“Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth,” by Juliette Ward, is the strongest story in an otherwise somewhat week April Clarkesworld. In some ways, this is an old-fashioned story, about a human mission trying to get along with aliens with an elaborate class structure, and the dangerous cultural misunderstandings that can arise between them all when they’re not saying exactly what they think they saying. Reminiscent of Poul Anderson or C.J. Cherryh in the elaborate social structures it develops for its alien civilization, it delivers one of the fundamental pleasures to be had from reading science fiction in the first place. “Conglomerte,” by Robert Brice, also in April, shows a group consciousness wrestling with the problem of expelling one individual component of their shared mind from the group, and the effect that has on the rest of the components.
The best story by far in the May Clarkesworld, and one of the best Clarkesworld has published all year to date, is “We Who Live in the Heart,” by Kelly Robson. Longer than stories in Clarkesworld have tended to be, this tells the story of malcontents who grow tired of living in underground colonies in an alien planet that consists mostly of vast oceans, and who opt instead for a more adventurous and much more uncertain life by taking control of and moving into what amount to immense organic submarines, enabling them to roam the seas at will—but also meaning that they must live in constant danger of losing control of their “ship.” The worldbuilding here is fascinating, as is the intricately worked-out detail of how the living “submarines” function and how it would be possible, to some degree at least, to control them, but the human relationships among the crew are equally complicated and equally compelling. By the end, the story has generated a great deal of suspense, as events show that their whole way of life may be insupportable. Nick Wolven’s “Streams and Mountains” is also good in May, about Park Rangers watching over a group of sasquatches in a reserve set aside for the in Pacific Northwest—but nothing here is quite what it seems, and some thorny ethical questions are raised before the story is through.
For the last several years, I’ve proclaimed one book or another by Jonathan Strahan to be the Best Science Fiction Anthology of the Year, but this year Extrasolar—Postscripts 38, edited by Nick Gevers, may give Strahan a decent run for his money. Unlike many of the past Postscripts anthologies, which have tended toward slipstream and soft horror with only a smattering of SF, Extrasolar is all core SF, it’s writers taking us on a “tour of the stars in our galactic neighborhood,” drawing on the knowledge about exotic stars and extrasolar planets derived from more than twenty years of observation by the Kepler telescope and other space telescopes, knowledge that paints a very different picture of what a solar system can be like than that which was gained by observing our own—and which has thrown new fuel on the fire of the debate about the Fermi Paradox. (Basically, if the universe is full of intelligent life and alien civilizations, where is everybody? Could it be that the Earth is the only planet where intelligent life has evolved and survived?—to date, anyway.) You’ll find arguments on either side here, as well as some ingenious compromises; like any good theme anthology, some of the stories here stretch the margins of the theme, some quite a bit, but for the most part Extrasolar delivers just what it says it’s going to deliver.
The best story here is probably “Canoe,” by Nancy Kress, in which the crew of an exploratory starship undertakes the largest-scale rescue mission in history. Alastair Reynolds’s “Holdfast” shows us two soldiers, one human, one alien, the sole survivors of their respective fleets of warships, still locked in mortal combat even as certain death races to overtake them; the story is grim, but does offer before the end a glimmer of a certain kind of hope. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s long, complex, and somewhat mystical “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse,” starts with a group of supergenius children stealing a luxury spaceship, more or less an ocean liner that travels space, and taking it on a voyage of both inner and outer discovery that leaves them transformed in ways they couldn’t have anticipated. Jack McDevitt tells an affecting story of star-crossed love with an O. Henry twist in “Arcturean Nocturne.” In“Shadows of Eternity,” Gregory Benford shows us an apprentice Librarian searching through hundreds of years of SETI messages from alien civilizations who makes an ominous discovery.
There are three stories here set in already-established series universes, which may fit a bit uneasily into the theme, since in these series the universe is already known to be swarming with alien civilizations and little or no exploration of unknown new solar-systems is done: “The Residue of Fire,” by Robert Reed, is another story set in his long-running “Great Ship” series, one of the best in awhile, as an immortal being investigates a race of passengers aboard the Ship for whom time doesn’t exist, and has a showdown with a nemesis from millions of years in his past; “A Game of Three Generals,” by Aliette de Bodard, another in her long sequence of “Xuya” stories, deals with a political prisoner who is forced by circumstances to remain imprisoned long after her sentence is over, and her bittersweet reunion with her “daughter,” a living spaceship; and in “Thunderstone,” Matthew Hughes contributes an adventure of hardboiled “confidential operative” Erm Kaslo in the heavily Jack Vance-inspired Ten Thousand Worlds, just as the universe is making one of its periodic switches from rationalism to magic.
Extrasolar also features good work by Paul Di Filippo, Terry Dowling, Ian Watson, Lavie Tidhar, and Ian R. MacLeod. Surprisingly, since I’m usually enthusiastic about his fiction, the only story here that didn’t really work for me was Paul McAuley’s “Life Signs.” Perhaps what he was doing here was too subtle for me to grasp, but to me it seemed like the story ended just when it had set up an interesting character in an interesting and potentially dangerous situation. I actually turned the next page, looking in vain for the rest of the story. I’m sure McAuley felt he’d put enough words of the page to convey the meaning of the story, whatever it was supposed to be, but it went over my head, and I’m left with no idea what the story is supposed to convey. Of course, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, so your mileage may vary.
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A Flight to the Future, ed. Kathryn Cramer.
Asimov’s, May/June.
Asimov’s, July/August.
F&SF, July/August.
The Best of Subterranean, ed. William Schafer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-837-7, $45, 752 pages.)
A Flight to the Future is an odd multimedia project edited by Kathryn Cramer (although Eric Desatnik is also listed as “Creator and Producer,” whatever that means). Sponsored by an X Prize and by the Japanese airline company Ana, A Flight to the Future collects thirty very short stories, many of them by leading science fiction authors, all working from the same starting point: Ana flight 008 takes off from Tokyo on June 28th, 2017, and, having inadvertently passed through a space/time warp of some kind, lands in San Francisco on June 28th, 2037—a literal flight to the future. The stories then concern themselves with how the passengers deal with and react to the future world they’ve been abruptly dumped into.
Considered as an anthology—there doesn’t seem to be a separate physical book available, but the stories are all accessible online at https//seat14c.com/future_ideas—there are several problems with this. This is definitely a futurist anthology, and a few of the stories really don’t deal with much except the protagonists wandering around gaping in awe at the Wonders of the Future, what we used to call Tour of the Great Steam Grommet stories (“And here is our marvelous Great Steam Grommet Factory! And over here is—”). Then there’s the fact that the future depicted in some of the stories doesn’t seem to be the same future in some important details, and some stories even depict what happened on the flight differently from others. More importantly, even those authors shrewd enough to add a personal human story to their Steam Grommet tours often rely on the Introduction (available both in written and animated forms) to set up the situation with time-jumping Flight 008, and don’t bother to cover the basic set-up again, which means that they don’t stand on
their own feet very well as individual stories outside of the context of the anthology, being dependent on that context to make a lot of sense to a reader who doesn’t know the basic setup.
The stories that do the best job of standing on their own feet, and also add an involving human story, are probably “Collapse,” by Nancy Kress and “Transitions,” by Eileen Gunn. Although they suffer from the above problems to one degree or another, and few of them can stand alone, making for interesting reading if you can make allowances for that are “Incorruptible,” by Peter Watts, “Gap Year,” by Justina Robson, “The Urge to Jump,” by Karl Schroeder, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, “A Passing Sickness,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, and “The Trouble With Brothers,” by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. A Flight to the Future also features work by Bruce Sterling, Gregory Benford, Brenda Cooper, Kathleen Ann Goonan, James L. Cambias, Sheila Finch, Hannu Rajaniemi, Chen Qiufan, and others. (There’s a contest for you to write and submit your own story for what happens to the passenger in Seat 14C, with the selected author winning $10,000 and a free flight for two to Toyko, but since the contest closed on August 25th, I’m not going to bother to explain the complex rules.)
The May/June issue of Asimov’s is an average issue, with a couple of standout stories. Best story here is “Triceratops,” by new writer Ian McHugh, taking us to a near-future in which hybrids of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens have been created, forming an entirely new race which doesn’t fit comfortably into either world—and who may be developing a way of life that their creators couldn’t have anticipated and which may have unforeseen implications for the future. Also substantial here is “The Runabout,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a long novella (listed as a “Novel” on the Table of Contents page) set in her long-running (six novels and a number of novellas to date) “Divers” universe, a far-future milieu in which salvage experts dive down to explore the wrecks of spaceships lost in the tides of space and time and multiple dimensions that sweep subspace, often at the risk of their own lives, and often, if they survive, returning with enigmatic and sometimes hugely dangerous artifacts. Also good in May/June is Jay O’Connell’s “The Best Man,” a comedy that proves that it’s not easy being green, especially when you have to serve as Best Man at the socially prominent wedding of a high-powered billionaire, Dale Bailey’s “Come As You Are,” about a drug that lets you know more about yourself than you really wanted to know, Karen Joy Fowler’s superbly crafted but enigmatic “Persephone of the Crows,” and Leah Cypess’s “On the Ship,” in which the protagonist has to figure out the nature of a mysterious crisis affecting the voyage of a Generation Ship (although it takes her a bit longer to figure it out than it will probably take most experienced genre readers).
The July/August issue of Asimov’s is stronger overall. Best story here is probably “An Evening with Severyn Grimes,” by Rich Larson, a suspenseful, fast-paced tale in which a kidnapped billionaire has to try to outwit his kidnappers while in captivity, and at the same time deal with an angry young woman who has some very real personal reasons for wanting him dead; the story features some nicely inventive technology, and is, as they used to say, “a page-turner.” R. Garcia y Robertson was one of the mainstays of Asimov’s in the ‘80s and ‘90s, selling many stories there, and it’s good to see him returning after a long silence with a lighthearted Space Opera romp,“The Girl Who Stole Herself,” featuring one of Robertson trademark plucky and resourceful teenage heroines, one who clearly has Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne lurking somewhere in her literary bloodstream. Although it deals with grim subjects such as slavery, kidnapping, military conquest, and murder, there’s something of a YA atmosphere about the story which lightens things up, and it’s fun to see our heroine tricking and out-maneuvering those who mean to do her harm. New writer Cadwell Turnbull turns in a poignant story about a man who learns to navigate between parallel universe and who experiences many versions of his rather dysfunctional family life, in “Other Worlds and This One.” In “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry,” Alexander Jablokov takes us to the ancient and densely-layered alien city of Tempest, where dozens of different alien races dwell literally on top of one another, and folows a human PI of sorts as she tries to unravel a dangerous riddle that threatens them all.
In the brisk and inventive “The Patient Dragon”—not a fantasy, in spite of the title—David Gerrold shows us that involving a super-powered agent in your clandestine affairs may be the wrong move, no matter how right it looks at the time; James Gunn, in what is obviously part of a de facto serialization, tells the story of an alien soldier struggling to survive in a harsh and unforgiving military organization, in “Weighty Matters: Tordor’s Story” (there’s another story in the same sequence, “Transcendental Mission: Riley’s Story,” in the same issue, but the other is the more interesting); Sheila Finch tells a near-mainstream story about the hardscrabble street life of homeless people, with only a nearly subliminal fantastic element, in “Field Studies”; and in “Gale Strang,” Michael Bishop tells probably the only story you’re ever going to read narrated by a bird cage.
The July/August issue of F&SF is a somewhat weak one. Of the nine stories here, eight are fantasy, with only one real SF story, “In a Wide Sky, Hidden,” by William Ledbetter, about a man obsessively searching among the stars for his older sister, a famous artist who had disappeared to a unknown world to create her masterpiece, with a whole planet for a canvas. Of the fantasy stories, probably the most interesting is David Erik Nelson’s “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House,” which injects a horror element into the basic concept of Robert A. Heinlein’s famous story, “He Built a Crooked House” (the shout-out obvious from the title)—although the result lacks the impact that Heinlein’s story had.
Subterranean Magazine, an online magazine intended mainly to be a loss-leader for Subterranean Press, attracting potential customers to check out Subterranean Press books by many of the same authors as those who appeared in the magazine, was launched in 2005, and for ten years was one of the best of all the online magazines. Although Subterranean Press itself is still going strong, editor William Schafer decided to pull the plug on Subterranean Magazine, which posted its last issue in 2014. I still miss it. In its day, it published a wide variety of excellent short fiction, from hard science fiction to fantasy to horror, perhaps the most eclectic editorial mix of any of the online magazines; although this is loosening up a bit now, with ezines such as Tor.com and Clarkesworld beginning to feature longer stories, Subterranean was for a while also one of the few online magazines, if not the only one, willing to run novellas and long novelettes, since most of the other online magazines refused to run anything over short story length.
The Best of Subterranean, edited by William Schafer, is a retrospective reprint anthology culled from the annals of Subterranean Magazine. At a $45 dollars, it’s a pricey anthology, but also a big one, with thirty stories from the magazine spread over seven hundred and fifty two pages, a reasonable proposition considering the almost-universally high literary quality of the stories contained within. The contents are eclectic enough that almost everyone will have their own list of favorites, but mine would include “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” by K.J. Parker, “The Bohemian Astrobleme,” by Kage Baker, “A Long Walk Home,” by Jay Lake, “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa,” by Alastair Reynolds, “Hide and Horns,” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Valley of the Girls,” by Kelly Link, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” by Ted Chiang, and “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn,” by Robert Silverberg. The anthology also contains an unproduced Twilight Zone script by George R.R. Martin, plus good work by Daniel Abraham, Joe Hill, Rachel Swirsky, Ian R. MacLeod, John Scalzi, Kelley Armstrong, Catherynne M. Valente, and others.
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Infinity Wars, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris, 361 pages)
Infinite Stars: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF, ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Titan Books, 9781785655937, 674 pages.)
Tor
.com, August 9.
Tor.com, July 19.
Tor.com, August 2.
Tor.com, May 17.
F&SF, September/October.
Stories from the Stratosphere, ed. Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn.
There were a number of original SF anthologies this year that presented themselves as offering a mix of Space Opera and Military SF, among them the two anthologies under consideration here, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Infinite Stars: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, edited by John Joseph Adams, reviewed here a couple of months back, would fit nicely into this category, and even an anthology of galactic exploration such as Nick Gevers’s Extrasolar, also reviewed here awhile back, contains a few stories such as Alastair Reynold’s “Holdfast” and Aliette de Bodard’s “A Game of Three Generals” that could easily be considered to be Military SF.
I’ll leave it to critics more astute than I am to try to rigorously parse and define the differences between Space Opera and Military SF. For myself, I’ll say that I can sort of instinctively and arbitrarily tell the difference, out on the edges of either subgenre, although things get a lot cloudier and more uncertain in the middle borderline where the two meet. It may be an oversimplification to say that just as all Space Opera is science fiction, all Military SF is Space Opera, but not all Space Opera is Military SF. I think the difference between the two forms depends on how strong the Military aspect is to a story, and how central the actual combat itself is to the story, since many Space Operas have ongoing interstellar wars as part of their background and the infrastructure of their settings without actually depicting the combat itself, where as core Military SF usually plunges you into the fighting on an individual level, sometimes in space battles, more often as we follow “boots on the ground” grunts on military engagements on alien planets. Each of the anthologies in question mix the proportions of those two elements somewhat differently.
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