Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Ken Liu also shows up in a strong January issue of the online magazine Clarkesworld, with another good story, “Tying Knots.” Liu pushes the boundaries of his usual envelope a bit with this one, which is primarily narrated, in an effective and authentic-sounding voice, by the Headman of a tiny isolated village high in the mountains of Myanmar, to which a well-meaning American scientist comes, offering a hand of friendship that unfortunately conceals a hidden hook. The speculative element here, deriving algorithms for protein-folding from the millennia-old knot-writing of the village people, is stronger than usual for Liu, although the technology trap that Headman Soe-bo unwittingly leads his people into is one that’s being sprung for real all over the world at the moment. Oragami, the subtheme of Liu’s story in the March/April F&SF, also shows up in this issue of Clarkesworld, in Yoon Ha Lee’s wild and exotic space opera (with an appropriately operatic revenge plot), “Ghostweight,” although in Lee’s hands, origami becomes a weapon and even a form of transportation. Lee’s paper spaceships may seem a bit unlikely if you stop to think about them, but Lee doesn’t give you that luxury, and the deadly origami war-kite becomes one of the story’s most vivid characters, along with the ruthless and predatory “ghost” who whispers in the protagonist’s ear throughout.

  The February issue of Clarkesworld is nowhere near as strong as January. The lead story, “Diving at the Moon,” by Rachel Swirsky, is an uneasy mixture of fabulation and science fiction, neither of which really work in their conjoined context, and “Three Oranges,” by new writer D. Elizabeth Wasden, is a grim and rather violent fantasy set in the days of Stalinist Russia. Since this is the first issue to appear after editor Sean Wallace stepped down, I hope this doesn’t represent the direction in which Clarkesworld is going to go in the future—there’s plenty of slipstream to be found, all over the internet, but good science fiction is much rarer and harder to find.

  The year opens for Interzone with a rather weak issue, Interzone 232, the January-February issue. The best story here is “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise,” by new writer Sue Burke, a story about a young woman being manipulated, ostensibly for her own good, by her guardian AI program. Like Cowdrey’s F&SF story, this story seems to be building toward a sinister ending, or at least a warning about well-meaning AIs determining what’s best for us, but takes a sudden swerve into a sunny ending (rare for Interzone) where it turns out that the meddling AI was right after all and everything turns out for the best and everyone, humans and machines, are all the best of friends by the end. There’s a rather unlikely fantasy, “Plucking Her Petals,” by Sarah L. Edwards, based on the dubious proposition that beauty is a physical property that can be drained from someone, like blood, a satirical time-paradox tangle, “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box,” by Douglas Lain, a post-cyberpunk caper by Michael R. Fletcher, “Intellectual Property,” and a first sale, the 2010 James White Award winner, “Flock, Shoal, Herd,” by James Bloomer, about a man seeking to reunite with his bizarrely transformed lover.

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  Subterranean, Winter 2011.

  Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change, Gordon van Gelder, ed. (OR Books, 348 pages).

  Lightspeed, 1/11-3/11.

  Brave New Worlds, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-221-5. $15.99, 496 pages). Cover art by Cody Tilson.

  The Winter 2011 issue of online magazine Subterranean is a strong one. There are a number of very good stories here, but my favorite may be “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” by K.J. Parker, who was very impressive at short lengths last year with stories such as “Amor Vincit Omnia” and “A Rich Full Week.” This one comes across as a subtler and ultimately more cruel version of Amadeus, as two competing musicians work through a complicated relationship of envy, ambition, admiration, and betrayal, with a dash of murder thrown in. I suppose you’d have to call it a fantasy, as it takes place in a totally created imaginary society, although there’s no magic or any supernatural element to be found—whatever it is, the cheeky but ruefully honest voice of the protagonist, a man all too aware of his faults but actually rather comfortable with them, makes this a fun story to read. Also first-rate is “A Long Walk Home,” by Jay Lake, an effective and ultimately rather harrowing story about an immortal who comes up to the surface from exploring an underground cave to find himself the only one left alive on a once-bustling colony planet (the rest of the population isn’t dead, the buildings aren’t destroyed, everybody is just gone, in a scenario reminiscent of the TV show Life After People), and who spends the next several hundred years alone, trying to figure out what happened. Since he never really succeeds, the story shouldn’t be satisfying, but once again that all-important element of a story, the voice—here it’s calm, methodical, rational, gradually growing more ragged as time goes by—somehow makes it all work.

  The Winter issue also contains a major new Majipoor novella by Robert Silverberg, “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn.” Nothing much actually happens here in terms of plot, except that two rival academics disagree over how to explore (and ultimately exploit) a newly discovered tomb of vast antiquity, but Silverberg’s lifelong love of archeology comes across clearly and strongly, and he manages to make the opening of the Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn as exciting and significant as the opening of King Tut’s Tomb, so that we really care about exploring it (no mean feat, since, of course, there never was a Pontifex Dvorn in the first place). In “The Melusine (1898),” Caitlin R. Kiernan gives us a steampunk version of one of Ray Bradbury’s sinister travelling carnivals, as Othiniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels show comes to a small town, carried by mechanical prairie schooners and preceded by a clanking, rattling herd of “automaton mastodonts.” Sadly, after all this build-up, nothing of any real significance happens thereafter, except that a lonely but extremely intelligent girl sees through a rather unlikely scheme intended to defraud her (for no easily discernable purpose), which collapses all in an instant, as if the author was worried about running out of space. There’s an entertaining but essentially minor addition to the long-running Draco’s Tavern series by Larry Niven, “The Artists,” about the unexpected consequences of an interstellar art exhibition sponsored by the alien Chirpsithra. And Marc Laidlaw tells us of the bitter outcome of a boy’s fascination with the work of H.P. Lovecraft in “The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft,” basically a straight mainstream story except for the associational value of having Lovecraft in it, and one which may or may not be fair to Lovecraft, who certainly held similar views at one point, but who seems to have mellowed a bit toward the end of his life. There’s also a podcast by Elizabeth Bear of a fantasy story in her New Amsterdam series, “The Tricks of London.”

  Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change, an original anthology edited by Gordon Van Gelder, is full of good solid work, but nothing really outstanding. Since stories set in an ecologically devastated future have become the most common settings for dystopias over the last ten years or so, there’s mostly nothing here that you haven’t seen before, although a few authors like Matthew Hughes find a way to play it for laughs, and a few premises, such as the Messiah in Jeff Carlson’s story who can make the Earth revolve any way he wants to at any speed or Michael Alexander’s vision of curing climate change by sending bad weather to the past, seem a bit too silly to be taken seriously as part of a dialogue about climate change; Alan Dean Foster’s extermination crew who battle giant insects teeters on the verge of coming across as silly too, although at least he offers a scientific rationale—rising oxygen levels, returning the planet’s atmosphere to the way it was in the Carboniferous Era—for the insect gigantism. The best story here is probably Bruce Sterling’s “The Master of the Aviary,” about intense political in-fighting and intrigue in an embattled future society thousands of years after ecological disaster has caused the collapse of our own now only partially remembered civilization. Gregory Benford gives us a tense thriller about ecological sabotage in “Eagle,” although, interestingly,
what the terrorists are trying to sabotage is an attempt to apply a technological fix to some of our problems (on the theory that things hadn’t gotten bad enough yet to bring about a really widespread change of attitude, so any attempt to make conditions better should be violently opposed); Benford paints a fairly complex and sympathetic portrait of the chief ecological saboteur, although it’s pretty clear on which side the author’s own sympathies lie. Judith Moffett’s “The Middle of Somewhere” is a very well-crafted and sensitively characterized look at an older woman and an impressionable young girl surviving through a tornado in a storm shelter and coming to have a mutual respect for each other as a result, but except for an almost subliminal message on a radio in the background about how there’s more tornadoes these days, it really doesn’t have a fantastic element—it could be happening right now, in almost any state in the country. Joseph Green diminishes an otherwise interesting study of people struggling to deal with rising sea-levels in Florida, in “Turtle Love,” by throwing an unnecessary gun-waving religious fanatic into the mix. M.J. Locke’s “True North” is about a survivalist who reluctantly becomes involved with a group of refugees, mostly children, after an ecological catastrophe, and ends up taking charge of them; it’s pretty entertaining, although it begins to feel a bit like an episode of The A-Team towards its improbable guns-blazing action climax. Pat MacEwen’s “The California Queen Comes A-Calling” is another recovery-after-an-environmental-disaster story, less fast-paced than the Locke, with a paddlewheeler full of lawyers bringing The Law back to drowned California communities.

  The most depressing stories here are also among the best, including Brian W. Aldiss’s “Benkoelen,” George Guthridge’s “The Bridge,” and Chris Lawson’s “Sundown.” The Guthridge manages to be even bleaker and more hopeless than the Aldiss, something that’s hard to do with Aldiss when he’s in his bleak and hopeless mode. Chris Lawson wins the prize for coming up with the most unusual environmental catastrophe here, although, unlike almost every other one in the book, it’s not caused by humanity—an unexplained precipitous drop in the solar constant that within hours plunges the Earth into a deep-freeze worse than any Ice Age. A few people survive in Hawaii, kept warm by geothermal energy from the volcanoes, and by the end they’re looking for other survivors elsewhere (although nobody thinks of looking in Iceland, which already largely runs on geothermal energy, and where you’d think a respectable number of people would make it through). The most optimistic story here that takes the theme seriously is Paul Di Filippo’s “Farmearth,” where technological society has survived and even made considerable progress in spite of ongoing environmental problems; the plot involves a naïve young boy getting unwittingly involved in a conspiracy by eco-terrorists to initiate a risky technological fix for Global Warming—the Pinaubo Option, setting off a supervolcano to pump cooling ash into the atmosphere (ironically, in the Benford, the eco-terrorists are trying to prevent a technological fix, rather than implement one).

  The new online magazine Lightspeed had a good year last year, and so far they’re shaping up to have a good year in 2011 as well. The best story there so far is Robert Reed’s “Woman Leaves Room,” from the March issue, a poignant story about a computer simulation who only slowly becomes aware that he is a simulation; it reminds me a bit of David Marusek’s well-known “The Wedding Album,” but has an intriguing voice of its own. Simulations also feature centrally in Ken Liu’s “Simulacrum,” from the February issue, which revolves around what amounts to a complicated, thorny three-way relationship between a father, the simulacrum of his young daughter that he’s created, and the daughter herself, now grown into a young woman who’s jealous and resentful of the frozen-in-time simulation of her younger self. This is another emotionally powerful story—Lightspeed doesn’t seem afraid of such stories; in fact, most of its stories seem to have a high emotional content and complicated relationships among the main characters—although it’s soured a little by the grown daughter’s stubborn refusal to reconcile at all with her father over the father’s past “infidelity” (sex with other simulacrums), even though her mother has gotten past it years before. Another complicated and thorny three-pronged relationship is at the heart of Cat Rambo’s “Long Enough and Just So Long,” from the February issue, in which two female space colony-dwellers become embroiled a triangle with a newly emancipated AI who had been constructed to be a sexbot, both women misunderstanding the relationship—and the AI—in different ways. The January issue is a bit weaker, but does feature Tanith Lee’s “Black Fire,” a Rashomon-like vision of a Close Encounter where an alien visitor takes hundreds of human women as lovers in the same night, each woman telling slightly different stories about the experience. The three issues also feature strong reprints such as “Gossamer,” by Stephen Baxter, “Cucumber Gravy,” by Susan Palwick, “Breakaway, Backdown,” by James Patrick Kelly, and “Spider the Artist,” by Nnedi Okorafor.

  Nobody should really complain about the sameness of emotional tone in the stories in Brave New Worlds, a reprint anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, since it says right on the cover that it’s an anthology of dystopian stories, and, well, you ought to know enough to realize going in that dystopian stories are usually pretty depressing. And so they prove to be, although some of them are also pretty powerful. Best of the reprint stories here include “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, “Dead Space for the Unexpected,” by Geoff Ryman, “The Funeral,” by Kate Wilhelm, “The Lunatics,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, “Peter Skilling,” by Alex Irvine, “The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away,” by Cory Doctorow, and ““Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman,” by Harlan Ellison, but there are also twenty-six other good stories here, making up into a rather strong anthology. Don’t try to read it all in one sitting, though, unless you want to get really bummed out!

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  Life on Mars, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Viking, 336 pages).

  Asimov’s, April/May

  Angel of Europa, by Allen Steele. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-412-6, $35.00, 96 pages). Cover art by Ron Miller.

  Life on Mars, edited by the indefatigable Jonathan Strahan, is another excellent all-science-fiction original anthology (something hard to find these days, when most “SF anthologies” have at least equal amounts of slipstream and fantasy mixed in), like his Engineering Infinity from earlier in the year. It’s not quite as strong as Engineering Infinity; the fact that it’s a YA anthology about the colonization of Mars produces a certain similarity of tone from story to story, especially as almost all of the protagonists are young teens or preteens (there are three stories here, for instance, about disaffected young teens running away from home, with perilous consequences resulting), but don’t let the fact that it’s a YA anthology put you off—there is plenty of grappling with serious, mature themes here, and a good deal of grit. You might want to read the stories one at a time, rather than swallow the book all in a gulp—always good advice with anthologies anyway.

  It becomes clear early on here that this is not your father’s Mars. These are not stories set on the nostalgic Old Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and other pulp writers, the Mars of miles-long canals, dead sea bottoms, and dying alien civilizations first dreamed into being by Perceval Lowell. This is the Mars discovered by the Mariner mission and subsequent space probes: dry, cold, imitable, with barely any air, pocked with craters and creased by immense gullies and ravines, some of them thousands of miles long, constantly raked by howling winds that lash blinding sand-storms into existence—and the authors do a very credible job, with only a minimum of handwaving about technological capabilities we don’t quite have yet, of showing how colonists could adapt to and survive, even thrive, under those conditions. One interesting note is that several of the stories feature the playing of MMORPGs or Dungeons & Dragons-like role-playing games on Mars as an important plot-element (most prominently in Cory Doctorow’s story “Martian Chronicles”, to which the idea is central), which certainly
wouldn’t have been true of Mars colonization stories written twenty years ago. Another story—Ellen Klages’s “Goodnight Moons”—features a member of the first Mars expedition unexpectedly discovering in route that she’s pregnant, something you probably wouldn’t have seen back then either.

  The best story here is probably Ian McDonald’s “Digging,” concerning a really massive terraforming effort that has stretched over generations; the project itself, which involves digging a really big hole in the crust of Mars, may seem a bit unlikely, but McDonald does such an evocative job of describing what it would be like to live in a society devoted to such an immense task, particularly from the perspective of a young person who has grown up in it and knows no other kind of life. Also first-rate is the late Kage Baker’s “Attlee and the Long Walk,” set on a Mars that’s somehow still evocative in spite of—or maybe because of—how seedy and run-down and marginalized the human presence there is, the most ingenious of the troubled-young-person-running-away-from-home stories, which succeeds because it narrows the focus to the fears inside the young protagonist’s head—she’s never really in much physical danger, although the story, seen through her eyes, is haunted by menace and terror at every step. Fortunately, she’s tough, resourceful, and smart, as most of Baker’s heroines are, and as I suspect she herself was. Alastair Reynolds’s “The Old Man and the Martian Sea” also features a young girl who runs away from home, although she survives not so much by her own efforts as by a series of fortunate happenstances; an absorbing story anyway, though. Several of the stories here, including the McDonald and the Baker, feature a plot-element about young people stranded out in the wilderness of Mars having to struggle to survive on their wits and ingenuity until they can be rescued or rescue themselves, something that you probably would have seen in a Mars colonization anthology from twenty years ago; this traditional theme is best handled by Stephen Baxter in “On Chryse Plain,” and by John Barnes in “Martian Heart,” who also throws in an affecting element of doomed love. The most complex characters in the anthology, and the most interesting psychological motivations, are to be found in Nancy Kress’s “First Principle,” which also does a good job of examining how the philosophical mind-set of Martian colonists would of necessity have to evolve to be different from that of Terran societies, if the colony was going to have any chance of surviving.