The rest of the stories in January are somewhat weaker. Ron Collin’s ‘‘Primes’’ is a clever story of some of the unexpected consequences of a technology that can manipulate the neural interfaces of consumers, placing near-subliminal advertisements directly into their brains – an all-too-likely future development, and one I look forward to with a sinking feeling of dread. William Jablowsky’s ‘‘Static’’ is a melancholy reconfirmation of the idea that it’s probably better not to know what’s going to happen in the future. And Steve Rasnic Tem’s ‘‘The Carl Paradox’’ is a time-travel farce, of the sort where future versions of the same person keep knocking on the door, with hilarity ensuing.
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Much the same could be said about the January/February F&SF – it’s an uneven issue, with nevertheless some strong stories in it… although I think that, on balance, the January Asimov’s has the edge.
The most substantial story in the January/February issue is new writer Seth Chambers’s novella ‘‘In Her Eyes’’, a steamy romance (with a lot more explicit sex than is usual in the genre these days) between an introverted young man and a flamboyant young woman who is revealed to be a shapechanger (this shouldn’t really be a spoiler, since a reference to ‘‘Morphlings’’ is dropped early on, and I doubt it’s going to come as a surprise after that, although the author drags out the reveal long after it’s going to be obvious to most readers what’s going on). This seems to be present-day Chicago (I’ve even eaten in the restaurant they have their first date in) with no real change from our own world except that the existence of ‘‘Morphlings’’ or ‘‘Polymorphs’’ is accepted as a fact by everyone, although not everybody is happy about it. The ‘‘science’’ explaining Polymorphs is on a comic-book level, involving bathing yourself with gamma radiation with a handy device in the bathroom – most younger readers will probably immediately think of the X-Men’s Mystique, and the shapeshifter’s abilities here are on a similar improbable level, although Chambers at least makes a point of emphasizing how difficult, unpleasant, and painful it is to change from one form to another. If the premise can’t really be taken seriously as plausible science fiction, the strength of the story is in the relationship between the hapless human narrator and his shapeshifting lover, which is intriguing, challenging, and ultimately compelling. At the end, the story darkens, brings up some interesting questions of identity, and ends on a poignant note.
Another story in the January/February F&SF about a man with a shapeshifting lover, although with considerably less emphasis on the sex itself, is Albert E. Cowdrey’s somewhat autumnal ‘‘Out of the Deeps’’, which is as much about losing the world of your vanished youth as it is about anything else. This is more somber and less comic than the usual Cowdrey story, a noir thriller that doesn’t really need the supernatural shapeshifter element, and might have been better off without it. Without the fantasy element, I could easily see this appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Another story about losing the world of your youth, except that in this case it’s the whole present-day world and modern civilization that is lost – abandoned by having the majority of people flee into virtual reality surrounds – is ‘‘For All of Us Down Here’’ by Alex Irvine. I still find this now-familiar scenario unlikely, but Irvine avoids most of the problems with it by keeping the focus tightly on a young boy accustomed to living in a diminished world of patched-together and improvised technology resorted to by those left behind, and delivers a satisfying story, although one that perhaps ends a bit abruptly, with important questions left unanswered.
In ‘‘The New Cambrian’’, Andy Stewart tells a claustrophobic story about the first expedition to Europa, although I suspect that the harrowing events that bedevil the protagonist are really in his mind, scenarios conjured by guilt and loneliness, since I see no plausible way for them to actually happen in the real world (including the first-person narrator dying at the end, a trope that’s become all too common these days). C.C. Finlay tells an entertaining, weird western in ‘‘The Man Who Hanged Three Times’’. Robert Reed delivers one of his rare disappointments in ‘‘We Don’t Mean to Be’’. Claudio Chillemi and Paul Di Filippo collaborate on an Alternate World War II story that disappointingly turns into an absurd comic-book Steampunk extravaganza, in ‘‘The Via Pansiperna Boys in ‘Operation Harmony’’’. Weaker stories in the issue include ‘‘The Lion Wedding’’ by Moria Crone (another human-shapeshifter romance, this one an ambiguous fantasy), Bruce Jay Friedman’s metafictional farce (similar in some respects to Eleanor Arnason’s ‘‘The Scrivener’’, but less entertaining) ‘‘The StoryTeller’’, and Oliver Buckram’s too-broad and much too long comedy about shenanigans in a mysterious museum, ‘‘The Museum of Error’’.
–Gardner Dozois
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON
Asimov’s 2/14
F&SF 1-2/14
F&SF 3-4/14
Nightmare 2/14
Lightspeed 2/14
Strange Horizons 1/14
Subterranean Winter ’14
The lead novelette in the February Asimov’s is ‘‘Schools of Clay’’ by Derek Künsken, who has written several really striking hard SF stories about intelligent creatures in extreme environments. This one is set in an asteroid belt around a pulsar, about a race of creatures made of clays, sometimes ‘‘ensouled’’ with independently thinking radioactive chunks, with a biology based on the radioactive material, energy from the pulsar, and volatiles mined on the asteroids. Their social structure is hivelike, and for this story the ‘‘worker’’ caste is ready to rebel, as a periodic migration, driven by time dilation induced by passage near a black hole, is about to start. Any way you look at it, that’s pretty cool stuff, and really nicely worked out here. The story qua story, and the characters, are well-enough handled if, not surprisingly, of lesser interest than the setting. That is to say, I suppose, classic sense-of-wonder SF.
Other nice pieces this month include Maggie Shen King’s ‘‘Ball and Chain’’, a warm extrapolation of the effects of China’s one-child policy and sexual selection on marriage arrangements in the future, and M. Bennardo’s ‘‘Last Day at the Ice Man Café’’, about a woman and her off and on relationship with a man revived after being frozen for centuries.
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I was very impressed by a story from Seth Chambers, a writer I’d never heard of, in the January-February issue of F&SF. ‘‘In Her Eyes’’ is shapechanger story, but SF, and set in more or less contemporary Chicago. In this version of our world, a small subset of people have the ability to ‘‘morph’’… usually in very small ways, but a very few can change their whole body, at something of a cost. Alex, who works at the Field Museum, bumps into an intriguing but not terribly attractive woman at the Museum and, despite her looks, is drawn into a relationship of sorts, partly founded on a shared interest in museums, and partly founded on her astonishing eyes. Of course, she’s a ‘‘morphling,’’ or, more properly, a ‘‘polymorph,’’ and once she approves enough of Alex she changes her body to resemble a woman she noticed him noticing… and then each week into a different woman. He is almost instantly obsessed, and she seems to be as well. Chambers presents these characters convincingly, and then takes it a step further in examining additional implications of polymorphism, eventually driving to a believable and honest resolution.
And I should mention a very amusing novelette by Oliver Buckram, ‘‘The Museum of Error’’. This is a museum dedicated to historical and scientific mistakes, with such areas as the Hall of Military Blunders and the Library of Lies. The story concerns a shy assistant curator of military history, his attraction to the daughter of the Museum director, and his investigation into the theft of a petrified dog. All of that works out about as you might expect (and amusingly enough), but the real delight is the offhand references to exhibit after exhibit, things like the red smear on the ceiling of one room, illustrating the inventor of
the ejection seat.
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Buckram shows up again in March-April with ‘‘A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly’’, a very different but still quite amusing story. The POV character is Treya, a translator between species, working in a port town. She’s lost business recently because an old flame, since betrayer, has set up as a translator too. The story, then, concerns negotiations to buy the herring catch this year. Alas, her client’s rival has hired her ex… and, indeed, things end surprisingly. This is a light, clever, story, with some neat notions about different species’ modes of communication, and a well resolved plot.
Even better is a lovely horror story from Michael Libling, ‘‘Draft 31’’. I say lovely partly because it’s one of those stories where you have no idea it’s a horror story until you are well on the way to the end. Doc Caplan has returned to his small town, where he’s the only doctor. One day his high school girlfriend, who dumped him when she went off to college, comes in, hoping for help with her son’s apparent psychological issues. Doc’s married now, but there’s obviously still a bit of a spark, and maybe a hint of schadenfreude that she’s ended up single with a teenaged kid… and he agrees to help for free, even though he’s not a psychologist. So far, so good… maybe this is about a man about to stray, or about a boy with an intriguing fantastical problem (he has imaginary friends, even an imaginary father)… but then the story, rather subtly, turns quite naturally in a different direction. Excellent stuff.
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The February Nightmare has a decidedly unlovely horror story by Adam-Troy Castro: ‘‘Clutch’’. The title character is a monster, who lives only to kill and eat people, and who can hardly talk or think.
At first blush it seems destined to be pure splatter horror, but not at all…. Clutch wanders into a meeting of monsters, and in the end this an extended, and pretty effective, joke. Without, of course, missing the opportunity for some description of gore and splatter.
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At Nightmare’s sister ’zine Lightspeed I liked another of Carrie Vaughn’s steampunkish stories of a British princess and her lieutenant friend. ‘‘Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition’’ has a certain sense of being more a scene-setting story than a self-contained tale. Princess Maud (known as Harry to a certain set of her friends) is at a public exhibition of the Britain’s ‘‘Aetherian’’ technology, derived from study of a crashed alien spaceship. Her brother George warns her that a spy is suspected to be attending. She’s worried about that, and about the Danish Prince Carl whom she likes – but does she like him enough to marry him, as much of her family expects? And what of her friendship for the certainly unsuitable Lieutenant Marlowe? And can a Princess marry and continue to have the adventures Harry has had, or even indulge her passion in the study of Aetherian tech? The story involves unmasking the spy, but that’s not terribly interesting…. It’s just nice to be in Harry’s company some more, and to meet her mother and her formidable grandmother (though, again, I am left unconvinced by SFnal depictions of Queen Victoria). At the end, though, what I really want is a Harry and Marlowe novel.
Also in the February issue of Lightspeed is a pretty good Ken Liu story, ‘‘None Owns the Air’’, about a young man in a small country in an Asian-flavored fantasy world (though how fantastical it is is open to debate) who is tasked with inventing a flying device. The story is mostly about how he does so, with the help of his religious sister and some sacred birds; what makes it more interesting than that fairly familiar basic outline is the depiction of the grey-shaded outcomes – both in a moral sense and in the actual future life results for the central characters.
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Strange Horizons in January has a nice atmospheric horror story by Margaret Ronald, ‘‘The Innocence of a Place’’. It’s told at a distance, by a historian studying the disappearances of the 15 girls at the Braxton Academy for Young Girls during a flood in 1911, along with a few older people, such as the lawyer who had opened his house to them when the Academy threatened to be submerged. We can see from the start what sort of thing is going on….What works is the distancing, the historian telling the story decades later, mainly using the diary of an adolescent who witnessed… some things… from window. Of course, maintaining their distance will prove problematic for both chroniclers.
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Jonathan Strahan guest-edits the Winter issue of Subterranean, with very good results. For example there’s a new Greg Egan story, which is always welcome. ‘‘Bit Players’’ takes on an old idea (‘‘non-player characters’’ in a computer game are truly alive) and develops it nicely, along the lines you might expect (they want rights) – but Egan’s variations are intelligent and interesting, very well thought through. That said, the characters are less interesting than the ideas (and, as usual with Egan, remarkably, arguably implausibly, brilliant), so the story doesn’t fully work.
There’s a new K.J. Parker story as well, and like the Egan it’s unmistakably its writer’s work. ‘‘I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There’’ is about a man looking for a way to do magic in a milieu in which magic is both widely regarded as impossible – and as a capital crime. He comes to a man who can supposedly teach one to walk through walls. Does he learn how? Well, what do you think? Is there a catch? Of course there is – a very sensibly worked out one. All presented with Parker’s realpolitik-ish view of human interactions, and with a nice mordant closing twist.
Another K.J. – Karen Joy Fowler – offers ‘‘Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story’’, a nicely creepy horror story that in tone, situation, and ambiguity reminded me of Kelly Link’s masterwork ‘‘The Specialist’s Hat’’. Fiona and Dacey are twins, and Nanny Anne is their nanny, of course, but she seems a bit sinister, and the mother and father are gone for Christmas and delayed in returning…. Best to let the story work itself out for yourself – it’s really good stuff. And, I think, the fourth horror story I’ve praised this month, probably a personal record!
Another favorite comes from Eleanor Arnason. ‘‘The Scrivener’’ is a story about a man with three daughters. He wants to be a writer, but isn’t very good at it, so he hopes one of his daughters becomes one, and to that end he names them Imagination, Ornamentation, and Plot; and eventually sends them to a critic to help them on their way. In the end the girls wander in fairytale-inspired directions… but really in their own directions. And everyone lives happily ever after.
And I’m sorry not to mention more. There’s a Bruce Sterling story about Queen Carlotta of Jerusalem (second story I’ve read about her in the past couple of months!), and good stuff from Frances Hardinge, Ellen Klages, and Jeffrey Ford, too – no stinkers in the whole bunch.
Recommended Stories
‘‘The Scrivener’’, Eleanor Arnason (Subterranean Winter ’14)
‘‘Clutch’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Nightmare 2/14)
‘‘In Her Eyes’’, Seth Chambers (F&SF 1-2/14)
‘‘Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story’’, Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean Winter ’14)
‘‘Schools of Clay’’, Derek Künsken (Asimov’s 2/14)
‘‘Draft 31’’, Michael Libling, (F&SF 3-4/14)
‘‘I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There’’, K.J. Parker, (Subterranean Winter ’14)
‘‘The Innocence of a Place’’, Margaret Ronald (Strange Horizons 1/13/14)
‘‘Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition’’, Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed 2/14)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, and original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119,
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
The Adjacent, Christopher Priest (Gollancz 978-0575105362, 12.99, 432pp, hc) June 2013.(Titan Books 978-1781169438, $14.95, 400pp, tp) March 2014.
Questionable Prac
tices, Eileen Gunn (Small Beer 978-1618730756, $16.00, 280pp, tp) March 2014. [Order from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton MA 01027;
Sunburnt Faces, Shimon Adaf; Margalit Rodgers & Anthony Berris, trans. (PS Publishing 978-1-84863-676-7, £20.00, 473pp, hc) November 2013. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England;
SHORT TAKE
Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, Brian Attebery (Oxford University Press 978-0-19-931607-6, $29.95, 240pp, tp) January 2014.
It takes a bit of triangulation to arrive at the core of Christopher Priest’s endlessly tantalizing and ultimately very satisfying The Adjacent, and some of that triangulation is quite literal: characters, events, and places are doubled and tripled, and the central apocalyptic images are areas of land in which everything has been obliterated, leaving only perfect equilateral triangles of blackened earth, the result of a mysterious new weapon which is the novel’s most flamboyant SFnal invention. Even the title has multiple meanings – as the mechanism through which the new weapon operates (allegedly by somehow displacing things into a neighboring quantum realm), as a technique of misdirection employed by stage illusionists, as a huge overcrowded shantytown on an island in Priest’s Dream Archipelago (whose appearance late in the novel is only the most radical move of a novel choreographed in unexpected moves). At times it’s reminiscent of the kind of generation-hopping linked narratives of a Michael Cunningham or David Mitchell, but mostly it echoes Priest’s own earlier preoccupations with stage illusions (The Prestige), possible alterities of WWII (The Separation), imaginary geography (The Islanders), and even the sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian England that he explored as far back as Fugue for a Darkening Island.
Locus, March 2014 Page 8
