Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Over there,” offered bin-Sawbones, pointing: “you can't miss it, head for the two hulking eunuchs and the evil vizier.” She pushed me hard in the small of my back. “Sorry, but business is business and when you're trying to marry the second richest man on Mars you can't be too picky, eh?"

  * * * *

  13. Jeremy Pulls it off

  The exit was unfortunately obstructed by Ibn Cut-Throat and his merry headsmen—with Abdul in tow, glassy-eyed and arms outstretched, muttering about brains. And Ibn Cut-Throat had spotted us!

  One thing I will credit the blighter with: his sense of spectacle was absolutely classical. “Ah, Mister MacDonald!” he cried, menacingly twirling the anti-chemwar vibrissae glued to his upper lip. “How disappointing to see you here! I must confess I hoped you'd have sense enough to stay in your room and keep out of trouble. I suppose now you hope I'm going to tell you all my plans, then lock you in an inadequately secured cell so you can escape? I'm afraid not: I shall simply have you cut off shortly, chop-chop. My game's afoot, and none will stop it now, for the ineluctable dialectic of history is on my side!"

  “I don't care what your dastardly scheme is, I have a bone to pick with you, my man!” I cried. The two headsmen took a step forward, and Laura clung to me in fear—whether feigned or otherwise I could not tell. “How dare you kidnap my concubine on the eve of a drop! That's not cricket, or even baseball, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I see you in any of my clubs, even by the tradesmen's entrance!” Meanwhile, Laura thrust a shapely arm inside my abaya and was fumbling with something in my dinner jacket pocket; but my attention was fixed on the villain before me.

  “Clubs.” The word dropped from his lips with stony disinterest. “As if the degenerate recreations of the class enemy would be of any interest to me!” I shuddered: it's always a bad sign when the hired help starts talking in polysyllables. One of his nostrils flared angrily. “Clubs and sports and jolly capers, that's all you parasites think of as you gobble down our surplus wealth like the monstrous leeches you are!” I'd struck a nerve, as I could see from the throbbing vein in his temple and the set of his jaw. “Bloated ticks languishing in the lap of luxury and complaining about your parties and fashions while millions slave for your banquets! Bah.” Laura unwrapped her arm from my robe and covered her face, evidently to shield herself from the scoundrel's accusations. “When we strive to better ourselves you turn your faces away and sneer, and when we give up you use us as beasts of burden! Well, I've had enough. It's time to return your stolen loot to the toiling non-U proletarian masses."

  My jaw dropped. “Dash it all, man, you can't be serious! Are you telling me you're a...?"

  “Yes,” he grated, his eyes aflame with vindictive glee: “the crisis of capitalism is finally at hand, at long last! It's about seven centuries and a Great Downsizing overdue, but it's time to bring about the dictatorship of the non-U and the resurrection of the proletariat! And your friend Abdul al-Matsumoto is going to play a key role in bringing about the final raising of class consciousness by fertilizing the soil of Olympus with the blood of a thousand maidens, and then crown himself Big Brother and institute a reign of terror that will—"

  Unfortunately I can't tell you how the Ibn-Cut Throat Committee for the Revolution intended to proceed, because we were simultaneously interrupted by two different people: namely, by Laura, who extended her shapely hand and spritzed him down with after-shave: and then by Jeremy.

  Now, it helps to be aware that harems are not exactly noted for their testosterone-drenched atmosphere. I was, of course, the odd squishie out. Old Edgy was clearly hors de combat or combat des whores (if you'll strangle my French) and the Toadster was also otherwise engaged, exploring conic sections with the fembot he'd been chasing earlier. But aside from myself and Ibn Cut-Throat—and, I suppose, Abdul, if he was still at home upstairs what with that crab-thingie plastered to his noggin—they were the only remotely butch people present.

  Jeremy had been in smelly, sullen retreat for the past week. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was in musth, that state in which a male mammoth or elephant hates and resents other males because the universe acquires a crystal clarity and his function in life is to ... well, Edgestar and Toadsworth got there first, minus the trumpeting and displays of aggression, but I'm sure you understand? There were no other small male mammals present, but Jeremy was well aware of his enemy, and his desperate need to assert his alpha-male dominance before he could go in search of cows to cover—and more importantly, there was one particular scent he associated with the enemy from long mutual acquaintance. His enemy smelled like me. But I was shrouded in a blackly occlusive robe, while Ibn Cut-Throat had just been doused in my favorite splash. And whatever Jeremy's other faults, he's never been slow to jump to a conclusion.

  I do not know what passed through the 80 percent of Jeremy's cranial capacity that serves as target acquisition and fire control, but he made his choice almost instantly and launched himself straight for where Ibn Cut-Throat's crown jewels had once resided. Proboscideans are not usually noted for their glide ratio, but, in the weaker than accustomed Martian gravity, Jeremy was positively aerobatic, as he jumped with grace and elegance and tusks, straight for Toshiro's tushie.

  “Tally ho, old boy!” I shouted, giving him the old school best, as Laura took two steps smartly forward and, raising her skirts, daintily kick-boxed headsman number one in the forehead with one of her most pointed assets—for her ten centimeter stiletto heels are not only jolly fine pins, they're physical extensions of her chrome-plated ankles.

  Now I confess that things looked dicey when headsman number two turned on me with his axe and bared his teeth at me. But I'm not the Suzuki of MacDonald for nothing, and I know a thing or two about fighting! I threw the abaya back over my head to free my arms, and pointed Toadsworth's Inebriator—which he had earlier entrusted to my safekeeping in order to free up a socket for his Inseminator—at the villain. “Drop it! Or I'll drop you!” I snarled.

  My threat didn't work. The thug advanced on me, and as he raised his blade I discovered to my horror that the Toadster must have some very double-jointed fingers in order to work that trigger. But just as the barber of Baghdad was about to trim my throat, a svelte black silhouette drew up behind him and poured a canister of vile brown ichor over his head! Screaming and burbling imprecations, he sank to the floor clawing at his eyes, just in time for Laura to finish him off with a flamenco stomp.

  Miss Feng cleared her throat apologetically as she lowered the empty firkin to the floor. (The brightly painted tiles began to blur and run where its damp rim rested on them.) “Sir might be pleased to note that one has taken the liberty of moving his yacht round to the tradesmen's entrance and disabling the continental defense array in anticipation of Sir's departure. Was Sir planning to stay for the bombe surprise, or would he agree that this is one party that he would prefer to cut short?"

  I glanced at Ibn Cut-Throat, who was still writhing in agony under Jeremy's merciless onslaught, and then at the two pithed headsmen. “I think it's a damned shame to outstay our welcome at any party, don't you agree?” (Laura nodded enthusiastically and knelt to tickle Jeremy's trunk.) “By all means, let's leave. If you'd be so good as to pour a bucket of cold water over Edgy and the Toadster, I'll take Abdul in hand and we can drop him off at a discreet clinic where they treat spinal crabs, what-what?"

  “That's a capital idea, Sir. I shall see to it at once.” Miss Feng set off to separate the miscreants from their amorous attachments.

  I turned to Laura, who was still tickling Jeremy—who by now was lying on his back, panting—and raised an eyebrow. “Isn't he sweet?” she sang.

  “If you say so. You're carrying him, though,” I said, ungratefully. “Let's hie thee well and back to Castle Pookie. This has been altogether too much of the wrong kind of company for me, and I could do with a nightcap in civilized company."

  “Darling!” She grabbed me enthusiastically by the trousers: “and we ca
n watch a replay of your jump together!"

  And indeed, to cut a long story short, that's exactly what we did—but first I took the precaution of locking Jeremy in the second best guest suite's dungeon with a bottle of port, and gave Miss Feng the night off.

  After all, two's company but three's jolly confusing, what?

  Copyright © 2006 Charles Stross

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  * * *

  IN THE LIGHT ROOM

  by John Garrison

  the photographer patiently renders

  her obscured subjects—

  singularities, dark matter,

  conspiracies, impossible sciences—

  into precise, radiant stillness.

  —John Garrison

  Copyright © 2006 John Garrison

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  * * *

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU

  This month's SF Sudoku puzzle, the subject of which was suggested by sudoku contest runner-up James Goreham, is solved using the letters AEJMNORST. Place a letter into each box so that each row across, each column down, and each small nine-box square within the larger diagram (there are nine of these) will contain each of these letters. No letter will appear more than once in any row, column, or smaller nine-box square. The solution is determined through logic and the process of elimination. Beneath the puzzle is a set of twelve blanks. Rearrange the following letters for an SF concept: A, A, E, J, M, N, N, O, R, S, S, and T. The solution to each puzzle is independent of the other. We've inverted the answer to the anagram so that you don't come upon it by accident.

  * * * *

  * * * *

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  * * *

  ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  Beautiful Dreamer

  t's been a banner period for new volumes concerning the life and career of artist Winsor McCay, he of Little Nemo fame. Checker Publishing—www.checkerbpg.com—continues their series of Early Works, which is now up to Volume Six. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, by John Canemaker and Maurice Sendak, offers us insights into the man behind the drawings. And Little Nemo in Slumberland—So Many Splendid Sundays, by Winsor McCay and Peter Maresca, having debuted in a gloriously oversized edition of limited availability, is now out of print and selling for three times its original price online.

  Today I'd like to look at another entry in the McCay revival: Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (Fantagraphics, trade paperback, $24.95, 176 pages, ISBN 156097569-5). For lack of editorial attribution, I have to assume that the book was compiled by publisher Gary Groth, with input perhaps from the author of the book's intelligent preface, Richard Marschall.

  Whoever selected and sorted these B&W images, they've chosen wisely and arranged intelligently. The lead-in material covers McCay's pioneering work in the animated cartoon medium, using McCay's own words in the form of a couple of essays. Then follow chapters respectively titled “Early Magazine Work,” “Newspaper Fantasy Illustrations,” “Midsummer Daydreams and Other Comic Strips,” “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” “Sunday Excursions,” and “Sermons on Paper.” You'll note the absence of any Little Nemo, which strikes me as a judicious move, given the wide exposure of that icon.

  The allure of these drawings for the typical Asimov's reader lies in their fantastical subject matter and treatment. With the exception of one or two mimetic editorial cartoons, every image herein depicts striking phenomena or actions or scenery that are either science fictional or surreal or absurd or oneiric. On p. 89, we find the mordant “Busy to the End,” which presents a post-apocalyptic city street where a Robinson Crusoe survivor is still vainly trying to hoard cash on the steps of a shattered bank. On page 127, “You Will See This” features an airliner of the future big as the Titanic. “Here God has Placed Us” (p. 139) is an allegory of mankind's place in the cosmos.

  These full-page canvases are rivaled only by the compact comic strips that McCay prodigiously produced. In all of them, his masterful architectural renderings, along with the machinery and furniture of everyday life, conspire with his fevered imagination to produce sights straight out of Dali. A jealous suitor flattens his rival like a piece of tin. A man's head swells and explodes in a burst of clockwork. A snow-eating dinosaur emerges from a suburban garage. The Sphinx of Egypt comes alive and capers after a tourist. An asparagus shoot pokes from the soil and swiftly matures to Jack-in-the-Beanstalk proportions. And so on and so on, with nary a repeat.

  One of McCay's great themes was the mutability of form, with objects transforming or altering their proportions. For instance, on p. 64, we witness a fur coat become a live bear, which promptly begins to savage its former wearer. This kind of protean identity shifting harks back to Greek myths—woman into tree, man into deer. Beneath their hilarious comedic surface—which itself is no trivial façade—McCay's art speaks to universal fantasies regarding the commonality of all existence.

  But what's also neat about this work is its historicity. Like all geniuses, McCay was both timeless and of his time. His strips are full of archetypes of the early twentieth-century USA: plutocrats, immigrants, housewives, Penrod boys, Pollyanna girls, office drones, boulevardiers, showgirls, and foxy grampas. From the point of view of the twenty-first century, nostalgia for a “simpler” era wafts potently off the page.

  Likewise, McCay partakes of the Rooseveltian/ Edwardian utopianism familiar to SF readers from the Gernsback/Frank Paul axis. McCay's delight in the glories of progress (see “Men Will Live on Mountaintops,” p. 129, for one instance) was matched only by his fears that stupidity would bring the whole edifice of civilization toppling down, resulting in the Thomas-Cole-style destruction he likewise exulted in as warning prophecy.

  The final image in this wonderful book is a curious allegory. A man stands with his back to the viewer at the edge of a Grand Canyon vista. But at the bottom of the canyon is the skyscraper-clustered island of Manhattan, unmistakable in its portrayal. What is arguably the quintessential urban center of the modern world is dwarfed by the natural surroundings into which it has been transplanted. The city is somehow simultaneously both diminished and exalted by this transposition. And the lone human viewer on his godlike perch—could this be McCay himself, contemplating the source of his inspiration from a celestial vantage, and thereby gaining some new perspective on both its worth and its inconsequence?

  Even now, in the early years of a new century, McCay still towers over all those appreciators and creators he continues to inspire.

  * * * *

  And one of those heirs is certainly the artist Tony Millionaire. Millionaire's work—most of which is in arresting black and white, just like McCay's—shares a lot of features with the master's. Like McCay, Millionaire can produce stunning architectural or landscape vistas, populated by rubbery humans and monsters. He's concerned with the intersection of reality and fantasy. And his plots and characters often manifest a kind of deliberately naïve (yet seldom campy or twee) stream-of-consciousness surrealism.

  Millionaire's latest graphic novel, Billy Hazelnuts (Fantagraphics, hardcover, $19.95, 110 pages, ISBN 156097701-9) is a magnificent introduction to Millionaire's oeuvre (much of which centers around his ragbag hero, Sock Monkey), a perfect jumping-on point for readers of all ages. Here, Millionaire's drawing and storytelling combine to produce another rousingly scary comedic adventure with less grimness than some of his work. (Will we ever forget Sock Monkey's suicide bid?)

  The bad mice who live in the Rim-perton household are determined to get back at the lady of the kitchen, who thwarts their raids. They fashion a kind of little golem out of organic debris and animate it. This is the eponymous Billy Hazelnuts, named for the nuts that serve as his eyes. Billy fails to achieve the goals of the mice, but is adopted by Becky Rimperton, the young savant modeled along the lines of Alan Moore's Jack B. Quick or Dexter from TV's Dexter's Laboratory.

  Before you can say “jealous mad scienti
st suitor” (Becky's nerdy neighbor, Eugene, fills that role), Becky and Billy are abroad on myriad adventures, including a visit to the dump for smashed planets and a ferocious battle between Eugene's robotic pirate ship and Becky's transmogrified militant Noah's Ark. Becky and Billy will undergo separation and loss, but all comes round fine in the tender climax.

  Millionaire's skill at eccentric dialogue (Billy exclaims, “I'm the pet child of calamity! I'll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on!") and his ridiculous propositions (a “seeing-eye skunk” that sends out olfactory radar) will leave any receptive reader rolling in the aisles. He conjures up a unique world that harks back to some magical L. Frank Baum era of culture, but which is informed by all the vicissitudes of the past hundred years.

  In short, if Winsor McCay were alive today, he'd either be creating Bill y Hazelnuts or praising it to the skies.

  * * * *

  The Archenemy of Thinness, Clutter, and Cliché

  When Samuel “Chip” Delany talks about writing, I listen with every atom of my being: precisely the same way Delany proclaims his hard-won truths.

  Delany has certainly spent more time thinking about the process of generating narratives—and subsequently getting the fruits of his lucubrations down on paper—than any other writer in the genre. Other masters of the finely wrought sentence, the compulsively readable masterpiece—Disch, Crowley, Aldiss, Wolfe—have done some major critical work, but it all pales in comparison to Delany's sustained and extensive corpus. He is the one working fiction writer in our field who can boast a multi-volume assault (or is it a seduction?) on the brute mechanics and numinous quiddities of the tale-telling process.

  Delany's latest volume in this vein might be his best yet. It covers everything from atomistic grammar tips to the founts of creative inspiration, with many a mid-level stop at the practical, the historical, the canonical—in short, the grand auctorial tragicomedy. The book's title hints at some of its multifariousness: About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, & 5 Interviews (Wesleyan University Press, trade paperback, $24.95, 432 pages, ISBN 0-8195-6716-7). But even this heterogeneous parade of forms fails to convey what's inside. Truly, as the jacket copy boasts, this book is the next best thing to taking one of Delany's courses. (He currently teaches at Temple University.)