Asimov's SF, January 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  [FOOTNOTE 5: The Jekyll Island Club participated in the first transcontinental “party line” phone conversation, in a ceremony held on January 15, 1915, that included President Woodrow Wilson phoning in from the White House, Alexander Graham Bell calling from New York, his assistant Thomas Watson talking in San Francisco, and William Rockefeller speaking to everyone from the clubhouse.]

  [FOOTNOTE 6: It appears Hess was trying to describe a biomechanism, but lacked the modern-day terminology for it.]

  [FOOTNOTE 7: A reference to a secret conference held at the Jekyll Island Club in 1910, when a small group of members, along with Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich and several economic experts, met to plan the restructure of the American banking system. The Federal Reserve System was the result of this meeting.]

  [FOOTNOTE 8: Edith Russell died in New York in 1959.]

  [FOOTNOTE 9: I've attempted to learn the pseudonym Solomon Hess used, yet this information isn't available in any of the standard literary references.]

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  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  FEBRUARY ISSUE

  Our February issue features a sprawling new novella by the award-winning Stephen Baxter, set in the same slightly shifted past of his Locus-award nominated novelette “The Ice War,” which appeared in these pages in September of 2008. You don't have to be familiar with that story to enjoy “The Ice Line,” which features some of the descendents of those august personalities as they deal with the oncoming threat of Napoleon's invading Grande Armee as it makes it way through England's interior. The story of how Baxter's terrifying Phoebeans (and a peculiar kind of undersea conveyance) are used in the war effort against old Boney, and with what dreadful consequences, awaits you in February!

  ALSO IN FEBRUARY

  February features three Asimov's debuts that are sure to turn heads: “Stone Wall Truth,” by gifted newcomer Caroline M. Yoachim, is a tale of tribal warfare and medicine, and how the two are both inextricably opposed and yet forever linked—we think you'll find Yoachim's treatment brave, insightful, and even a little uncomfortable; Aliette de Bodard contributes a lovely and affecting story of post-singularity human beings who have achieved a sort of Zen satori in spite of their banishment by a cruel future-dynasty, and the not-yet-awakened monks who inhabit the spaces between the two in “The Wind-Blown Man"; and David Erik Nelson's zany “The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond” is sure to remind you of gonzo greats like Neal Barrett, Jr. and Howard Waldrop, not to mention Walt Kelly's redoubtable Pogo! The venerable talents are also on display during February, with the return of Bruce McAllister,who offers a nostalgic and haunting ghost tale of northern Italy and “The Woman Who Waited Forever"; and Damien Broderick, who continues his unofficial series of tours de force inspired by classic SF talents, with “Dead Air” a Phil-Dickian meditation of claustrophobic urban sprawl and the recently deceased visiting from beyond the grave and through your television screen.

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg, in his Reflections column, continues his survey of the classic works of science fiction by “Rereading Clarke"; Peter Heck brings us “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our February issue on sale at your newsstand on December 22, 2009. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in classy and elegant paper format or those new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!

  COMING SOON

  new stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Reed, Tom Purdom, Allen M. Steele, Alexander Jablokov, Molly Gloss, Sara Genge, William Preston, Peter Friend, Barry B. Longyear, and many others!

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  The Lands of the Lost

  It's been much too long since James Blaylock gifted us with a book. Until a few months ago, his most recent non-trunk novel was The Rainy Season (1999). Another substantial offering was the story collection 13 Phantasms, from 2000. Both way too long ago for us Blaylock addicts.

  Now, of a sudden, he's got three books out! Saints be praised! We'll look at only two of them here, since our focus this month is, as semi-irregularly, on the small press alone. But that should not stop you from immediately rushing out and purchasing the third item, The Knights of the Cornerstone (Ace, hardcover, $23.95, 304 pages, ISBN 978-0441016532).

  In 1989, Ken Kesey issued a novel titled Caverns, which was a collaboration between the famed writing instructor and his current class of would-be authors. Why do I mention this now? Because one of Blaylock's new titles is Metamorphosis (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $30.00, 64 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-221-4), which consists of three stories JB wrote with three different students of his. If you can think of another such instance beyond these two books of mentor and mentees collaborating for print, let me know, because I can't!

  The ancillary matter—a nice introduction by Tim Powers (who also provides illos!), an afterword by Blaylock, and a second trailer by a certain “William Ash-bless"—reveals that the students, for this exercise, boned up on Blaylock's own output, then sought to imitate the master, who subsequently refined their contributions by “adding his own two cents.” The resulting homages are curious creatures.

  On the one hand, they read almost like pure Blaylockian fiction. These three students—Adriana Campoy, Brittany Cox, and Alex Haniford—nailed the tropes and techniques and characters most often favored by Blaylock. In “Stone Eggs,” Campoy presents us with a whimsical nephew house-sitting for a missing oddball uncle. Cox's “P-38” finds melancholy nostalgia in a going-out-of-business hobby store. And Haniford's “Houses” depicts supernaturalism in the suburbs. So what we have here are three quintessential and entertaining Blaylock pieces—rare and coveted items from a fellow who does not often work at such lengths.

  But underneath each tale, like a ghostly murmur, are the unique voices of the youngsters, and they're seductively promising and distinctive. As Powers says, “Remember their names,” for such talents will inevitably shine solo.

  All in all, a successful and enjoyable experiment in sharing the work and the glory.

  As for Blaylock's own new short novel, The Ebb Tide (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $35.00, 136 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-228-3), I should hardly need to do more than announce that it's a new Langdon St. Ives adventure, the first in that seminal steampunk series in nearly twenty years. Providing a resolution to past mysteries—whatever did happen to the coveted box containing that mysterious cosmic artifact?—the book is more of a pendant than a full-fledged new romp. Nonetheless, it holds everything we've come to love about the series: the chummy heroes, the nefarious villains, the absurd situations and queer Victorian technology. The exploits of St. Ives and his pals barrel along like a cheese-rolling contest, pausing only for moments of quiet exoticism. Here's his portrait of a drowned carriage on the sea bottom.

  “It stood upright on the sands as if it were a museum tableau.... The wheels were buried to the axles, the exterior covered with undersea growths—barnacles and opalescent incrustations, decorated by Davey Jones. The skeletons of four horses were tethered to it, and there were human skeletons inside, still traveling hopefully.”

  Beautiful, apt, haunting—that pretty much sums up the appeal of Blaylock's whole oeuvre.

  * * * *

  Around the Vancian World

  Having ruefully conceded that Jack Vance meant what he said when he maintained that he was done with fiction writing, I had resigned myself to reading no more by one of my favorite writers, and one of the gems of our field. How could I complain, sad as I was? He had given us so much, and was now deservedly enjoying his later years work-free.

  Imagine my delight, then, to get a copy of This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Subterranean, hardcover, $40.00, 208 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-245-0), the master's autobiography. It's too slim for my tastes, but in the end utterly satisfying for its size.
Dictated to an amanuensis due to Vance's blindness and inability to employ a computer any longer, the book possesses a chatty air which yet exhibits the refinements of prose that made Vance a byword among stylists. (There are even some famed Vancian footnotes!) The reader is carried along as if being entertained on some tropical veranda by a local cosmopolitan character, a fellow rich with stories and wisdom, who knows just what drinks and food to order, in whatever port.

  We begin with Vance's California youth. Born in 1916, the young Vance grows up in a world that seems like fantasy fiction itself from the vantage of 2009. He limns his early burgeonings of talent, his foibles and triumphs, with an objective eye. We stride with him as he inhabits a variety of colorful jobs and educational pursuits. When he marries his life's soulmate, Norma, fathers a child, and become a professional writer, we embark on a series of round-the-world travels that hint at the sources of Vance's illustrious talent for evoking exoticism. Throughout the tale of his life, the twin refrains of sailing and music run like brilliant leitmotifs.

  In a curious way, Vance's account reminded me of Jim Thompson's two autobiographical volumes, Bad Boy (1953) and Roughneck (1954). Thompson was a brawling, ham-handed misanthrope, while Vance is a gentle, deft lover of humanity, but there's something that links the two. Although Thompson was born ten years earlier, he and Vance shared the same general historical period of their youth. They both evoke in their memoirs a vanished, utterly non-digitized, non-media world, where face-to-face encounters and grappling with physical realities dominated existence and shaped their outlooks. They share an attitude of complete engagement with life. It's as if man and cosmos were locked in a perpetual wrestling match, sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly. As Vance says of himself, when he saw a challenge, he was impelled to take it. This kind of vital grappling with reality and either subduing it or being subdued by it marks their fiction as well.

  But in the end, there's no one like Jack Vance, and no fiction like his. To get some sense of the roots of those wonderful stories, and simply to enjoy hanging out in the company of a gifted raconteur, you must add this autobiography to the shelf that contains similar works by Jack Williamson, J.G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, and Arthur C. Clarke. Too short a list, really. What wouldn't you give for a similar volume by Sturgeon, Kornbluth, or Sheckley?

  * * * *

  Black Hole No Longer

  What an irony! The English-language genre known as science fiction was established by Hugo Gernsback, an immigrant to America from Luxembourg, a land with no small connection to the Germanic peoples. And yet today, do Americans know, revere and enjoy the important Germanic components of their SF heritage? Hardly. As critic and editor Franz Rottensteiner says in the introduction to his essential new survey, The Black Mirror and Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Austria (Wesleyan University Press, trade paper, $27.95, 432 pages, ISBN 978-0-8195-6831-1), “translated German SF is almost nonexistent, and thus beyond the threshold of visibility.” It exists then for Americans beyond the event horizon of some literary black hole.

  Rottensteiner sets out to remedy this blindness, removing the metaphorical blackness that enshrouds Germanic SF from the eyes of Americans.

  He starts out with a comprehensive chronology and categorization of Germanic SF, all the way from the seventeenth century up to the present. Lucid and compelling, this mini-course in the subject whets the appetite for what's to follow: the representative stories, all translated with aplomb and care and talent by Mike Mitchell, and arrayed in five sections.

  The first department is “The Pioneers: Science Fiction Before World War I.” Here we get some rather Verne-ian and Wellsian items, such as the two tales by Kurd Lasswitz. One of these chronicles the technological wonders of the year 2371, while the other deals with a utopian scheme. Our next era is “Between the World Wars,” a vintage corresponding to pre-Campbellian SF in this country. A piece like Hans Dominik's “A Free Flight in 2222,” with its emphasis on the sheer wonder of rocketry, is typical.

  “German Science Fiction Comes into Its Own after World War II” actually bypasses the 1950s and leaps right into the 1960s, when such sophisticated writers as Herbert W. Franke and Carl Amery flourished. I particularly enjoyed “The Age of the Burning Mountains,” by Horst Pukallus, which wryly portrays the transition to a post-electronic age, due to the Earth's passage through a “Cosmic Cloud.”

  Next is a detour not in time, but in space: the focus switches to Communist East Germany in “SF from the German Democratic Republic.” But all is not drear dogma, as we see in a strikingly surreal entry like “The Eye That Never Weeps,” by the team of Angela and Karlheinz Steinmuller.

  The last, longest and strongest section is “The Current Generation: From the 1990s to the Present.” Even a passing familiarity with SF from this region will cause such names as Wolfgang Jeschke and Andreas Eschbach to resonate. But then the reader will get pleasant surprises such as Michael Marrak and his “Astrosapiens,” which reads like a conflation of Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon (1960) and Robert Silverberg's The Man in the Maze (1968).

  What's most striking about these stories—and I don't think it's an artifact of Rottensteiner's selection process—is a certain uncommercialism, a strange narrative gravitas. Oh, sure, all these pieces appeared in commercial outlets. Yet they seem to lack the genial, but at times meretricious, marketplace voice of American and UK SF. There's no particular emphasis on “action,” and on bookmarkable characters and on reader-pleasing feints. A more somber, intellectual heft attaches to even the most light-hearted specimen here. Truly, this volume is a dispatch from another world than ours, best exemplified in the piece that lends its name to the whole.

  The title story, by Erik Simon, involves visitors from space who present humans with a one-dimensional object whose front side is the perfect mirror, and whose nonexistent backside is the perfect black hole. Rottensteiner was clever to choose this image for his book's title. Germanic SF was and is indeed a kind of simultaneous reflection and negation of English-language SF, now revealed in all its odd configurations. But hardly one-dimensional at all!

  * * * *

  Shambling Towards Morrowland

  The universe which James Morrow inhabits—and of which he is the reigning demiurge—is not ours. Oh, sure, it bears certain points of resemblance to our mundane sphere, attaches to ours tenuously at certain shared loci. But it's a much bigger, weirder, funnier and more outrageous place, where the corpses of gods get hauled away like dead whales, and famous books can narrate their own stories, among other conceits. Morrow's latest novel, Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon Publications, trade paperback, $14.95, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-892391-84-1), while a tad less outre than some of his past conceptions, upholds this standard of jaw-dropping effrontery in the service of art.

  The frame-tale around the core of the book is the hurried, desperate composition of one man's memoirs in the year 1984, as he drunkenly occupies a hotel room, facing suicide as his most probable exit.

  Syms Thorley once had a major career during the Golden Age of Hollywood. But Thorley's calling, in the far-off year of 1945, was not to play in comedies or romances, nor in westerns or melodramas. No, Thorley specialized in portraying monsters such as the Frankensteinian Corpuscula or the Mummyesque Kha-Ton-Ra. He's very good at what he does, however, and even somewhat proud. With his girlfriend, scriptwriter Darlene, by his side, he's content, and finds life good.

  But then Uncle Sam comes calling.

  It seems that top-secret Project Knickerbocker needs Thorley's skills. Having bred gigantic fire-breathing lizards intended to wreak havoc on Tokyo (the monsters are hidden out in the California desert), the government has exhibited some last-minute moral compunctions. Rather than simply turn the critters loose without warning on the enemy, they want to try some shock-and-awe first. Thorley will mimic a pint-sized version of the beasts, in a special costume, and, through the ferocity of his filmed performance, convince the J
aps to surrender.

  Or so the theory goes. But theory does not incorporate such factors as a rival actor, public reaction to a sighting of the costume, and other chaotic intrusions.

  Plainly Morrow is working in a more lighthearted and simplified vein than his usual recomplicated and sometimes densely ideational novels. Like the monster movies from which he draws his inspiration, this book is meant to be all surface effects—humorous rather than scary, in this case—concealing its message beneath a froth of excitement and spectacle. But pulling off such a trick involves at least as much skill as writing a book with more solemnity, and Morrow proves fully up to the challenge.

  First, he creates and maintains an utterly authentic and consistent voice for Thorley, both during his heyday and during his despairing decrepitude. You can't help rooting for the guy, admiring his professionalism and sympathizing with the sad course of his life.

  Second, Morrow nails the qualities and quirks associated with the genre of monster films. He's plainly done immense research into these pix, and devoted much thought to defining what makes them so appealing. Yet his research never dominates the story.

  Likewise, he's recreated the era of the 1940s very believably, summoning up a nostalgic portrait of days gone by that nonetheless incorporates the realism of everyday life. (Although one detail—Dos Equis beer on tap in 1945—seems to me a little anachronistic.)

  Finally, he's blended his invented characters and events so smoothly with the historical personages that the interface is seamless. When producer Sam Katzman or director James Whale are onstage with Thorley, they all seem equally “real.”

  The resulting swift-paced, multi-laughs-per-page tale is something that reads like a collaboration between Ron Goulart and Howard Waldrop. Its satire is not as biting as Morrow's usual acid-dipped fangs, but rather more affectionate: a homage and pastiche in parts. There are no real villains here, no outrageous idiocies or wrong-headedness or folly to condemn. Everyone is merely trying to do the best job they can, insofar as they can define it. The fact that things collapse and fail is part of the structure of the universe, rather than anybody's fault.