Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Playful and a lot of fun, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Fast Ships, Black Sails is an anthology of original pirate story/fantasy crosses, pirate/slipstream crosses, and even a few pirate/SF crosses. If some authors here give the impression that the whole of their research into pirates consisted of watching a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean, others clearly know their stuff, and, for the most part, even the stories that are the sketchiest on the pirate stuff make up for it with the colorful fantasy element. The best stories here are Garth Nix’s “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe,” another of his hugely entertaining Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories (a series that is clearly one of the modern heirs of Fritz Leiber’s “Gray Mouser” stories, along with Michael Swanwick’s “Darger and Surplus” stories), Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s SF story “Boojum” (one of several deliberately retro-pulp SF Space Pirates stories this year, another being Alastair Reynolds’s “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice,” from Strahan’s The Starry Rift), which features a rapacious living spaceship, and Kage Baker’s “I Begyn as I Mean to Go On,” the third pirate story that Kage—who clearly does know her pirates—has produced in the last couple of years (the others being 2006’s “The Maid on the Shore” and this year’s Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key), and the closest thing to a straightforward pirate story here, although there is some creepy stuff on the island where the pirates go in search of treasure. The anthology also contains good work by Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Naomi Novik, Howard Waldrop, Carrie Vaughn, and others. The stories in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, edited by William Schafer, are fairly representative of the kind of stories usually to be found on the Subterranean website, although none of them actually appeared there, being published for the first time here instead: fantasy, dark fantasy sometimes shading into horror, a smattering of science fiction, all extremely well-crafted. The best stories here are the playfully bleak “Penguins of the Apocalypse,” a sort of sinister version of the movie Harvey, by William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers’s bizarre and complex SF story, “The Hour of Babel,” Patrick Rothfuss’s gripping sword & sorcery tale, “The Road to Levinshir,” and Kage Baker’s nostalgic but chilling seaside fantasy, “Caverns of Mystery.” There are also good stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Carey, and others.

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  Dreaming Again, Jack Dann, ed.

  Postscripts 15, Nick Gevers, ed.

  The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Del Rey)

  Subterfuge, Ian Whates, ed. (NewCon Press)

  Celebrations, Ian Whates, ed. (NewCon Press)

  Myth-Understandings, Ian Whates, ed.

  American publishers, especially the big trade houses, seem to like their genres segregated—no fantasy in science fiction anthologies, no science fiction in fantasy anthologies, no mystery or mainstream in either. That’s not true of Australian publishers, however, where it seems to be okay to jumble different genres together in the same anthology, and it’s certainly the rule with Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann—the follow-up to 1998’s monumental Dreaming Down Under, edited by Dann and Janeen Webb, which brings us a similarly rich stew of fiction by Australian authors working in different genres, horror, fantasy, slipstream, science fiction. A wide variety of moods, too, with some stories horrific and grim, others seeming almost to be Young Adult pieces. There’s a bit too much horror here for my taste—a few zombie stories go a long way with me, and there’s lots of zombie stories here, to the point where it almost seems to become a running (or lurching) joke—but there’s also enough fantasy and science fiction stories in this huge volume to make up into respectable anthologies of their own, and if horror is your cup of blood, you’ll find the horror stories to be of high quality. Almost everything here is of high quality, in fact (even the stories I didn’t care for were excellently crafted), a rich smorgasbord, by thirty-six different authors, representative of the obviously busy Australian scene, from writers making their first few sales to the last story of Australian veteran author A. Bertram Chandler.

  For my money, the best story in the book is Garth Nix’s “Old Friends,” which dances ambiguously on the borderline between fantasy and science fiction, first seeming like one, then the other. The above-mentioned recently rediscovered lost last story of A. Bertram Chandler, “Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo,” is brisk and competent and entertaining, as was most of his stuff, filling a niche that few writers bother to try to fill anymore, that of the solid B list mid-list author. Margo Lanagan’s “The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross” is powerful but harsh and unsettling, one of several examples of rather tough stuff from Lanagan this year, and includes a scene that may make more squeamish readers wince and turn away. “In From the Snow,” by Lee Battersby, is also a grim and ruthlesslessly logical story, set in a Post-Apocalyptic world after some unspecified disaster where the survivors must be prepared to do just about anything to keep on surviving, while “Lost Arts,” by Stephen Dedman is a look at a much gentler future, a Utopian society on another planet (although you do have to wonder, with the economy they’re shown as having, why anyone would use money at all anymore). Simon Brown’s “The Empire” is a pastiche of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, one of several we’ve had this year, while Sean McMullen’s “The Constant Past,” also rather Victorian in tone, cleverly tells how a librarian figures out a way to defeat a murderous time-traveller without ever leaving the library. There is also good science fiction here by Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch, Rowena Cory Daniels, and Jason Fischer, whose “Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh” drives the zombie theme entirely across the line into very entertaining Grand Guignolish satire, set in an Australia ravaged by, in the authors own words, “some sort of messed-up Mad Max/George Romero disaster” (and which qualifies as SF by the thinnest of doubletalk rationalizations).

  Straightforward fantasy (as opposed to horror, although sometimes that line is hard to draw) is best represented here by “Twilight in Caeli-Amur,” by Rjurik Davidson, “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga,” by Peter M. Ball (another zombie story, but a considerably more subtle and elegant one), and “Manannan’s Children,” by Russell Blackford, although there’s also good fantasy work by Isobelle Carmody, Richard Harland, Jenny Blackford, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Janeen Webb, and others. Best of the horror stories for me was Terry Dowling’s “The Fooly” (although in some ways the most horrific story in the book may be Margo Lanagan’s).

  The question, raised in the past by Greg Egan and others, as to whether there is such a thing in the first place as specifically Australian science fiction, as opposed just to science fiction in general, is a question too large to be settled here, but most of the stories in Dreaming Again that take place on Earth at least feature Australian settings, and a few of the stories—mostly the fantasies—seem to draw on Australian myths and legends.

  In the past, I’ve criticized the British magazine Postscripts for not running enough core science fiction, and as if to twit me on this, Postscripts 15, a huge double-length (or longer) issue that is probably best considered as an anthology rather than a magazine, bills itself an “all science fiction issue!” Not that that’s true, of course. By my definitions, there’s at least six or seven fantasy stories of one sort of another here, a couple of slipstreamish things, a couple of somewhat steampunkish Alternate History stories (some argue that Alternate History shouldn’t be accepted as science fiction, which is why I mention them, although I don’t agree with that), a reprinted article by Arthur C. Clarke, a metafiction piece by Brian W. Aldiss about meeting the Queen, and a fascinating autobiographical article by Paul McAuley about growing up in post World War II England. There is plenty of core science fiction here though, nevertheless, most of it of excellent quality.

  Many of the best stories here are to be found in the special “Paul McAuley section,” which features, in addition to the above-mentioned autobiographical essay, a novel excerpt from McAuley’s The Quiet War, and four stories by McAuley: “A Brief Guide to Other
Histories,” a rather bleak piece indicating that crosstime travellers will almost inevitably fuck up one parallel history after another, in cascade function, “Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World,” a knockabout time-travel comedy, “The Thought War,” a high-tech zombie story (what is it with zombie stories this year? Almost every anthology featured at least one of them, and there was a specifically dedicated zombie anthology as well), and the best of the McAuley’s, and perhaps the best of the issue, “City of the Dead,” which depicts a dangerous attempt to unravel biological mysteries on an alien world. The other story which is in contention for the title of the issue’s best is Ian McDonald’s [A Ghost Samba], which does almost as a good a job of painting an evocative picture of a future Brazil as his Cyberaid stories have done with a future India. Chris Roberson gives us an outsider’s perspective on his Celestial Empire timeline in “Thy Saffron Wings,” Matthew Hughes spins a brisk tale of interstellar double-dealing and double-crosses in “The Eye of Vahn,” and Steven Utley works an odd implied horror-movie-like slant on his Silurian Tales series in “Variant,” and there are other good SF stories here are by Jay Lake, Robert Reed, and Michael Moorcock.

  There have also been a crapload of robot stories this year (robots and zombies, the year’s two dominant motifs!), and one of the best of them is Mike Resnick’s “An Article of Faith”—there’s nothing startlingly new here, as far as the theological arguments examined in the text are concerned, but the issues are laid out in a clear and simple, and emotionally effective, way. Scott Edelman also tells a robot story, a bit more heavy-handedly, although with some interesting questions raised, in “A Very Private Tour of a Very Public Museum.” Beth Bernobich’s novelette “The Golden Octopus” is an elaborate piece about the invention of time-travel in a very steampunk Alternate World, a bit confusing here and there, but very engaging. Brian Stableford continues his recent fascination with the 19th Century with a Victorian UFO story, “The Best of Both Worlds,” and Stephen Baxter tracks SETI research across the ages in “Eagle Song.” Alex Irvine’s “Shad’s Mess” is a rather icky technohorror piece, Garry Kilworth’s “Atlantic Crossing” has a very silly idea that shouldn’t have served to keep a vignette afloat, let alone a short story, Terry Bisson’s religious satire “Let Their People Go: The Left Left Behind” is much too long, and Eric Brown’s “State Secret” has nearly the same plot, and is nearly as silly, as “Conspiracies: A Very Condensed 937-Page Novel” from Sideways in Crime.

  The best of the fantasy stories are Justina Robson’s peculiar “Legolas Does the Dishes,” Jack Dann’s Renaissance fantasy/SF cross “Under the Shadow of Jonah,” and Paul Di Filippo’s exuberant steampunk fantasy “Professor Fluvius’s Palace of Many Waters.”

  Flying in the face of what I said above about American trade publishers, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a cross-genre anthology featuring SF, fantasy, horror, and slipstream stories. Oddly, for a book that puts “Science Fiction” first in its title, especially from a company like Del Rey, which is known for it’s solid, core, rather traditional science fiction, the smallest element in the mix is science fiction, with horror, fantasy, and slipstream making up the bulk of its contents—and what science fiction there is is soft near-future SF, with Datlow herself announcing in the Introduction (rather proudly, I thought) that “you won’t find off-planet stories or hard science fiction” here. The best story in the book, by a good margin, is one of those near-future SF stories, in fact, Maureen McHugh’s tale of a future China and what people will do to get by in it, “Special Economics.” Paul McAuley and Kim Newman tell a perhaps too frenetically busy but still entertaining story about enigmatic UFO aliens being held prisoner by the government, in “Prisoners of the Action,” Pat Cadigan spins a disquieting sort-of ghost story in “Jimmy,” Jason Stoddard tells a rousing but improbable Alternate History tale (Navahos with elephants!) in “The Elephant Ironclads,” and Elizabeth Bear tells the slipstreamish but absorbing story of how “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall.” “Daltharee,” by Jeffery Ford is an intricate slipstream story about cities in bottles, and “The Lagerstatte,” by Laird Barron, is the somewhat standard but well-crafted tale of a woman haunted by her dead husband.

  All the stories in the Del Rey Book, in fact, are extraordinarily well-crafted line-by-line, but somehow most of the rest of the stories are disappointing in other ways. I was one of those who defended Christopher Rowe’s previous “reconfigured Kentucky” story, “The Voluntary State,” from the charge that it was incomprehensible, but although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this one, “Gather,” is incomprehensible (I can sort of get a murky idea of what’s going on), I know that I’m missing a hell of a lot, and finished the story with the uneasy feeling that I wasn’t at all sure what had just happened or why. Lucy Sussex’s tale of a volcano-chaser, “Ardent Clouds,” is fun, but it has an almost subliminal SF element of the “blink and you miss it” kind. There is a Lake Monster in Nathan Ballingrud’s “North American Lake Monsters,” but it’s a dead one that’s used in a totally symbolic way to represent the disintegration of the family—a dead moose would have served the same purpose just as well. Several of the rest of the stories—Lavie Tidhar’s “Shira,” Richard Bowes’s “Aka St. Mark’s Place,” Anna Tambour’s “Gladiolus Exposed”—seem oddly inconclusive and incomplete, seeming to just stop when they’re getting interesting rather than progressing to any sort of a resolution or climax. And although I know that as the Queen of the Horror Editors, Ellen likes her fiction dark, and although I know that a lot of people think highly of the story, Margo Lanagan’s pederastic retelling of Hansel and Gretel (oddly, the second Hansel and Gretel story we’ve had this year, with the other one being in Dreaming Again), “The Goosle,” is much too dark and horrific for me; I found it rather offputting, in fact, and I’d advise squeamish readers to be careful about reading it.

  All of this makes it impossible for me in good faith to put The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy up among the year’s top anthologies, where you’d think a big anthology from Ellen Datlow would be, although there is still a lot of good stuff here for your money, and it’s still a book worth reading.

  One of last year’s strongest anthologies, appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere, was disLOCATIONS, edited by Ian Whates, from very small press publisher NewCon Press. This year, Whates and NewCon Press published three original anthologies, Subterfuge, Celebrations, and Myth-Understandings. None of these is quite as strong as disLOCATIONS, but all contain good stories of various types, and all deserve your attention. The strongest of these is Subterfuge, which, probably not coincidentally, considering my tastes, contains the highest percentage of science fiction (although all three anthologies contain a mix of SF and fantasy). Best stories here are the fast-paced “The Rhine’s World Incident,” by Neal Asher and the clever battling-telepaths story “Emptier Than Void,” by John Meaney, but there are also good SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Una McCormack, Tony Ballantyne, and others. The best of the fantasy stories are Tanith Lee’s creepily evocative “Underfog (The Wreckers)” and Dave Hutchinson’s story about ruthlessly deadly Elves bloodily reclaiming a near-future England, evidentially part of a series, “Multitude.” The best story in Celebrations, an anthology commemorating the 50th anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, is Alastair Reynolds’s Phil Dickian SF piece, “Soiree,” but there’s also a steampunk story by Stephen Baxter, a violent post-cyberpunk story by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, another War of the Worlds pastiche (this one by Ken MacLeod), another Killer Elves story by Dave Hutchinson, a near-future study of the social effects of the Biological Revolution by Brian Stableford, a good fantasy by Liz Williams, a puzzling dream-like story that I’m not sure I understood at all by M. John Harrison, a Dream Archipelago story (the first in many years) by Christopher Priest, and, of course, a zombie story, although a rather kinder, gentler, and more autumnal one than usual, this one by Molly Brown. The weakest of the thre
e anthologies is Myth-Understandings, which features mostly fantasy. Best story here is Tricia Sullivan’s extremely peculiar “The Ecologist and the Avon Lady,” although there’s another strong fantasy by Liz Williams, and good work by Justina Robson, Pat Cadigan, Kari Sperring, and others.

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  Jim Baen’s Universe

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

  Tor.com

  Subterranean

  Fantasy

  Strange Horizons

  Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Asimov’s, December

  F&SF, December

  Interzone 218

  Interzone 219

  Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, Lynne Jamneck, ed. (Lethe Press, 10 1-59021-101-4, $15.00, 216 pages). Book design by Toby Johnson.

  Otherworldly Maine, Noreen Doyle, ed. (Down East, 978-0-89272-746-9, $15.95, 318 pages). Cover by Greg Mort.

  With 2009 looming on the horizon as I type these words, let’s wrap up 2008 with a quick retrospective look at what some of the more prominent electronic magazines and websites (a form which becomes more important year by year to those wanting to keep up with the good short fiction being “published”) have featured this year.