Whichever critical pigeonhole you try to push Andy Duncan into, he remains one of the best and most original writers in the business, and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories will certainly make it on to my shortlist of the year’s best collections.
Speaking of Duncan, he has another good story, “On 20468 Petercook,” up on Tor.com for April 11th. This one also is science fiction, if you can imagine a funnier version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot written as science fiction and cast with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as the two main characters.
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F&SF, May/June.
Interzone 239.
Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr., by Neal Barrett, Jr. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-406-5, $40.00, 560 pages.) Cover art by Vincent Chong.
The May/June issue of F&SF is somewhat weak, with several pleasant stories, but nothing that’s going to be appearing on any award ballots—although there is more science fiction and less fantasy here than there usually is. One of the most enjoyable stories here is “Liberty’s Daughter,” by Naomi Kritzer, which involves a young girl “PI” (of sorts) who tracks down hard-to-find items down for a living who takes on a commission to find a missing indentured servant in a rather Libertarian offshore “nation” made up of linked floating ships, a commission that leads her into much more dangerous territory than she initially thinks that it will. There’s a pleasant air to this, rather like what a Nancy Drew novel might be like if it was written by the Robert A. Heinlein of his “juvenile novels” period, and, since it stops with large plot-points left up in the air, I assume that there’s going to be a sequel or sequels. There’s a similar YA feel, a bit less Heinleinesque, to Chris Willrich’s “Grand Tour,” an enjoyable read about a young girl in an affluent future society trying to come to terms with her issues with her family before setting off on a Grand Tour of the nations of Earth while her family simultaneously sets off on a Wanderjahr to another planet, a journey that will keep them apart for more than a decade. Although considerably grimmer in tone than either of the stories above, there’s a also a YA feel to Michael Alexander’s “The Children’s Crusade,” narrated by a young man in an impoverished and religiously intolerant rural farming community where food is scarce and the level of technology has been falling for generations, and his life-changing encounter with a Mysterious Stranger from elsewhere who turns out to know the secrets of the true origins of their world, and who can offer the narrator a possible way out, if he has the courage to take a chance on it.
Also amusing here is Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Asylum,” another of his stories exploring the supernatural side of New Orleans, in which a personable but hapless young man, a bit of a naif, actually, almost a James Thurber character, finds that he enjoys the company of ghosts much more than the more prickly, demanding company of the living. In “Typhoid Jack,” new writer Andy Stewart offers a look at the life of a supposedly street-smart virus-peddler (although he’d have to be rather dumb to not see through the trap he runs into) in a future where things are run for us for our own good by a race of intelligent and ruthlessly efficient androids, and the only way to get some time off is to buy a day’s worth of sickness on the street. New writer Matthew Corradi’s “City League” tells a baseball-oriented story about a man who comes to doubt his memories of the Big Game in a future where memories can be bought and sold, and new writer Pat MacEwen’s “Taking the Low Road” is a somewhat unlikely Space Opera about immigrants allowing themselves to be swallowed by the cosmic Space Worms who travel through the universe’s wormholes in order to be instantly transferred to a new home world…although things, of course, go drastically wrong. I’ve never really warmed to Fred Chappell’s long “shadow master” fantasy series, but for those who have, there’s a novella in the series here, “Maze of Shadows.”
The March/April issue of Interzone, Interzone 239, makes for rather glum reading. The best story here is also, probably not coincidentally, the least bleak: new writer Suzanne Palmer’s “Tangerine, Nectarine, Clementine, Apocalypse,” about a boy living on a highly regimented totalitarian space station—which calls itself “Utopia” and likes to think of itself as benign—whose old life is suddenly wiped away and who is forced to take a leap into the unknown to find a new and hopefully better life for himself somewhere else. Like her previous Interzone story, “The Ceiling Is Sky,” from last year’s Interzone 234, the initial setup is glum enough, but there’s real affection between the apprentice and his master to cut that a bit, and the story at least lets the protagonist break out of it at the end to achieve at least the possibility of attaining a better life, unlike most of the rest of the stories here. (It’s still unclear to me, though, how the killer nanobots came to be in the pomelo in the first place.)
New writer Matthew Cook’s “Railriders” is too much of a one-to-one translation of the concept of rail-riding hobos, translating them instead, not entirely convincingly, to destitute stowaways aboard interstellar spacecraft. Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Twember” is a melancholy tale about a man struggling to resolve family issues in the midst of an enigmatic and probably world-ending apocalypse involving unstoppable “time storms” that nobody knows the origin of, closer really, in its lack even of speculation about the origin of the storms, to horror than SF. Nigel Brown’s “One-Way Ticket” is another melancholy story about a party of terminally ill humans who are making their way on pilgrimage to an alien holy place where the prospect of a life after death, of sorts, is being held out to them, and a dying reporter who intends to pierce the veil of mystery about what really happens there and report the truth back to the rest of the universe, but who instead decides not to do it because that might spoil the possibility of solace that others might find there. New writer Jon Wallace’s “Lips & Teeth” involves a prisoner with strange abilities who is kept in confinement in a prison camp in some future totalitarian, vaguely Asian, realm, one who has been imprisoned for so long that he’s no longer sure that he wants to escape; a talking, sentient pickaxe is introduced as a character, but its existence is never explained. New writer Jacob A. Boyd’s “Bound in Place” takes us to a curious fantasy world where ghosts are used as household-running AIs and even everyday household appliances; like the bulk of the stuff in this issue, it’s also rather depressing.
Back in the mid-’80s, when I was editing Asimov’s magazine, I pulled an unagented manuscript by a writer whose name I didn’t recognize out of the slush pile. It was a sloppy, badly typed manuscript, usually an indicator that the story is the work of a novice, but there was something compelling about the voice it was written in, and I continued to read until I hit a scene where, in describing the wonders of New York City, the narration casually mentions in passing “a boy tying celery to a cat,” and I realized that I was no longer sure whether the author was a brilliant satirist or totally insane, and went off to seek a second opinion. Of course, it turned out that that author, Neal Barrett, Jr., was a brilliant satirist, perhaps the best in SF, and was also a veteran author who made his first sale way back in 1960 and who had written westerns, mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction in addition to a number of SF novels; that story containing the no-doubt rather annoyed cat with celery tied to it was “Perpetuity Blues,” which still strikes me as one of the funniest (and weirdest) SF stories ever written, rivaling some of the best work of that other great SF humorist, R.A. Lafferty. Although he’d been writing for decades before then, Barrett really began to generate a buzz in the late ‘80s with the sudden massed appearance of a number of mad, highly energetic stories in markets such as Asimov’s and Omni, so that the affect was almost that of a major new writer appearing in our midst.
Most of the best of those stories are collected in the well-named Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr, which will certainly make my shortlist of the best collections of the year. Like Andy Duncan, who we were talking about here last month, like R.A. Lafferty, like Avram Davidson, like Howard Waldrop, Barrett is one of the great Eccentrics, absolutely uniqu
e writers whose work doesn’t really fit well into the mainline of development for either science fiction or fantasy, but which frequently and freely mingles elements of both, as well as generous handfuls of other genres, western, mystery, horror, whatever’s to hand in the writer’s kitchen that day. Barrett is probably best-known for developing what I think of as the Gonzo Apocalypse story—stories set in a grim post-Apocalyptic landscape that at the same time contains a large number of wildly improbable, madly surreal, and often very funny elements—in stories such as “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (which centers around a robot hooker and a seven-foot-tall mutated possum with a machine gun) and “Radio Station St. Jack,” and in novels such as Through Darkest America, but, like Andy Duncan, he actually has a much wider range stylistically than that, as testified to here by poignant and autumnal stories such as “Sallie C.” and “Winter on the Belle Fourche,” which are also early examples of the Alternate History form before that subgenre really got rolling. But many of his stories are just flat-out weird, like the indescribable “Stairs,” which can make a good claim to the title of strangest science fiction story ever written—although the aforementioned “Perpetuity Blues,” “Highbrow” (which features the generations-long building of a mountain-high statue of Richard Nixon), “Cush,” and “The Last Cardinal Bird in Tennessee” could certainly give it a run for its money.
Barrett’s work won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you like vivid, unique, quirky, strong-flavored stuff that’s unlike anything that anybody has ever written before or ever will write again, then this collection belongs in your library.
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The New Yorker, June 4 & June 11.
Asimov’s, April/May.
Asimov’s, June.
Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas, by Robert Reed. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848633-12-4, 328 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.
As several people have already joked, Hell must have frozen over—because the double June 4 and June 11 issue of The New Yorker is a special “Science Fiction Issue,” something many of us, particularly the old hands, never expected to see in our lifetimes. For those of us used to decades of seeing SF kept out of literary mainstream markets like The New Yorker by a nearly impenetrable firewall, this comes as quite a surprise, although there have been indications for a couple of years now that things might be changing. Though, as a few reviewers have pointed out, things perhaps haven’t changed all that much—rather than using authors more centrally identified with the genre, the authors contributing fiction here are all authors who would be familiar to The New Yorker’s audience, most of whom have appeared in the magazine several times before, and most of the stories here are somewhat slipstreamish, to greater or lesser degree, at a considerable distance from core SF; you’ll find no hard science here, or off-world stories, or far-future stuff, or tales featuring aliens or spaceships or AIs or clones or talking space squids. Still, it’s a start. Who knows what a few more years may bring?
The best story here, by a substantial margin, is Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” which would be a straight spy story, although a good one, except for the intriguing way it which it is written—I’ve heard it said that it’s written in Twitter posts, but it seems to me more as if it’s written in the form of the spy’s running advice to herself during the mission, or, considering the title, which references the “black box” recovered from the wreckage of a plane crash to tell investigators what went wrong, more probably her advice to other spies who may someday attempt similar missions, left behind after her death; the thing it reminds me the most of, in fact, to resort to a lowbrow reference, is the spy’s running voiceover commentary on the TV show Burn Notice. Junot Diaz’s “Monstro” is another intriguing story, although it can’t seem to make up its mind what kind of story it is, starting off as a story about a mysterious plague that breaks out in a Haitian refugee camp, mixing in a story of unrequited love, and then morphing into a story about survivors watching an enigmatic catastrophe, reminiscent of Cloverfield. The story ends just as it’s starting to become the most interesting, with everything unresolved, something they probably wouldn’t have let Diaz get away with in Asimov’s or F&SF.
In addition to fiction, the issue also contains short essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, China Mieville, and the late Ray Bradbury, as well as an article about aliens in fiction by Laura Miller, and even reviews of genre TV shows such as Doctor Who—there are no reviews of SF books, though, perhaps an indication that Hell hasn’t frozen quite all the way to the bottom.
Meanwhile, back in the heart of the genre, the April/May issue of Asimov’s is a strong one. Best story here is probably James Patrick Kelly’s novella “The Last Judgment,” a direct sequel to his “Men Are Trouble” from all the way back in the June 2004 Asimov’s, taking us down some Mean Streets in company with a Private Eye in a bizarre future where aliens with godlike powers have made all the men in the world disappear, apparently on some strange whim, leaving human existence as we now know it has been turned completely on its head, and forcing the women left behind to forge a new society on their own. Kelly handles the noir PI element smoothly and well, although there’s probably nothing about the case itself that’s going to baffle regular mystery fans; the real strength of the story comes from the glimpses of the workings of the society that has evolved in the total absence of men, and the hints about the possible (and possibly changing) motivations of the aliens that come across during the course of the investigation. Also first-rate is Tom Purdom’s “Bonding With Morry,” another in a long line of stories in which humans form emotional bonds with robot caretakers—or think that they are, anyway. Purdom never really settles the issue of whether his clear-eyed and hard-headed senior has really become attached to his robot nurse and housekeeper, but seems to say that even half-fooling yourself by pretending that you have is a good thing for a lonely man at the end of his life.
In the suspenseful “Something Real,” Rick Wilber takes real-life baseball player Moe Berg on a secret World War II mission to assassinate Werner Heisenberg before he can produce an atomic bomb for Hitler—something that was actually considered in our own timeline—but the mission grows more complicated when he crosses paths with a woman who seemingly has the power to move between Alternate Realities—and take him with her. “Living in the Eighties,” by David Ira Cleary is another complex time-travel tale, one drenched with ‘80s nostalgia, but since I have no ‘80s nostalgia, it didn’t work well for me; if you do have it, your mileage may vary. Ian Creasey’s “Souvenirs” deals with the aftermath of a minor crime in a bustling spaceport where lots of different alien races rub elbows (or whatever it is they have)—and I must say, sadly, that the police and government agencies in this society take the wild claims of an indigent street-dweller much more seriously than would probably be the case in ours, and treat her with much more consideration than she’d probably receive today, where she’d most likely be ignored or thrown out of the police station on her ass. In Sandra McDonald’s “Sexy Robot Mom,” a doggedly loyal robot surrogate mother is determined to bring the fetus implanted within her to term and deliver it successfully to its parents, in spite of the interruption of decades of unintentional cryogenic slumber, a societal collapse, and what appears to be the arrival of a new Ice Age, to say nothing of the fact that the parents are almost certainly dead; the robot is so single-mindedly set on its task in the face of all odds that it becomes almost endearing after awhile, although the whole situation is pretty unlikely, and the story really needs a resolution of whether “she” succeeds or not. New writer Gray Rinehart tells a fast-paced but even more unlikely story in “Sensitive, Compartmented,” in which a telepath is sent off in a superfast spy plane to spy on the territories below, gets shot down, and ends up being captured by a boatload of rather caricatured Russians, one of whom happens to be a telepath like herself. New writer Josh Roseman’s “Greener” gains little or nothing from being set in the near-future and told as an SF story rather than as a straight
mainstream story.
The June Asimov’s is considerably weaker, with nothing that really stands out. There’s decent work here by Mercurio D. Rivera, Will McIntosh, Megan Arkenberg, Jack McDevitt, Alan DeNiro, Kali Wallace, and Bud Sparhawk—solid stuff, but none of it really first-rate, and I suspect that none of it will be showing up on next year’s award ballots. Most entertaining story here is probably Bruce McAllister’s “Free Range,” which is told in a calm and mellow enough voice to keep you from quite noticing, while you’re reading it, anyway, just how silly this tale of Magic Guardian Chickens that protect you from Killer Owls From Outer Space actually is.
I remain puzzled as to why Robert Reed isn’t more famous than he is, in spite of the fact that he’s consistently produced four or five (at least) of the year’s best stories year after year now for almost twenty years, usually appearing in several of that year’s various Best of the Year anthologies, and sometimes in all of them at the same time. You’d think by now that he’d be a household name, but although he did win a Hugo a few years back—he’s not. Perhaps it’s because his best work is done in short fiction, not at novel length, and novels are where the real reputation-building is going on these days. Perhaps it’s because his stories are often so different from each other in tone and execution and subject matter and genre that you can’t form a picture of what a “typical Robert Reed story” is going to be like, and that hampers the creation of a brand-identity—and so, name recognition (a problem he shares with Walter Jon Williams, and a couple of other good writers).
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