Ellen Datlow’s two latest horror anthologies, Lovecraft Unbound, a mixed original (mostly) and reprint anthology, and Poe, an all-original, both collecting stories “inspired” by the work of their respective authors, are a bit out of my usual purview, but I’m going to mention them anyway, because, well, they’re by Ellen Datlow, and a list of the year’s prominent anthologies really should include them. Actually, although they’re ostensibly horror anthologies, both books do contain a science fiction story (although the argument can and has been made that Lovecraft’s own work is in itself de facto science fiction, with the monsters actually coming from different dimensions or times or from space rather than of supernatural origin): in Lovecraft Unbound, a chilling story about an interdimensional pest-control officer and his unusual helper, “Mongoose,” by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, and in Poe, a During-the-Holocaust modern update on Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, “Lowland Sea,” by Suzy McKee Charnas—both among the best stories in their respective volumes.
Of the rest of the stories in Lovecraft Unbound, the strongest is probably Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell,” with other good work by William Browning Spencer, Lavie Tidhar, Holly Phillips, Richard Bowes, Marc Laidlaw, and others, and good reprint stuff by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Michael Chabon, and others. Of the rest of the stories in Poe, the best stories are probably Lucius Shepard’s “Kirikh’quru Kronkundor” and Pat Cadigan’s “Truth and Bone,” with other good work by Sharyn McCrumb, Glen Hirshberg, Laird Barron, Gregory Frost, Kim Newman, and others.
Datlow’s other 2009 anthology, co-edited with Terri Windling, Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, is quite a different sort of book, YA fantasy rather than horror. It seems to be aimed at a very young audience, younger than is usual with Datlow & Windling YA anthologies, and is certainly considerably less dark and less sophisticated than most of their other collections of fairy tale retellings have been. Best story here is Kelly Link’s “The Cinderella Game,” the only story with any real bite, although I also enjoyed Peter S. Beagle’s “Up the Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers” and Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest.” There’s also interesting work by Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Jane Yolen, and others.
The Vampire Archives, The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, edited by distinguished mystery anthologist Otto Penzler, is an anthology of reprint vampire stories (this probably doesn’t come as a surprise, once you get past the title), weighing in at a whopping 1,034 pages of extremely small type, consisting of eighty-five stories, by authors ranging from Sheridan Le Fanu and Ambroise Bierce and Arthur Conan Doyle to Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, through Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch and Frederic Brown, and on to Tanith Lee and Dan Simmons and Stephen King. There is also an extensive, not to say exhaustive, 110-page bibliography of other vampire fiction, both novels and short stories. Sharing bookstore shelves with this behemoth is another large anthology of (mostly) reprint vampire stories, By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams, which features reprint work by authors such as Garth Nix, Tad Williams, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, plus an original novella by John Langan, and original stories by Ross E. Lockhart and Sergei Lukyanenko.
Although there are duplicated authors (Tanith Lee’s in both books, as are Stephen King and Brian Stableford), out of a combined total of 121 stories, only one story, Anne Rice’s “The Master of Rampling Gate,” is used in both anthologies—which gives you some idea how many vampire stories there’ve been! Penzler’s anthology has a stronger academic emphasis, with more historical work, while Adams’s anthology mostly concentrates on contemporary work; the earliest copyright date on the acknowledgement page is 1977, while most of the stories were published in the Oughts.
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Interzone 224.
Interzone 225.
X6, a Novellanthology, Keith Stevenson, ed. (Coeur De Lion, 978-0-646-51035-4, 636 pages). Cover design by Kirby Jones.
Panverse One, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dario Ciriello, ed. (Panverse Publishing, 978-1-60402-000-7, 284 pages). Cover art by Vitaly S. Alexius.
Footprints, Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, eds. (Hadley Rille Books, 978-0-9819243-9-7, 288 pages.) Cover art uncredited.
Talebones, Winter 09
Strange Horizons
Clarkesworld
Abyss & Apex
Apex Magazine
Fantasy Magazine
Subterranean
Cosmos
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show
Jim Baen’s Universe
Tor.com
The most substantial story in Interzone 224 is Jason Sanford’s novella “Sublimation Angels,” a story about human refugees who have been living underground and eeking out a subsistence living for hundreds of years on a frozen planet where they were sent to study aliens who refuse to interact with them at all, and a slow-growing revolutionary movement that emerges from the lower social strata of the intricate and draconian social structure that has evolved to keep the colony going. The story does a good job of creating a complex, if rather claustrophobic, alien environment, but the ending feels rushed, with everything wrapped up quickly in only a few pages, as if the author had become aware that he was running out of room. Also good in Interzone 224 is Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Godfall’s Chemsong,” which is notable for alien characters who are really alien, deep-sea dwellers whose marginal existence is occasionally supplemented by the bounty of a body sinking down from some high-tech war happening on the surface, but the unexplored backstory going on above is potentially more interesting than what’s happening below, which is concerned with an exile from his tribe trying to scrape by and being lucky enough to happen on a nice juicy corpse. Chris Butler’s “The Festival of Tethselem” is mostly memorable for its nicely rendered setting, an alien pastoral set in a city where thousands of pilgrims are converging for a religious festival centered around a holy relic who might have stepped out of James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Man Who Walked Home.”
Two different stories about unstoppable monsters who leap from ambush to kill random victims in beleaguered future societies feature in the somewhat weak Interzone 225. The better of these is Jason Sanford’s “Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows,” although it’s not as good as his story from the previous issue, and both stories (the other is Rebecca J. Payne’s “By Starlight”) are rather too obviously metaphors for terrorism of the suicide-bomber variety. The most entertaining story in the issue is probably Lavie Tidhar’s “Funny Pages,” one of several recent stories that come up with rosters of costumed comic-book superheroes different from the familiar ones we know in our world—all probably inspired by the release of the movie version of The Watchmen, is my guess. “Bone Island,” by Shannon Page and Jay Lake, is the story of dueling witches battling for magical supremacy on a remote and isolated island, somewhat similar in atmosphere to a story by Margo Lanagan I’ll be discussing below.
An obscurely published (from an American perspective, anyway) anthology from Australian small press Couer De Lion, X6, a “novellaanthology” of six novellas edited by Keith Stevenson, slips into the original anthology race late in the year and makes a very respectable showing for itself, nosing ahead of several more prominently published anthologies in the race for the “Best Anthology of the Year” title. The best story here, and one of the most powerful of the year, is Paul Haines’s almost 40,000-word long novella “Wives,” a brutal and compelling story about an economically and environmentally stressed near-future Australian society where ill-advised selective-breeding techniques have led to a severe shortage of women available to be wives, and the extreme measures some are willing to take to obtain one anyway. Be warned, that when I said it was “brutal,” I wasn’t kidding—this story pulls no punches, is full of very unpleasant people, and is not for the faint-hearted or squeamish reader, but it has the fascination of a grotesque and bloody accident on the highway that you can’t make yourself look away from. Almost as good, and alm
ost as disturbing in its own much quieter way, is Margo Lanagan’s fantasy novella “Sea-Hearts,” one of the best fantasy stories of the year, which intriguingly reinvents the familiar selkie story in the vividly described setting of a remote wind-swept, wave-battered island, not unlike the one in the Page and Lake story above, a bit like one of the Scottish islands in the North Sea. There, in an isolated fishing community huddled at the edge of a hostile and restless sea, an entire social structure with its own mores and taboos and strictures has grown up around the secret at its heart, and when that secret begins to unravel, the society does as well. Told from the perspective of a young boy becoming aware of the oddities and discrepancies of village life for the first time, even in his own family, “Sea Hearts” has emotional power and is quite moving at times, but is equally notable for its language, which is rich and clotted and poetic, full of wordplay, occasionally a bit hard to parse but capable of delivering powerful effects, including perhaps the best transformation-into-a-selkie scene I’ve ever read. X6 also contains Terry Dowling’s “The Library,” a novella set in his long-running “Rynossaros” series, which take place in an Australia far enough in the future to have grown evocatively alien, with stylistic touches reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith and J.G. Ballard’s “Vermilion Sands” stories, and a Phil Dick-like what-is-real?-bending story by Cat Sparks, “Heart of Stone.”
This is going to be a hard anthology to find for many readers, particularly for those on this side of the globe; it’s not even available on Amazon.com. I’d suggest you go direct to the publisher, Couer De Lion, at www.couerdelion.com.au and mail-order it.
Not quite as successful as X6, but still featuring some substantial work, is another novella collection from another small press, Panverse One, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Dario Ciriello. The best story here is probably an atmospheric fantasy centering on a strange space-time discontinuity that opens up around Emily Bronte of Wuthering Heights fame, trapping her and her dysfunctional family and the entire village of Haworth, Yorkshire in an ever-growing expanse of moorland, “Delusion’s Song,” by Alan Smale. Also good, although very different in mood, is a suspenseful science fiction story about competing parties of treasure hunters in a vast derelict alien spaceship, “The Singers of Rhodes,” by Jason K. Chapman, and a story about a generations-long conflict between the wilderness dwellers who have lost contact with high-tech and the City folk who still have it, “Waking the City,” by Andrew Tishbert.
Unthemed anthologies are rare these days, as are novella collections, let alone unthemed novella collections, so these two are something different in today’s market, and definitely worth seeking out. Panverse One may be somewhat easier to find than X6, at least it’s available through Amazon.com, but you might still do better going direct to the publisher, Panverse Publishing, at www.panversepublishing.com.
Another anthology from a very small press is Footprints, edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, from Hadley Rille Books (www.hadleyrillebooks.com), an anthology commemorating the Moon Landing (I’m surprised there weren’t more of these, considering that it’s the 40th anniversary of that event) by speculating what alien beings might make of the footprints left behind on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 11 if they discovered them thousands or millions of years from now. This is a much more uneven anthology that the two reviewed above, with lots of indifferent work, but there’s a good story by James Van Pelt, “Working the Moon Circuit,” and other interesting stuff by Brenda Cooper, Eric Choi, Heather McDougal, Alastair Mayer, and others.
A few columns ago, I lamented the passing of the little print magazine Talebones after fourteen years of publication in a review of what I thought was their final issue, but it turned out that I was a bit premature. Talebones is still dying, alas, but their actual final issue, Winter 2009, number 39, is just out now. It makes a better issue to go out on than their previous issue, which was a bit weak. This one features good stories by Don D’Ammassa, Carrie Vaughn, Cat Rambo, Aliette de Bodard, Patricia Russo, and others.
As the end of the year is looming as I type this, let’s do some quick wrap-ups of other markets, mostly online ones.
Earlier in the year, the long-running ezine Strange Horizons ran good work by Lavie Tidhar, Sandra McDonald, Elliott Bangs, and others, and they’ve finished up the year with good SF stuff by Benjamin Crowell, Tim Pratt, Jennifer Linnaea, and others, good fantasy by people like Alaya Dawn Johnson, Rachel Manija Brown, and others, and good slipstream by Cat Rambo, Leonard Richardson, and others. Lavie Tidhar’s “The Shangri-La Affair,” from 26 January, Elliott Bangs’s “This Must Be the Place,” from 2 February, and Sandra McDonald’s “Diana Comet,” which ran from 3 February to February 9, were my favorites.
Clarkesworld ran good stuff this year, much of it SF, some fantasy or slipstream, by Kij Johnson, Gord Sellar, Jason K. Chapman, Lavie Tidhar, Sarah Monette, Tobias S. Buckell, Catherynne M. Valente, Cat Rambo, and others. Best story was probably Kij Johnson’s unsettling “Spar,” from Issue 37.
Abyss & Apex, which seems to run more SF than many of the other sites, had good stuff by Samantha Henderson, Karl Bunker, Marie Brennan, Christopher Green, Paul Carlson, Ruth Nestvold, Richard A. Lovett, Bud Sparhawk, and others.
Apex Magazine featured good work, most of it fantasy or slipstream, by Theodora Goss, Ekaterina Sedia, Gord Sellar, Peter M. Ball, Aliette de Bodard, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and others.
Fantasy Magazine had good work (almost all of it fantasy or slipstream, unsurprisingly enough, although there was one strong SF story by Lavie Tidhar, “The Integrity of the Chain,” from July) by Nancy Kress, Tanith Lee, Patricia Russo, Ruth Nestvold, Jay Lake, John Mantooth, and others.
Other than the stories selected by me for the issue I guest-edited, which I won’t mention, Subterranean had good work, some of it first-rate, by Alexander C. Irvine, Garth Nix, Tim Pratt, James Blaylock, Kim Newman, Kris Nelscott, Lewis Shiner, and others. Irvine’s “Seventh Fall,” from the Summer issue, was probably the strongest story here this year.
The Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos runs a story per issue, usually SF, and also puts new fiction not published in the print magazine up on their website. They had a strong story by Karl Bunker this year, “Under the Shouting Sky,” from the August/September issue, as well as interesting stuff by Craig Delancey, Greg Meller, Stuart Gibbon, V.C. Kemerer, and others.
The flamboyantly titled Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show had good work by Peter S. Beagle, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ian Creasey, Tim Pratt, Aliette de Bodard, Eugie Foster, Tony Pi, and others, including a number of stories, both reprint and original, by Orson Scott Card himself; although they publish both SF and fantasy (rarely slipstream), they tend to lean toward fantasy, which tends to be of generally higher quality than their SF.
Jim Baen’s Universe, once the Great White Hope of the online fiction-magazine world, is in its fourth year, and it will unfortunately be its last, since it’s been announced that the ezine will shut down after its April 2010 issue—a major loss for the field. Jim Baen’s Universe published only one really major story in 2009, John Barnes’s complex time-travel piece “Things Undone,” in the December issue, but there was lots of other good work, both SF and fantasy, by David Gerrold, Jay Lake, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Naomi Kritzer, Lezli Robyn, Graham Edwards, John Lambshead, Gary Kloster, and others.
Tor.com is a website that regularly publishes SF, fantasy, and slipstream, as well as articles, reviews, and commentary. They had another strong year in 2009, publishing a wide range of different kinds of stories (although they tend to lean a bit toward slipstream and steampunk) by Jo Walton, Harry Turtledove, Damien Broderick, Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, Kij Johnson, Ken Scholes, Elizabeth Bear, Steven Gould, Rachel Swirsky, and others. Jo Walton’s “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” and Kij Johnson’s “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles” may have been the strongest stories here this year.
2010
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Asimov’s, 1/10
Asimov’s, 2/10
F&SF, 1-2/10
Subterranean, Winter 2010
Clarkesworld, 1/10
Tor.com
Asimov’s Science Fiction starts off 2010 with a strong January issue after a somewhat weak December 2009 issue. The best story here is probably Robert Reed’s “The Good Hand,” an Alternate History take on a world where a post World War II United States in sole possession of atomic weapons takes its role as Policeman to the World a bit too seriously, a tense and ultimately sad story that crackles with Cold War paranoid tension. Also excellent is new writer Felicity Shoulders’s “Conditional Love,” which explores the human costs of the trial-and-error period which must certainly exist between the present and the shining posthuman future described in much SF, where well-intentioned attempts to create genetically altered and “improved” children leads not to supermen but to bizarrely damaged kids instead, a transitional period rarely discussed in posthuman SF, which usually takes the success of genetic manipulation for granted; this is a moving, compassionate story with a killer twist in its tail.
Also first-rate is Allen M. Steele’s “The Jekyll Island Horror,” which does an excellent job of integrating historical material about Jekyll Island—all of which is true, by the way, as unlikely as it sounds—into the fantastic element, although I’m not entirely sure why the fantastic element is a giant, Godzilla-like monster rather than the more conventionally-sized space-travelling alien that the story seems to suggest it’s going to be. A change of pace is provided by another good story, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Marya and the Pirate,” a rousing tale of space piracy and hijacking that also functions as a sort of sly postmodern commentary on Tom Godwin’s famous story “The Cold Equations”; the pirate and his victim are forced by unexpected circumstances to work together in order to survive, and the solution they come up with to what seems like an unsolvable problem is ingenious and satisfying in a traditional “hard-science” way. Steve Rasnic Tem also takes us into space for a much-quieter but also satisfying story, in which “A Letter from the Emperor” that an old friend has been waiting for his entire life may or may not have been delivered.
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