Instructors (l to r): Paul Cook, Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Mike Resnick, Toni Weisskopf, Eleanor Wood, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead; Eva Eldridge asks Mike Resnick to sign a book
The 2013 workshop will be held aboard Norwegian Sky from December 2-6, sailing again from Miami to the Bahamas. Further information will be available at
–Francesca Myman
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GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS
Robots: The Recent A.I., Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, eds. (Prime) February 2012. Cover by Vladislav Ociacia.
War and Space: Recent Combat, Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, eds. (Prime) May 2012. Cover by Brian Christensen.
Armored, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Baen) April 2012. Cover by Kurt Miller.
Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime) October 2012. Cover by Scott Grimando.
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Random House Children’s Books) September 2012.
Epic: Legends of Fantasy, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Tachyon) October 2012. Cover by John Coulthart.
Robots: The Recent A.I., edited by Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, is a strong, mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, recent stories about robots and AI (artificial intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ’50s). The one original story is a fine one, Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘Under the Eaves’’, a bittersweet romance between a human girl and a ‘‘robotnik,’’ part organic/part mechanical soldiers created to fight in a recent war and then abandoned to beg on the streets. This is one of a series of stories that Tidhar has been writing in the last couple of years about ‘‘Central Station,’’ an immense spaceport built near present-day Tel Aviv, where spaceships to the Moon, Mars, and the Outer Solar System come and go, and the passengers, some altered in strange ways, mingle in the ancient neighborhoods below with the locals – many of whom are immigrants themselves from waves of migration decades or centuries past. It’s been clear for a while now that Tidhar was strongly influenced by the late Cordwainer Smith, and that’s nowhere clearer than in these Central Station stories, which layer in references to other locations, characters, and stories from Tidhar’s busy interplanetary future, and often throw in poems and songs as well. The towering, cloud-piercing Central Station itself is clearly a homage to Smith’s own Earthport, from Smith’s Instrumentality stories, with an updated, gritty, multi-cultural ambience all its own.
Of the reprint stories in Robots: The Recent A.I., the best are probably Catherynne M. Valente’s ‘‘Silently and Very Fast’’, Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘Tideline’’, Cory Doctorow’s ‘‘I, Robot’’, Ian McDonald’s ‘‘The Djinn’s Wife’’, Rachel Swirsky’s ‘‘Eros, Philia, Agape’’, Benjamin Rosenbaum’s ‘‘Droplet’’, and Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Shipmaker’’, but there are also good stories here from Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year.
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Another good mixed reprint (mostly) and original SF anthology, by the same editorial team, is War and Space: Recent Combat, an anthology of recent military SF, although their definition of ‘‘military SF’’ seems a bit broader than it sometimes is. As with Robots: The Recent A.I., there is one original story here, Sandra McDonald’s ‘‘Mehra and Jiun’’, which isn’t as strong as the Tidhar story in Robots, but which does an effective job of depicting the uneasy alliance of two warring enemy soldiers stranded together on the hostile surface of Europa.
Of the reprint stories, the best are Ken MacLeod’s ‘‘Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?’’, David Moles’s ‘‘A Soldier of the City’’, Charles Coleman Finlay’s memorable novella ‘‘The Political Officer’’, Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘‘Between Two Dragons’’, Paul McAuley’s ‘‘Rats of the System’’, and Tom Purdom’s ‘‘Palace Resolution’’, but there’s also strong stories by Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Geoffrey A. Landis, Cat Rambo, and others. Good value for the money.
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Armored, an all-original SF anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, is a bit more traditional an assemblage of military SF – although even here, some of the stories, like those by Carrie Vaughn and David D. Levine (although they’re among the best in the book), stray somewhat from the ostensible theme: stories about armored fighting suits. These are more or less mobile, personal, wearable tanks, probably first popularized by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Starship Troopers, seen subsequently in lots of SF, including movies such as Avatar, and currently hovering right on the edge of becoming an actuality; certainly it won’t be more than ten or 15 years at most before we have them prowling the battlefields in the real world. The best stories here are David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell’s ‘‘Jungle Walkers’’, Alastair Reynolds’s ‘‘Trauma Pod’’, Ian Douglas’s ‘‘The Johnson Maneuver’’, Simon R. Green’s ‘‘Find Heaven and Hell in the Smallest Things’’, Karin Lowachee’s ‘‘Nomad’’, and Sean Williams’s ‘‘The N-Body Solution’’, as well as Carrie Vaughn’s ‘‘Don Quixote’’ and David D. Levine’s ‘‘The Last Days of the Kelly Gang’’ – but the book also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Genevieve Valentine, Michael A. Stackpole, Tanya Huff, David Sherman, and others.
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I tried to sell my own version of the next anthology for over a decade, only to have publisher after publisher turn it down on the grounds that nobody would buy it because ‘‘science fiction fans weren’t interested in rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll fans weren’t interested in science fiction’’ – so it’s with a certain amount of jealousy that I congratulate Paula Guran for managing to sell her own version and actually get it into print: Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy.
Some of the best stories here were even slated to appear in my own, unsold version: Howard Waldrop’s ‘‘Flying Saucer Rock and Roll’’, Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘The Feast of Saint Janis’’, Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Rock On’’, Norman Spinrad’s ‘‘The Big Flash’’, Edward Bryant’s ‘‘Stone’’, Lewis Shiner’s ‘‘Jeff Beck’’, Lucius Shepard’s ‘‘…How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song…’’, Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘We See Things Differently’’ – classics all, and all stories that still hold up well even after the 20 or 30 years or more (the oldest story here is Spinrad’s, from 1969) that have passed since their initial publication. Rock On, however, in addition to the oldies, also contains more recent hits by Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Denton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly.
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My favorite original fantasy anthology of the year is Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology about witches, Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, which means that Strahan has pulled off, in my own estimation, anyway, the difficult task of editing both the best fantasy anthology and the best science fiction anthology (Strahan’s Edge of Infinity, reviewed here last month) of 2012. Not surprisingly, since it’s aimed at a YA audience, Under My Hat is not as substantial and chewy as Edge of Infinity, but it has a very pleasing wit and lightness of tone about it (for the most part – there are a few darker stories) that ought to appeal to the adult fantasy-reading audience as well. The best stories here include Peter S. Beagle’s ‘‘Great-Grandmother in the Cellar’’, Margo Lanagan’s ‘‘Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow’’, Ellen Klages’s ‘‘The Education of a Witch’’, Garth Nix’s ‘‘A Handful of Ashes’’, Jane Yolen’s ‘‘Andersen’s Witch’’, and Holly Black’s ‘‘Little Gods’’, although there are also fine stories here by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Jim Butcher, M. Rickert, Patri
cia A. McKillip, Isobelle Carmody, Tim Pratt, Tanith Lee, Charles de Lint, Frances Hardinge, and Diana Peterfreund, as well as a poem by Neil Gaiman.
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Another substantial fantasy anthology, this one all reprint, is Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. This makes an interesting companion volume to David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman’s The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, which I reviewed earlier this year, although Epic is pitched as being an anthology of ‘‘epic fantasy’’ stories rather than as a ‘‘sword & sorcery’’ anthology. It’s sometimes difficult to make a distinction between ‘‘epic fantasy’’ and ‘‘sword & sorcery’’: both are set in invented fantasy worlds, both have thieves and sword-wielding adventurers, both take place in worlds in which magic exists and there are sorcerers of greater or lesser potency, both feature fantasy creatures such as dragons and giants and monsters… and yet, it seems to me as if there is a subtle distinction to be made between the two, although it will need a more astute critic than me to articulate it in a satisfactory way. If that line does exist, it’s subtle enough that it’s easy to make mistakes in classification, and this anthology makes a couple of them: it seems that Michael Moorcock’s Elric story ‘‘While the Gods Laugh’’ can hardly not be a sword & sorcery story, call it what you will instead, considering that Elric’s roots go all the way back to the creation of S&S as an identifiable subgenre and Moorcock himself has long been considered one of its founding fathers. Similarly, Melanie Rawn’s ‘‘Mother of All Russiya’’ is neither epic fantasy nor sword & sorcery, but rather a well-crafted historical fantasy (with a minimal fantasy element at that) set in 10th-century Russia (or a proto-Russia, still in the process of assembling).
Quibbles about classification aside, this is a meaty, solid anthology that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fantasy styles, enabling them to decide which worlds and authors they like best. Having gotten a taste of that author’s work, they can then go on to seek out more of it – and in most cases here, there’s a lot of similar work to be found, since most of these authors are very prolific. The best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is clearly George R.R. Martin’s ‘‘The Mystery Knight’’, an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Also excellent are Robin Hobb’s ‘‘Homecoming’’, Patrick Rothfuss’s ‘‘The Road to Levinshir’’, Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘‘The Word of Unbinding’’, Tad Williams’s ‘‘The Burning Man’’, Orson Scott Card’s ‘‘Sandmagic’’, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘‘The Alchemist’’, and the book also features good work by Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N.K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, Mary Robinette Kowal, and the aforementioned Michael Moorcock and Melanie Rawn.
–Gardner Dozois
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LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON
Asimov’s 1/13
Phantom Drift #2 Fall ’12
Eclipse 12/12
Strange Horizons 11/12, 12/12
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/15/12
After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Hyperion) October 2012.
Stranded, Anne Bishop, James Alan Gardner, and Anthony Francis (Bell Bridge) August 2012.
Bloody Fabulous, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Prime) October 2012.
Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed. (Audible) December 2012.
As a new year opens, I feel compelled to view its stories through the prism of 2012’s most talked-about essay, Paul Kincaid’s LA Review of Books review of Gardner Dozois’s and my Best of the Year books plus the Nebula anthology, in which he detected what he called ‘‘exhaustion’’ in the field of short SF. By this he meant, as I read it, several things: a certain tendency to excessive reworking of old SF tropes (including a fondness for SF that explicitly references older SF); a lack of SFnal discipline, mainly reflected in too much (for him) blurring of the lines between SF and fantasy; and, perhaps most damning, a certain failure to actively engage with plausible futures. Even though my book came in for some criticism, I felt Kincaid made some excellent observations, and definitely his points are worth pondering. (Note that he insisted that this exhaustion was not necessarily an aesthetic disparagement of the stories in question – some he objected to were still good stories – and that the above is my reading of his essay, and may misrepresent his actual views.) At any rate, the first two Asimov’s stories of 2013 that seemed to me to illustrate a potential divide: two strong stories, one of which to me does seem forward-looking and engaged with the future, and the other of which is definitely nostalgic and a paean of sorts to SF’s lost dreams.
The first story is Alaya Dawn Johnson’s ‘‘They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass’’. Libby is a 42-year-old woman living in a community struggling to keep things going, in a future ravaged by the attentions of the ‘‘glassmen,’’ whose true nature is unknown (aliens? altered humans? AIs?), but who enforce draconian restrictions on regular human life, and who also sometimes bomb people with explosive glass beads. One of their rules is that abortion is forbidden. Libby’s somewhat irresponsible sister is pregnant, and doesn’t want to keep the baby, pushing Libby into a dangerous journey to a town where a person capable of performing an abortion might be found. Presented as such, the story might seem in danger of stridency, but it avoids that. Libby’s character, with her complexities, is one reason, and the (not really resolved) mystery of the glassmen, at least slightly illuminated when Libby and her sister are captured by one of them, is another. In the end, this is an unexpectedly moving, and also SFnally absorbing, story, and one that seems fresh and engaged.
It’s not fair, really, to suggest that, in contrast, James Van Pelt’s ‘‘The Family Rocket’’ isn’t ‘‘engaged’’ with the future. Indeed perhaps its theme, regret at the loss of the dream of space travel, might be regarded as quite directly engaging with our present future. But that very theme is central to what I call ‘‘Where’s my Flying Car?’’ SF – SF that explicitly discusses the way we have failed to live up to old SF dreams. ‘‘The Family Rocket’’ is a character-centric story in which a young man brings his girlfriend to his family home – his father’s junkyard – embarrassed by his father’s old stories of building a rocket from the junk he has collected. And of course he is pushed to a more sympathetic view of his father’s dreams – in a quite moving story. (The kicker, to be sure, is that in this particular future space travel, travel even to Mars, is a reality, if one reserved mostly for the rich.)
The whole January issue of Asimov’s is quite strong. ‘‘Over There’’ by Will McIntosh, is first rate SF horror, told effectively in parallel point of view, as a physics researcher runs an experiment which seems to split the universe into parallel streams – though people can experience what their other universe counterpart is experiencing. But one universe is menaced by unexplained ‘‘dragons,’’ which freeze anyone they touch – leading to terrible agony for the counterparts in the other universe. The researcher and his wife end up on the run in both places, as people look for revenge on those responsible for this disaster, and things are complicated further because his wife is pregnant. In the end, the SFnal aspect is simply an enabling strategy for a wrenching personal drama, and a very effective one. Finally, Suzanne Palmer, who looks to me like a writer who has suddenly found her voice – her metier – and perhaps, too, the right – contributes a ripping good, long novelette, ‘‘Hotel’’, in which a bevy of suspicious characters descend on a curious Martian hotel, with a variety of divergent plots in mind.
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A different approach to the ‘‘exhaustion’’ within the genre is to look to the edges (though, as I read Kincaid, that’s something he regrets). Phantom Drift, a literary journal that began in 2011, signals its slant with the subtitle ‘‘A Journal of New Fabulism’’. The fiction editor is Leslie What. They publish a mix of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. There’s no
thing you’d call science fiction here, nor traditional fantasy, but the stories are well written and powerfully imagined.
My favorite was Dennis Ginoza’s ‘‘Other Names, Other Histories’’, which stretches religious (especially Christian) imagery to desperate lengths in telling of a priest’s quest to a terrible desert in search of a revenant (a remade dead man) who may lead him to a new faith, or to accommodation with his loss of faith. This is fine work – as are other pieces here like Robert Guffey’s ‘‘Cryptopolis’’, a similarly religiously tinged story about a mysterious city – but the focus is mostly inward, and as such there is no ‘‘engagement’’ with realistic futures (or even with the present).
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Eclipse Online in December features another strong Lavie Tidhar story, set what I’ll call his ‘‘Central Station’’ future, though this piece, ‘‘The Memcordist’’, is set all over the Solar System, and at several different times in the life of a man who grew up ‘‘on stage,’’ in a sense, implanted with some tech such that his every experience is broadcast for anyone who wants to share. His life, shaped mostly by two women, his ‘‘stage-mother’’ and the one woman (another memcordist) he truly loved, is well portrayed, and we also get a neat look at the extent of this future. To me, Tidhar is one writer who is consistently engaged in speculation on a rigorous (and diverse) future, especially in these Central Station stories.
Locus, January 2013 Page 6
