Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

, which would release two stories every month throughout the year. Three issues of Eclipse Online appeared in 2012, the October, November, and December issues, and so far the literary quality here has been very high, with several of the stories having already been picked up by one or another of the Year’s Best anthology series. My favorite Eclipse story to date is Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘The Memcordist’’, from the December issue, another of his Central Station stories, set in a busy interplanetary and multicultural future swarming with robots, cyborgs, rogue AIs, and bizarrely bioengineered creatures of every description, all of whom mix and mingle and interact in the gritty back streets of Old Tel Aviv, along with earlier waves of immigrants and refugees. This one, which also takes us to the colonies of the Outer Solar System and back, features a protagonist whose entire life, from birth to death, is being broadcast, with millions of viewers watching every moment of his existence. Also good in December is Christopher Barzak’s ‘‘Invisible Men’’, which takes an ultimately rather touching look at the events of one of H.G. Wells’s most famous novels from an entirely different perspective.

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  The best story in the November issue is Eleanor Arnason’s ‘‘Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery’’, another story in her long-running series about the alien Hwarhath people, which also includes her critically acclaimed novel Ring of Swords. This story deals in a subtly droll manner with an alien woman who becomes obsessed with a human fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, and in the course of describing the effect that that obsession has on her relationships with her own people, has something to say about human nature as well; ultimately, her fascination with the great detective and the insights provided by employing his methods allow her to solve a baffling mystery on her own world. November also features a nicely done YA story about pyromania, Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s ‘‘Firebugs’’.

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  The best story in the October issue, and one of the best fantasy stories published all year, is K.J. Parker’s ‘‘One Little Room An Everywhere’’, a slyly funny story about a young wizard trying to take a magical shortcut to success that leads him down some very strange byways indeed, and who learns that the price of success may be more than he’s willing to pay. Also good in October is Christopher Rowe’s ‘‘The Contrary Gardener’’, about a disgruntled gardener in a radically Green future dominated by biotechnology who runs afoul of a conspiracy to destroy the ‘‘thinking machines’’ that the conspirators fear are getting a little too smart.

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  With 2013 looming as I write these words, let’s take a quick look at some of the worthwhile short-story collections of 2012 that haven’t been mentioned here yet this year.

  Elizabeth Bear is one of the most accomplished of the field’s new (or new-er, anyway, since she’s been publishing since about 2003) writers. Her latest collection, Shoggoths in Bloom, is her best yet, containing her Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winning story ‘‘Tideline’’, her clever homage to Asimov’s robot stories, ‘‘Dolly’’, ‘‘Gods of the Forge’’, ‘‘The Something-Dreaming Game’’, and her intricate novella of a future India, ‘‘In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns’’, as well as an original story, the somber and moving ‘‘The Death of Terrestrial Radio’’. This is a mixed SF/fantasy collection, and, for me, the SF generally works better than the fantasy, but also collected here is her Hugo-winning ‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’, which is great fun for any fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, and other good fantasy stories such as ‘‘Orm the Beautiful’’, ‘‘Love Among the Talus’’, and ‘‘The Horrid Glory of Its Wings’’.

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  One of the greatest of all the field’s Old Masters, Ursula K. Le Guin, had two monumental collections out this year: The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands.

  My tastes being what they are, I thought that the second volume, Outer Space, Inner Lands, which contains most of the SF stories, many of them from her Hainish cycle, was the stronger of the two volumes, containing powerful stuff such as ‘‘Nine Lives’’, ‘‘Betrayals’’, ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’, ‘‘The Shobies’ Story’’, ‘‘Semley’s Necklace’’, and the award-winning ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’’ (although at least two of the stories in this volume are fantasies, ‘‘The Wild Girls’’ and ‘‘The Rule of Names’’, which is the earliest story here and one of the seeds of her later Earthsea series).

  The first volume, Where On Earth, which mostly concentrates on stories that are closer to slipstream or even straight mainstream, has some great stuff as well, including ‘‘Ether, OR’’, ‘‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’’, ‘‘The Direction of the Road’’, ‘‘May’s Lion’’, and several of her wonderfully written Orsinian Tales, including ‘‘Brothers and Sisters’’, ‘‘A Week in the Country’’, and ‘‘Unlocking the Air’’, which may be among the earliest examples of the now-frequent subgenre that tells realistic stories with no supernatural elements set in totally imaginary countries (this volume also contains a straight SF story, and a good one, ‘‘The Diary of the Rose’’).

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  Another (relatively) Old Master, from the generation just after Le Guin, is Joe Haldeman, who has a big retrospective collection out early in 2013, The Best of Joe Haldeman. The best story here may be the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella ‘‘The Hemingway Hoax’’, but there’s plenty of other first-class work here, including ‘‘Hero’’, the seed that grew into his most famous novel, The Forever War, ‘‘For White Hill’’, ‘‘None So Blind’’, ‘‘The Mars Girl’’, ‘‘Sleeping Dogs’’, ‘‘Anniversary Project’’, ‘‘Tricentennial’’, and ‘‘More Than the Sum of His Parts’’, as well as stuff a bit removed from his usual science fiction, such as ‘‘Manifest Destiny’’, a Western, and ‘‘Lindsay and the Red City Blues’’, a supernatural horror story.

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  Another exceptional writer from the generation just a few years after Haldeman (literary generations are often separated by only a few years of real-world time in the science fiction genre) is John Kessel. His 2012 retrospective, The Collected Kessel, is available as an e-book. Kessel is an eclectic writer with a wide range that covers all sorts of SF, fantasy, slipstream, and near-mainstream work. Unsurprisingly, I like his SF work the best, and this volume collects some of his best SF stories, including the wonderful ‘‘The Pure Product’’, ‘‘Some Like It Cold’’, ‘‘The Miracle of Ivar Avenue’’, ‘‘The Juniper Tree’’, ‘‘Stories For Men’’, ‘‘Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance’’, and ‘‘Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine’’, but some of his non-SF stuff is first-rate as well, including ‘‘Pride and Prometheus’’ (which was doing the mash-up thing long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and doing it better), ‘‘Gulliver At Home’’, and the unclassifiable, Nebula-winning ‘‘Another Orphan’’, but even the near-mainstream stories such as ‘‘Every Angel Is Terrifying’’ and ‘‘Buffalo’’ are riveting.

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  Another literary generation down from Kessel is Allen M. Steele, who has made a career primarily out of Heinleinesque novels and stories that explore humankind’s expansion into space. Some of the best of these are collected in Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete ‘‘Near Space’’ Stories: Expanded Edition, an enlarged version of an earlier collection. The best stories here are probably the poignant ‘‘The Emperor of Mars’’ and the darkly comic ‘‘The Death of Captain Future’’, both Hugo Award winners, but the book also features strong work such as ‘‘The Weight’’, ‘‘The Exile of Evening Star’’, ‘‘Zwarte Piet’s Tale’’, ‘‘Live From the Mars Hotel’’, ‘‘Working for Mister Chicago’’, ‘‘The War Memorial’’, and ‘‘The Return of Weird Frank’’.

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  Like Elizabeth Bear, Kij Johnson belongs to a more-recent literary generation; she started selling in the late ’80s, although she didn’t really attrac
t any serious attention in the field until the mid- ’90s. Some of the best of her stories are gathered in her 2012 collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Johnson’s work is sometimes more slipstreamish than I usually like, and some of that tone slips into even her science fiction, which often inhabits the borderland between SF and fantasy, but there’s a liquid clarity to her voice and a lyrical elegance to her prose that makes me like stuff I usually wouldn’t. The best story here is the most recent, and the closest thing to a hard SF story that Johnson has yet written, the complex and compelling novella ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’, which won her both Nebula and Hugo Awards in 2012 and in my opinion may have been the best novella of the previous year. There is other strong work here, though, most of it falling on a line somewhere between slipstream and straight genre fantasy, including ‘‘The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles’’, the Sturgeon Award-winner ‘‘Fox Magic’’, ‘‘The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change’’, ‘‘Story Kit’’, her controversial (and harrowing) Nebula Award-winner, ‘‘Spar’’, ‘‘The Horse Raiders’’, and ‘‘At the River of Bees’’.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  F&SF 1-2/13

  Asimov’s 2/13

  Analog 3/13

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/29/12, 12/15/12

  Eclipse 1/13

  Lightspeed 1/13

  On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion) 2012.

  Gods of Risk, James S.A. Corey (Hachette) September 2012.

  F&SF’s first 2013 issue is a solid one. Robert Reed is back (surprise!) with ‘‘Among Us’’, about a man who works for a secret agency that obsessively tracks people identified as ‘‘Neighbors,’’ people who are outwardly indistinguishable from humans but who appear to be aliens, here for some inscrutable reason. The story seems by turns to be about the aliens, then about the people who track them, and how this (in many ways) distasteful mission changes them. David Gerrold offers ‘‘Night Train to Paris’’, a fine little horror story in which a writer on said train encounters a man who tells him a story about how people seem to go missing from this train fairly often. Judith Moffett’s ‘‘Ten Lights and Ten Darks’’ is a sweet story about a somewhat cynical reporter forced to write a story about pet psychics, who discovers an unexpected ability in himself when he meets a woman looking for help with her very skittish dog. And newish writer Desmond Warzel gives us ‘‘The Blue Celeb’’, about a couple of vets with a barbershop in Harlem who discover that an abandoned Chevy Celebrity parked in front of their shop seems to cause terrible things to happen to people who get in it. All fine steady work.

  But I thought the best piece was ‘‘A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel’’ by Ken Liu, an alternate history in which the Japanese take control of China early enough to avoid WWII, and, starting in 1930 or so, build a tunnel across the Pacific for economic reasons. The story is told by a man from Formosa, who was recruited to help build the tunnel, and who has stayed on in Midpoint City after its completion. His relationship with an American woman he meets eventually forces him to consider some dark events during the tunnel’s construction. This thoughtful story confronts the way international power politics, and racial aspects of the same, affect ordinary people, and the way that even minor hierarchies can push people to atrocities under pressure.

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  Over at Asimov’s for February we see another alternate history with a greater role for non-Western powers (and there are more to come this month!): Vylar Kaftan’s ‘‘The Weight of the Sunrise’’ is set in 1806 in the Incan Empire. The Empire is fairly strong, though still ravaged by the smallpox that in our history contributed to Pizarro’s conquest. The narrator, Lanchi Ronpa, is a somewhat privileged man, because he survived a smallpox epidemic. He also is a descendant of an Englishman who ‘‘went native,’’ and so he is chosen as an interpreter when an American ambassador arrives, offering a means of preventing smallpox in exchange for enough gold to help finance a war against their English rulers. This offering seems cruel enough, and seems worse when the American’s talk of freedom for his country is compared with his treatment of his slave. Lanchi’s loyalties are tested as well by the discord among his rulers. This is an enjoyable piece, but perhaps the setup and optimistic resolution are a bit pat.

  David Erik Nelson’s ‘‘The New Guys Always Work Overtime’’ has a use for time-travel I haven’t seen before – cheap labor. The story turns movingly on a tragic source of cheap labor from the past – people snatched from concentration camps.

  Finally, the best story here is ‘‘The Golden Age of Story’’ by Robert Reed. This looks at an interlocking series of characters who take a shadily supplied drug that promises to increase their creativity and IQ. Over the course of the story, we learn a bit more about what the drug really does as society is profoundly affected: it’s a strong look at a plausible and scary means of altering our brains.

  At Analog in March, Harry Turtledove offers a sharp look at a possible future, ‘‘The End of the World as We Know It, and We Feel Fine’’. We see Willie playing with his pet fox, encountering a quarrelsome neighbor, and meeting a pretty girl. We learn what Willie is like, and his fox, and the girl, but not so much the neighbor – they are people designed for a non-confrontational future, changed in the way the fox was changed to be doglike. And the story shows us what that change gains and loses, and asks (without an answer) would it be worth it?

  Also good is Sean McMullen’s ‘‘The Firewall and the Door’’, though it got me thinking again about Paul Kincaid’s suggestion that short SF shows signs of ‘‘exhaustion.’’ This story is another of those that laments the failure of one SF’s central dreams, in this case expeditions to the stars. Here one ship has been sent to Alpha Centauri, at great expense, quantum-linked to operators back on Earth. They discover potential life on an Earthlike planet, but the plans are to continue to Gliese 581, when the ship is sabotaged. The story is told from the point of view of a judge who acts as a quasi-prosecutor of the saboteur, in a wacky legal system worthy of some of Charles Harness’s ideas. He learns, of course, the real motives of the saboteur, as well as their real identity. I could see what was coming, but it works quite nicely nonetheless.

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  The closing few issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies feature some strong work. I’ll mention one from each. In #109, Gregory Norman Bossert’s ‘‘The Telling’’ is a very original story about a strange child (significantly named Mel) in a strange house whose master has just died. Mel, ambiguously some sort of heir, is drafted to do the ‘‘Telling,’’ to ask the bees of the household to continue to offer their favor. The story is full of atmosphere, and weirdness, and disconnection: a lovely piece, from a writer who has impressed with everything I’ve seen from him, and each story quite different from the others. In #110, Alec Austin’s ‘‘Casualties’’ evokes Harry Potter in a sense, telling of a group of magic students (complete with school names like Gravinward and Orvenal) remembering (in a sense) the aftermath of a Voldemort-like figure’s attempts to take over the world, an attempt they thwarted at great cost. The focus is on Simon, the one who remembers what really happened, who lost his lover in the battle, and who regrets things the most. It’s a purposefully dark look – sort of a rebuke to the epilogue of the Harry Potter books – and is bracing and rather moving. Finally, in the last issue of 2012, Noreen Doyle offers ‘‘His Crowning Glory’’, set in her slightly alternate version of Egypt. This witty and entertaining tale shows Jon Fox, disgraced former member of the Research Club, trying to discover some of the missing elements needed to complete the restoration of a temple. Fox is successful, but in the process encounters a djinee with its own agenda.

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  Eclipse Online’s first few months have been so impressive that perhaps it’s not a surprise that neither of the stories from January is quite as good
as the best to date, but both are nice work. Genevieve Valentine’s ‘‘The Advocate’’ looks at a woman maneuvered into acting as a representative for the Martian ‘‘ambassador’’ to the UN. The Martians, it turns out, are a rather primitive life form, and are being presented to Earth somewhat cynically. Worse, they are apparently having a hard time surviving in the tank they are kept in at the embassy. A wry little piece. ‘‘The Amnesia Helmet’’ by F. Brett Cox is about a girl in the ’30s who loves serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and who determines to build a real ‘‘amnesia helmet,’’ like in Buck Rogers. It’s a fine, subtle sort of proto-feminist story.

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  Likewise, the January Lightspeed is sort of middling. Once again, I preferred the two Fantasy offerings. A.C. Wise’s ‘‘With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came’’ recalls Fahrenheit 451 a bit, in an very different style, telling of a woman who joins a strange library after her lover goes off to war, eventually learning of the librarians’ mission: to save the books that war will ultimately burn. I wasn’t quite convinced, but as ever, Wise’s lovely prose made it worth reading. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ‘‘Purity Test’’ is a somewhat predictable but still affecting tale of a woman whose cruel father, convinced his wife had betrayed him, insists on tests of virginity for his son’s prospective brides. In the end his daughter (the narrator) must face such a test herself, but not before she learns to doubt its value. [I should note that I have recently joined Lightspeed to assist in selecting reprint stories, though I have no involvement in selecting the originals.]

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  I recently saw two very strong novellas that might be easy to miss. Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station, Drifting, is another in her Xuya alternate history, in which the Chinese and Mexica (i.e. Axtecs) have become great space-based powers. Several recent stories have been set in a colonized galaxy and on space stations, some controlled by the Dai Viet. This one is set on a remote station, Prosper, controlled by an obscure branch of a powerful family, and run by a Mind, who is also one of the family’s ancestors.