Locus, December 2012

by Locus Publications

(although they will send you a perfect-bound 152-page print version for $29.95). Each issue contains a mix of non-fiction essays and fiction, and while the essays in this issue remain eclectic and interesting – Samuel Arbesman speculates on the kinds of relationships we might form with machines that are smarter than we are, Christina Agapakis explores biotechnology, Justin Pickard examines the implications of a future rise of Luddite movements – the fiction is overall somewhat weak.

  The best story here by a good margin is Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘Choosing Faces’’, a look at the plasticity of identity granted by future technology so wildly imaginative that it actually tumbles over the edge into Galaxy-style satire. The other two stories, Dave Gullen’s ‘‘All Your Futures’’ and Nan Craig’s ‘‘Scrapmetal’’, are solid, competent efforts, but nothing exceptional, and although the editors boast about how new and exciting the core ideas explored in each story are, in fact, they’re nothing new: Ken Liu’s ‘‘Waves’’, from the December Asimov’s, uses the same core idea as ‘‘All Your Futures’’ – colonists on a generation ship being beaten to their destination by spaceships using Faster-Than-Light drives developed after the colonists left – and Liu wasn’t the first one to explore this idea, either.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  Eclipse Online 10/12, 11/12

  Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) November 2012.

  Asimov’s 12/12

  Analog 12/12

  F&SF 11-12/12

  Strange Horizons 10/12

  Electric Velocipede Summer ’12

  Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, Ann VanderMeer, ed. (Tachyon) December 2012.

  The most striking news in the SF short fiction field at the end of 2012 is the conversion of Jonathan Strahan’s excellent original anthology series Eclipse into an ezine. That’s a common path for magazines, but this is, I think, the first anthology to make such a move, though if you think about it, unthemed original anthologies have from the beginning resembled magazines (and indeed the very first, Star, morphed into a short-lived magazine itself!), so for Eclipse to go online is fairly logical.

  And so far the results are promising. October features ‘‘The Contrary Gardener’’ by Christopher Rowe and ‘‘One Little Room an Everywhere’’ by K.J. Parker. The title character of Rowe’s story, Kay Lynne, is a gardener, of course, but in this future gardeners grow genetically engineered plants, engineered not just for better food utility but for other uses like blood transfusion. Her father is a respected farmer as well, but their relationship is difficult, perhaps partly due to his contracts with the military, but also due to fairly typical parent/child issues. Therefore his gift of a ticket to the Kentucky Derby (which Kay despises anyway) is a surprise – leading of course to an offer for her skills. The backstory hints at a somewhat oppressive state, and at conflict with AIs. These threads point to Kay’s choice, in a story which intrigues partly because of the well-limned characters, and partly because of the background. Parker’s story is about a failed student of magic who stumbles upon a magical means of creating great art, which makes him a fortune, until he discovers the negative side effects. As we expect from Parker, it’s also a bracingly cynical lesson in morality.

  In November Eclipse Online features a very welcome Hwarhath story from Eleanor Arnason, ‘‘Holmes Sherlock’’, about a Hwarhath woman named Amadi Kla, who is a translator of human stories, and who particularly loves the ‘‘stories about a human male named Holmes Sherlock.’’ This gives her a reputation as a potential detective, and so her family’s matriarch asks her to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a young woman of their lineage. What she finds is scandalous, in Hwarhath terms – which makes it interesting as a way of illuminating that society to us, and of course illuminating our society by contrast. And, as usual with Arnason, it’s very dryly humorous. Also in November, Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s ‘‘Firebugs’’ is a fine story about a society of clone families, and a member of such a family who has, much against her will, differences, and potentially dangerous ones.

  •

  Strahan also gives us a new anthology of stories set in the relatively near future Solar System, Edge of Infinity, which has a plethora of neat pieces. I could cite a number of stories here – Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Tyche and the Ants’’, about a girl raised in a virtual environment on the Moon, or Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘The Deeps of the Sky’’, about a native of Jupiter encountering a stricken ship from Earth – to name two, but I had two favorites. ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’ by Pat Cadigan is set in Jupiter’s orbit among the various workers, most of whom have had themselves altered to forms more useful in space. It concerns the legal travails of an unaltered woman who wants to alter herself after an injury – which of course also reflects the legal and political situation of everyone out there. There’s also John Barnes’s ‘‘Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh’’, about an AI who gets involved (it’s his job) with the relationship issues of a man and a woman – which ends up impacting the relationship of humans and AIs quite profoundly.

  •

  Asimov’s for December leads with a decent story from Chris Beckett, ‘‘The Caramel Forest’’, set on an alien planet, about a couple of children who are intrigued by the natives, whom most of the humans fear. Ultimately, the story is SF told in the mode of a scary fairy tale. The longest story is ‘‘Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected’’ by Steven Popkes. Jacob is a once-successful rock star who is suddenly contacted by his ex-lover, Rosie. She wants him to serve as a song doctor, but not for a human, rather for a ‘‘divaloid,’’ a simulation of a teenaged pop star. Rosie is helping to program the divaloid and she wants to understand how, or if, one can program creativity. Naturally, the ultimate question – one asked again and again in SF these days, indeed one considered by the John Barnes and Christopher Rowe stories I’ve already discussed – is what the divaloid wants, or if the divaloid can ‘‘want’’ anything. The magic Jacob performs doesn’t necessarily convince me, but the interaction between the main characters – Jacob, Rosie, and Dot (the divaloid) – does convince: a moving and thoughtful story. Also strong is ‘‘The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing’’ by Sandra McDonald, in which the title character, who edits classic SF films to make them less sexist, is offered a chance to complete the unfinished ’70s adaptation of Leigh Brackett’s The Ginger Star. There’s some playing to us geeks here – it’s hard not to think that The Ginger Star would have made a pretty cool movie – but the story also features some sharp characters, an interesting future, and some good ideas about movies.

  •

  The best story in the December Analog is ‘‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’’ by Michael Alexander & K.C. Ball, an alternate history in which the moon is colonized (to an extent) in the 1970s – but at the cost of more power for Richard Nixon. Laura Kerrigan is an ex-cop brought to the Moon to secretly investigate a series of ‘‘accidents’’ that may be murders, during the building of a spaceship. What she finds is, perhaps a bit too predictably, corporate malfeasance – which naturally means she might be the next target. It’s a pretty solid story with some plausible SFnal tech to accompany the central mystery.

  •

  F&SF’s year-end issue also has a strong long novella, ‘‘Katabasis’’ by Robert Reed. This is another of his Great Ship stories. Katabasis is a tour guide on a high gravity environment in the Ship, leading tourists on a very difficult trek. She rejects the request of one man, Varid, to act as his guide, agrees to guide recurring characters Perri and Quee Lee, and then finds her party joined by Varid. Their particular journey, which turns out to be very hard, is contrasted with the long-past journey of Katabasis’s people across their strange planet (and then eventually to the Ship), as well as the different but tragic history of Varid. It’s both SFnally fascinating and a powerful study of two damaged beings in Katabasis and V
arid.

  Also very good is another Steven Popkes story, ‘‘Breathe’’, about a family of vampires of a sort – they can steal ‘‘health’’ from other people. The story contrasts two brothers, one who rejects his ‘‘gift’’ and another who has benefited greatly from it, as their father dies (perhaps too slowly). A sharp moral exercise.

  •

  At Strange Horizons I liked ‘‘In the Library of Souls’’ by Jennifer Mason-Black, mainly for the central idea – a literal library of souls. It’s a somewhat Borgesian building full of books that contain the essence of a person’s life. The protagonist is the leader of a small group of guardians of the library, which is suddenly threatened by flood. As the books are threatened, it becomes clearer that what they represent – the lives of people.

  •

  I thought the Summer issue of Electric Velocipede to be one of its stronger outings. It opens with ‘‘Cutting’’ by Ken Liu, a brief fable about monks who deal with their holy work by trying to cut away everything untrue – is this a metaphor about writing? Well, perhaps not; perhaps it’s more directly about what it says, the admixture of truth and human error in religious texts. Anyway, the poetic closing is effective. Ann Leckie’s ‘‘Night’s Slow Poison’’ is an enjoyable, if somewhat old-fashioned, story about a man from an isolated planet charged with protecting its main secret – how to navigate there – from its enemies. It’s set on a spaceship heading to this planet, though the real interest comes as we learn the back story of the main character – his disappointment in love and his family’s financial distress – either of which might, perhaps, motivate him to treachery.

  Best of all is ‘‘Heaven Under Earth’’ by Aliette de Bodard. Liang Pao is the First Spouse of a man on a planet where, for some reason, women are rare. Liang is genetically male, but has been altered to be able to bear implanted children as have his fellow Spouses, but now he must welcome a surprise – an expensive female bride. His first concern is for his own position, but he soon understands that the woman is in a difficult position herself – an aging ex-prostitute who had no interest in this marriage. Again, the hints of the society in the background are very interesting, and the predicament and position of Liang Pao is involving and affecting.

  •

  Steampunk Revolution is a new anthology from Ann VanderMeer. It features an array of mostly quite recent stories (including at least three excellent stories from 2012, Nick Mamatas’ ‘‘Arbeitskraft’’, Carrie Vaughn’s ‘‘Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil’’, and Karin Tidbeck’s ‘‘Beatrice’’, each of which I’ve discussed here earlier this year).

  There are three originals, of which I thought the best was ‘‘A Handful of Rice’’ by Vandana Singh, concerning a man planning to assassinate the King – the ruler of Hindustan and the Harbinger of Peace and Prosperity. It’s steampunk because it’s set in an alternate Hindustan, where the King, having driven out the British, has harnessed ‘‘the metallurgic genius of ancient Indians,’’ and it’s Revolution because the King has banned the ancient healing arts, and killed many of their practitioners. The story has bite because the main character, a healer, also knew and loved the King when they were young men together.

  Recommended Stories:

  ‘‘Holmes Sherlock’’, Eleanor Arnason (Eclipse Online 11/12)

  ‘‘Heaven Under Earth’’, Aliette de Bodard (Electric Velocipede Summer ’12)

  ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)

  ‘‘The Black Feminist’s Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing’’, Sandra McDonald (Asimov’s 12/12)

  ‘‘Breathe’’, Steven Popkes (F&SF 11-12/12)

  ‘‘Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected’’, Steven Popkes (Asimov’s 12/12)

  ‘‘Katabasis’’, Robert Reed (F&SF 11-12/12)

  ‘‘The Contrary Gardener’’, Christopher Rowe (Eclipse Online 10/12)

  ‘‘A Handful of Rice’’, Vandana Singh (Steampunk Revolution)

  –Rich Horton

  Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119, , for review.

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer 978-1-618-73034-3, $24.00, iv + 246pp, hc) November 2012. [Order from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton MA 01027; .]

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer 978-1-618-73035-0, $24.00, iv + 286pp, hc) November 2012.

  Errantry: Strange Stories, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer 978-1-618-73030-5, $16.00, 292pp, tp) November 2012.

  Jack Glass, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-0-575-12762-3, £14.99 374pp, hc) July 2012.

  The most significant word in the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s monumental two-volume short fiction retrospective from Small Beer Press is the least assuming one: ‘‘selected.’’ Le Guin, whose deservedly legendary 50-year career includes (according to the ISFDB) more than 130 stories, has chosen only 38 of them, which means that a lot gets left out, and Le Guin does not have a track record of writing many stories that deserve to get left out of anything. So she, and possibly her editors Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, have refrained from the more familiar and more commercial rubric ‘‘best of’’ in favor of the more austere ‘‘selected,’’ which leads to the obvious question: selected how and for what purpose? Le Guin provides some perfectly rational answers in the introduction to the first volume – no novellas because of the stories they would bump (hence classics such as ‘‘The World for World is Forest’’ and ‘‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’’ are missing), few stories linked closely to novels or story-suites (though we get a glimpse of Earthsea in ‘‘The Rule of Names’’), and some stories that Le Guin wanted ‘‘to bring back into the light.’’ She complains at the beginning of her introduction that she ‘‘begged people’’ to suggest stories and ‘‘nobody would’’ (though she admits that Grant & Link encouraged the inclusion of at least one). Well, asking your neighbors to name your favorite children for you won’t work, either, and for a good reason: they’re way more curious about what you think than about what they think. And learning how Le Guin views her own fiction may not be the major revelation of this collection – that lies in revisiting the stories themselves – but it’s still fascinating, because it suggests that the long and almost irresistible habit of deifying Le Guin in the realm of SF and fantasy just might, paradoxically, be another way of underestimating her achievement.

  Let me explain. The earliest of the stories collected here dates from 1964, the latest from 2005 (although the stories are not arranged in chronological order, another wise decision on Le Guin’s part). The science fiction stories appear pretty much exclusively in Volume Two, while there are some non-SF stories there and some literary fantasies in Volume One. Not too surprisingly, the SF tales, especially the earlier ones, tend to come from venues like Amazing, Fantastic, Omni, New Dimensions, F&SF, and Asimov’s, while the less genre-like tales appeared in places like The Little Magazine and TriQuarterly. But the magazine that originally published more of these stories than any other is The New Yorker, the source of five stories, all dating from the 1980s (the same decade that magazine published its only Gene Wolfe story, and decades before its famous bet-hedging ‘‘science fiction’’ issue). Now The New Yorker may not be the imprimatur of canonization that it acts like it is – it’s certainly published its share of writers you’ve never heard of again – but it may have some capacity to shift the terms of discussion of a writer’s work, and the fact that Le Guin was nearly a regular there for a while (there were actually ten stories between 1979 and 1990) is suggestive. I’m not referring to the old ‘‘escaping the ghetto’’
canard, as though genre were a matter of bad urban planning, but to the question of how we might most fruitfully read her work in toto, which these volumes invite us to do. Sometime in the 1980s, I think, Le Guin, without ceasing to be one of the great SF writers, became one of the great American writers.

  And her chosen pattern of organization for this collection, deliberately or not, reflects this by inviting us to look at her work more holistically than we are accustomed to. Any SF reader like myself will be delighted to see such acknowledged classics as ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’’, or ‘‘Nine Lives’’, or ‘‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’’, but many may be surprised at the Orsinian or Oregonian tales (three from Searoad) that make up much of the first volume.

  Revisiting these tales for the first time in years, and some for the first time entirely, I was struck by two that aren’t necessarily among those I’d have named if you’d asked me a month ago to name favorite Le Guin tales. One, ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’, is pure Hainish SF, while the other, ‘‘Half Past Four’’, is not SF by any stretch. Yet each is radical in its own way, and maybe the space that can encompass these very different tales is the sort of space we ought to be talking about when we talk about Le Guin. ‘‘Half Past Four’’ is a kind of repertory fiction, in which four characters with the same names and roughly the same power relationships to each other are reimagined in eight different stories, so that a sweet retarded stepson in one tale become a computer science student in another and a gay lover (of the stepfather from the earlier story) in another. It’s hardly a conventional story, and Le Guin’s abiding fascination with the fluid structures of family relationships is as evident here as it is in ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’, a brilliant thought experiment on gender roles set on a planet in which female births vastly outnumber males, resulting in a society in which, as one narrator observes, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power. The males are pampered and treasured, but at eleven they are yanked from their families and sent to live in a kind of nightmare theme park of violent sports and free sex (in fact, the women pay them), while the women maintain the society and exclusively receive higher education. Like many of Le Guin’s Hainish tales, it’s told through a series of observational reports and narratives over a lengthy time span, including a short story by one of the natives. (Another of the techniques which Le Guin pioneered is the use of multiple narrative voices, and in so thoroughly nailing the tone of anthropological field reports that it’s nearly become a convention in SF.)