place is “Mika Model,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, which appeared in the April 26 issue of the online magazine Slate, which doesn’t usually run fiction. This is a gripping story about an AI-run sex robot who kills “her” owner; is it murder, or is it just product malfunction? This territory has been covered before, notably in Elizabeth Bear’s “Dolly” from 2011, but Bacigalupi does an excellent job of exploring the issue of machine sentience and its implications for the relationships between humans and robots/AIs—something that may not remain the province of science fiction for long, as we continue to hurtle (sometimes, it seems, with accelerating speed) into the unknown territory of the 21st Century.
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Asimov’s, June.
Asimov’s, July.
Asimov’s, August.
F&SF, July/August.
F&SF, September/October.
Clarkesworld, March.
Clarkesworld, April
Clarkesworld, May.
Clarkesworld, June.
Lightspeed, July.
Lightspeed, August.
Lightspeed, September.
I’m just back from having spent four months in the hospital, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. As a result, I’m not going to try to review the entire issues of magazines that I missed reviewing while I was in the land of surgeries and physical therapy, but rather just hit the highlights of those issues, the stories that have impressed me the most during that period (I did try to keep up with my reading, although it wasn’t always easy). Some issues may have one or two stories mentioned from them; some may have none. (That doesn’t necessarily mean that the stories in those issues were bad, by the way—just that there was nothing that stood out enough from the average to strike me as exceptional.)
Paul McAuley shows us the power of dreams, even the dreams of rats, in the strongest story in the June Asimov’s, “Rats Dream of the Future.” (Mercurio D. Rivera’s “Unreeled” and Jay O’Connell’s “What We Hold On To” are also good here, although not quite in the same league.) Rich Larson has had an impressive flood of good stories out this year in many different markets, including the best story in the July Asimov’s, “Masked,” which takes us to a near-future where your Social Media profile has become such an important part of your identity that, without it, you might as well not exist at all—as one unfortunate young woman finds out when she has to struggle with just such a situation. Also good in July is “Webs,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, a tense tale of a future which unfortunately seems all-too-likely considering the mood of our country today, where mobs of scared citizens hunt down and attack those they perceive as different from them, and the government either does nothing or actively assists them. The August Asimov’s features two very strong stories, among the best to appear in Asimov’s so far this year, Matthew Claxton’s “Patience Lake,” a compelling story in which an injured and down-on-his-luck cyborg must make a dangerous and potentially fatal stand to defend the farm family that tried to help him, and the edgy and erudite “KIT: Some Assembly Required,” by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz, in which an attempt to create an AI modeled on Elizabethan playwright and poet (and spy) Christopher Marlowe has some unexpected, and potentially world-changing, results.
The May/June F&SF and the July/August F&SF are full of competent and entertaining stories, most of them fantasy, but nothing exceptional—with the exception, in the July/August issue, of Lavie Tidhar’s novella, “The Vanishing Kind,” a moody, noirish, Alternate Worlds story about a Private Eye in an England that has been conquered and occupied by the Nazis trying to track down a missing woman through the Mean Streets of a world where just about everybody is corrupt and nobody is to be trusted. The September/October F&SF, on the other hand, “A David Gerrold Special Issue,” is a very strong issue, the strongest that F&SF has had all year. It features several major stories, most prominent of which are “Those Shadows Laugh,” by Geoff Ryman, and “The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello,” by David Gerrold. The Ryman takes us sideways in time to an island nation populated by women of another species of the genus homo, one that perhaps died off in our world, who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They famously keep to themselves, with most of the island forbidden to tourists except for an enclave run by the Disney Corporation, but now they are reaching out for scientific help from the rest of the world, allowing a geneticist to come and work with them to try to eliminate a major flaw in their reproductive system. The scientist falls in love with the land and the people, and one of the story’s strengths, in addition to the details of a fascinating social system quite different from our own, is his tragic realization that he can never be part of that world, no matter how hard he tries to fit in. Gerrold’s “The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello” is a posthumous sequel to Theodore Sturgeon’s well-known (or once well-known, anyway—these days, it’s entirely possible that many younger readers will be encountering Mr. Costello here for the first time) story “Mr. Costello, Hero.” In this one, the epony
mous Mr. Costello, a shrewd and persuasive con man with nobody’s better interests at heart except his own, arrives on a frontier colony planet to pitch a grandiose scheme that could change life on the colony forever, and becomes entangled with—and, eventually, opposed by, a pioneering farming family, one of whom gradually realizes the terrible effects Mr. Costello’s scheme could have if it succeeds. This one is a lot of fun, in tone reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, with a hefty dose of John Varley mixed in as well, an enjoyable fast-paced read. The September/October F&SF also features a prequel to The Last Unicorn, “The Green-Eyed Boy,” by Peter S. Beagle, a story about a dying alien desperately trying to find someone to help it, with tragic results, “The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh,” by Desirina Boskovich, a good near-mainstream story about racketeers and racetracks, with an interesting fantastic twist, “The Sweet Warm Earth,” by Steven Popkes, and a fairly routine ghost story that nevertheless does a good job of making us believe that it might have been written by James Boswell, “A Melancholy Apparition,” by Ian Creasey.
The March Clarkesworld was fairly routine, although with a good space story, Jack Skillingstead’s “Salvage Opportunity,” and a good time-travel story, A.C. Wise’s “Seven Cups of Coffee,” but the next three issues featured some outstanding work. The strongest stories in the April Clarkesworld are “Touring with the Alien,” by Carolyn Ives Gilman and “The Bridge of Dreams,” by Gregory Feeley. The Gilman is just what it says it is, a woman driving around the rural countryside in a van with a dying alien (being killed by an addiction to our idea of consciousness, something it had never encountered before) as passenger; the interactions between the woman and the alien and human raised by the aliens since birth as a “translator” are strong and emotionally moving, and the alien’s view of existence is fascinating. The Feeley story rationalizes elements of Norse mythology in a way vaguely similar to the Marvel Thor comics and movies, but on a much more sophisticated level, and with much harder “hard science” being used to explain the abilities and limitations to those abilities of creatures who still fundamentally remain superhuman by our current standard—including an immortal cyborg who is the builder and maintainer of the equivalent of the Bifrost Bridge of mythology in the outer solar system (although I would have liked to see some explanation of why he does this, since nobody ever seems to use it for anything), who is summoned back to inner solar system to attempt an even-more dangerous task he’s reluctant to undertake. Also good in April is “The Cedar Grid,” by Sara Saab. The best story in the May Clarkesworld is “Jonas and the Fox,” another excellent story by Rich Larson, who has produced at least a half-dozen of them this year; this one brings us to a colony planet where a once-idealistic revolution has turned corrupt and bloodily violent (think the French Revolution and Madam Guillotine), and takes us on the run with a fleeing aristocrat who finds a very unusual place to hide—but one which he might not be willing to pay to price to maintain. Also good in May are “The Universal Museum of Sagacity,” by Robert Reed, about a seemingly ordinary woman with a cosmic secret, and “Left Behind,” by Cat Rambo, about a woman who helps clients who are about to become disembodied uploads design “memory palaces,” and who becomes a little too deeply involved with one of them. The best story in the June Clarkesworld, and one of the strongest they’ve published all year, is “Things With Beards,” by Sam J. Miller. This is a hard-hitting—in fact, frankly brutal—story of a man with a secret so horrifying that he can’t even bear to remember it himself, and constantly struggles against doing so; this story is not for the squeamish, so be warned, but it is one of the year’s most powerful stories. “And Then One Day, the Air Was Full of Voices,” by Margaret Ronald, is much more cerebral and less visceral than the Miller, but has a fascination of its own, as a future in which SETI has finally provided an answer to the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe must deal with the implications of that voice from the sky falling silent. Also good here is Zhang Ran’s “The Snow of Jinyang.”
The strongest story published in Lightspeed this year so far is “The One Who Isn’t,” by Ted Kosmatka, about a child hopelessly lost in the maze of his own mind, which appeared in the July Lightspeed. Also good in Lightspeed were “Those Brighter Stars,” by Mercurio D. Rivera and “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus,” by Jeremiah Tolbert in the August Lightspeed, and “The Lives of Riley,” by Sean Williams and “Unauthorized Access,” by An Owomoyela, in the September Lightspeed.
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Bridging Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1-78108-419-9, 446 pages.)
Drowned Worlds: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 333 pages.)
Now We Are Ten—Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press, ed. Ian Whates. (NewCon Press, 978-1-910935-18-7, 265 pages.) Cover Art by Ben Baldwin.
Asimov’s, September.
Asimov’s, October/November.
Asimov’s, December.
With 2017 looming as I write these words, here’s some more catch-up work.
Although it’s a bit weaker than last year’s Meeting Infinity, which was a particularly strong entry in the series, Jonathan Strahan’s Bridging Infinity still manages to be probably the strongest original SF anthology of the year, a feat that Strahan’s managed for a number of years in a row now. I speculate that may part of the trouble here may be that Strahan may have been putting Bridging Infinity together at more-or-less the same as he was his catastrophic climate change anthology Drowned Worlds, his other 2016 anthology, and that the line between the two anthologies got somewhat blurred; certainly several of the better stories here—“Cold Comfort,” by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty, “Induction,” by Thoraiya Dyer, “Monuments,” by Pamela Sargent—would have fit just as well or better into Drowned Worlds—and that may have kept Bridging Infinity more focused on near-future Earth than some of the other Infinity anthologies, which have often taken us into the deep future and the furthest reaches of the Solar System, and even of the Galaxy, and shown us some mind-blowing stuff. Nevertheless, Bridging Infinity is still a strong anthology, and not without it’s share of Sense Of Wonder-invoking science fictional visions. Best stories here are probably “Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee,” by Alastair Reynolds, which follows a scientist who eventually is transformed into something more than human as she struggles to stay involved with a project that will take thousands of years to complete, “Six Degrees of Separation Freedom,” by Pat Cadigan, about a corporate headhunter trying to recruit people willing to abandon their previous lives and even bodies to be able to live in space, “Parables of Infinity,” by Robert Reed, about one of the builders of Reed’s Great Ship who issues a warning to the present inhabitants, and “Seven Birthdays,” by Ken Liu, about a woman who travels deep, deep into the far-future in order to bring about a reconciliation with her estranged (and long dead) mother. The anthology also features good work by Stephen Baxter, Allen M. Steele, An Owomoyela, Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, and others.
Jonathan Strahan’s other 2016 original SF anthology, Drowned Worlds: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond, is also a good one, featuring, like Bridging Infinity, a few of the year’s best stories—although there have been so many stories about catastrophic climate change in the last few years, with rising sea-levels swallowing cities and coastlines (and even, in a few cases, the entire land area of Earth), people watching as their homes sink beneath the sea, refugee camps full of people displaced by the flooding, nations falling apart and Balkanizing due to the social upheaval and chaos, and so forth, that inevitably some of these stories may strike readers as a bit familiar. I’m more impressed here with the stories that look beyond the familiar Doom and Gloom of the initial catastrophes and try to imagine how humans (who, after all, are extremely adaptable animals) and human society might be able to evolve strategies and ways of life that would enable them to survive and even eventually prosper under the new conditions pertaining to a po
st-Climate Catastrophe world. Not surprisingly then, for me the best stories here are those that attempt to do just that, namely “Elves of Antarctica,” by Paul McAuley, in which people adapt to life in a de-iced Antarctica, evolving new customs and even new superstitions and legends along the way, “Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts,” by Ken Liu, in which tourists visit and try to learn moral lessons from one of the sunken cities of our present civilizations, “Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy,” by Charlie Jane Anders, which shows us the essentials of family and even tribalism successfully adapting to a world that we’d consider ruined, which is to them normal, and (although I’m not sure this is entirely possible, scientifically) “The Future Is Blue,” by Catherynne M. Valente, in which, there being no other land available, civilization is rebuilt atop floating mats of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. (“Cold Comfort,” from Bridging Infinity, about the early days of reclaiming Antarctica for habitation, would have fit perfectly in this grouping as well.) Drowned Worlds also features good stories by Lavie Tidhar, Sam J. Miller, Sean Williams (whose story might have fit better in Bridging Infinity), and others. The anthology also reprints one of the earliest catastrophic climate change stories, and still one of the best, “Venice Drowned,” by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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