There’s no confusion about genre classification in Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern—it’s just what it says that it is, stories about contacts with aliens, all of them science fiction, and all of them considerably more varied, subtle, and intelligent than the flood of shoot-’em-up Alien Invasion movies we got over the last year or so. This is another really solid reprint anthology, and another excellent value for your money. The best stories here are probably Bruce Sterling’s “Swarm,” Michael Swanwick’s “A Midwinter’s Tale,” Bruce McAllister’s “Kin,” Molly Gloss’s “Lambing Season,” Pat Cadigan’s “Angel,” Paul McAuley’s “The Thought War,” and Nancy Kress’s “Laws of Survival,” but there are also good stories by Neil Gaiman, George Alec Effinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Baxter, Mike Resnick, Harry Turtledove, and thirteen others. Like The Urban Fantasy Anthology, there’s really nothing bad here.
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The New and Perfect Man: Postscripts 24/25, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing Ltd., 978-1-848631-65-6, 30.00 Pounds Sterling, 392 pages.) Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.
Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed Ian Whates. (Solaris, 978-1-907-922-094, 448 pages.) Cover art by Pye Parr.
TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, ed. Stephen Cass. (Technology Review, Inc., $7.95, 80 pages.) Cover art and interior illustrations by Chris Foss.
Gravity Dreams, by Stephen Baxter. (PS Publishing Ltd., 978-1-848631-89-2, 11.99 Pounds Sterling, 101 pages.) Cover art and Endpaper Art by David A. Hardy.
Almost everything in The New and Perfect Man, the continuation of Postscripts magazine in anthology form, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, is finely crafted, but overall I somehow found it faintly disappointing. The editors will shake their heads and sigh wearily when they read this review, for it’s a long-time complaint of mine, one I’ve made about Postscripts before, but there’s little science fiction here, and not even much fantasy, the bulk of the anthology being made up of slipstream and literary surrealism, with the occasional bit of soft horror—which, for a book that costs thirty pounds sterling, makes it a somewhat questionable buy, for me at least. For someone of my no-doubt unevolved tastes, reading almost four hundred pages of slipstream, no matter how intricately and cunningly crafted line-by-line, becomes something like eating an enormous blancmange all at one go—no matter how tasty it is, you begin to long for some meat and potatoes by the time you’re finished.
If you’re a fan of slipstream, your mileage may vary greatly, and you may instead like the very stories that didn’t impress me, but for my tastes, the best stories here are, unsurprisingly, the occasional science fiction and fantasy stories. The stories I liked best were probably Keith Brooke’s “Imago,” a complex story of a man investigating what caused an earlier version of himself to commit genocide on an alien planet, and Ken Macleod’s “The Vorkuta Event,” a story about a creepy Lovecraftian intrusion into our reality that took place in Cold-War Russia. Also good is Adam Roberts’s “Thrownness,” in which (for no reason ever explained), a man is cut loose in time, and only gets to spend a couple of days in a particular timeline before being kicked to another, all of them nearly identical to our own; Roberts himself mentions the movie Groundhog Day, something most readers would probably be thinking anyway, but the response of his protagonist to discovering that what he does in one timeline has no affect on the next, and therefore no lasting consequences, is more amoral and more ruthlessly logical than anything Bill Murray’s character did, including rape, robbery, and murder, all of which he justifies to himself as having been perfectly reasonable things to do under the circumstances. Robert Reed gives us another tale of ecological terrorism (a popular theme this year), this one on a domestic scale, in “Euphoria.” Jay Lake tells a vivid mythological fantasy in “Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors,” and there are a couple of effectively moody, low-key ghost stories, Rio Youers’s “The Ghost of Lillian Bliss” and Joel Lane and Mat Joiner’s “Ashes in the Water.”
Although there’s a couple of slipstreamish fantasy stories thrown in, as seems almost obligatory for SF anthologies these days, the bulk of Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, the resurrection of the old Solaris Book of Science Fiction series, now edited by Ian Whates, is made up of solid core science fiction, which makes it much more to my taste—in fact, I’d say that Solaris Rising is one of the three or four best SF anthologies published this year.
There’s lots of good stuff here. Among the best: Dave Hutchinson tells the story of a man reluctantly saving the world, over and over again, from a potentially disastrous Lovecraftian intrusion in “The Incredible Exploding Man.” Ian McDonald gives us a sly look at how social media might be used to overthrow corrupt regimes by seeming to give the dead a voice in “A Smart Well-Mannered Uprising of the Dead.” Ken Macleod introduces us to expatriate SF writers living in Paris after fleeing an American dictatorship, who witness a potentially world-changing event, in “The Best Science Fiction of the Day Three.” Keith Brooke and Eric Brown follow a guilt-stricken man returning to a pastoral planet to reluctantly deliver a bit of devastating news, in “Eternity’s Children.” Lavie Tidhar clones Che Guevara, with far-ranging effects, in “The Lives and Deaths of Che Guevara.” Alastair Reynolds tells us about a scientist obsessed with leaving a message for future civilizations to find, at any cost, in “For the Ages.” Stephen Baxter’s melancholy “Rock Day” is about the last boy left “alive”—sort of—after all other humans have gone. In “Eluna,” Stephen Palmer takes us to a fascinating although somewhat opaque future (one that made me wonder if the backstory would be less murky if I’d read any of his novels, although I don’t know if they’re set in the same universe or not) for a story about a young girl struggling to win her place in a very strange society. There’s also good stuff here by Pat Cadigan, Adam Roberts, Jack Skillingstead, and others—in fact, there’s almost nothing here that isn’t at least good, and some that’s outstanding. A very solid debut for a series that I hope will continue.
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has published good SF in the past, by Greg Egan, David Marusek, and others, and now they’ve published a special all-SF issue, TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, edited by Stephen Cass, which promises to be the first in an annual series of such issues, functioning as quasi-anthologies in magazine form. The first TRSF is, as promised by the title, all solid core SF, leaning toward hard SF, near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (and threats) of emerging technologies, most set within the next ten or twenty years. This does give them a certain similarity, you won’t find any far future or flamboyant Space Opera stories here, but the quality of the twelve individual stories is quite high, and, considered as an anthology, TRSF would certainly have to qualify as one of the year’s best. All the work here is solid and interesting, but the best stories are probably Pat Cadigan’s “Cody,” an ingenious and suspenseful postcyberpunk adventure, Ken Macleod’s “The Surface of Last Scattering,” which deals with father/son issues between another well-intentioned ecological terrorist (this one somebody who releases a bioweapon that destroys all paper on Earth, in order to wipe the slate of the past clean) and his estranged child, Gwyneth Jones’s “The Flame Is Roses, The Smoke is Briars,” in which “neuronauts” utilizing an experimental technology strain for a glimpse of the distant past, and Elizabeth Bear’s “Gods of the Forge,” in which a young woman must struggle with the ominous implications of a supposedly benign mind-control technology—but there are also good stories here by Vandana Singh, Geoffrey A. Landis, Ken Liu, Joe Haldeman, and others.
Two of the stories sound a mild cautionary note about the totally wired, invasive, Twitter/Facebook future boosted by cyber enthusiasts, both of them, interestingly, by authors usually numbered among those enthusiasts: Cory Doctorow’s funny “The Brave Little Toaster,” about the annoying intrusion of “smart” materials that constantly b
lather commercials into our lives, and Paul Di Filippo’s “Specter-Bombing the Beer Goggles,” which wryly exposes a real danger inherent in the “everybody’s-hooked-into-Virtual Reality all the time” future. The best job here of showing how “emerging technologies” could believably transform our lives in a positive way is to be found in Vandana Singh’s “Indra’s Web,” which explores how alternate power sources could help to end poverty in rural India (and, by implication, elsewhere).
Just a look at the contents page, which classifies the stories by category, shows how things have changed in the last few decades: there’s two stories about “Communications,” two about “Biomedicine,” two stories about “Energy,” and stories about “Computing,” “Robotics,” “Web,” and even “Materials,” but only one story about “Spaceflight,” and in that story, Landis’s “Private Space,” the effort to launch a privately-funded spacecraft is unsuccessful (although the protagonists remain determined not to give up). A collection like this would certainly have examined very different areas forty years ago.
It’s probably going to be difficult to find this on most newsstands, so your best bet is probably to order it directly from the publisher at www.technologyreview.com/sf It only takes about a week to arrive in the mail, and costs $7.95—and at that price for the quality of the material you get, it’s one of the best reading bargains of the year.
Since the publication of the first stories in the sequence in 1987, Stephen Baxter’s “Xeelee” series has grown into one of the most extensive and recomplicated series in science fiction, consisting of dozens of stories, two dedicated collections, and at least twelve novels, with the stories themselves, chronicling humanity’s war with an implacable alien enemy, the Xeelee, taking place across a span of billions of years of human history. The latest addition to this complex sequence is the novella “Gravity Dreams,” which PS Publishing has released as part of a two-novella chapbook, packaged with the reprint novella “Raft,” which was later expanded into Baxter’s first novel, Raft. “Gravity Dreams” is a direct sequel to “Raft,” taking place millions of years after the events of the original novella, in which a doomed scientific expedition plunges into a bizarre universe where the force of gravity is a billion times stronger than it is in our own, and becomes stranded there. “Gravity Dreams” splits its action between the humans in our universe, who are bracing themselves for what may be the final deadly assault by the Xeelee, and the inhabitants of the other universe, descended from the Raft’s original crew, who have become adapted to their radical new environment over the ages. A surviving piece of high technology from the original Raft enables communication to be established between the two universes, and prompts the mounting of a rescue expedition of sorts to retrieve at least some of the castaways from their exile, with mixed results.
If you haven’t read any other Xeelee stories, your best bet is to just ignore the extremely complicated backstory—Cliff’s Notes version: there’s an alien race called the Xeelee who have been fighting a war against humanity for billions of years, causing humanity to evolve and adapt into strange forms in order to survive—and enjoy the pleasures of the foreground action, which are considerable. The volume also contains a cover and endpaper art by renowned SF artist David A. Hardy, and makes an attractive package.
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F&SF, November/December.
Asimov’s, December.
Interzone 235.
Interzone 236.
Interzone 237.
The best story in the November/December F&SF is Carolyn Ives Gilman’s novella “The Ice Owl,” a moody and faintly melancholy story about a young girl living with her irresponsible mother in a slum neighborhood in a city on an alien planet who meets an old man with an enigmatic past who eventually becomes her tutor and mentor; a subplot features her attempts to penetrate the secret of the old man’s mysterious past. Although her mentor greatly widens her intellectual horizons, not all of the knowledge he leads her into is pleasant, and the story resonates with echoes of loss, of worlds vanished and loved ones destroyed, even of genocide, and with the foreboding sense, gradually gathering strength as the novella progresses, that the cycle of loss and destruction is about to start all over again, sweeping the girl’s familiar world into oblivion this time. In its basics, the story could easily have been told about a young girl on the Lower East Side of New York meeting an old refugee who had fled the horrors of World War II in Europe, but the science fictional details are ingenious and cleverly chosen, and add an evocativeness and strangeness that justifies telling it as SF instead.
Also good in November/December is “Object Three,” by James L. Cambias, a slam-bang space adventure in which a band of ruthless desperadoes double-cross and double double-cross each other in the struggle to possess the key that may unlock the mysteries of an enigmatic alien artifact that might be billions of years old and contain secrets so valuable as to be beyond price. Cambias tells this one fast and taut, and keeps you guessing to the end as to who is going to ultimately triumph in this pavane of conspiracy and betrayal. Similar in tone is the novella “Quartet and Triptych,” by Matthew Hughes, another adventure of resourceful master thief Luff Imbry, set in a milieu heavily (and acknowledgedly) influenced by the works of Jack Vance, an interstellar society that exists many millennia from now but still an era or two before humanity gives up on space travel and retreats to the haunted gloom of Vance’s Dying Earth. This is technically a reprint, first published last year as a novella chapbook from PS Publishing, but as probably few of the magazine’s readers will have seen it in that form, I doubt that too many of them are going to object to encountering it here. Like all of the Luff Imbry stories, this is great fun, a satisfyingly robust and colorful tale, at least as full of double-crosses as the Cambias, in which Imbry matches wits with some sinister and powerful high-tech “ghosts” from ages past for the possession of the ultimate prize (until the next adventure, anyway).
The rest of the November/December issue, from this point down, is weaker. F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey delivers a typically well-written fantasy, “How Peter Met Pan,” which ultimately left me a bit confused as to what the point of all the macabre and somewhat gristly goings-on it contains had been. Tim Sullivan contributes another nicely characterized fantasy, “Under Glass,” which ultimately goes on a bit too long for a bit too little a payoff (and which really leaves unanswered the story’s basic question, why Bob would have wanted his soul imprisoned in a Mason jar in the first place). There’s also a hereto unpublished fantasy story by the late Evangeline Walton, author of the acclaimed Mabinogion tetralogy and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, “They That Have Wings”—unfortunately, there’s usually a reason why trunk stories end up in the trunk, and this one should have been left there.
Asimov’s, which had a strong year, ends 2011 with a somewhat weak December issue overall, although there are a few good stories. The best story here is probably Connie Willis’s Christmas novella, “All About Emily,” which deals with the efforts of an “artificial”—basically, an android—to join the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, and the established human Broadway star who forms an uneasy relationship with “her,” mentoring and helping the artificial while all the while being all too aware of the events of the movie All About Eve, which is constantly referenced in the story, in which a star is effectively replaced by her innocent-looking understudy, who plots to bring her down and take her place. The fear that human performers or artists will be replaced by robots or computers is an old one, going back in the field at least as far as Walter M. Miller’s Hugo-winning “The Darfsteller” in 1955, in which human actors are put out of business by artificial ones; there have been several different takes on the theme this year alone, including a story elsewhere by Ken Liu, with whom Willis shares a Table of Contents here, “Real Artists”. Willis’s take on the theme here is slyly funny, as should come as no surprise to those familiar with her comic stories, but is also deceptively light, raising some rea
l and very serious issues about the kind of relationships that might develop between humans and their own artificial “children.” Also good here is the aforementioned Ken Liu’s “The Countable,” a complex story told from the perspective of a troubled savant-like boy. Although an already accomplished and highly promising new writer, Liu has a tendency to load his stories with static infodumps, something he should work on; this story will be too math-heavy for many readers, including charts and graphs included as part of the text, none of which I’m convinced is actually necessary to the telling of the basic human story.
Pamela Sargent’s “Strawberry Birdies” is another story about a child who sees the world in ways that nobody else does, similar to the Liu story above and Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” from an issue earlier this year, this one with a time-travel angle reminiscent of John Varley’s “Air Raid.” Steve Rasnic Tem contributes “Ephemera,” an autumnal study of a rare-book dealer whose world slowly slips away as print books gradually become obsolete. New writer Suzanne Palmer gives us “Surf,” a fast-paced but rather unlikely Space Opera adventure in which the protagonist operates with near-supernatural competence, all too clearly aware of having the Author on her side in situations where a mistake in timing of a second would mean certain death. ““Run,” Bakri Says,” by new writer Ferrett Steinmetz, is a gaming-world story of sorts, in which a woman must die again and again and again until one of her “iterations” finally gets it right and solves the problem. Tim McDaniel’s “The List” is an unfunny joke story.
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