–Gardner Dozois
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LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON
Granta Spring ’14
Harper’s 6/14
F&SF 7-8/14
Asimov’s 8/14
Interzone 5-6/14
Lightspeed 7/14
Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) June 2014
Some catching up and some looks at unexpected sources this time. For example, the Spring Granta, a special issue about Japan, is of genre interest due to ‘‘Printable’’ by Toh EnJoe (who had a story in Strange Horizons last year).
‘‘Printable’’ begins as a somewhat Borgesian piece about translations and curious plagiarisms – writers copying stories other writers have not yet written. One story cited concerns a near future in which everything is printable – even meat and body parts, and eventually, inevitably, people. EnJoe takes this idea to stranger places still – though always fruitfully in contact with the story’s opening. Really excellent work.
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From Harper’s in June, ‘‘The Second Doctor Service’’ by Daniel Mason is a fine piece of fantastica. It’s told in the form of a letter from a country doctor, presumably in the 19th century, to a medical journal. Dr. Service reports his growing belief that his life is being taken over by another version of himself (a ‘‘second Dr. Service’’), who appears identical but is somehow better at almost everything (as even his wife confirms). A somewhat familiar idea perhaps, but very stylishly executed.
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The July-August F&SF is guest-edited by C.C. Finlay, the second guest-edited issue of a major ’zine in two months. I turn to the short stories first, and a couple of comic pieces I quite enjoyed. Annalee Flower Horne’s first published story, ‘‘Seven Things Cadet Blanchard Learned from the Trade Summit Incident’’, is feather light but very fun, about a spaceship’s Cadet-Captain with a reputation for pranks being unjustly charged with an incident at a trade summit. Also light but darker, if you see what I mean, is Sandra McDonald’s ‘‘End of the World Community College’’, a description of the course offering, and faculty at the title college, after a generalized apocalypse.
Two more short stories, not light at all, also impressed me. ‘‘Belly’’ by Haddayr Copley-Woods is a dark, gruesome, fairytale variation, about a girl eaten by a witch, and ‘‘imprisoned’’ in her belly for years. It’s uncompromising and oddly compelling. ‘‘The Only Known Law’’ by William Alexander concerns humans on the verge of colonizing another planet, and an alien messenger of sorts who is studied by two scientists, a man and his wife. It moves smartly to a familiar but effective moral.
The novelettes are a fine bunch as well. ‘‘Subduction’’ by Paul Berger is about an amnesiac who shows up on an island near Vancouver. He has no idea who he is, but he can see strange things, and perhaps he has unexpected powers – at least, so the cute but perhaps murderous woman he encounters thinks. Nice work. ‘‘Palm Strike’s Last Case’’ by Charlie Jane Anders is a superhero story – about a kind of messed-up superhero – and it’s also a planetary colonization story. An unexpected mixture, and I’m not sure it entirely works, but there’s a fair amount neat stuff here. David Erik Nelson’s ‘‘The Traveling Salesman Solution’’ is very dark SF about a wheelchair-bound veteran who stumbles across curious evidence that someone has solved the Traveling Salesman problem, and who understands what that means for society.
The best story though, is the last, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s ‘‘A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i’’. It’s a vampire story and in crude outlines it doesn’t seem too original: vampires have taken over and raise humans as cattle. The main character, Key, is a Hawaiian woman who has collaborated with humanity’s new rulers, partly out of infatuation for one of them and partly of hope that she may get the ultimate reward of being ‘‘turned.’’ So far, it’s nothing new, but after 40 years of reading this stuff I do worry that not much really seems new anymore. What matters is making familiar material fresh and special, and Johnson does so beautifully, as Key, having been sort of a trusty on a ‘‘farm’’ for years, is transferred to a much higher-class vampire resort after a favorite human has died. She is brought to see what the young humans, who are raised in luxury for the vampires to taste, really feel. The ending is as perfect as I’ve seen in a long time.
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Jay O’Connell contributes the novella to the August Asimov’s, ‘‘Of All Possible Worlds’’. Costas Regas lives in an apartment in Boston, with a curious old man as his landlord. The landlord has a secret, of course, and Costas stumbles onto it (the title hints at what it is). The old man can alter history, and he does so repeatedly, aware that each timeline he tries ends with humanity destroyed by one means or another. Once again, not a terribly new idea. O’Connell elaborates it by involving SF history – what sort of history is hinted at by the old man’s name: Mr. Hieronymus. That’s all kind of fun, and the central love story, between Costas and his wife, is sweet stuff. It adds up to an entertaining but ultimately not quite outstanding story. Indeed, this issue is full of pretty decent work that doesn’t quite go past decent to brilliant for me. Hard to complain too much, but hard to really celebrate it either.
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Neil Williamson’s ‘‘The Posset Pot’’, from the May-June Interzone, is set in a near future in which civilization has crashed due to the intrusion of ‘‘bubbles’’ from another world that seem to swap part of that world with whatever they intersect in our world. (Yes, again not the newest of ideas, but given a bit of a different spin here.) Of course that means, mostly, destruction (or death) for whatever or whoever is only halfway in a bubble. The posset pot of the title is found by the main character, who survives in Glasgow with an old man, mourning his wife, one of the first to disappear. Not much happens in the story – it’s about our slow increase in understanding the overall situation and the protagonist’s personal situation – and it works quite well.
I also like ‘‘Two Truths and a Lie’’ by Oliver Buckram, one of those stories whose structure makes it work. It’s told in brief sections, each ending with three statements, as with the title game: two are true and one is false. The story itself concerns a woman meeting a mysterious man coming out of the sea, their relationship, and her wondering if he’s an alien. Slight, I suppose, but quite well done.
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Lightspeed’s July issue opens with a severely satirical story by Adam-Troy Castro, ‘‘The New Provisions’’. The subject is corporate manipulation of the law, in this case made retroactive, so that the POV character, Phil, loses his car, his house, his job, his wife, and his freedom for increasingly absurd reasons. It’s quite entertaining, in a mordant way, but I can’t help thinking it’s so over the top that it undermines the main message, leaving the reader thinking, ‘‘Well, that would never happen,’’ instead of, ‘‘We have to stop this happening.’’ It’s a fine line. By comparison, in The Space Merchants, each step somehow made sense. That said, I quite liked the story.
The other story I really liked was ‘‘Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology’’ by Theodora Goss, in which a group of post-docs and grad students write about an imaginary country, creating history, religion, culture, etc., from scratch, then somehow find that it really exists. Did they create it? One of them ends up marrying a daughter of the Khan, and that is even stranger, as she has an identical twin who is ignored by everyone (as in Cimmeria, twins have no independent souls), but who follows them everywhere. Very Borgesian, of course, and very fine.
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Jonathan Strahan’s recent set of hard-SF-oriented original anthologies from Solaris have, it seems, become a sort of stealth series: all have ‘‘Infinity’’ in the title, and all center mostly (but not entirely) on space travel. The latest is Reach for Infinity, and it’s as good as the others, which is to say, highly recommended.
One of the non-space-oriented stories is ‘‘Trademark Bugs: A Legal History’�
� by Adam Roberts, which, like Castro’s ‘‘The New Provisions’’, is a satire on corporate rapacity, and which also perhaps overplays its hand. And which also is ghoulishly entertaining. Here pharmaceutical companies find themselves too successful for their own good: they’ve managed to pretty much cure everything so there’s no more need for new drugs. Their solution is to engineer new diseases, which then will require new pharmaceutical treatments. The story follows the legal challenges to aspects of this situation, and how ultimately the entire social order is changed as a result.
The book opens with a new story by Greg Egan, always welcome. ‘‘Break My Fall’’ is less mind-blowing than perhaps we expect: it’s pure hard SF, even almost ‘‘engineering fiction,’’ in that its main focus seems to be explicating a plausible idea for relatively inexpensive and fast travel from Earth to Mars, via Stepping Stones, with which the travelers’ small ships rendezvous and gain energy by slinging around them. Egan doesn’t forget to include an involving human story, about a disaster and a heroic rescue. Good stuff, if not Egan’s very best.
I could go on and on: there’s a strong new Karl Schroeder story about arms inspector Gennady Malianov, ‘‘Kheldyu’’. Here he is investigating a pretty neat installation in Siberia, a huge tower designed to extract cheap energy while removing excess CO2 – a win-win situation, it seems – but vulnerable to malicious misuse. There’s a good piece from Karen Lord, ‘‘Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts’’, about a person who becomes increasingly cyborgized, partly in an attempt to escape a sort of spacesickness that seems to make space habitable only by robots. There’s another, rather gleefully nastier story about robots controlling space exploration, Alastair Reynolds’s ‘‘In Babelsberg’’. And there are a couple of fine pieces about quite different new art forms: ‘‘The Dust Queen’’ by Aliette de Bodard, and ‘‘‘The Whole Immense Superstructure’: An Installation’’ by Ken MacLeod.
And, finally, my favorite piece in the book is from Hannu Rajaniemi. ‘‘Invisible Planets’’ is quite openly an hommage to Italo Calvino (and his book Invisible Cities), but it stands on its own. It comprises a few brief sections describing different unusual planets, and I liked it for the impressive imagination displayed in describing each planet, and for the real feeling conveyed by the linking material.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘Two Truths and a Lie’’, Oliver Buckram (Interzone 5-6/14)
‘‘The New Provisions’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed 7/14)
‘‘Belly’’, Haddayr Copley-Woods (F&SF 7-8/14)
‘‘Printable’’, Toh EnJoe (Granta Spring ’14)
‘‘Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology’’, Theodora Goss (Lightspeed 7/14)
‘‘A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i’’, Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)
‘‘The Second Doctor Service’’, Daniel Mason (Harper’s 6/14)
‘‘Invisible Planets’’, Hannu Rajaniemi (Reach for Infinity)
‘‘Trademark Bugs: A Legal History’’, Adam Roberts (Reach for Infinity)
‘‘Kheldyu’’, Karl Schroeder (Reach for Infinity)
‘‘The Posset Pot’’, Neil Williamson (Interzone 5-6/14)
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;
–Rich Horton
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
Beautiful Blood, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean 978-1-59606-652-6, $40.00, 292pp, hc) July 2014. Cover by J.K. Potter. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
Academic Exercises, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-59606-609-0, $40.00, 530pp, hc) July 2014.
The Severed Streets, Paul Cornell (Tor 978-1-42994-385-7, $26.99, 407pp, hc) May 2014.
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon 978-1-61696-171-8, $14.95, 192pp, tp) August 2014.
Unexpected Stories, Octavia E. Butler (Open Road 978-1-49760-137-6, $3.99, 90pp, e-book) June 2014. [Order from
In his story notes for The Dragon Griaule, his compilation of stories about that famous mile-long sleeping dragon, Lucius Shepard said of his abortive attempts to kill it off, ‘‘Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.’’ With the first Griaule novel, Beautiful Blood, appearing only months after Shepard’s untimely death in March, that offhand comment takes on a sadly prescient tone. He also mentions in those notes that each story seemed to contain the germ of yet another story, and indeed the basic outline of the story of Shepard’s narrator Richard Rossacher shows up in a footnote to the 2010 novella ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’, in which Rossacher is described as ‘‘a young medical doctor’’ who derived from the dragon blood ‘‘a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the population of the Temalaguan littoral’’ and who later became a kind of evangelist of Griaule’s divinity. As it turns out, these events are only episodes in the remarkable decades-long tale of Rossacher, who emerges as one of Shepard’s more memorable characters in a tale that rivals ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’ as the best of the Griaule stories.
Beautiful Blood also links with the original Griaule story, ‘‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’’, in that its timeline encompasses that story, and Meric Cattanay, the artist who proposes gradually killing the dragon with poisoned paint, shows up as a minor character here. But the stage is dominated by Rossacher, who begins as a poor but idealistic hematologist hoping that a derivative of the dragon’s blood might work as an anti-clotting agent, and soon discovers that it does far more than that – even giving him a kind of Dorian Gray-style extended youth after he’s injected himself with it – and eventually sets himself up as a wealthy drug lord controlling the supply of the addictive derivative called MAB (for ‘‘more and better’’). One of the apparent effects of Rossacher’s initial overdose, though, is that he occasionally loses years of memories. He’s surprised to wake up one morning and discover that he’s not only wealthy, but that the prostitute Ludie, who had been one of his few friends, is now the manager of his business empire, although she now seems strangely distant from him. Seeking to improve his relations with both civic and church authorities (who have attempted to assassinate him), Rossacher forms an uneasy alliance with a cynical councilman named Jean-Daniel Breque (interestingly, the name of the French translator of The Dragon Griaule). He also forms a relationship with Martita, a maid whom he had raped after she rescued him from the assassination attempt, and eventually with an investigator named Amelita, who proves to be the love of his life – though his effort to reward her with his own formula for eternal youth backfires in a bizarre way. He does indeed spend a period as a kind of evangelical philosopher of the dragon’s divinity, but through a series of misjudgments and betrayals ends up spending much of his life in exile from his home Carbonales Valley and the dragon itself, whose fate here is a bit different from that suggested in earlier tales.
There is more than enough material here for a novel three times the length of Beautiful Blood, but Shepard, for all his occasional flights of lyrical excess, was really a rather economical writer, and it may be that the novella was the most suitable arena for the kinds of stories he told, with enough space to intrigue us with characters and settings, and enough vacancies to leave us wanting more. Beautiful Blood, both fortunately and unfortunately, leaves us wanting more. For one thing, the geography and history of the tale seem to shift in unexpected ways, initially clearly related to Europe (Rossacher supposedly studied in Berlin and read von Humboldt and Alfred Russell Wallace), but when Rossacher finds himself in exile in a nearby kingdom, it seems closer to the Latin American setting of Shepard’s ‘‘The Skull’’ – it has a jungle which is in danger of being chopped down, and the king regrets the oppression that resulted ‘‘when the fruit compa
nies moved in.’’ There are, rewardingly, several such allusions to a spectrum of Shepard’s prior work in this novel, and a strong suggestion that this imaginative world – which he told us in the very first story is ‘‘separated from our own by the thinnest margin of possibility’’ – may be as huge and enigmatic as that dragon itself, and possibly as long lasting.
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There may be a good reason why K.J. Parker is the only author to win back-to-back World Fantasy Awards for novellas (in 2012 and 2013). As engaging and popular as Parker’s novels have been, the remarkable outpouring of shorter fiction over the last five years or so – nearly all of it collected in Academic Exercises and most having appeared originally from Subterranean Press – is practically a master class in the form, a body of work that suggests an already accomplished artist refining a particular instrument while still experimenting with structure and technique. Parker’s familiar dry and mordant wit is still much in evidence, as is the meticulous attention to procedural matters and odd bits of microhistorical lore (like the inconvenience and expense of obtaining blue pigments for manuscript illuminations), but readers are going to find a good deal more magic than in the novels (even though the adepts practicing it resolutely deny they are doing so) and a lot more first-person narrators, who are about as reliable as you’d expect from Parker’s familiar gallery of scurrilous if amiable rogues, scoundrels, liars, cowards, and double-crossers.
Locus, August 2014 Page 8
