Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The rest of December is more uneven. New writer Alexandra Duncan turns in a strong and thoughtful story, very reminiscent of Le Guin, about cultural misunderstandings between an Earthwoman and the tribe of spacegoing nomads that her father had once lived amongst, “Bad Matter.” Matthew Hughes contributes a story, “Hell of a Fix,” which wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an issue of Unknown, complete with demons who talk in comic 1930’s slang, about the escalating complications caused by a man accidentally summoning a demon; entertaining, although it goes on too long. In “Inside Time,” Tim Sullivan gives us a love-triangle set in a rather unlikely location, a high-tech prison station that floats between branes (why they’d go to these enormously expensive and complicated lengths just to incarcerate a couple of people is an issue that the story never really adequately addresses). Richard Bowes’s “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said” is the creepy story of a surgery patient who is haunted in dreams and waking hallucinations by the relentless ghost of a policeman, particularly disquieting for anyone who’s ever spent any serious amount of time in the hospital, the ambience of which Bowes captures very well. Nancy Springer’s “Iris” is a poignant and well-told Christmas ghost story. Terry Bisson’s “Farewell Atlantis” and Harvey Jacobs’s “The Man Who Did Something About It” are minor, innocuous stories by authors capable of better.

  Two of the stories, by Brendan DuBois and Sarah Thomas, are devoted to demythologizing the dream of space exploration and colonization. DuBois’s “Illusions of Tranquillity” is much the better crafted of the two, and so, as a result, does a particularly effective job of draining the last of the glamour and any possible Sense of Wonder from the theme, showing us a Moon colony where life is so squalid and unpleasant that the inhabitants will do anything to get away from there and back to Earth—the whole idea of humans moving into space has clearly been a misguided, dead-end mistake. Why a science fiction magazine would want to demythologize the dream of space exploration, one of the things that theoretically entices people to buy it in the first place, is another matter.

  There are several good stories in the October/November issue of Asimov’s, as well as a few ambitious failures, making it a much stronger issue overall than the September issue had been. The best stories are Robert Reed’s “Before My Last Breath,” which unravels a fascinating archeological mystery involving an abortive alien colonization of Earth millions of years ago, and Ian Creasey’s “Erosion,” in which a recently created posthuman, reveling in his newfound powers and abilities, says a nostalgic farewell to ordinary life on the planet before heading out forever to the stars—and learns a few sharp lessons in the process.

  Another mystery, this one biological, is explored in Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore’s “Blood Dauber,” which is frequently fascinating, although it pulls in a few too many different directions at once, and there’s too much in there about the protagonist’s unhappy home life, a little of which goes a long way. Nancy Kress contributes an excellent bit of flash fiction (or a vignette, as we old farts defiantly continue to call them) in “Deadly Sins,” about a bit of industrial espionage with long-term consequences for the rest of the world. R. Garcia y Robertson takes us back to the faux Barsoom of his recent “SinBad the Sand Sailor” for one of his typical adventurous, mildly risqué, fast-paced romps, detailing what goes on during “Wife-Stealing Time”; this one doesn’t have a serious bone in its body, but it’s fun. In the issue’s only real fantasy story, Christopher Barzak’s “The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter” takes us through familiar Ghost Whisperer territory, but works in a couple of elegant twists of its own.

  In the ambitious failures category, reluctantly, I must list Damien Broderick’s “Flowers of Asphodel” and William Barton’s “The Sea of Dreams,” both still worth reading, but neither of which really worked for me. Broderick did a pastiche/homage to Cordwainer Smith a couple of months ago at Tor.com, and here he tackles a pastiche/homage to Roger Zelazny. “Flowers of Asphodel” actually contains some of the most intriguing conceptualization of the entire issue, but I had trouble with the deliberately opaque, highly mannered prose style. Zelazny was known for breaking into passages of highly ornamented prose, especially in his early work, but he always kept them short, and he never let them obscure the plot or interfere with the forward momentum of the storyline; here, there are whole pages that are so “poetic” that it’s hard to parse them, and it takes a real effort even to figure out what’s happening; as some bewildered fan comments have shown, many readers never could. Zelazny knew better than that. “The Sea of Dreams” is one of a number of adolescent wish-fulfillment stories that Barton has written, but the wishes being fulfilled here have become so specific to a young boy who grew up in a particular part of the country during a particular historical period and who had particular sets of interests and particular friends and who read particular types of fiction—in other words, to Barton himself—that it’s hard to maintain interest through a story as long as this if you’re not Barton. Where a story such as Barton’s “Off on a Spaceship” touched upon near-universal adolescent dreams, in “The Sea of Dreams” it’s his dreams being realized, not necessarily yours.

  Alex Irvine is having a good month, since, appropriately enough, the best story in the Summer issue of Subterranean, referred to as the “Special Alexander C. Irvine Issue,” is Irvine’s “Seventh Fall.” This is a Post-Holocaust story (although the disaster is natural—an asteroid strike—rather than a nuclear war), set in a fragmented society that is slowly fading into barbarism, in spite of the efforts of a few isolated people and groups here and there to hang on to some of the learning and culture of the Old Days—there’s nothing particularly unique about the conceptualization here, but it’s very nicely executed, and manages to work up a real emotional charge: by the end, you really care about the travails of the hapless protagonist, and want to see him come to a safe harbor. There’s another Irvine story here too, a satirical Galaxy-style look at a beleaguered rancher defending his lawn against Green activists, “Eagleburger’s Lawn,” but although it’s entertaining, it lacks the emotional power of the previous story.

  This is a strong issue of Subterranean, though, and contains several other good stories. One of the best is Garth Nix’s “The Heart of the City,” a swashbuckling and highly entertaining historical fantasy which features dueling angels and demons, the machinations of the sinister Cardinal Richlieu, and lots of swordplay. Also robustly entertaining is Kim Newman’s “Moon, Moon, Moon,” about white magicians investigating a deadly cult in Victorian England, similar in its matching of Lovecraftian fantasy and detective or spy fiction to Charles Stross’s “Laundry” series, but with an atmosphere closer to Sherlock Holmes than Len Deighton. Elizabeth Bear contributes a lyrical though enigmatic slipstream/fantasy with “Snow Dragon,” and Neal Barrett, Jr. delivers a semi-comic horror story, although one with lots of violence, in “Limo.”

  Over at Tor.com this month, the website serves up a freewheeling steampunk extravaganza by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, set in a sideways version of 1930s Manhattan, “Zeppelin City,” which comes complete with daredevil girl autogyro pilots, aerial combat, plummeting zeppelins, zealous socialist agitators, plucky girl inventors, and Naked Brains in jars; this is a lot of fun, sort of what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow should have been like. There’s also a slipstream story by Tim Pratt, “Silver Linings,” that tries to marry a rather trivial, somewhat silly idea, solid, motionless clouds that you can literally mine silver linings out of, with a more serious story about a prince fleeing his inheritance for moral reasons and the fear of what he might do if he had the power, but it’s a somewhat uneasy marriage, and I think that the prince-in-hiding story really should have been saved for a fantasy setting that matched it in ethical gravitas.

  Most of Dave Hutchinson’s work that I’ve seen, most of it in British anthologies, has been fantasy, but he turns to science fiction with admirable results in “The Push,” a long novella that has been pub
lished as a chapbook by British small press NewCon Press, who have published a couple of good anthologies such as disLOCATIONS and Subterfuge in the past few years. This is the story of the colonization of a planet, looked at from the perspective of one of the original founders, who returns two hundred years down the line to find that history has turned him into a hero and even a god, titles he distinctly does not want—and that there’s an unexpected new threat, based on supposedly non-sentient animals suddenly becoming intelligent, that threatens the existence of the colony and that he must reluctantly deal with. This is breezily ironic, reminiscent of Zelazny in some of his more relaxed modes, and the writing is loose and jazzy—and if it’s not terrifically deep or profound, it’s a distinct pleasure to read, and reads very quickly for a story of this size. (The only real criticism I could make is that Hutchinson doesn’t seem to provide an explanation for the story’s core problem, how and why the aliens suddenly became intelligent in the first place; if he did, I missed it.) From the perspective of the American audience, and perhaps even from the British, this is going to be very obscurely published, by an ultra-small small press, almost certainly not available in bookstores, probably not even specialty SF bookstores, so if you’d like to read it, your best bet may be to go to the NewCon Press website, neweconpress.com, and order it. It should eventually be available through Amazon, although it isn’t at the moment.

  15

  EclipseThree, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-162-1, $14.95, 289 pages.) Cover art by Richard Powers.

  When It Changed, Science into Fiction: An Anthology, Geoff Ryman, ed. (Comma Press, 978-1-90558-831-92, 273 pages.)

  Postscripts 19, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing, 878-1-848630-19-2.) Cover art by Edward Miller.

  Postscripts 20/21, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing)

  Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse Books, 978-1-59582-146-1, $19.95, 419 pages.) Cover by Tina Alessi.

  Poe, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Solaris, 978-1-84416-652-7, Pounds Sterling 7.99, 523 pages.) Cover by Darius Hinks.

  Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds. (Viking, 978-0-670-06141-9, $16.99, 207 pages.) Cover art by Esao Andrews.

  The Vampire Archives, The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, Otto Penzler, ed. (Vintage Crime, 978-0-307-47389-9, $25.00, 1,034 pages.) Cover art: poster from the film “Le Cauchemar de Dracula.”

  By Blood We Live, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-156-0, $15.95, 485 pages.) Cover Art by David Palumbo.

  Judged on literary merit alone, without consideration of what genre the stories belong to, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse 3 is clearly one of the best anthologies of the year, with almost all of the stories excellently crafted line-by-line. And yet, I don’t think I’ll be the only genre reader to put the book down feeling vaguely disappointed. There’s very little science fiction here, and most of what is here is soft, near-future SF, no hard science fiction, no space opera, no far-future stuff, only one story that even takes place off Earth. There’s not even that much genre fantasy, although there are a few. Instead, many of the stories are slipstream. Now, I can admire in an abstract way the technical skill that goes into writing slipstream, but I rarely have any strong emotional response to it—it’s not providing what I read science fiction and fantasy for. So, as a result, many of the stories here leave me cold, in spite of the cleverness of craft that went into them.

  The best story in Eclipse 3 is one of the science fiction stories (of course, with my prejudice toward SF, I would think that, wouldn’t I?), Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things,” a very near-future story, set maybe a decade from now at most if the economic recovery falters and fails, a quiet but deeply human story about a woman in an impoverished world struggling to get by while at the same time somehow hold on to her basic decency. The other science fiction stories are also good: Nicola Griffith’s “It Takes Two” is another very near-future story, about the development of behavior-modification techniques that if they aren’t secretly already here, will certainly be along the day after tomorrow, and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Galapagos,” an intense, scary technohorror piece, the only story here with a spaceship in it, rather claustrophobic in spite of taking place in outer space.

  The best of the fantasy stories is Daniel Abraham’s “The Pretender’s Tourney,” although it has no obvert supernatural element in it, merely being set in an imaginary world much like our own medieval past, rather like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series or Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint stories. There’s also a somewhat predictable but evocatively rendered autumnal fantasy by Peter S. Beagle, “Slight of Hand,” a sensitive reimagining of the Secret Garden scenario, “A Practical Girl,” by Ellen Klages, a strange, anti-romantic mermaid story by Elizabeth Bear, “Swell,” a look at a really small dragon by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, “Mesopotamian Fire,” and a horror story by Nnedi Okorafor that does a good job of drawing on African folklore, “On the Road.” Those second-generation Sword & Sorcery stories we were talking about last month are represented here by Jeffrey Ford’s “The Coral Heart,” which adds a splash of flamboyance and violence to a book whose dominant mood is quiet, almost somber.

  Of the slipstream stories, the strongest for me was Karen Joy Fowler’s disturbing “The Pelican Bar”. With its young female protagonist, a case could be made for considering Ellen Klages’s story to be YA, but although it too has a young female protagonist, nobody’s going to mistake Fowler’s story for YA for long—it’s one of the bleakest and most emotionally grueling stories of the year, in fact. At the end, Fowler drops a sly hint that would allow you to read the story as SF—but I found that unconvincing.

  Eclipse clearly remains one the most important anthology series in the genre, especially with the deaths of Fast Forward and The Solaris Book of Science Fiction, but I hope he puts some more SF in the next volume, as he did in Eclipse Two, which was more to my taste.

  Another eagerly anticipated but somehow faintly disappointing anthology, even though almost all of the stories are science fiction this time, is Geoff Ryman’s When It Changed. The idea here was to match SF stories with non-fiction articles by actual scientists discussing the real-world feasibility and consequences of the ideas which had inspired the stories. It sounded great, and had a good roster of authors, and I was really looking forward to it—but when I finally finished the book, my overall reaction was one of mild letdown. Not that the stories here are bad—in fact, there are a couple of pretty good ones—and almost all of them are worth reading, but somehow the majority of them lack that certain flair that lifts decent work to a level of excellence…and I found most of the articles by the scientists disappointingly superficial as well, clearly written for an audience less sophisticated and scientifically knowledgeable than an experienced genre audience can be expected to be. The best stories here are Ryman’s own “You,” an intricate infinite-regress cycle of video blogs, and Adam Roberts’s “Hair,” about a clandestine program of biological engineering that might change human destiny. Also good is Gwyneth Jones’s “Collision,” although it may be somewhat confusing to those readers not already familiar with her previous “Buonarotti” stories.

  Postscripts, the British magazine now reinvented as an anthology series, has a similar mix as Eclipse Three—typically, little science fiction, especially of the hard science or offplanet variety, some steampunk, a few fantasy stories, the occasional Twilight Zoneish mild horror piece, lots of slipstream, everything literate and very well-crafted, but, for me at least, often uninvolving. (To be fair, Postscripts did a special “all science fiction issue!” last year, which, although it contained a number of fantasy stories in spite of its claim, did feature a number of core SF stories, and even a couple of off-world stories set on other planets. This year, though, SF was again a bit scarce in Postscripts.)

  There’s a fair amount of slipstream, for instance, in Postscripts 19, bu
t it does also feature two good SF stories, Matthew Hughes’s “Enemy of the Good,” one of his Jack Vance-like stories about the misadventures of master thief Luff Imbry in an interstellar society, and Chris Beckett’s “The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9,” in which a professional tourist is shaken and psychologically scarred by his encounter with an alien religion, as well as a steampunk Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Daniel Abraham’s “Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance,” and a violent and gripping fantasy, reminiscent in mood of Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger,” set in an American Old West where settlers must uneasily co-exist with demons, M.K. Hobson’s “The Warlock and the Man of the Word.”

  Postscripts 20/21, a big Double Issue, has pretty much the same kind of feel and mix. The best stories here are probably Chris Roberson’s “Edison’s Frankenstein,” a steampunk tale of murder and mysterious doings at the Columbian Exhibition in a world where Edison’s inventions have been supplanted by strange alternate technologies, and Robert Reed’s “Tests,” one of the few SF stories here, another of several stories that have appeared in the genre in the last couple of years examining the ultimate implications of the Fermi Paradox. Stephen Baxter contributes a long steampunk take on the traditional British Boarding School story in “The Phoebean Egg,” Lisa Tuttle takes us along with a curious kind of recruiter making his rounds in a grimy future world in “Ragged Claws,” Matthew Hughes give us another brisk and entertaining Luff Imbry adventure in “Another Day in Fibbery,” and Marly Youmans tells a lovely Bradburyesque fantasy in “The Horse Angel.” I usually don’t like metafiction, but Paul Park’s “The Persistence of Memory, or, This Space For Sale” was done with such an expert and subtle touch, that I surprised myself by liking it anyway.