Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Put simply, this is a huge chunk (2,100 pages!) of some of the very best science fiction to be published in the Twentieth Century. Yes, at sixty dollars the complete two-volume set is expensive—but these days taking a family of four to see the latest Transformers movie is not going to be a whole lot cheaper, and this omnibus will give you many more hours of entertainment, and will still be there years from now for your children and grandchildren to read as well.

  In short, The Hainish Novels and Stories belongs in the library of everyone who enjoys the best that science fiction has to offer.

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  Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, ed. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. (Upper Rubber Boot, 978-1-937794-75-0, 253 pages.) Cover art by Likhain.

  Global Dystopias, ed. Junot Diaz (Boston Review, Boston Globe).

  Children of a Different Sky, ed. Alma Alexander. (Kos Books, 177 pages.) Cover art by Gordana Curgus.

  Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak. (Laska Media Groups Inc., 978-1-928140-04-9, 354 pages.) Cover art by Samantha M. Beiko.

  Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, ed. Ellen Datlow. (Tor, 978-0-7653-9106-3, 333 pages.)

  Let’s take a look at some of the minor anthologies of 2017 that we haven’t covered as yet. Mostly from small presses, these are anthologies that aren’t in the same league overall as the year’s major anthologies such as Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Wars or Nick Gevers’s Extrasolar—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still worthwhile stories to read to be found in them.

  Falling into the futurology/climate change category we discussed last month, like David Brin and Stephen W. Potts’s Chasing Shadows, is Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. This is (or says that it is) a collection of Solarpunk stories. It’s a bit unclear precisely what “Solarpunk” is, or what distinguishes it from all the other sub-categorizations in our genre, and I’ll leave that for more astute critics to figure out (assuming that we ever hear anything about Solarpunk again; remember the few months a couple of decades back, before it was exiled to the graveyard of dead genre sub-classifications, when everybody was briefly talking about “Cowpunk”?). The anthology’s Introduction describes Solarpunk as “a new movement in SF that examines the possibility of a future in which currently emerging movements in society and culture such as the green movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and certain aspects of Occupy Wall Street coalesce to create a more optimistic future in a more just world.” This sounds good—I myself have been calling for less despair and nihilism in SF and more stories set in “a more optimistic future in a more just world”—but some of the authors here don’t seem to have gotten the message, since the anthology doesn’t frequently deliver material like that, but instead mostly bleak stories where all the battles have been fought and lost.

  The best story here is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Road to the Sea,” an autumnal but mutedly lyrical look at a society struggling to survive and put itself back together after most of the world as we know it has been destroyed by catastrophic climate change. Also good is “A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World,” by A.C. Wise, another autumnal story about the people, mostly older folk, who choose to remain behind on an Earth with a rapidly shrinking habitable zone while their children set off in generation ships to seek refuge out among the stars; quietly moving in many ways, but hardly “optimistic.” Jess Barber’s “You and Me and the Deep Dark Sea” and Tyler Young’s “Last Chance” are also poignant, but rather bleak, the Barber showing the population of a small seaside community learning the hard lesson of working together to survive in the face of ongoing catastrophic climate change, and the Tyler, until the twist ending, set in an Earth rendered completely uninhabitable, with the only humans surviving in deep-buried underground cities. The story here that seems to do the best job of conforming to the self-described tenets of Solarpunk is Nisi Shawl’s “The Color of Money,” which takes place in the Alternate World setting of her recent novel Everfair, and which deals with political maneuverings to keep natural resources out of the hands of rapacious large nations.

  So, a number of strong stories and some good reading here, but there’s no real reason why the majority of the stories couldn’t have been published in an ecological/climate change anthology rather than a specifically Solarpunk one. Be interesting to see what the next Solarpunk anthology, if there is one, is like. Sunvault also features a large number of poems and illustrations, and strong reprints by Daniel José Older and Nick Wood.

  There’s no pretense of optimism about the future in Global Dystopias, a special section of the Boston Globe newspaper, edited by Junot Diaz. The title tells you just what you’re going to get, and most of the stories here are brutal and grim. Oddly, many of the dystopias presented here vere into the surrealistic to one degree or another, with only Maureen McHugh’s global pandemic really a realistic possibility. The best stories here are Charlie Jane Anders’s “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” a sort of updated version of Kafka’s The Castle taken to an extreme, with a faceless government unit, acting for no particular reason the victim ever understands, doing it’s best to strip an individual of everything that makes them an individual; “The Reformatory,” by Tananarive Due, an even more brutal example of a “correctional institute” doing much the same sort of thing as in the Anders story; and Maureen F. McHugh’s “Cannibal Acts,” about refugees in a remote outpost struggling to do whatever they need to do to survive in the face of a worldwide pandemic that has killed the rest of the human race. Grim stuff, and not for those with weak stomachs.

  The fact is, though, I’m getting tired of dystopias. When you can see just by turning on CNN that you already live in one, they lose something of their appeal. I’d like to see some stories instead that provide realistic hope for a viable human future—which is why I wish movements like Solarpunk well (although a bit skeptical that they’ll actually be able to deliver).

  Children of a Different Sky, edited by Alma Alexander, is a mixed SF and fantasy anthology about refugees and immigrants, with part of the profits being donated to various charitable institutions that help refugees, such as Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, with a list of the addresses of such charities in the book’s front matter if reading Children of a Different Sky moves you to make donations of your own. The best stories here are Aliette de Bodard’s “At the Crossroad of Shadow and Bone,” which literalizes a metaphor for war in a horrifying fashion as a relentless and unstoppable churning black mass that rolls slowly across the countryside, swallowing and obliterating everything in its path, and a straight mainstream story, “The Horse Head Violin,” by Jacey Bedford, a moving and ultimately hopeful story about Belgian refugees fleeing to Britain during World War I. Also good here are stories by Brenda Cooper, Seanan McGuire, and others.

  One of the most interesting and encouraging developments in modern science fiction is a flood of good new writers of Asian descent (some Asian-American or Asian-Canadian, some living in various Asian countries around the world) entering the field. In recent years, writers such as Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Vandana Singh, Indrapramit Das, Yoon Ha Lee, and Liu Cixin (who won a Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem) have established reputations for themselves, and Clarkesworld has been featuring a story or two translated from the Chinese in almost every issue. And as shown by Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak, there are plenty of other Asian writers out there to be found.

  Of course, to talk about “Asian Science Fiction” raises the same question that critics in the field were struggling with when discussing “Australian Science Fiction” a few years back. Other than using Australian characters and placing their stories in Australian settings, is there anything that makes Australian Science Fiction aesthetically different from America
n Science Fiction or British Science Fiction? Here the question is, other than using Asian characters and placing their stories in Asian settings, it there anything that makes Asian Science Fiction aesthetically different from other varieties? Then, for Australian Science Fiction, the consensus answer was “No,” and judging from the stories in this anthology, most of which could have appeared in any magazine or anthology without seeming out of place, the answer here is more or less “No” as well, with many of the stories leaning toward the cyberpunk and the post-cyberpunk. (The translated-from-the-Chinese stories that have been appearing in Clarkesworld seem to have a bit more aesthetic difference, although that could be because of the uneven quality of the translations themselves.) Aesthetic differences show up in a more pronounced way in the fantasy stories, not surprising since they’re drawing on a whole different body of mythology and folklore than does the standard genre fantasy.

  Questions of categorization aside, there’s a lot of good reading to be found in Where the Stars Rise. The strongest stories here are “Looking Up,” by S.B. Divya, telling how a woman’s decision to emigrate to Mars sparks a reconciliation with her family at home, “Memoriam,” by Priya Sridhar, about a child torn from his family by war and his long journey to find his place in life, “Spirit of Wine,” by Tony Pi, about a man’s struggle to rescue his brother from possession by a destructive spirit, “The dataSultan of Street and Stars,” by Jeremy Szal, a cyberpunk caper about a hacker’s dangerous mission to liberate captive AIs, and “Weaving Silk,” by Amanda Sun, detailing the struggle of two sisters to survive in a Japan wrecked by natural disasters. Also good here are stories by Calvin D. Jia, Minsoo Kang, Fonda Lee, Melissa Yuan-Innes, and others.

  I usually don’t review horror anthologies, but although there are streaks of darkness in it (it is, after all, an Ellen Datlow anthology), the subject matter of Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, edited by Ellen Datlow tends to make the stories more whimsical than horrific, and so more to my liking. The strongest stories here, from my perspective, are Andy Duncan’s compassionate study of Alice illustrator Sir John Tenniel, “Worrity, Worrity,” Ysabeau S. Wilce’s madcap “The Queen of Hats,” Richard Bowes’s study of an Alice in Wonderland movie that never was, “Some Kind of Wonderland,” and Seanan McGuire’s rather sad and poignant study of a reverse-Alice, one who came out of Wonderland to face the problems of the real world, “Sentence Like a Saturday.” There’s also good work here by Jane Yolen, Jeffery Ford, Delia Sherman, Priya Sharma, Genevieve Valentine, Catherynne M. Valente, and others.

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  Visions, Vectors, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, ed. Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. (Arizona State University, 978-0-9995902-2-5, 347 pages.)

  Clarkesworld, June.

  Clarkesworld, July.

  Clarkesworld, August.

  Clarkesworld, September.

  Clarkesworld, October.

  Clarkesworld, November.

  Clarkesworld, December.

  Lightspeed, December

  Asimov’s, November/December.

  Analog, November/December.

  F&SF, November/December.

  With 2018 looming on the horizon, only a few days away as I write these words, let’s do some mop-up of things I haven’t covered yet.

  Last month we discussed futurology/Think Tank anthologies. The strongest of this grouping snuck in under the wire, just in time to be still eligible for consideration among 2017’s anthologies, Visions, Vectors, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. Sponsered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, this is a mixed fiction/non-fiction anthology dealing with the near-future prospects for space travel and the eventual colonization of other worlds in the Solar System. The essays are beyond my purview here (although they look interesting), but the fiction part of the anthology is quite strong, including a few of the best stories of the year. The best stories here are “Vanguard 2.0,” by Carter Scholz, dealing with the moral choices faced by an astronaut who discovers intrigue and political machinations at a space station in Near-Earth orbit, “Death on Mars,” by Madeline Ashby, in which astronauts on a mission to Mars learn that while you sometimes have to keep secrets, there’s always a price to pay for keeping them, and “Night Shift,” by Eileen Gunn, in which a programmer must struggle to control the increasingly eratic behavior of an AI overseeing the manufacturing of Von Newman-machine mining robots on an asteroid. There are also superior stories here by Karl Schroeder, Steven Barnes, Ramez Nam, and Vandana Singh.

  The last half of the year was uneven for Clarkesworld; while a few of the issues were unexciting, they also published some of the year’s best stories along the way.

  The June Clarkesworld was another good issue, with three strong stories, “My Dear, Like the Sky and Stars and Sun,” by Julia K Patt, which follows the owner of a shop that sells quasi-legal bionic body-modifications as she deals with a strange new customer, “The Ways Out,” by Sam J. Miller, which portrays the struggle of mutant children with bizarre opportunities to get by in a continuous-surveillance society that regards them as potential menaces, and “Neptune’s Trident,” by Nina Allan, a melancholy Post-Holocaust tale about a women in a small village of survivors trying to conceal the fact that her lover has a sickness that they other villagers would consider to be contagious.

  Strongest stories in the July Clarkesworld are “The Bridegroom,” by Bo Balder, about a young man reluctantly taking his place in a generations-old tradition to which he’s expected to devote the rest of his life, “Travelers,” by Rich Larson, a grisly technohorror piece about a woman waking from suspended animation before she’s intended to in the middle of a colonizing starship’s voyage to a distant planet, and “The Significance of Significance,” by Robert Reed, following the life of a young woman who believes that the entire universe as we know it is an elaborate simulation.

  The August Clarkesworld is a bit weaker, but does contain worthwhile work such as “Twisted Knots,” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires (the second story Clarkesworld has published this year about the problems involved in using a 3D printer to print meat), “In the Blind,” by Sunny Moraine, and “The Stone Weta,” by Octavia Cade.

  The strongest story in the September Clarkesworld, and one of the best stories that Clarkesworld has published all year, is “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics,” by Jess Barber and Sara Saab. Here they join forces to tell a story of star-crossed love, love that remains unrequited for many years—and of how to rebuild a troubled world; this is one of the few stories this year that, rather than wallowing in hopelessness and despair over the climate changes we’re undergoing now and the even more major ones to come, explores ways that we might come to terms with change and build a viable human future. Also good in September is “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer, which follows a stalwart maintenance robot as it battles a powerful predator infesting—and endangering—a starship on a desperately important mission.

  The October Clarkesworld features a strong and creepy story, “The Last Boat-Builder of Ballyvoloon,” by Finbarr O’Reilley, which takes us to a future in which the seas have been rendered off-limits to humans by an all-to-plausible human-created menace as frightening as any horror out of Lovecraft. Also good here is “The Sum of Her Expectations,” by Jack Skillingstead, which shows us a woman willing to go to extremely dangerous lengths to attempt to rescue her AI, which is stranded on a hostile—and forbidden—alien planet.

  The November Clarkesworld is somewhat weaker. Strongest story here is probably “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons,” by Sue Burke, an enjoyable story about a Battle Bots-style combat being fought out on Mars by small remote-controlled robots. Also interesting, although somewhat unlikely, is “Praetya Plastics,” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, in which all the plastic being continuously dumped into the sea eventually evolves to become alive and sentient.

  After a strong year, Clarkesworl
d unfortunately closes out 2017 with a weak December issue. Best story here is probably “The Rains of Mars,” by Natalia Theodoidou, about a woman having an emotional melt-down that eventually leads to a psychotic break—well-crafted, but didn’t really need to be science fiction at all. Also interesting is “Crossing Lasalle,” by Lettie Prill, about someone desperate enough to upload their consciousness into a computer that they’re willing to take big risks to achieve that goal; unfortunately, since they have no really compelling reason for needing to do this, it’s hard to build up a lot of sympathy about whether they secede or not.

  After a so-so year, Lightspeed closes out 2018 with a weakish December issue. Best story here is “A Third of the Stars of Heaven,” by Cadwell Turnbull, about a woman who refuses to be cured by modern medicine provided by sophisticated alien medical technology; well-written and nicely characterized, but gains little from not being mainstream story about a Christian Scientist facing the same crisis of conscience instead.