An odd item is The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, Quercus One (Three Legged Fox Books), edited by Paul Brazier, a British small-press anthology of stories that have supposedly been previously published in electronic form on the members-only Quercus SF site (www.quercus-sf.com—although it doesn’t seem to have been undated for several years). Half of the book is taken up by rather specialized Alternate History stories about alternate fates for the now-destroyed West Pier in Brighton, England, hence the title, and the rest of the book is devoted to more generalized SF, fantasy, and slipstream stories. Best thing here is Liz Williams’s “Who Pays,” a high-tech literalization of Egyptian mythology, but there are also good stories by Geoff Ryman, Lavie Tidhar, Andy W. Robertson, Chris Butler, and others.
Posted up to date on the Winter 2009 issue of Subterranean is a gritty look at a night in a Mean Streets free clinic during the ‘60s, “Clinic,” by Kris Nelscott—no fantastic element, but a fine absorbing read with excellent period detail. The new Tor.com has an elaborate metafictional fantasy by Jeff VanderMeer, “Errata,” clever but not really my cup of tea. The January Clarkesworld has a wistful look at a boy caught quite literally between two worlds, one an alien world as it is and the other the same world as it might have been, “Celadon,” by Desirina Boskovich, and a bittersweet story told in email form about a boy caught in the trap of poverty and desperate circumstances on the Moon, “Teaching Bigfoot to Read,” by Geoffrey W. Cole; it could just as easily have been told with a factory worker in Pittsburgh or Cleveland standing in for the story’s dissolute Moon laborer father, with no really significant changes, which comes close to making it SF only by courtesy—but it’s affecting enough that I’m willing to give it a break. After all, if there ever is a big city on the Moon, no doubt it will contain the poor and marginalized as well as the rich and powerful, and it ought to be valid to write about them as well, even if their lives aren’t all that different from their brethren in grinding poverty on the current-day Earth.
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Other Earths, Nick Gevers and Jay Lake, eds. (DAW)
We Think, Therefore We Are, Peter Crowther, ed. (DAW, 978-0-7564-0533-5, $7.99, 311 pages.) Cover art uncredited.
Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald. (Pyr, 978-1-59102, $15.00, 279 pages.) Cover art by Stephen Martiniere.
F&SF, 3/09
Asimov’s, 3/09
Apex Magazine, 1/09
Apex Magazine, 2/09
Tor.com
Last year was an excellent year for original anthologies, and so far 2009 is shaping up to be a pretty good one as well.
Among the first of the year’s original anthologies out of the starting gate are Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake and We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther, both very strong, and both head-and-shoulders above the usual run of DAW original anthologies—probably not least because they draw upon authors well outside the more usual stock company of authors who appear in one DAW anthology after another.
Last year we saw a strong Alternate History anthology, Sideways in Crime, and this year brings us another, the strongest of the two DAW anthologies under discussion, Other Earths. Other Earths makes a conscious attempt to go after scenarios more subtle and sophisticated than the typical “What if the Nazis had won World War II?” setup common to the Alternate History subgenre—in the editors words, “A very large portion of the alternate history canon is concerned with militaria, fiction about soldiers and the wars they fight. This is as if an entire symphony orchestra were represented only by the brass section; however grand, the brass quickly becomes monotonous playing on its own.” In the main, they do an admirable job of giving the other instruments in the orchestra their due, although there are still a couple of stories here mainly concerned with wars and soldiers (including, yes, an offbeat variant on the “What if the Nazis had won World War II?” theme), and a few of the stories are subtle enough that it’s a bit difficult to determine what makes them Alternate History at all. The best story in the book, and one of the best stories of the year to date, is Robert Charles Wilson’s immensely sad vision of a world where the Civil War didn’t occur (which you’d think would be a good thing—but not necessarily), “The Peaceable Land, or The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” There are also excellent stories here by Gene Wolfe, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, and Greg van Eekhout (along with the Wilson, the most traditional Alternate History work in the book, although all have their own quirky twists), a long and emotionally grueling Heart of Darkness-like tale by Lucius Shepard about an author encountering scary Alternate Realities of a more personal sort, and somewhat more experimental stuff by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jeff VanderMeer, and Paul Park. If you ran into the stories by Theodora Goss and Liz Williams in any other setting, you’d be unlikely to think of them as Alternate History stories at all and would just read them as straight fantasy; read as such, they’re excellent, probably among the year’s best fantasy stories—and yes, do even have an Alternate History rationale if you squint at them a bit.
We Think, Therefore We Are, subtitled “15 original tales about the nature of artificial intelligence,” is not quite as impressive as Other Earths, having a higher percentage of dry and somewhat too-abstract stories, but is still a strong anthology. Best story here is Chris Roberson’s mystery/SF cross (also an Alternate History story) about a recalcitrant ship’s AI stalling a spaceship in mid-voyage for enigmatic reasons, “Dragon King of the Eastern Sea,” but there are also first-rate stories by Keith Brooke, Patrick O’Leary, Robert Reed, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, and others.
Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days is likely to be one of the best single-author collections of the year, if not the best, and it also contains, published here for the first time, a lengthy, complex novella dealing with deadly sibling rivalry in McDonald’s vivid and lushly atmospheric Future India setting, “Venus at the Cat Circus,” which probably will hold up as one of the best novellas of the year as well. McDonald has been working at the height of his considerable powers in the last couple of years, producing some of the very best work in contemporary SF, and also collected here are other recent memorable stories such as “The Little Goddess,” “An Eligible Boy,” “Sanjeev and Robotwallah,” and Hugo-winner “The Djinn’s Wife.” Making this a very strong collection indeed.
Science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, has been rather scarce in the 2009-dated issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction so far this year, but the March 2009 finally delivers a strong SF tale (if a bit murky one), Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Unstrung Zither”. The debt this one owes to Cordwainer Smith is a bit too obvious, and it’s one of those stories where the author knows a lot more about the background of the tale’s society and universe than he ever quite manages to convey entirely to the reader, giving it all a slightly fuzzy quality, as you have to guess at much of the unexplained backstory—nevertheless, it’s a compelling read in an interesting and non-standard setting, probably the best story in the issue. Also strong is Robert Reed’s “Shadow-Below,” one of a series of stories that Reed has been writing over a period of several years now, concerning a tribe of native people who live in hiding from the surrounding white society, still living as their ancestors did in earlier centuries before the Europeans arrived. I suppose these stories are science fiction, set as they are in the near future, although they read much like fantasy and the SF element to date has been incidental, relegated to the background rather than featured in the foreground (though there are hints in the present story that the series may become more strongly SFnal in subsequent installments). The series has been following the adventures of a boy named Raven as he struggles to come to terms with the surrounding white society and still keep faith with his own hidden people, and this story deals with another stage in his difficult Coming-of-Age. There will almost certainly eventually be a novel crafted out of this sequence of tales, and “Shadow-Below” is satisfying if you’ve read the earlier stories, but probably not so much if you haven’t;
it really doesn’t stand on its own feet that well as an independent unit. In Daniel Abraham’s Scheherzade-like fabulation, “The Curandero and the Swede,” a nervous groom-to-be at a family gathering is seized upon by an old uncle (much like the Ancient Mariner seizes and fascinates the Wedding Guest with his glittering eye) who proceeds to tell him an intricate sequence of nesting stories. The story as a whole is infused with intelligence and wit, but although the uncle’s stories are drenched with magical goings-on, the frame story itself has no fantastic element at all; in fact, the would-be groom never leaves the porch (and although the uncle’s tale-spinning is supposed to deliver a profound, life-changing moral to the rather feckless protagonist, it’s unclear to me just what that moral is supposed to be). I’m glad to see Marc Laidlaw returning to fiction writing after a gap of several years, but I didn’t warm to the last story in his Gorlen the Bard fantasy sequence, and I didn’t warm to the one in the March issue, “Quickstone,” either. The Classic Reprint is Robert Bloch’s Hugo-winning fantasy “That Hell-Bound Train,” which is introduced by an interesting memoir by William Tenn.
The best story in the March Asimov’s, by a considerable margin, and one of the best of the year so far, is Nancy Kress’s “Act One,” a compelling novella about a once-famous actress and her devoted manager who get much more publicity, of an unfortunate sort, than they bargained for when they inadvertently become embroiled with an act of biological terrorism—one with potentially world-changing results. The rest of the stories in the March issue are less impressive. The best of the remaining stories is probably R. Neube’s amusing “Intelligence,” in which it’s demonstrated that just because an Artificial Intelligence is intelligent, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s smart. The Chinese in Harry Turtledove’s story of cultural conflict between a future China and a future America, “Getting Real,” are so superior to the hapless Americans, practically omnipotent, like super-competent Earthmen outwitting bumbling Christopher Anvil aliens, that there’s little real tension here; the story seems mostly a vehicle for delivering the historical irony that the Chinese are now addicting large numbers of the American population to a Virtual Reality drug, just as we (or the British, at least) once encouraged opium addiction among the Chinese to earn huge profits and, not at all incidentally, keep China weak and destabilized. Sara Genge’s “Slow Stampede” seems like an early attempt at the opening of a novel, full of elements that don’t quite gel, like bits of gristle and fat and uncooked carrots floating on top of a stew. Holly Phillips’s “The Long, Cold Goodbye” is opaque as a brick, very difficult to force your way through, overwritten and trying much too hard to be “poetic” line-by-line, taking thirteen pages to work its way painfully through about three pages worth of plot.
Gord Sellar, who was all over with good stories in 2008, pops up again this year with another strong story in the February issue of ezine Apex Magazine, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” a brutal story of rape and biological exploitation with echoes of Geoff Ryman’s “The Unconquered Country.” The February issue also has a weird piece by Lavie Tidhar, “Dark Planet,” in which the identities of a human hunter and his alien prey (or is it vice versa?) get tangled inextricably together, and a reprint of Steven Francis Murphy’s affecting “Tearing Down Tuesday” from Interzone. The January Apex Magazine brings us a grim and powerful tale by Ruth Nestvold of survivors hunting each other through the ruins of post-apocalyptic Berlin, “On the Shadow Side of the Beast,” plus a story about the inherent dangers of dwelling in living houses, “Starter House,” by Jason Palmer, which reminds me somewhat of Jack Vance’s short novel The Houses of Izam, although Palmer’s living houses are much sillier than Vance’s ingenious ones were. There’s also a reprint of Eric James Stone’s “In Memory,” from Writers of the Future XX, which covers familiar territory, the difficulties of an uploaded personality in keeping in touch and in sympathy with the real world of flesh it has left behind, but covers it rather well.
Up recently on Tor.com is a really first-rate Alternate History story by Jo Walton, certainly one of the year’s best, “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction,” about a world where the Great Depression got worse instead of better, and stayed that way—something that makes for rather uneasy reading these days. Also up on Tor.com is a lyrical and elegant story by Ken Scholes that skates along the borderline of fantasy and science fiction, “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon,” about an absolute ruler who falls in love with the one woman he can never have, and the dramatic consequences of his doomed romance.
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Federations, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-201-6, 379 pages.)
Apex Magazine, 3/09
Interzone 220
Subterranean, Winter 2009
Asimov’s, 4-5/09
F&SF, 4-5/09
A mixed reprint and original anthology, Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, probably isn’t going to end up among the year’s top anthologies, although it’s filled with good solid stuff, and a few stories a bit better than that. Although lacking most of the subgenre’s Usual Suspects, it reads rather like a Military SF anthology, with some of the stories rather reminiscent in feel of Star Trek fiction—not really a surprise, since the editor specifically evokes Star Trek in his Introduction, saying that he was looking for work that “builds on those same tropes and traditions.” The best story here by a good margin is John C. Wright’s rousing spaceage take on Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, “Twilight of the Gods,” which performs the trick of writing valid science fiction that reads like epic fantasy as well as anyone has ever done it. Also good are Mary Rosenblum’s “My She,” a poignant story about the telepaths that hold an interstellar foundation together, told from the perspective of the doglike Servants (rather like Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople) who guide and protect them, Yoon Ha Lee’s “Swanwatch” (which seems to be set in the same universe, with a largely unexplained backstory, as her “The Unstrung Zither” in the March F&SF), an evocative story whose characters are a bit too emblematic and thinly sketched-in as human beings to be as affecting as they should be, and Allen M. Steele’s “The Other Side of Jordan,” a nice story of star-crossed lovers who lose each other and find each other again in spite of the vast interstellar distances in the way. James Alan Gardner’s “The One with the Interstellar Group Consciousness” is a one-joke story that goes on for much too long, and Catherynne M. Valente offers us a curious and rather perverse story about embargoes in the interstellar wine trade that turn into actual war (shades of The Phantom Menace!), “Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy.” Federations also contains solid work by Genevieve Valentine, Trent Hergenrader, and others, and good reprint stories by Alastair Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, and others—the most impressive of which is Reynolds’s “Spirey and the Queen,” one of the best of his early stories.
The March issue of ezine Apex Magazine features a well-crafted homage to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (there was another one, by a different hand, in Clarkesworld last year), Theodora Goss’s “The Puma.” There’s also a crueler and sadder (and probably much more likely) variant of Babe, “The Mind of a Pig,” by Ekaterina Sedia.
The best story in Interzone 220 is Jason Stoddard’s “Monetized,” one of the purest examples I’ve seen in some time of what Kingsley Amis once referred to as the “Comic Inferno” story, the kind of smart and openly satiric story that Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth used to write for Galaxy back in the ‘50s when H.L. Gold was the editor; this one features a sort of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube intensively networked world where the economy is based on buying and selling endorsements for everything that you do, horrifying and unsettlingly possible. Eugie Foster’s “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” is an elegantly strange slipstreamish fantasy. Leah Bobet’s “Miles to Isengard” is one of those annoying stories where the actions of the characters start out pretty damn unlik
ely, and become relentlessly more stupid from then on. The focus of the story should have been on the arguments the ecoterrorists are having with the atomic bomb they’re hauling across country, which does hold a frisson of interest—undercut, however, by the question as to whether the bomb is really talking or it’s all in the narrator’s head, a bit disappointing when you realize it’s probably subjective after all; I would have much rather had it turn out that the bomb actually is taunting and mocking them. The character of the feral kid they pick up along the way is also irrelevant, and only serves to distract from the focus of the plot. Rudy Rucker’s “After Everything Woke Up” is very silly, and hugely exceeded my New Age tolerance levels.
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