The best story in the August Asimov’s is probably Damien Broderick’s “The Qualia Engine,” a worthy addition to the long line of supermen-in-hiding stories that stretches all the way back to Olaf Stapledon, with notable stops along the way at A.E. Van Vogt and Henry Kuttner, among others. The Broderick is a dense story, made chewy by many infodumps, but with a rich nougat vein of well-observed human emotion to keep us gnawing away at it. The main subplot, and the protagonist’s obsession, learning by technological means to see through another person’s eyes—and, more importantly, feel the world as they feel it—also is a science fiction motif with a long tradition, but Broderick handles it well, bringing it into the 21st Century with some updated science. Also first-rate, although deliberately ambiguous, with no definite or clear-cut answers ever arrived at, is Michael Blumlein’s “California Burning,” a story about a man who discovers that his father may or may not have been an alien, and Robert Reed’s “Creatures of Well-Defined Habits,” an elegant story about a future whose rich immortals are bored enough to resort to playing decades-long games of status and one-upmanship with each other, even if they have to go to the far side of the solar system to win.
The two characters in Derek Zumsteg’s “Blue” are pretty much doomed from before the start of the story, and although they go through the motions of trying to increase their odds, their struggle for survival isn’t really the main focus here. Atypically, it’s an expertly handled hard science story where most of the space is devoted to the characters—a man and a woman, the last survivors of a spaceship crew—working out their prickly and yet oddly close relationship with each other. Thankfully, Zumsteg doesn’t have them have sex, which most other writers would have, and they’re still bickering and sparring with each other as they plunge toward almost certain death in a black hole—the story also doesn’t spell out whether they manage to successfully pull off their very thin chance of survival or are killed, leaving them before they actually get to the ultimate crisis point, also unusual for this kind of story; most hard SF would have had them work out an ingenious last-minute way to survive, and would have shown you them doing it. Steven Popkes’s “Two Boys,” a sensitive and nicely handled story of recreated Neanderthals trying to deal with the rest of human civilization, reminds me strongly of Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words” from last year, although Popkes’s Neanderthals are a lot quirkier psychologically than Kosmatka’s, more different from modern humans (the scene where they all break into riotous laughter at the assassination of one of their own is a nice touch), and the story gains a certain perspective by being told through human eyes rather than from the Point of View of the Neanderthals. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Consciousness Problem” paints a compelling picture of a woman who thinks that she’s a clone, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Turbulence” is a relatively minor piece about another woman who may or not be bad luck to everyone around her.
Ambiguity, especially as to an experience’s authenticity, may be this issue’s subtext, in fact, and shows up in one key or another in almost every story—was the father in Blumlein’s story an alien or wasn’t he? is the simulacrum in Reed’s story really synonymous with the dead man he’s replaced? is the woman in Kowal’s story a clone or is she not? will the astronauts in Zumsteg’s story survive or won’t they? And so on.
The best story in Interzone 222 is Sarah L. Edwards’s “Lady of the White-Spired City,” a quiet, understated, but also subtly powerful story about an emissary of an interstellar civilization returning to the land of her birth after a span of generations away, and having to struggle with all the myriad of ghosts of the past that are raised by her return. In “Unexpected Outcomes,” Tim Pratt spins an ingenious tale in which people react to the news that their world is actually a computer simulation—being run as part of an elaborate social experiment in some Uber-universe—with defiance rather than despair, and decide to alter the outcome of the experiment by altering their behavior within it. In “Mother of Champions,” Sean McMullen exposes a worldwide conspiracy by superintelligent cheetahs who use their powers to manipulate the human race to their own advantage—entertaining and audacious, but I find the cheetah cabal almost as unlikely as his two-mile-long art-eating dragon. Aliette de Bodard delivers “Ys,” an atmospheric fantasy about the magical raising from the sea of the long-drowned land of Ys, a story that reminds me strongly of Fritz Leiber’s classic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story “The Sunken Land.” Kim Lakin-Smith contributes another satirical “Comic Inferno” story, this one blessedly short at least, “Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married,” which takes place in a Grease-like world (cue the Teenage Death Songs in the background, particularly, say, “Leader of the Pack” or “Dead Man’s Curve”) where society is ruled by warring hot-rod gangs. The issue is closed out by Nina Allan’s well-written but enigmatic “Microcosm,” which not only has a subliminal fantastic element, but very nearly a subliminal plot as well, with all sorts of hints about mysterious past doings that are never really revealed or resolved, leaving me wondering what in the world was supposed to have been going on; this fells much more like a Black Static story than an Interzone story.
The June 1st issue of Lone Star Stories is the last one, as the ezine is pulling the plug and calling it quits—a shame, as they were one of the most interesting electronic magazines out there, and had published some excellent material in the past. The June 1st issue has no real science fiction in it, but it does feature a nice bit of metaphorical metafiction by Jo Walton, “Parable Lost,” a Halloween fantasy about a Trickster figure on the loose among the trick-or-treaters by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Pranks,” and a story by Leah Bobet, “The Parable of the Shower,” about a modern woman trying to deal with Old Testament-like Divine Visitations in the modern world—slyly amusing, although it goes on a little too long.
Recent postings on Tor.com include a quiet but intriguing Alternate History story about baseball by Harry Turtledove, “The House That George Built,” which imagines a reality in which Babe Ruth missed his opportunity and never became the titan of the sport that he became in our timeline, but where other men, passed over in our world, get their time at bat instead; nicely ironic, demonstrating how much the course of our lives are determined by the smallest of details, and a good portrait of the Babe, who, in spite of his flaws, possesses a certain grandeur and dignity even in ruin. Tor.com also recently featured a really evocative Japanese fantasy by Kij Johnson, narrated by a lost cat trying to find her way home across an alien and hostile landscape, “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles.” Johnson handles the cat’s viewpoint expertly, anthropomorphizing her just enough to make us sympathize with her travails and the loss of her little world, but not so much so that she becomes a little human being in a furry cat suit; throughout, you never forget that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of a cat, and the fact that you understand more about the world she’s trying to deal with than she does adds a certain poignancy. Her adventures are quite exciting in places and ultimately rather moving, and this is certainly one of the best fantasy stories of the year so far.
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Interzone 223
Analog, 10/09
Talebones, Summer
Weird Tales, August
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-78-8, $29, 576 pages). Cover art by Michael Whelan.
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-79-5, $29, 576 pages). Cover art by Michael Whelan.
The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness, Poul Anderson. (NESFA Press, $29). Cover art by Tom Canty.
Wireless, Charles Stross. (Ace, 978-0-4410-1719-5, $24.95, 368 pages).
Dominic Green is a little-known and under-rated writer, on this side of the Atlantic at least, whose almost entire output of short fiction, about twenty stories between 1996 and 2009, has appeared in the British magazine Interzone. In
terezone has rewarded him for his loyalty by providing a welcome showcase for his work in Interzone 223, which features three very strong original stories by Green, and in effect functions as a “Special Dominic Green Issue.” Green’s voice reminds me of that of the late James Tiptree, Jr.—his stories are often narrated by a world-weary Insider who has become alienated from the goals he’s supposed to be working toward, a cynical but compassionate (although worn-out) expert who still hopes for better days but realizes that there’s little realistic chance that The System isn’t going to win in the end—and for all the world-weariness, the stories are told with élan and verve, and a fondness for wordplay that sometimes errs on the side of enthusiasm. These qualities are the most strongly in evidence here in “Coat of Many Colors”—about a psychologist examining a genetically created animal who may be demonstrating signs of intelligence, and her efforts to keep government officials from breeding and slaughtering it anyway for its iridescent chameleonic skin—which could easily have been a Tiptree story, except that I suspect that Tiptree would have been even more cynical, as Green allows a note of cautious hope to creep in at the end, as Tiptree probably would not have. Also first-rate is “Butterfly Bomb,” about an old man raising a child by himself on an otherwise totally deserted planet, a clever story where nobody and nothing turns out to be even remotely what they seem. Another way in which Green is like Tiptree is his fondness for wild new ideas, the wilder the better, and his lack of fear or hesitation about painting in broad strokes with bright primary colors, qualities which “Butterfly Bomb” features in abundance. My least favorite of the three Green stories, although still good, is “Glister,” which still has lots of bizarre conceptualization, but which is even more cynical than the other stories, dark and downbeat and literally hope-less in a way that seems to be a specialty of one kind of British SF. I suspect Tiptree would have approved of that one too.
In spite of his many short story sales to Interzone, Green has been unable to sell a novel, and has finally given up and posted several of his novels to be read for free up on his website, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/lumfylomax/, and those of you who enjoyed his stories here might want to check them out. Those book editors who are bemoaning the lack of quirky novels by new writers to publish should check them out too.
In the rest of Interzone 223, Suzanne Palmer, in “Silence and Roses,” gives us a story that manages to balance on the razor-edge of mawkish sentimentality without quite falling all the way in, an impressive job of tightrope-walking. (This, by the way is another robots-struggling-to-adjust-after-all-the-humans ((or most of them, anyway))-are-dead story, of which there have been several so far this year, with several published last year as well.) Eric Gregory’s “The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai” also contains some intriguing conceptualization, but is a bit murky and opaque in a way that Green is not.
The best story in the October Analog is Michael F. Flynn’s novella “Where the Winds Are All Asleep.” Like Tolkien before him with the Mines of Moria, Flynn takes us down to “the deep places of the Earth” where monsters dwell unsuspected by surface dwellers, far enough underground that his characters blunder across and rouse the strange and dangerous beings that live there, with dire consequences—although rather than Balrogs, in Flynn they’re living lava creatures of several different sorts. Once it really gets underway, the story is fast-paced and compelling, and manages to generate some genuine suspense, especially in the final chase sequence (although you know that the protagonist is going to escape, because you meet her first in the initial frame scene—which does blunt the suspense a bit). My biggest problem with the story is with that framing device, couching the story as a tale being told after the fact in a bar, which seemed to me not only unnecessary but a bit detrimental to the pacing, since the opening bar scene reads slow and a bit too arch to me. I also found it hard to believe that the woman was actually telling all this to the patrons in a bar in the very literary way that she’s telling it, or that all those patrons are sitting there in polite silence listening to this very long yarn unfold, without talking amongst themselves or cutting across the narrative with requests for refills. I’d have liked the story a smidgen better if the framing sequences had been done away with altogether—although even with them, it’s certainly one of the better stories to appear in Analog so far this year. Also good in the October Analog is “Cold Words,” by new writer Juliette Wade, a story about a diplomatic mission to an alien planet that’s in danger of foundering on the rocks of cultural misunderstandings. Wade does a really good job of creating alien aliens, with their own distinctly non-human psychology and cultural values, and showing how language, the words themselves, can both create barriers and help to tear them down. Robert Grossbach gives us “An Idea Whose Time Had Come,” a somewhat ponderously arch story about an effort to elect a robot/AI to the office of President of the United States; perhaps Grossbach is right about it being an idea whose time has come, since we’ve seen several other stories with similar plotlines in recent months. A hangover from the unpopular Bush Administration, perhaps?
The semiprozine Talebones was a lively little magazine that had been publishing interestingly quirky stuff since 1995—but now they’re throwing in the towel and ceasing publication, and issue 38, the Summer issue, will be their last. I for one will be sorry to see them go; they didn’t do a lot of center core SF, running more slipstream and soft horror than I would ideally like to see, but almost everything they did was of professional-level quality, and some of it was quite good. Unfortunately, the Summer Talebones is not a particularly strong issue to go out on, with little that could be called either SF or really exceptional, although the issue does feature interesting fantasy stories by Mary Robinette Kowal and Scott Edelman, and a time-travel tale of sorts by Marshall Payne.
As one magazine dies, another, already counted among the fallen and deeply mourned, returns to life, as new publisher Tir Na Nog Press, headed up by Warren Lapine, former honcho of the now-defunct DNA Publishing Group, brings out the first issue of their revivified Realms of Fantasy magazine, dated August 2009. The long-running Realms of Fantasy had been announced as having died earlier in the year, occasioning much grief in the genre audience, before it was bought by Tir Na Nog and given a new lease on life. The new incarnation of Realms of Fantasy is a whisker smaller than the previous version, and not quite as slickly produced, but it’s still a good-looking magazine, quite handsome in fact. More importantly, it’s still being edited by long-time editor Shawna McCarthy, who has edited the magazine since its very beginnings, which ought to guarantee a continuity of quality and literary tone and of types of story chosen—and so it seems to be, since there’s nothing here in the new incarnation that would have been shockingly out-of-place in any issue of the old Realms. Best story in the issue is Tanith Lee’s chilling “Our Lady of Scarlet,” in which a young student magician trapped in a plague-ridden city and in a quarantined boarded-up inn must use all of his fledgling skills to fight off a sinister Deity taking shape across the hall who is trying to absorb him—with mixed success. Ian Creasey’s “Digging for Paradise” is also good, a story balanced between science fiction and fantasy, with a bit of the flavor of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, as a powerful wizard travels to the far-future, to the final days of Earth, to recover magical talismans he buried ages before. Dennis Danvers’s “Healing Benjamin” has an intriguing initial set-up, with a boy bringing his cat back from the dead, but goes off-track when the cat suddenly begins to talk, one complication too many.
This is shaping up to be another good year for short-story collections. We’ve already had Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald, Crystal Nights and Other Stories, by Greg Egan, and The Best of Gene Wolfe, by Gene Wolfe, all of which will certainly be in the running for the title of Best Collection of 2009, which could make that competition quite a horse-race. Early in the year, NESFA Press brought out the first two volumes—The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume One: Threshold and The Collected Stories of R
oger Zelazny: Volume Two: Power and Light—in a projected six-volume series designed to collect all of Zelazny’s short fiction (some of it never before published), and also issued the first volume in a similar series designed to do the same for the short work of Poul Anderson, The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 1: Call Me Joe. Now both of these series have produced new volumes, which will certainly put a few more horses in the race.
The Zelazny series has brought out two new volumes, both huge collections with evocative Michael Whelan covers: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain and The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon, while the Anderson series has issued The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness, with a handsome Tom Canty cover.
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