In terms of literary quality, although both the Strahan and the Schmidt are good, Infinity Wars is the stronger of the two anthologies, containing several of the years best stories; in fact, barring the sudden last minute appearance of another SF anthology that’s better between now and the end of the year, something I find unlikely, I’d have to say at this point that Jonathan Strahan has once again managed to edit the best original SF anthology of the year, as he has done for a number of years in a row now. However, though, it may not appeal to hardcore fans of Military SF as much as the Schmidt. Although there are a few stories here which plunge you right into battle, such as David D. Levine’s “Command and Control,” Rich Larson’s “Heavies,” and Peter Watts’s “ZeroS,” many others instead skirt the periphery of the typical Military SF story, telling their tales from perspectives not often explored. In Carrie Vaughn’s “Evening of the Span of Their Days,” a maintenance supervisor in charge of a repair dock for spaceships scurries desperately about trying to gather enough supplies to repair the flood of ships likely to come out of battle damaged in the war that everyone knows is coming but nobody likes to talk about; in Eleanor Arnason’s “Mines,” settlers on a colony planet deal with the aftermath of war, with their daily lives threatened by the thousands of mines scattered across the landscape by the enemy; in An Owomoyela’s “The Last Broadcasts,” a computer technician charged to conceal all knowledge from the public of an ongoing war that humans are losing wrestles with her conscience over the morality of what she’s been told to do. In the two best stories here, Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield” and Nancy Kress’s “Dear Sarah,” the Das deals with an injured soldier, hurt in combat on the Moon, who lives in poverty in a cardboard slum, his service seemingly forgotten by just about everybody, including the force he served, while the Kress depicts a woman who faces lifelong ostracism and even possible deadly retribution from her survivalist family for daring to join the Army. In some ways, Infinity Wars is a kind of stealth anti-war anthology, with character after character wrestling with doubts about the morality of the war and the orders they’ve been given and whether or not they should comply with them, sickening of the slaughter involved, particularly of civilians; even the high-tech “zombie,” raised from the dead to fight again, in Peter Watts’s ultraviolent “ZeroS” eventually begins to question the morality of the missions he’s sent on, and in Elizabeth Bear’s “Perfect Gun,” even a sentient spaceship grows sick of the killing and decides that it’s not going to co-operate in dealing it out anymore.
Infinite Stars is much more centrally a Military SF anthology, although even here there are stories that deal with the periphery and preparation for war rather than with combat itself, such as Jack Campbell’s “Shore Patrol,” David Drake’s “Cadet Cruise,” and Dave Bara’s “Last Day of Training.” The best stories here are Alastair Reynolds’s “Night Passage,” in which the crew of a ship who blunder into a strange cosmic phenomenon in Deep Space are faced with mutiny, betrayal, and double-cross piled upon double-cross, and Linda Nagata’s “Region Five,” in which a squad of high-tech-equipped foot soldiers trapped in a high-rise building must fight their way to escape through mobs of fanatical rebels during a civil war. There’s also good work here by Charles E. Gannon, David Weber, Jody Lynn Nye, and Elizabeth Moon. Adding substantially to the value of Infinite Stars is a strong list of reprint stories by Lois McMaster Bujold, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Nnedi Okorafor, A.C. Crispin, and Anne McCaffrey, including harder-to-find stories such as “Stark and the Star Kings,” by Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, “Duel on Syris,” by Poul Anderson. “The Iron Star,” by Robert Silverberg, and “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” by Cordwainer Smith.
Tor.com has had a run of strong stories in the past couple of months. Best of them is Greg Egan’s “Uncanny Valley,” posted on August 9, which deals shrewdly and poignantly with the question of whether the “copy” of a dead man is synonymous with the once-living man himself or a totally new personality, and which of the man’s memories have been left out of the creation of the copy, and why. Linda Nagata’s “The Martian Obelisk,” posted on July 19, shows us how the project of building a bittersweet memorial to humanity’s now-failed attempt to spread beyond the Earth is interrupted by an unexpected emergency that may change everything. Stephen Baxter’s “The Martian in the Woods,” posted on August 2, an unlikely but surprisingly effective blend of H.P. Lovecraft-style horror with H.G. Wells, gives us a forest in England grown haunted and strange by the presence within of one of the surviving Martians from the invasion depicted in Wells’s The War of the Worlds. “Sanctuary,” by Allen M. Steele, in what is pretty obviously the first installment of a de facto serialization, describes a mission to another planet that goes completely and catastrophically wrong, stranding the human crew on a world where anything made of plastic or metal is quickly eaten by ravenous microrganisms, and leaving them about to face First Contact with natives who have developed technologies which use wood and ceramics instead.
The September/October issue of F&SF is a strong one. Best story here is “Starlight Express,” by Michael Swanwick, a melancholy and evocative story about a man in a far-future Rome who encounters a mysterious woman, only to, inevitably, lose her again. Also substantial here, although it probably won’t satisfy some readers, is Samuel R. Delany’s first story for F&SF in forty years (since 1977), “The Hermit of Houston.” Those looking for a strongly plotted or action-filled tale are not going to find it here; instead, this is an old man’s rambling, discursive reminiscence, jumping back and forth in time, of his long life in a world that has been shattered and reshaped by some unspecified disaster or series of disasters (probably climate change-related), with national boundaries redrawn and society’s views on sexual identity rethought, so that both men and women as we define them today have been sorted into many different genders, “natural” procreation is sternly discouraged, and much of the rearing of children is left to youth gangs and armies. The story can be hard to chew in some spots, at its most discursive, but if you stick with it, will reward the reader with some fascinating social speculation about a different kind of future society and some compelling imagery. (Warning: the story is also much more sexually explicit than is usual for F&SF.) Also good in September/October is Naomi Kritzer’s “Evil Opposite,” in which a graduate student who invents a “quantum spyglass” must learn to navigate through the infinite possible versions of his own life, and perhaps learn some lessons from the mistakes other versions of himself are making.
Robert Reed’s “Leash on a Man,” in which a high-security prison—and, in particular, one Neanderthal prison guard—must rise to the challenges involved in housing a new super-smart prisoner who had murdered an entire world; and in a broadly satiric mode, in “Hollywood Squid,” Oliver Buckram offers a zany farce with a few good laughs in it about a squid-like alien who wants to become a movie star.
The other type of anthology common this year features what Jonathan Strahan has aptly called “Think Tank Fiction,” consisting of futurology-based speculation about what the near-future is going to be like, often shading into catastrophic climate-change fiction, often sponsored by some major corporation, and frequently available only online with no actual physical book existing. We’ve already seen and reviewed two good examples of this kind of non-print anthology, A Flight to the Future, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future, editor unknown, both available only online (or in the November issue of Wired Magazine, in the case of the later), and now we have another one, Stories in the Stratosphere, from Arizonia State University, edited by Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. The fiction part of the anthology consists of four very short stories by Carter Scholz, Brenda Cooper, Karl Schroeder, and David Brin and Tobias Buckell, all dealing with the use of “stratollites,” enormous balloons designed to hover in the stratosphere, the outermost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, just before outer space, showing the
many uses to which they can be put—and some of the things that might go wrong as well. None of these stories is likely to end up being considered to be among the year’s best stories, but they’re entertaining and fun to read. No print edition is available, but Stories in the Stratosphere can be downloaded in various formats from csi.asu.edu/books/overview/
103
Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World, ed. David Brin and Stephen W. Potts. (Tor, 978-0-7653-8258-0, 336 pages.)
Shadows & Reflections: Stories from the Worlds of Roger Zelazny, ed. Trent Zelazny and Warren Lapine. (Positronic Publishing, 978-1-5154-1738-5, 240 pages.) Cover art designed by Jay O’Connell.
Omni, October.
The Hainish Novels and Stories, by Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Brian Attebury. (Library of America, 978-1598535372, $60.00. 2,100 pages.)
Last month we discussed one grouping that the year’s original SF anthologies naturally falls into, the Space Opera/Military SF group. The other major group is what we probably could call futurology anthologies, featuring near-future stories that deal with the effect of technological change on society, many of them concerning the reshaping of our culture and psychology by social media, advancements in computer technology, and the coming of the constant-surveillance society, some dealing with the wide-spread and far-ranging effects of catastrophic climate change (with a few even offering suggestions about how it could be combated or successfully adapted to). One subset of this group is what Jonathan Strahan has dubbed “Think-Tank Fiction,” collections of near-future futurology stories often sponsored by writers assembled and commissioned for the task by some major corporation; usually there is no physical anthology available for sale, but the stories can be accessed online. This year, we’ve already seen a number of such non-print anthologies, available only online: A Flight to the Future, edited by Kathryn Cramer, sponsored by an X Prize and by the Japanese airline company Ana, Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future (editor unknown), Stories in the Stratosphere, from Arizonia State University, edited by Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn, and Megatech, sponsored by The Economist magazine, edited by Daniel Franklin (mostly non-fiction, but with two stories from Nancy Kress and Alastair Reynolds).
Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World, edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts, is a sort of cross between a futurology anthology and a Think-Tank project; it’s sponsored by The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Intelligence (UCSD), but also published in physical form by a major genre trade publisher, the only one of this group that isn’t online-only. It’s also by far the most substantial of the group. Most of the Think-Tank project stories are so concerned with introducing a novel futurologist idea about possible near-future societies that they have no room left for an involving human story employing the effects of that idea, but that’s not a problem here, where even the weakest of the selections at least don’t forget to include a human story. The contents are split between original stories and reprint stories, with a number of essays also included about the effect of developing technologies on what our future world will be—or may be—like. Brin strikes a determinedly optimistic note throughout in his introduction and comments about how the “transparent society” that may be coming due to advances in computer technology and the hothouse flourishing of social media (in effect, a world where secrets are no longer possible) will be a good thing, the cure for many of the woes and problems of today’s society. Not being as optimistic as Brin, I’m somewhat less likely to believe that such transparency will really be “top-to-bottom,” and wonder instead if things will shake out so that the rich keep their secrets more closely guarded than ever while ordinary people in a constant-surveillance society will have no privacy or ability to keep even the most minor of secrets at all. I hope that I’m wrong and Brin is right, but the jury’s still out. Some of the authors here don’t seem to wholeheartedly support Brin’s optimistic vision either, since a number of the stories about what such a “transparent world” would be like seem considerably more like dystopias than utopias to me.
The best of the original stories here are “Elephant on Table,” by Bruce Sterling, a slyly satiric look at the end of an era and of one way of competing for power (although competing for power certainly still exists in this future, the methods of competing for it have drastically changed, leaving old-style politicians stranded way behind), and “Eminence,” by Karl Schroeder, which visualizes a whole different way to structure the economy of a society, one which might actually have some real-world applications. Also good among the originals are stories by Aliette de Bodard, Nancy Fulda, Jack Skillingstead, Gregory Benford, Cat Rambo, and Brenda Cooper. The reprints include good work by Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Brin himself, and others.
Another type of anthology, much rarer, is the tribute anthology, which gives other writers the chance to play with the settings and characters created by some famous SF/fantasy author by crafting their own stories set in that author’s worlds. In the last few years, we’ve had tribute anthologies dedicated to Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, and Samuel R. Delany, and now we have one dedicated to Roger Zelazny: Shadows & Reflections: Stories from the Worlds of Roger Zelazny, edited by Trent Zelazny and Warren Lapine. Zelazny’s flamboyant body of work certainly offers many lushly romantic settings and characters for others to work with, from Lord of Light to the Amber series, and from rebellious deity Mahasamtman to the immortal Conrad to worldmaker Francis Sandow to Corwin of Amber. The problem is, as it also was with the Gene Wolfe tribute anthology, that Zelazny himself has set the bar so high, in terms of imagination and distinctive elegance of prose, that it’s almost unfair to expect any other writer to be able to clear it—and indeed, few of the authors in the anthology are really up to the challenge. The best story here is probably “Playing God,” by Steven Brust, one of the few contributions to catch something of the audacious elan and insouciance characteristic of Zelazny’s work. Also good here is the dreamlike “Nights in the Gardens of Blue Harbor,” by Gerald Hausman, although with its languid Jamaican setting and its frequent references to both Ian Fleming and James Bond, it seems more influenced by Fleming than Zelazny, although Zelazny helped to plot it before he died. Also worth reading for their own sake as entertainments, although not convincing as something Zelazny might have written, are “The Lady of Shadow Guard,” by Lawrence Watt-Evans, “The Aspect of Dawn,” by Shariann Lewitt, and “Rock and Road,” by Michael H. Hanson.
The big news this month is the return of Omni magazine. Omni was a large-format slick magazine, published in print for from 1978 to 1995. It was known for its (sometimes credulous) popular-science articles and for the excellence and expensiveness of its graphics, but what made Omni famous in genre circles was the fact that it also published two or three science fiction/fantasy/horror stories per issue, selected by famed Hugo-winning editor Ellen Datlow, who solicited memorable work by writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, Octavia E. Butler, Stephen King, and dozens of others. Now, after years of behind-the-scenes legal battles and a couple of abortive reboots, Omni is back in the same large-size slick format with an all-new October issue. The popular-science articles are beyond my purview here, but the good news is that Ellen Datlow is also back as fiction editor, and the likelihood is that she’ll again make Omni into one of the most important sources out there for good genre fiction. The October issue features three good stories: “Sidewalks,” by Maureen McHugh deals poignantly with the story of a refugee who has lost her entire universe and is now stranded in our own; “Verweile Doch (But Linger),” by Rich Larson, paints a portrait of a man with a very strange Wild Talent, the ability to stop time for everybody else around him and keep the world frozen for as long as he wants to—but how long does he want to?; “Every Hour of Light and Dark,” by Nancy Kress takes us to
a future where the human race has destroyed the Earth, and a group of refugees living on Moon must fish through time to retrieve a few of the treasures otherwise lost to history.
So the new Omni is off to a good start, and I wish the magazine good luck in days to come.
Perhaps the best reading bargain you’re going to get this year, and maybe this decade, is a huge omnibus collection of some of the best of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels and stories, all science fiction and all set in her Hainish universe, The Hainish Novels and Stories, from the prestigious Library of America, edited by Brian Attebury. There are two volumes, which can be ordered boxed together or separately. Volume One is predominantly devoted to her Hainish novels, Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Dispossessed, and what I still consider to be her masterpiece (although many would argue for The Dispossessed instead), The Left Hand of Darkness, plus a selection of Hainish stories such as “Winter’s King,” “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” “The Day Before the Revolution,” and “Coming of Age in Karhide.” Volume Two is in a way even more impressive, containing the five-novella “story suite” that make up Five Ways to Forgiveness, a work that rivals (and perhaps surpasses in some ways, notably the complexity and uncomfortable nature of the social issues it raises, issues definitely relevant to our own society) for excellence even The Left Hand of Darkness itself, plus very strong late Hainish stories like “Another Story, or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” “Mountain Ways,” “The Matter of Seggri,” and “Solitude.” Plus a wide selection of introductions to the novels and essays about the Hainish universe by Le Guin.
Sense of Wonder Page 60