Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Electronic magazine Clarkesworld is off to a strong start in 2017 as well, although many of the stories in the January issue may be a bit too dark for the taste of some readers. The strongest story here is “The Ghost Ship Anastasia,” by Rich Larson, a powerful and disturbing bit of techohorror that takes us along to Deep Space with a salvage crew sent to reclaim the presumably dead wreck of an experimental “Bioship” that turns out to be not quite as dead as they’d thought it might be. This one has some gruesome stuff in it, and is probably not for the squeamish—compelling, though. Also leaning toward techohorror, although with a much slower build-up than the Larson story, which plunges you almost immediately into the horrific, is “Interchange,” by Gary Kloster, the story of a group of construction workers cut off from our reality by a bubble in time so that they can finish a difficult job in what will seem like hours to those of us on the other side of the bubble—but who eventually find that they may not be as isolated from the outside world as they think. This one takes it’s time and succeeds in building up some seriously creepy tension by the end, similar in some ways to John Campbell’s classic “Who Goes There?” (made into movies as The Thing From Another World and the later remake The Thing), although I have some difficulty believing that such a potentially dangerous bit of technology as the time-bubble would be used for a task as trivial as replacing a highway overpass. I suppose that “A Series of Steaks,” by Vina Jie-Min Prased could also be considered at least a little bit gruesome, or at least distasteful, concerning as it does the 3-D printing of artificial but undetectable steaks that never came anywhere near a cow, with much discussion of the veins and marbling and texture of the “meat,” but there’s an underlying sunniness about it that keeps it from coming across as technohorror, ultimately being in its strange way optimistic and rather sweet instead. A little less effective—too long, for one thing—“Milla,” by Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini deals with an explorer landing on a distant planet whose suit’s computer system is infiltrated and corrupted by a long-dormant AI created by a now-extinct alien race, and the efforts of the AI and the explorer to come to some kind of mutual understanding that will enable them to survive.

  Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts, edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law, doesn’t rival the top anthologies of the year, such as Jonathan Strahan’s Bridging Infinity and Drowned Worlds, but it’s still a solid effort, a mixed SF/fantasy original anthology, with a number of entertaining stories to be found within its pages. The emphasis here is on stories about, and sympathetic to, people with mental illnesses and conditions of various sorts that make friends and families keep them at a distance, and the ways they struggle to deal with and sometimes control and transcend their conditions—there are several stories here, for instance, in which schizophrenia is really an ability to communicate with other creatures that ordinary humans either can’t perceive or can’t communicate with, including aliens, the fey, and the High Lords of Faerie, but there are plenty of other sorts of strangers and outcasts here, including uplifted dogs, Neanderthals, invisible girls, and others. Best story here is “Carnivores,” by Rich Larson, a fast-paced noirish tale of a recreated Neanderthal trying to discover (and burgle) the secrets of an intensively guarded vault, but also good are “The Dog and the Sleepwalker,” by James Alan Gardner, “Tribes,” by A.M. Dellamonica, and “I Count the Lights,” by Edward Willett. The best of the stories that deal with the distancing from family, friends, and society at large that can be caused by mental conditions is “How Objects Behave on the Edge of a Black Hole,” by A.C. Wise. The anthology also features an extensive Appendix of Mental Health Resources.

  The most prominent title in the stand-alone reprint anthology market in 2016 was undoubtedly The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, a massive retrospective anthology that makes even my own The Year’s Best Science Fiction, frequently referred to as a “bug crusher,” look small. At 800,000 words and over 102 stories from authors around the world, you could probably crush small mammals, perhaps a chihuahua or a toy poodle, with this one. As is always true with these big retrospectives, it would be possible to question the use of one author’s particular story over that of another story by the same author, or the inclusion of work by one author when another author is missing—but any anthology that reprints Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” John Crowley’s “Snow,” Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” R.A. Lafferty’s “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” plus stories by Greg Bear, Michael Bishop, Samuel R. Delany, Pat Cadigan, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C.J. Cherryh, James Blish, Iain M. Banks, and 92 (!) other authors, including many foreign authors in translation whose work is not usually seen in anthologies like this, is obviously a book worth reading, and one that belongs in every SF fan’s library. There’s little doubt that it’s probably the best reading bargain of the year, with more than 100 stories for a smaller cover price than some of the year’s other, much slimmer, anthologies.

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  F&SF, January/February.

  F&SF, March/April.

  Tor.com, January 4.

  Tor.com, January 18.

  Tor.com, January 25

  Tor.com, February 8.

  Tor.com, February 15.

  The January/February issue of F&SF gets the year off to a good start for the magazine, featuring two superior stories, one fantasy and one science fiction. The fantasy story is “Homecoming,” a novella by Rachel Pollack, 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, and to perform other magical tasks, such as the finding of souls that have been lost. In this one, he’s charged with finding part of a woman’s soul that’s gone missing, and in the course of tracking it down and retrieving it, inadvertently frees a malevolent creature who has been trapped in magical bondage for sixty-five thousand years, a creature of immense power who immediately goes on a killing spree that there may be no way to stop, and which is due to get much worse. It’s up to Jack to constrain the creature again, an almost impossible task. Fortunately, he has friends to help him—and, even more importantly, extremely powerful enemies whom it may be possible to persuade to aid him as well. The magical system used in the Jack Shade stories is one of the most intricate and unusual such systems being employed in modern fantasy today, and the mystical world that Pollack creates in them, one inextricably wrapped around and interacting in many different ways with our modern everyday world, forming a mystic ecosystem of supernatural checks and balances, layered hierarchies, and rival Powers that is rich and complex and strange.

  The superior science fiction story is “There Used To Be Olive Trees,” by Rich Larson, a prolific writer of short fiction whose reputation has climbed very fast in only a couple of years, thanks to a slew of good stories in many different markets, both print and electronic. This one takes place in a desolate far-future where dwindling enclaves of humanity struggle to survive in a world dominated by “gods” who mostly sail by overhead, ignoring the problems of those below, although occasionally they will grant a “miracle” of one sort or another if petitioned in the proper manner. It’ll soon become clear to all but the dimmest readers that the gods are AIs and machine intelligences of different sorts, and the important people in the human enclaves are those who can successfully control the implants that let them communicate with the machine gods, something most people can’t do. Having failed a test of his ability to do so three times, the apprentice Valentin runs away from his enclosed enclave and sets off across the wasteland, once the campo, where there had used to be olive tree
s, and vineyards, and rich human towns. He soon is captured by a feral human, a wilder, and becomes involved in a vivid adventure which brings him into closer contact with the enigmatic and often-capricious gods, and forces him to make hard choices about what’s really important in the world. This stands on its own feet well, but would also make a good opening for a novel.

  Also good in January/February is Robert Reed’s “Dunnage for the Soul,” in which a scientific test is developed to determine which humans (and which animals) have souls. It turns out that some humans have souls and some do not, and this knowledge deeply divides society into a new kind of Have/Have Not split, including the protagonist, who is officially judged to be soulless, and must thereafter suffer the persecution and disdain of the souled majority. Some interesting questions raised here about what it means to be human; the only trouble I have with the story is the speed of the almost universal acceptance that the device is actually registering the existence of a “soul” that some possess and some do not, rather than some other as-yet not understood bio-electrical phenomenon—surely there’d be more resistance to the soul explanation than this. Marc Laidlaw’s “Wetherfell’s Reef Runics” is a fairly standard Lovecraftian Incursion story, made more interesting by its use of Island local color and scuba-diving expertise. Gregor Hartmann’s “A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore” is about a man working up his nerve to openly express his true (and dangerous) political opinions in the face of the gathering storm clouds of a Civil War—no particular reason why this had to be science fiction, but nothing hurt by it being so, either.

  The March/April F&SF is weaker overall, but still has some entertaining stuff in it. Matthew Hughes’s “Ten Half-Pennies” is an Origin Story for Hughes’s series character Baldemar. As Hughes himself would readily admit, the obvious inspiration for Baldemar (and to some degree for another of Hughes’s heroes, Raffalon) is Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever, one of the seminal characters in modern fantasy. But unlike Vance’s Cugel stories, where a great part of the joke is that Cugel is nowhere near as clever as he thinks himself to be, Baldemar really is clever, and the depiction of how he works himself out of abject poverty and up into a more respectable level of society as a wizard’s henchman by his determination and resourcefulness and quick wits makes for compelling reading, perhaps the best story of the whole series to date. Also playful and entertaining (and written, I suspect with the author’s tongue more than a bit in her cheek) is Eleanor Arnason’s “Daisy,” about a PI who is hired to retrieve a gangster’s kidnapped pet octopus—a creature who turns out to be a lot more than it first seems. The mystery here will not be terribly hard to puzzle out for anybody familiar with cephalopod anatomy, but the story is whimsical and fun nevertheless. Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Avenger,” is also fun, about an attorney named William Warlock who specializes in cases requiring supernatural intervention (sort of a less-complex version of Rachel Pollack’s Jack Shade), and who here ends up trying to protect a widow living in the backcountry of Louisiana from a band of the murderous semi-comic rednecks that Cowdrey does so well. A rare James Sallis story, “Miss Cruz,” introduces us to an itinerant musician who discovers that he has an unsettling ability he neither asked for or wanted, but may not be able to resist using. Robert Grossbach’s “Driverless” details a lethal crisis that arises when a fleet of AI-controlled driverless cars becomes self-award and discovers a will and a dark purpose of their own.

  Electronic magazine Tor.com is also off to a good start in 2017. Their year in fiction started out with a creepy horror story by Kelly Robson, “A Human Stain,” posted on January 4, about a family mansion that contains a sinister family secret you’re better off not discovering. “The Atonement Tango,” by Stephen Leigh, a fast-paced story set in the Wild Cards universe, followed on January 18, then, on January 25, “The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island,” by Julianna Baggot, a melancholy story about a computer programmer who designs therapeutic Virtual Reality surrounds intended to help patients with emotional problems work out their issues who turns out to have some serious issues of his own. But as February began, Tor.com posted its two best stories of the year to date, both strong science fiction, “The Old Dispensation,” by Lavie Tidhar, on February 8, and “Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee, on February 15. “The Old Dispensation” is set in a fascinatingly complex milieu—a pocket universe, created by Israeli scientists, where the laws of physics are different, allowing for quick travel among many different planets. Now, thousands of years later, after a Diaspora into the universe, and at a time when its very origin has been forgotten, the other universe has become an empire ruled over by a religious order in which aliens are regarded as Abominations, and whose ruler, the Exilarch, must constantly be on guard against the heresies that spring up among his own people. News of a new heresy being spread by a new prophet on the remote planet Kadesh, causes the Exilarch to send one of his most powerful agents, an Adjudicator, to snuff it out—but what he encounters there will change everything forever. “Extracurricular Activities” is more of a traditional Campbellian Space Opera, set in a less-complicated milieu, but one which still features several interstellar empires that maintain ostensibly friendly trading relationships with each other while simultaneously functioning in a sort of Cold War condition, constantly employing spies and agents to keep an eye on each other and to spot possible advantages to shift the balance of power. Shues Jedao, a warmoth commander and one-time assassin, finds himself reluctantly participating in one such undercover mission, accompanying a group of spies disguised as traders to an alien space station to find a one-time classmate of his and discover whether he’s turned traitor or not, and what damage he’s done if he has. Yoon Ha Lee manages the difficult task here of telling a suspenseful and action-packed spy story while still somehow keeping it lighthearted in overall tone. The story is often quite amusing, and certainly provides a story that’s a lot of fun to read. In fact, it reminds me of something Poul Anderson might have written in his prime, one of his Dominic Flandry stories, perhaps—in my book, no small accomplishment.

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  Analog, March/April.

  Asimov’s, March/April.

  F&SF, May/June.

  The March/April issue of Analog is an unusually strong one, featuring two long novellas, a form that’s becoming hard to find these days. The best of them, and the best story in the issue, is a flamboyant, entertaining novella by Michael F. Flynn, “Nexus.” Flynn is writing here with his tongue at least lightly in his cheek, demonstrating a faint, benign, godlike (or at least author-like) amusement at the outrageous nature of the hoops he’s having his characters jump over down on the page. SF critic Damon Knight, when referring to the intensely recomplicated works of Charles L. Harness, was fond of speaking of Harness’s “kitchen-sink technique,” and Flynn has certainly thrown everything but the kitchen sink into “Nexus,” including two different groups of aliens (one invading, and one long-established on Earth, in hiding as a secret society), two different time-travelers, including one who is seeking to wipe out our universe and replace it with a reconstruction of his own lost timeline, an immortal woman who used to hang out in the courts of Byzantium (although even she can’t remember what her ultimate origin was), a supersmart AI housed in an android body, and a powerful human telepath working as a PI. Juggling a cast of characters of such complexity calls for great skill on the part of the author, but Flynn is up to the task, bringing all of the moving parts together for a satisfying ending which all of the characters interact in necessary ways to bring about a conclusion that could not have happened if one of them had been missing, as intricately interlocking as the best of bedroom farces—which in some ways is just what this is, without the sex (this is an Analog story, after all). This is certainly one of the best stories of the year so far, and a great deal of fun.

  The other long novella in the March/April Analog, “Plaisir D’Amour,” by John Alfred Taylor (an author I’m pleased to see writing again after a long silence), is quite differe
nt in mood and pacing, and while it doesn’t deliver the freewheeling fun of Flynn’s “Nexus,” offers the reader rewards of its own. This is a curious story in some ways, paced more like the opening of a novel than a standalone novella, and with something of an old-fashioned air to it, as Taylor is writing here as if nobody has ever heard of the concept of a self-contained spaceship society that only sporadically makes contact with planet-bound cultures, and so feels the need to describe how such a society would function in every environmental, procedural, and socioeconomic aspect in great, sometimes exhaustive, detail, material that many of today’s authors would skip over in a sentence or two, assuming that the readers were already familiar with the base tropes involved. So that the novel I’m projecting here would come out something like a ‘50s-style YA novel, a lost Heinlein juvenile, perhaps. This is, oddly, both the strength and the weakness of the story. The weakness because some readers may give up on the huge amount of detail on the everyday running of the ship that the story expects you to absorb, as though you’re swatting for a test, and stop reading altogether. The strength because, if you can stick with it, all this logistical detail becomes interesting in its own right, and does provide one of the most complete visions of how such a society would function I’ve seen.

  There is a affecting human story here, although it comes in late, and is mostly kept in the background—the doomed love affair between the sociologist from Earth, who must leave the ship after a set amount of time, and one of the crew, who can never leave the ship, because of the adaptions her body has made to being raised in low-gravity. Another curious thing about this story is that the modern reader may find themselves waiting for a dramatic moment which shatters the ship’s society or at least tests it to destruction in crisis mode, and indeed room has been left for places where such a development could fit in, among others the discovery of a tendency among the ship’s children to be severely agoraphobic, or the ship being hit by a meteorite—but in each case, the ship’s inhabitants handle the potential crisis smoothly and logically, and no society-shaking event ever does occur. At the end, even the doomed love affair ends exactly as you knew it had to, with its poignancy coming from its inevitability.