Locus, April 2013

by Locus Publications

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  It’s amazing how much the first stories in an anthology set the tone for the reader’s experience. In both the anthologies under consideration this month, I tended to judge the stories by the standards set by the opening pieces. This works well for John Joseph Adam’s latest volume The Mad Scientist’s World Guide to Domination, which leads off with a story by Austin Grossman titled ‘‘Professor Incognito Apologizes: An Itemized List’’. In this tongue-in-cheek story, a supervillain pre-records an apology for his girlfriend, because he just knows that she’s going to find her way into his secret lab. He goes over their history and his attempts at leading a double life, and I enjoyed it even more than Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible. The short story is a more concentrated dose of the irony and humor that seemed a bit watered down in the novel.

  Harry Turtledove continues the tongue-in-cheek vibe with ‘‘Father of the Groom’’, in which the eponymous mad scientist takes a dislike to his son’s Bridezilla-to-be. While I thought that the narrator was overly snarky, this is a fun story. And that’s what most of the anthology proves to be: a whole lot of really fun stories playing with the tropes of the superhero/supervillain relationship. Seanan McGuire’s story ‘‘Laughter at the Academy’’ posits an alternate world where there is a testable disorder that turns geniuses into mad scientists, and describes the meta-villain exploiting that weakness in others. David Levine gives the supervillain a chance to air his side of the story in a ‘‘Letter to the Editor’’. Heather Lindsley’s supervillainess is saving up money for her world domination schemes by counseling other villains in ‘‘The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan’’. One of my favorites in the volume is ‘‘Ancient Equations’’ by the late L.A. Banks, featuring a mad scientist who’s gone off the reservation on the organic/new age/occult side of the road instead of the fascist superweapon side.

  Several stories also take on the supervillain’s assistant: In ‘‘Captain Justice Saves the Day’’ Genevieve Valentine gives us the perspective of the harried admin dealing with a boss who might be from hell if he were more competent. In one of two reprints, Jeremiah Tolbert’s ‘‘Instead of a Loving Heart’’ has a more sombre take on the involuntary lackey’s role. Laird Barron gives us a darkly twisted assistant in ‘‘Blood and Stardust’’.

  The biggest problem with the anthology comes in the middle. After a wide variety of quick, punchy, mostly ironic stories, the volume comes to a screeching halt with Diana Gabaldon’s very long historical story, ‘‘The Space Between’’. It is a complete shift in tone, setting, and theme that suffers immensely in contrast to the breezy stories that come before. It takes awhile for things to get back on track, and, in fact, that anthology concludes with some of the more reflective pieces.

  Those reflective stories include the other reprint entry, the amazing ‘‘Mad Scientist’s Daughter’’ by Theodora Goss, which brings together the daughters of several 19th-century mad scientists in one London house – a lovely story, and quite sharp. ‘‘Mofongo Knows’’ by Grady Hendrix asks what happens when the old stories end, with a tale of the rather sordid and unglamorous retirement of some stock pulp characters. ‘‘Rocks Fall’’ by Naomi Novik gives us the perspective of a mid-level superhero confronted with a vastly superior, but still rather human, supervillain. It’s a quiet story, not at all what you’d expect. And the anthology winds up with Ben H. Winters’s ‘‘The Food Taster’s Boy’’, which gives us a horrific look at what might come to pass if the supervillain were to win. All in all this is a really interesting anthology that gives us a number of perspectives, mostly funny but also often thoughtful, on this most clichéd trope of adventure fiction.

  •

  In Victoria Blake’s Cyberpunk anthology, by contrast, the leading stories set an almost impossible standard. The anthology opens with William Gibson’s ‘‘Johnny Mnemonic’’ (1981) and ‘‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’’ (1985) by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. These are both core cyberpunk stories that pull absolutely no punches. Their worldbuilding comes fast and furious, making no allowances for the reader. Even when the narration is infodumping, it’s like the story’s speaking to a future reader, one who is closer to this future (and probably hipper and cooler than you, too). They’re hyperkinetic and alienating to read, whether it’s Johnny navigating the cyborg criminal underworld or Rice cavorting with 18th-century nobility and ignoring his rapacious corporate duties. These stories are so emblematic that one spends the rest of the anthology asking each story in turn: ‘‘How cyber is it, and how punk?’’ And with many of the stories, compared to Gibson and Sterling/Shiner, the answer comes back: not that much.

  The next three stories are particularly different in tone and substance. ‘‘Interview with a Crab’’ (2005) by Jonathan Lethem follows directly after ‘‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’’, but has none of the same affect. It’s an interesting story, putting a surrealist spin on modern media culture, but it’s hard to regard it as either terribly cyber or terribly punk. Likewise, ‘‘El Pepenador’’ (2012) by Benjamin Parzybok has cyborgs and the nitty gritty of a trash-picker’s life, but doesn’t in any way match the aesthetic of the first stories. ‘‘Down and Out in the Year 2000’’ (1986) by Kim Stanley Robinson was included, according to the editor’s introduction, specifically because it is a critique of cyberpunk’s attitude towards ‘‘the street.’’ Robinson reminds us of just how grinding, demeaning, and unadventurous poverty really is. It deliberately sucks all the punk out of cyberpunk.

  Two of the only stories that do rise to the aesthetic bar set early on are, unsurprisingly, by other core cyberpunk writers. Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Rock On’’ (1984) features an old woman, who is integral to rock and roll, being forced to help pathetic imitators, and does so in prose reminiscent of beat poetry. Rudy Rucker’s 1982 ‘‘The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics’’ literally brings back Kerouac’s ghost in a drug-fueled vision. Compared to these early stories, everything else seems sedate and restrained.

  That’s not to say that there aren’t fantastic stories here. In a reprint anthology, the editor can be choosy and pick the best. David Marusek’s ‘‘Getting to Know You’’ (1997) holds up very well as the intrusive nature of an ‘‘assistant’’ AI becomes apparent. Cat Rambo’s ‘‘Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars’’ (2007) is an excellent story of poverty, love, and death, where the narrator has a very distinctive voice. The protagonist of Gwyneth Jones’s ‘‘Blue Clay Blues’’ (1992) is juggling an investigation in a backwater town and his small daughter at the same time. ‘‘The Nostalgist’’ (2009) by Daniel H. Wilson uses augmented reality to aggressively deny reality, although the story is so sentimental that it seems a stretch to put it in a cyberpunk volume. ‘‘Mr. Boy’’ (1990) by James Patrick Kelly is an amazing tale of extreme body-modification among the over-privileged, although, more fundamentally, it is a story about growing up. Paul Di Filippo’s ‘‘Life in the Anthropocene’’ (2010) has perhaps my favorite worldbuilding in the volume, with a world mostly settled into its reaction to the ravages of climate change, but where not everyone is happy about the new arrangements.

  There are also newer stories that play with form and structure. ‘‘The Blog at the End of the World’’ (2008) by Paul Tremblay is just like it sounds, and it manages the reverse chronology of the blog format well. Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘User-Centric’’ (1999) is told in the form of a threaded e-mail conversation in a product development team and is absolutely convincing. In ‘‘The Lost Technique of Blackmail’’ (2009) Mark Teppo deftly combines cyberpunk and noir, with one of the most ornate and alienating pieces of worldbuilding since the founders’ stories.

  Of course, some stories leave you questioning the ones not included. Greg Bear’s ‘‘Fall of the House of Escher’’ (1996) makes me wish that Greg Egan’s ‘‘Dust’’ (the precursor to his break-out novel Permutation City) had been included, as it covered the concerns of uploaded immortals so well. Lewis Shiner’s ‘‘Soldier, Sailor’’ (1990), with
its allusive story set on Mars put me in mind of Hannu Rajaniemi. Some of his stories, particularly ‘‘His Master’s Voice’’ and his novel The Quantum Thief, share the over-the-top kinetic aesthetics that I associate with cyberpunk.

  It might have helped if the collection went for story notes on each story, instead of relying on the brief Introduction to make the argument that these stories represent the evolution of cyberpunk. In the end, I felt like I had a collection of very good stories, but not a particularly convincing argument about the subgenre’s progression into the future.

  –Karen Burnham

  TIM PRATT

  Tenth of December, George Saunders (Random House 978-0812993802, $26.00, 272pp, hc) January 2013.

  Of the ten stories in George Saunders’s breathtaking new collection Tenth of December, only three make unambiguous use of speculative elements. A fourth, the chilling story-in-memo-form ‘‘Exhortation’’, could have appeared in a genre magazine without arousing comment, hinting as it does at a vast dystopian bureaucracy. So, with just three-tenths (maybe two-fifths) of the book qualifying as speculative fiction, why review it in Locus?

  Well, Saunders is almost one of ours. He’s been publishing ambitious, accomplished, blackly funny fiction for years, and often uses the machinery of SF to achieve his satirical ends or to enliven his social commentary, much the way Kurt Vonnegut did. He routinely slips SF stories into the pages of The New Yorker (which, to be fair, is more welcoming to SF than most genre readers probably realize), and previous books, including Civilwarland in Bad Decline and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, also contained work of genre interest. While many literary authors who dabble in speculative matters do so clumsily, Saunders has a great head for extrapolation, and for cataloguing the human consequences of advanced technologies. He’s one of our best living short fiction writers, producing work full of vibrant writing, heartbreakingly believable characters, and observations so sharp they cut to the bone.

  ‘‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’’ is one of the best stories published in the past year, in genre or out. Written as the diary of an anxious husband and father, just barely in the middle class and obsessed with giving his children a better life (or the appearance of one), he risks financial disaster by investing in the newest craze: ‘‘Semplica Girls,’’ women from the Third World who undergo surgery to run a microfiber thread through their heads from temple to temple. The women are dressed in white and hung on those threads in the yards of wealthy Americans as decorations. The Semplica Girls get money to send back to their families, and the customers get to show off their wealth. It’s an over-the-top idea, but it cuts to the heart of Western exploitation, social climbing, and class anxiety – and it’s also funny, harrowing, and sad.

  ‘‘Escape from Spiderhead’’ takes place in a private prison run by a pharmaceutical company, where the inmates serve as guinea pigs for new drugs. Our viewpoint character is a regretful felon named Jeff, who experiences the effects of several cleverly named drugs, including the ‘‘VerbaLuce’’ that makes him eloquent, the ‘‘VeriTalk’’ that compels truthfulness, and the ‘‘ErthAdmire’’ that makes him appreciate the serenity of nature. He’s given a new experimental drug that makes him fall intensely in love with a pair of female inmates (who are dosed with the same drug), but only temporarily – the commercial applications are obvious. When the researchers test whether any lingering romantic feelings remain by forcing Jeff to choose which of the women should receive the brutal punishment drug DarkenFloxx, which causes suicidal levels of depression, the remnants of his essential humanity compel him to resist.

  ‘‘My Chivalric Fiasco’’ could be set in the same world, with a guy named Ted hired at the local Renaissance Faire and given a drug that makes him act (and think, and talk) like the fictional notion of chivalrous knight, complete with Random Capitalizations of Important Words. But while such chivalric effects make for good theater, they make for bad workplace interactions when the ‘‘king’’ at the Faire doesn’t live up to Ted’s new Standards of Proper Behavior.

  Unless you have an extreme aversion to realistic stories, the rest of the collection will wow you, too. ‘‘Home’’, about a soldier returning to a country that seems unreal and a family he barely comprehends, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist last year and is one of the best treatments of PTSD and the difficulty of readjusting to civilian life that I’ve ever read. ‘‘Victory Lap’’ is a perfect crime story and character study, with time spent in the minds of the victim, the perpetrator, and the bystander who steps in; ‘‘Tenth of December’’ is the affecting tale of a man who decides to die, and ends up saving someone’s life instead; and ‘‘Puppy’’ is a wrenching vignette about poverty, social anxiety, and people doing wrong while trying to do right.

  All of Saunders’s stories are notable for their pitch-perfect characterization and exquisite handling of viewpoint. The people in his stories seem entirely real, and no matter how outlandish the premises, the characters are utterly grounded psychologically. We know these people. We believe in these people. Sometimes we are these people.

  –Tim Pratt

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LISTENS TO AUDIOBOOKS: AMY GOLDSCHLAGER

  Red Country, Joe Abercrombie

  The Alchemist and The Executioness, Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell

  Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed.

  City of Dark Magic, Magnus Flyte

  Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone

  Devil Said Bang, Richard Kadrey

  The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman

  Red Country, Joe Abercrombie; Steven Pacey, narrator (Hachette Audio 9781619692336, digital download, $26.98, 20 hr., unabridged) November 2012.

  Steven Pacey perfectly expresses the rampant cynicism and emotional complexity of Joe Abercrombie’s latest gritty fantasy. When mercenaries burn down Shy South’s farm and kidnap her younger sister and brother to sell to religious fanatics made barren by radiation, she determines to go after them. Her companion on her quest is her stepfather Lamb, whose obviously fake name and notorious reputation as a coward are clearly shields for an extraordinarily violent past (readers/listeners of Abercrombie’s previous works will quickly ferret out his true identity). Along the way, they collect inconsistently reliable allies and enemies, including Shy’s potential love interest Temple, a weaselly lawyer who’s slowly and inconveniently developing a conscience. Pacey has a gift for devising truly distinct voices for each character, with plausible accents. His women’s voices are not as strong as they might be, as his voice is somewhat too deep for women’s roles, but they still work fairly well. Plus, when feudal social divisions play such a strong role in a story’s underpinnings, a British narrator tends to be better at highlighting them than an American might. This production offers plenty of action, humor, tension, and blessedly unsaccharine, absolutely genuine warm moments.

  •

  The Alchemist and The Executioness, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tobias S. Buckell; Katherine Kellgren and Jonathan Davis, narrators (Brilliance Audio 978-1-4692-8029-5, 5 CDs, $19.99, 5.5 hr., unabridged [also available as MP3-CD and digital download]) January 2010.

  Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell each offer up a passionate paean to parenthood in novella form, set in a shared universe where profligate use of magic has brought forth the toxic bramble, which chokes arable lands and poisons those who touch it. In Bacigalupi’s ‘‘The Alchemist’’, the title character nearly beggars himself to create a device and concoct a potion that will destroy the bramble, allowing him to use the magic that is the only cure for his daughter’s lung disease. Unfortunately, when he finally succeeds in his quest, the city rulers have an unexpected and unpleasant use for his invention. Jonathan Davis’s grave, sonorous tones perfectly suit the desperate, obsessed, and sadly naïve alchemist.

  The title character of Buckell’s story is the daughter of one of the city’s executioners, who reluctantly picks up the axe of his office when he is too ill to accept the
duty himself. That same day, raiders attack, killing her husband and carrying away her two sons to an unknown fate. Axe in hand, she races off in pursuit, creating a legend that she must somehow do her best to live up to.

  Is there any voice that Katherine Kellgren can’t do? She has the gift, as the best voice actors do, of utterly vanishing vocally into a part. She chooses an indefinably ‘‘foreign-sounding’’ accent for the executioness. It’s incredibly charming, but admittedly inconsistent with Davis’s performance, as he didn’t use that accent in his narration, even though both stories are initially set in the same city and even share a character. This is an all-too-common occurrence when multiple narrators are employed; I really wish more effort was made to bring narrators together and allow them to come to mutual agreement on accent, pitch, and so on. Both Davis’s and Kellgren’s performances are lovely as separate entities; I just think that the potential was there to make them an even more perfect whole. Nonetheless, this collection is quite worthy of your time, and essential if you’d like to encounter these stories together; the print versions are only available separately.

  •

  Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed.; Wil Wheaton, Scott Brick, Christian Rummel, Jonathan Davis, Stefan Rudnicki, David Marantz, Ilyana Kadushin, Khristine Hvam, L.J. Ganser, Dina Pearlman, Allyson Johnson, Marc Vietor, Nicola Barber, narrators (Audible Frontiers, digital download, $27.97, 12 hr., unabridged) November 2012.

  Sometimes I feel terribly redundant, writing about the audio version of books previously reviewed as text. That’s why it’s so pleasing to offer you something unique, an audio-only anthology commissioned by Audible Frontiers, edited by Gardner Dozois, and featuring new stories by SFWA members. Each story begins with a first line appropriated from classic literature, from such disparate works as Pride and Prejudice and the Communist Manifesto. Each story has its own narrator (a true rarity, and the lineup includes some of the most prominent voice actors in the field), and an introduction spoken by the author.