Now that the late lamented Sci Fiction has died, probably the most important ezine on the internet, and certainly the one that features the highest proportion of core science fiction, is Jim Baen’s Universe (www.baensuniverse.com), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint, which takes advantage of the freedom from length restrictions offered by the use of pixels instead of print by featuring in each issue an amazingly large selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, stories by beginning writers, classic reprints, serials, columns, and features, certainly more material than any of the print magazines could afford to offer in a single issue. The best SF story in Jim Baen’s Universe this year was Nancy Kress’s harrowing study of the unexpected consequences of genetic engineering, “First Rites,” but there were also good SF stories by Ben Bova, Jay Lake, Lou Antonelli, Bud Sparhawk, Marissa Lingen, David Brin, and others; best fantasy stories here were Tom Purdom’s “Madame Pompadour’s Blade” and Pat Cadigan’s “The Mudlark” (although the fantasy element was very slim, and this may actually be a mainstream story, depending on how you squint at it) There was a lot of good solid work in Jim Baen’s Universe this year, but it somehow didn’t seem like there was as much first-rate work as last year.
A similar mix of SF stories, fantasy stories, and features, including media and book reviews and a new story by Orson Scott Card per issue, is featured in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com), edited by Edmund R. Schubert under the direction of Card himself. There seems to be a greater emphasis on fantasy here than at Jim Baen’s Universe, and they do better with the fantasy, in terms of literary quality. The best story in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show this year, by a good margin, was Peter S. Beagle’s elegant Japanese fantasy “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,” but they also featured good fantasy stories by Dennis Danvers, Stephanie Fray, and others, and good SF stories by Ken Scholes, Aliette de Bodard, Sharon Shinn, and others.
The new Tor website, Tor.com (www.tor.com), a blog/community meeting ground that features lots of commentary and archives of comics and art in addition to original fiction, has quickly established itself as another important internet destination. Earlier this year, I reviewed first-rate stories featured there by Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Charles Stross. Since then, they’ve featured an excellent and highly atmospheric fantasy story by Jay Lake, “A Water Matter,” a clever postmodern revisitation of The Matter of Barsoom, sort of, “The Film-Makers of Mars,” by Geoff Ryman, and other good stories by Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, and Brandon Sanderson.
Two former print magazines that have completed a transformation to electronic-only formats, something I think we’ll inevitably see more of as time goes by, are Subterranean (http://subterraneanpress.com), edited by William K. Schafer, and Fantasy (www.darkfantasy.org), edited by Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo . Subterranean usually leans toward horror, and “dark fantasy,” although they also run SF, and, in fact, the two best stories featured there this year, “Mirror of Fiery Brightness,” by Chris Roberson and “Kilimanjaro,” by Mike Resnick, were both SF, as were other good stories by Beth Bernobich and Mary Robinette Kowal; fantasy was represented by Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, and others. Fantasy, as should be expected from the title, usually sticks to traditional genre fantasy and the occasional mild horror story, sometimes a bit of slipstream, almost never running anything that could be considered SF. The best stories here this year were Holly Phillips “The Small Door” and Rachel Swirsky’s “Marrying the Sun,” although there were also good stories by Gord Sellar, Peter M. Ball, Ari Goelman, and others.
Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com), edited by Susan Marie Groppi, assisted by Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner, features more slipstream and less SF than I’d like, but lots of good stuff continues to appear there nevertheless; best stories this year were “The Magician’s House,” by Meghan McCarron, “Called Out to Snow Crease Farm,” by Constance Cooper, and the amusing First Contact story, “The Gadgey,” by Alan Campbell, but there was also good work by A.M. Dellamonica, Bill Kte’pi, Deborah Coates, and others. The best stories this year in Abyss and Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction (www.abyssandapex.com), edited by Wendy S. Delmater in conjunction with fiction editors Rob Campbell and Ilona Gordon, were “Angry Rose’s Lament,” by Cat Rambo, “Snatch Me Another,” by Mercurio D. Rivera, and “Troy and the Aliens,” by Ruth Nestvold, but Abyss and Apex also featured good stuff by Alan Smale, Marissa Lingen, Vylar Kaftan, and others. I reviewed Clarkesworld Magazine (www.clarkesworldmagazine.com), which was edited by Nick Mamatas until July, when Sean Wallace took over, earlier this year, mentioning stories by Jay Lake, Jeff Ford, Tim Pratt, and others; since then, they’ve continued to publish good work, usually short and quirky, by Robert Reed, Eric M. Witchey, Don Webb, and others.
Turning back to the quaintly old-fashioned world of print, Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction have both been having good years, but both produced rather weak December issues. The best story by a good solid margin in the December Asimov’s is Tim Sullivan’s “Way Down East,” a poignant look at how the lives of some Maine lobstermen are affected in unexpected ways by a visit from an alien dignitary. Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Still on the Road,” written in the voice of Jack Kerovac, is more a slipstream story than an SF story, amusing but very slight. The rest of the stories are mostly concerned with music of some sort, rock n’ roll, Wagner, and are generally forgettable, including the lead story, David Ira Cleary’s “The Flowers of Nicosia.” Even Steven Utley’s “Perfect Everything” is, atypically for Utley, pretty forgettable. The best story in the December F&SF is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “A Skeptical Spirit,” a brisk and amusing story of a house haunted by a skeptical ghost whose glum presence drives all the other ghosts away, and the misadventures of the house’s owner in trying to exorcise it in order to attract a better class of resident spirit. Robert Reed’s “Leave” has an intriguing premise, as Reed’s stories almost always do, but the SF element is thin, and in a year where there have been a number of other good Reed stories produced, this only falls toward the middle of the pack. Wayne Wightman returns after more than a decade’s absence, but unfortunately the story he returns with, “A Different Country,” a semi-satirical political piece, is only so-so, rambling on for much too long. Eugene Mirabelli’s slipstreamish “Falling Angels” has a vivid opening scene that it then fails to do very much else with, and John Langan’s “How the Day Runs Down” is another of the year’s innumerable zombie stories, reprinted from the zombie anthology The Living Dead.
The best story in Interzone 218, and one of the best of the year, is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “His Master’s Voice,” a posthuman story (told by an intelligent dog) that is cranked up to about as high a bit-rate as it is possible to get without the story becoming totally incomprehensible (which it probably is, to some readers). The rest of the issue changes pace considerably, becoming slow, contemplative, melancholy. Three stories are devoted to work by Chris Beckett, the best of which is “Greenland,” a dismaying view of a decaying future England which is very powerful but also very bleak, delivering up more of a freight of depression than perhaps some readers are going to be willing to unload in these hard economic times when they’re probably already depressed. “Rat Island” is even more bleak and hopeless, enough so that it begins to seem almost stylized. “Poppyfields” is more contemplative, less bleak, but it’s SF only by courtesy, as a regular teenage runaway could easily have stood in for the dimension-shifting teenager here without changing anything of significance. Tim Lees’s “Corner of the Circle” is more wistfully autumnal than bleak, a boy’s reminiscence of his strange relationship with a vivid and peculiar woman in a New York City which is regularly visited by ships from the stars. The story I enjoyed the most in Interzone 219 was Aliette de Bodard’s “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn,” a cleverly worked-out mystery set in an Alternate History world that would have been perfectly at home in the Alternate History/Mystery
cross-genre anthology Sideways in Crime, published earlier this year. Also good is Mercurio D. Rivera’s “The Fifth Zhi,” about a clone, one of a stream of clones sent on a suicide mission, who begins to wonder if the game is really worth the candle. The conceptualization in Gord Sellar’s “The Country of the Young” is fairly standard stuff, a woman trying to unravel the identity of a mystery man who has been altered by genetic engineering, but the milieu in which it’s set, a sympathetically described North Korea, is unusual for SF. Like his earlier Interzone story, Jason Sanford’s “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” seems to totter on the borderline between SF and surrealism; this one comes down perhaps a bit more firmly on the SF side and tells an emotionally involving story, although the science is pretty shaky.
The stories in Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, edited by Lynne Jamneck, wrestle back and forth between lesbian erotica and science fiction, some having more of one, some having more of the other, but there are several stories here where the ratio of SF to erotica is high enough that they strike me as perfectly legitimate SF stories, with a sexual element not particularly higher than that to be found in many other SF stories—these include stories by Nicola Griffith, Melissa Scott, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Gwyneth Jones, whose “The Voyage Out” is one of the best stories of the year, a compelling story of a woman sentenced to be literally thrust out into the unknown, in a more extreme high-tech form of the fate faced by those convicts once Transported to Australia.
Otherworldly Maine, edited by Noreen Doyle, is a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology which features strong reprints by Edgar Pangborn, Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, and others, as well as good original work by Gregory Feeley, Lee Allred, and Jessica Reisman. Gregory Feeley’s “Awskonomuk” is probably the best story here, although it really has no fantastic element at all.
5
F&SF, 1/09
F&SF, 2/09
Asimov’s, 1/09
Asimov’s, 2/09
Subterranean, Winter 2009
Tor.com
The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, Quercus One, Paul Brazier, ed. (Three Legged Fox Books, 978-0-9554783-2-1, no cover price listed, 258 pages). No cover art credited.
Clarkesworld, January
With the somewhat dubious exception of a Carol Emshwiller story, there is no science fiction whatsoever in the January 2009 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Best story in the January issue is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Seafarer’s Blood,” which isn’t quite up to Cowdrey’s usual standards, but which still delivers some slyly satiric touches in telling the story of a man who “travels” in time by possessing the bodies of people in the past while they’re both asleep; unfortunately, it turns out that that door swings both ways, and comic confusion and mayhem ensues; it’s the sort of thing I could see Topper author Thorne Smith writing if he’d somehow survived into the 21st Century. Solid reading value is also provided by Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Minuteman’s Witch,” which retells the Battles of Lexington and Concord from a supernatural perspective; this is entertaining, but perhaps too obviously the opening chunk of a novel. Dean Whitlock, who had been a hot new author in the ‘80s and who hasn’t been heard from for many years, makes a welcome return with “Changeling,” which is really a rather sweet mainstream story which doesn’t so much have a fantastic element as a highly unlikely element, as a forlorn young couple “drive” their Volkswagen out into the North Atlantic in search of dreams; I hope actual Volkswagen owners aren’t inspired to try this, since in real life my guess is that the car would either sink or they’d be swept helplessly out to sea. Michael Meddor’s “The Boy Who Sang for Others” is also rather sweet, a difficult trick to pull off, since it’s about demonic possession. Also, you guessed it, sweet (in fact, “sweet” is the defining word for this issue) is Carol Emshwiller’s “The Perfect Infestation” (which can pass for science fiction if you give it a large enough benefit of the doubt), in which alien parasites who have infested the bodies of dogs and cats in preparation for an invasion decide to give up on the conquest plans because they enjoy being pets so much (my immediate thought was, what about all the thousands of feral cats and dogs freezing in alleyways in every large city, to say nothing of all those battered and abused animals you see on Miami Animal Police and other such shows—wouldn’t they be more than glad to go ahead with the subjugation of the human race?). Not sweet at all, rather nasty, in fact, is Jim Aiken’s “An Elvish Sword of Great Antiquity”—but it’s also highly predictable.
There is some SF in the February F&SF, but not a lot; again, the bulk of the contents are fantasy. Charles Coleman Finlay returns with an SF piece this time, perhaps the issue’s strongest story, “The Texas Bake Sale,” which covers much the same kind of semi-comic gonzo After-the-Apocalypse territory that Neal Barrett, Jr. has covered in a number of stories such as “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus”—perhaps a bit less gonzo than Barrett’s stuff, played rather straight, in fact, once you get by the silly Bake Sale gimmick, but still an entertaining read. Mario Milosevic’s “Winding Broomcorn” is another sweet fantasy, this one about benign witchcraft, Eugene Mirabelli’s “Catalog,” more slipstream than fantasy, is just peculiar, and never did make a lot of sense to me, and Fred Chappell’s “Shadow of the Valley” is another in his fantasy “shadow traders” series, which is beginning to wear a bit thin for me. By far the bulk of the issue is devoted to a reprint of Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog”; now this is undoubtedly a classic fantasy, one that won a number of awards on first publication, perhaps the best “ghost car” story ever written, gripping and, yes, rather sweet, at least in a sweetly autumnal way—but since it takes up so many pages here, I think I’d rather have seen the space devoted to new material instead.
The January issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is considerably more substantial, especially if, like me, you prefer the meat-and-potatoes of actual core SF to fantasy. The best story in the January Asimov’s, and one of the best of the year so far, is Mary Rosenblum’s “Lion Walk,” a fast-paced and compelling SF mystery set in a nature reserve where scientists are recreating creatures from the Pleistocene by selective breeding, a story that manages to work both as genuine SF and a genuine mystery, and featuring, as Rosenblum’s work almost always does, a complex and sympathetic viewpoint character. (I find it a little unlikely that the United States would really be willing to devote so much of its territory to a nature reserve, but I’m willing to give Rosenblum a pass on that in the interests of getting a highly entertaining story in return.) The other top story in January is Robert R. Chase’s “Five Thousand Light Years from Birdland,” a clever and well thought-out First Contact story that also functions as a homage to Poul Anderson—and if you don’t know why, you need to read more Anderson (something that’s becoming easier to do, as Baen and NESFA Press are bringing much of his short work back into print). Damien Broderick’s “Uncle Bones” is a high-tech zombie story which sets up an emotionally powerful situation whose consequences it then mostly dodges by veering off into TV-cop-show melodramatics, and Will McIntosh’s “Bridesicle” is another look at a kind of high-tech “life after death,” a rather unlikely one, teetering on the verge of satire without quite falling all the way over into it, although it does provide a somewhat dubious answer to the always-vexed question of who’s going to pay for cryogenically storing all those people and how; like Broderick, McIntosh rather slides away from the most unsettling aspects of his own story, and the subplot about “riders” may actually be more interesting than his actual premise. Nancy Kress does her usual expert job with “Unintended Behavior,” but this one strikes me as rather pro forma, and I could see the “surprise” ending coming a long way away. E. Salih’s “Messiah Excelsa” is opaque and uninvolving, and Larry Niven’s “Passing Perry Crater Base, Time Uncertain,” is very minor.
The big story in the February Asimov’s is Judith Berman’s novella “Pelago,” which starts deep in media res, rather confusingl
y, and never stops for breath thereafter. Much of the backstory is never explained, although a lot of it can be worked out by implication, which gives some of the story a vaguely fuzzy quality, as though it’s slightly out-of-focus, something which is exacerbated by the way it’s written. Stripped of its stylistic flourishes, and ignoring some of the mysteries of its unexplained backstory, it’s a rather straightforward and headlong New Space Opera adventure, fast-paced, suspenseful, full of inventive detail, rather like something Alastair Reynolds might write—in fact, in plot and setting it reminded me quite a bit of Reynolds’s novella “Nightingale,” from 2006. Berman, though, has chosen to write her dialog in a “creole” form which is occasionally quite hard to parse, especially at first; eventually you get more used to it and it becomes easier to understand, but it does make the story harder to get through, requiring the reader to put more work into reading it, something that can be dangerous—the reader may choose to give up instead. This is obviously the first section of a novel, coming to a logical stopping place rather than actually resolving, and I’m not sure how many readers are going to have the patience to force their way through four hundred pages of creole dialog.
Another strong story in February is Colin P. Davies’s “The Certainty Principle,” which sets up an intriguing situation and poises some hard questions to its characters, but which then also slides away into unlikely TV Cop Show melodramatics at the end; I think it might have been better to set this whole story on Mars, rather than introducing the present-day after-the-fact storyline (or, conversely, vice versa—not both at once, though). Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling offer us a knockabout Cosmological Farce (like a sex farce, but with physics rather than sex) in the typically frenetic “Colliding Branes,” in which two runaway bloggers are faced with the imminent end of the universe. Since they remain throughout much more concerned by continuing to blog than by the fact that the universe is coming to an end, surely one of the jokes, and never show much emotional affect, the catastrophe lacks any real emotional weight for the reader; having painted themselves into a corner, with the universe in the process of being destroyed, Rucker and Sterling then conjure up an ingenious but unlikely (and very Ruceresque) multi-dimensional way to rescue the protagonists at literally the last possible second. Matthew Johnson’s “The Coldest War” is a tense story of two soldiers (or are there two?) playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game on an isolated arctic island during a renewed Cold War between Canada and Denmark. The details of the cold-weather technology needed to function militarily in such an extreme environment are worked out cleverly and convincingly, but the whole situation, having to fire a flare once a day to establish possession of the island, seems rather pointless—which probably is the point, in the final analysis. Speaking of the point, Steven Utley’s “The Point” is expertly cooked gruel, but rather thin gruel for all of that; clever but minor. Carol Emshwiller’s “The Bird Painter in Time of War” is a poignant fabulation about the futility and brutality of war, obviously deeply felt, and will undoubtedly bring a tear to the eye of many a reader—for my taste, though, you could see the author pulling the strings behind the scenes just a little too obviously here.
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