Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The new stories posted up on the Winter 2009 issue of Subterranean include one of the kind of Gonzo Post-Apocalypse extravaganzas that seem to have been pioneered in the field by Neal Barrett, Jr. back in the ‘80s, “Grail-Diving in Shangrilla with the World’s Last Mime,” by Ken Scholes; this one gets even more gonzo than usual, throwing in zombies, flying saucers, angels, cross-dressers, gun-toting mimes, and the Holy Grail in the form of an oversized coffee mug—so over the top, in fact, that it eventually all becomes rather too silly. The issue also features two wistful and autumnal near-fantasies, much quieter in tone, that skate along the border of genre and mainstream, “Her Voice in a Bottle,” by Tim Pratt, and “The Dry Spell,” by James Blaylock.

  Although I no longer have any professional connection with Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, I can’t deny that I still feel a bias toward it and wish it well, having been in on the birth of the magazine and having subsequently spent twenty years of my life editing it, and so I’m pleased to see it reach its 400th Anniversary Issue, the April/May issue. It’s a fat issue, and if most of the stories stuffed into it are probably not going to show up on any award ballots next year, with a few possible exceptions, there’s still plenty of good solid enjoyable stuff to read here.

  The best story in April/May is probably Damien Broderick’s “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide,” in which remote-viewing psychics lead scientists to an alien spaceship that has been buried in the ice on Titan for tens or even hundreds of millions of years; the tension between the use of quasi-magical psi powers and science is interestingly handled, and informs the emotional conflicts within the viewpoint character himself, who is quite well-drawn and unusually complex. (It’s too bad, however, that none of the Fermi Paradox-related questions raised by the discovery of the spaceship are ever actually answered, or even really have a possible answer, or even several, hinted at.) Also first-rate here is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Spires of Denon,” in which a cat-and-mouse game is played out between those who want to preserve and those who want to loot another enigmatic archeological find on an alien planet; great fun, with the only caveat being that one of the protagonists, Gabrielle Reese, is portrayed as being so arrogant, unlikable, and, more importantly, dumb, that we never have any sympathy for her or any doubt that she’s going to be bested by shrewd security guard Meklos Verr, which drains much of the potential suspense from the story. The issue’s other big story is Brian Stableford’s “The Great Armada,” which is loaded to the scuppers—whatever they are—with bizarre and original conceptualization, but which is the fourth in a series of four huge novellas, and in which the backstory has become so complicated by this point that it’s hard to follow, and much of the text is taken up with infodumps trying to explain what came before.

  Chris Beckett’s “Atomic Truth” is a prequel of sorts to later stories such as his “Piccadilly Circus,” which take place in a London where almost everybody has opted-in to a network which allows you to live in a projected Virtual Reality city and ignore the crumbling real city that’s actually all around you; this one takes place while the network is in its earliest stages, just before it takes full hold, and is well-crafted as usual, with the characterization of the wandering madman particularly nice, although I have my usual doubts that people would really buy into the system in the overwhelming percentages that they eventually do in these stories, where just about everyone is plugged-in. The elves in Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick’s “The Armies of Elfland” are not your father’s elves, being deadly, cruel, and perverse instead. Swanwick has already covered some of this territory before in his novels The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and The Dragons of Babel, but the elves here seem particularly perverse, capricious, and cruel; Gunn’s influence, perhaps? (Interestingly, there was another sequence of stories about ruthless and vicious Killer Elves going last year, by David Hutchison; must be something in the air.) This is gorgeously colored and stuffed with vivid fantasy imagery, although the fact that it’s all one grim emotional tone from beginning to end makes it read a bit flat overall. Jack Skillingstead’s “Human Day” is clearly an attempt to write a Phil Dick story, but it’s a kinder, gentler Phil Dick story, one where, yes, everybody is proven by the end to be a simulacrum of some sort, including the protagonist, but where that turns out to not be such a bad thing after all. Similarly, Kate Wilhelm’s “An Ordinary Day with Jason” is a Twilight Zone episode without the usual nasty Twilight Zone twist at the end, where everyone is pretty benign and things all work out for the best. Nancy Kress’s “Exegesis” is an amusing little academic joke, a bit reminiscent of Connie Willis’s “Ado.” Robert Reed’s “True Fame” starts out being a story about the difficulty of protecting your identity in an high-tech Information Age, one of several in recent months, but then takes a sudden sharp turn into Faerie. The eponymous cowgirls in Deborah Coates’s “Cowgirls in Space,” find what amounts to a Magic Wishing Ball, never explained, and, proving that they’ve never read any fairy tales, find out to their sorrow that you’d better be careful what you wish for.

  The April/May issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is the first of its bimonthly issues, larger than usual, and with plenty of stories, features, and reviews stuffed into it. As is usually the way to bet it, the fantasy stories here provide the strongest work in the issue, although there are a couple of legitimate SF stories as well. The best story here is probably Sean McMullen’s “The Spiral Briar,” which centers around an intricate and ingenious attempt to physically invade and conquer Faerie, in retaliation for the usual abductions and seductions being preformed by Good Folk crossing from the Other Side; this does an entertaining job of merging the atmosphere of fantasy with the hard-edged nuts-and-bolts atmosphere of engineer SF, as the human artisans doggedly experiment with ways to achieve their peculiar goal. Ellen Kushner’s “A Wild and a Wicked Youth” is a prequel to her popular novel Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, the Origin Story, to borrow comics terminology, of that novel’s main character, Richard St. Vier (for Swordspoint fans, nothing more will need to be said). Like the novel itself, like much of Kushner’s work, which has sometimes been referred to as “mannerpunk,” this comes close to being fantasy-by-courtesy—set in an imaginary Secondary World, yes, but one very much like our own Europe a couple of hundred years past, and with no obvert supernatural elements. Still, the storyline here is so compelling, and the character of Richard St. Vier so complex and interesting, that I can’t imagine that any but the strictest of fantasy purists will object to the lack of wizards and dragons. There’s no doubt whatsoever about the fantastic elements in John C. Wright’s “One Bright Star to Guide Them,” which is stuffed with a diversity of them, including magic swords, talking cats, doorways to other worlds, and demonic adversaries. In Wright’s “Twilight of the Gods,” mentioned in the review of Federations, above, he was effectively writing science fiction disguised as fantasy, but here he’s writing pure quill no-doubt-about-it fantasy—in fact, his own somewhat eccentric take on C.S. Lewis’s Narnia sequence, with many of the same thematic elements, including an immensely powerful magical lion, viewed slightly askew. It’s highly entertaining stuff, although the moral choice/religious element gets a bit heavy-handed here and there—but then, it does in Lewis, too. Jack Skillingstead’s “The Avenger of Love” is a Twilight Zoneish story, something he seems to be doing a lot of lately, an After-Life fantasy which functions as a homage of sorts to the work of Harlan Ellison.

  Science fiction in the issue is represented by Deborah J. Ross’s “The Price of Silence,” which starts out well (in spite of a cartoon Evil Military Man, who you are clearly supposed to hiss at every time he appears), but which abruptly stops without really having dealt with any of the problems it raises; by a pleasant if innocuous Baseball on the Moon story by Harry Garfield, “Stratosphere”; and a by a story by S.L. Gilbow in which industrialists go to rather improbable lengths to salvage a damaged robot, “Andreanna.”

  The Classic Reprint this issue is
Thomas M. Disch’s slyly satiric “The Brave Little Toaster,” which is widely taken today to be “heartwarming” and even cloyingly sentimental in spite of the fact that Disch here clearly has his tongue as far into his cheek as it is possible to go. Not the least of the ironies attendant on Disch’s turbulent life is that many of his obituaries announced “Author of “The Brave Little Toaster” dies,” as though this deadpan sardonic story was the high point of his career, and if Disch was wrong about there being an Afterlife, I’m sure he’s looking down and smiling ruefully at this terminal irony right now. Nevertheless, though frequently misunderstood, “The Brave Little Toaster” is a great read, especially recommended for those who haven’t read it but have only seen the Disney cartoon, drenched with the ferocious, razor-sharp wit that is one reason why this author will be so keenly missed.

  8

  F&SF, 6-7/09

  ASIMOV’S, 06/09

  ANALOG, 1-2/09

  Lone Star Stories, 02/09

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, 03/09

  The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume One: Threshold, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-71-9, $29, 575 pages.) Cover art by Michael Whelen.

  The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Two: Power & Light, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-77-1, $29, 575 pages.) Cover art by Michael Whelen.

  The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 1: Call Me Joe, Poul Anderson. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-75-7, $29, 510 pages.) Cover art by Bob Eggleton.

  The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh. (Zubaan/Penguin Books, 978-8-18-988404-8, no price given, 206 pages.) Cover art by Anita Roy.

  Substantial science fiction stories have been a bit scarce in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction so far this year, where the best work is usually done in fantasy, so it’s a nice change to see a good solid meat-and-potatoes SF novella in June/July, the best story in the issue and one of the better stories of the year, Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Paradiso Lost.” Like the author’s “The Tribes of Bela,” to which this is a prequel, this is an old-fashioned off-world adventure story with elements of mystery and violent conflict, nothing dazzlingly new or profound, unlikely to impress sophisticated critics (who weren’t impressed by the previous story either), but the sort of straightforward entertainment that is likely to please many of the readers. Although the villainous figure of the General is a bit of a cartoon (one who, fortunately, disappears from the story after only a few pages), as a veteran, one of the things I appreciate here is the feeling that comes through in the text in a dozen small ways, mostly attitudinal, that the author has actually been there himself and understands the mentality of the military life, particularly at an enlisted man’s level—the kind of psychological authenticity that is often lacking even in Military SF. I also like Cowdrey’s conception of subspace as a big empty void containing nothing whatsoever but one that still takes a very long time to cross, so it seems as if you’re hanging in dark nothingness for months at a time. There’s also plenty of wit here, although unlike the author’s more-frequent supernatural comedies, this has an underlying seriousness of tone.

  June/July also features two stories about the interaction of childhood imagination / fantasy and the real world that almost act as symmetrical reversals of each other, Robert Reed’s “Firehorn” and Mike O’Driscoll’s “The Spaceman,” with the question of belief and how belief affects reality central to both—in both, an act of childhood imagination takes on a life of its own, although to very different effects; Reed’s story offers a science-fiction rationale (and the rather attractive notion that AIs will be as gapingly gullible and credulous as humans are), O’Driscoll’s is straightforward fantasy in spite of a spaceage element (could have been pirate ghosts luring children away on the Flying Dutchman as easily as easily as an astronaut and his phantom space ship). John Kessel’s exquisitely written “The Motorman’s Coat,” does gain some nice local-color touches by being set in a future Prague, but since this psychologically complex study of obsession could just as effectively have been set in any time-period, with any object of obsession standing in for the eponymous Motorman’s Coat, the SF element here is mostly cosmetic, not essential to the telling of the story itself. Carolyn Ives Gilman’s bitterly funny “Economancer” does indeed, as the editor says in his headnote, explain a lot about what’s gone wrong in our modern world. And Wayne Wightman’s “Adaptogenia” is a comic Apocalypse with something of the quirky tone of R.A. Lafferty to it. The Classic Reprints are John Varley’s “Retrograde Summer” and Gary Jennings “Sooner or Later or Never Never,” with the Varley in particular being one of his most significant early stories, the one that made me in particular sit up and take notice of him as a writer to keep an eye on in years to come.

  With the exception of one story, everything in the June Asimov’s is science fiction, something I’m pleased to see, especially as their fantasy is often weaker than the fantasy in F&SF. The two best stories in the issue are “Going Deep,” by James Patrick Kelly, and “Controlled Experiment,”by Tom Purdom. The Kelly, which is about a family reunion of sorts in a high-tech future where “dreamfeeds” direct into the brain are common and some humans have been genetically bred to be able to enter a state of hibernation for long space voyages, comes across rather like a more-sophisticated version of one of Robert A. Heinlein’s so-called “juveniles” (what would today be called Young Adult novels), the kind of thing Heinlein might be writing today if he had lived long enough to continue his “juveniles” into the Oughts. The voice here is pleasant, as is the frustrated and conflicted (but not strident) young girl narrator, and with the YA field as strong as it is today, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t the kind of thing that Kelly ought to be doing as his next novel. (A word should be said here about Kelly’s accomplishment of having been able to write a new story for every June issue of Asimov’s for the last twenty-five years, most of which have been of good quality, and a few of which—such as “Mr. Boy,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “1016 to 1,” and the Hugo-winning “Think Like a Dinosaur”—have been exceptional, an unbroken string of good short material hard to match anywhere else in the genre.) Tom Purdom’s “Controlled Experiment” is also excellent, a bit reminiscent of Damon Knight’s “Country of the Kind,” one of several stories Purdom has written about a character’s emotional state being constantly monitored and tweaked by social engineers and experimenters, in this case to control an individual who has been judged to have an uncontrollable temper—sort of a more sophisticated extension of the electronic monitor tags that present-day convicts under house arrest are made to wear. It struck me as initially a bit unlikely that they go to such elaborate lengths for this experiment, but against the rich and highly civilized society Purdom postulates, in which “life-imprisonment” can amount to a sentence of thousands of years, it becomes more plausible (in a more impoverished future, they’d probably just shoot him). I very much like Purdom’s invention of a class of people called “mischiefs,” an evolution of today’s hackers, creating chaos for chaos’s sake, that seems to me all too likely to actually come into being.

  Chris Willrich’s “Sail the Morne” is a deliberately retro Space Pirates story, briskly told and highly entertaining, if a bit too self-consciously pulpish in places; the paper universe here seems filled with rather unlikely-looking alien races, in fine Planet Stories style, but, also like in the pulps, none of them really come across as very different from baseline humans in psychology, being basically humans in octopus suits. Still, it’s good fun. Also a bit retro is Eric Brown’s “Cold Testing,” which sets up a love triangle between a “female” robot, a human woman, and the human man they’re both romantically interested in—see if you can guess who sacrifices themselves for whom, something that’s a bit too easy to see coming. The protagonist in John Alfred Taylor’s “Bare, Forked Animal” is forced to undergo a sort of inadvertent high-tech invisibility, falling between the cracks of an intensively urbanized future
, and Taylor does bring home the feeling of how distressing this would be, although the feckless character makes so feeble an attempt to save himself until the very last moment that you become rather annoyed with him. Sandra McDonald’s “The Monsters of Morgan Island,” the one non-SF story in the issue, is not so much a fantasy either, but instead a rather labored allegory.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Recovery Man’s Bargain,” the best story in the January/February issue of Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact, and one of the better stories to appear in Analog so far this year, is also somewhat retro, more Old Space Opera than New Space Opera, with the eponymous Recovery Man zipping easily back and forth between the stars in a small one-man spaceship, rather like they do in Jack Vance’s “Gaean Reach” novels, after being blackmailed into setting off on a nearly impossible quest by a sinister alien race. This could have appeared in Analog at almost any time during the last sixty years, but it’s expertly done, and very entertaining. Also a bit different from the standard Analog fare in the January/February issue is Dave Creek’s “Zheng He and the Dragon”—the SF element is predictable stuff, nothing you haven’t seen before, but the historical local color is nicely handled.

  The best story in the February 1st issue of ezine Lone Star Stories, and one of the best of the year so far, is Jay Lake’s “On the Human Plan,” a far-future story about the ultimate destiny of humankind that manages the very difficult task of being intensely poetic from beginning to end without ever becoming purple or florid or overwritten. Impressive. Also worth reading in February 1st is Samantha Henderson’s “Chandra’s Game,” a cyberpunk story about a freelance female operative struggling to deal with the usual nasty types while negotiating the Mean Streets of a gritty asteroid city in search of a missing person. Jeremy Adam Smith’s “Eko and Narkiss” gives us a far-future variation of familiar Greek mythology, grown strange through the lens of ages.