An odd item is Solaris Rising 1.5: An Exclusive ebook of New Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates, available only in ebook form, an original SF anthology designed to act as a “bridge” between 2010’s Solaris Rising and next year’s upcoming Solaris Rising 2 anthology—in other words, it’s a teaser or sampler or preview of the kind of fiction you can expect to find in Solaris Rising 2, put out there with the hope that if you like it, you’ll then buy the print anthology in 2013. Fortunately for this scheme, the overall literary quality here is pretty high. The best story here, by a substantial margin, is Adam Roberts’s “What Did Tessimond Tell You?”, in which a scientist attempts to unravel what seems at first like a minor mystery, but one that leads her step by step into a disturbing—in fact, dismaying—realization. Also good is Aliette de Bodard’s “Two Sisters in Exile,” although the plot, featuring a woman reluctantly attending the funeral of a political enemy, with vast political consequences attached, is a bit too similar to the author’s own “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” from the January Clarkesworld. Gareth L. Powell’s “Another Apocalypse” starts out as a exciting chase-and-intrigue story, one that leaves you wondering how in the world the protagonist is going to get out of this mess—but then another storyline altogether smushes into the story and takes it over, and the protagonist of that storyline effortlessly rescues the original protagonist with no effort or ingenuity on his part called for; disappointing, since it starts out very well. Paul Cornell’s “A New Arrival at the House of Love” deals with bored decadent posthumans so removed from you or I that they might as well be gods, and is reminiscent in tone of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, with its cruel and playfully decadent far-future immortals, but unlike Moorcock, whose novels were written as Victorian pastiches, Cornell’s story is written in a fairly opaque manner that may be difficult for some readers to get into, and may deter some altogether; persistence will reward you with an interesting story, though. Paul Di Filippo’s “A Palazzo in the Stars” is an elegant steampunk retake on H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Sarah Lotz’s “Charlotte” is a variant of the old story about the lonely old woman whose life is changed for the better by bonding with a dog, who ultimately rescues her, except that the dog has been updated to being a giant robot spider instead. And Mike Resnick’s “The Second Civil War” isn’t really a story at all, but rather an (interesting) piece of Alternate History speculation, as though Resnick is laying out the groundwork for a story he hasn’t actually written yet.
As far as I can tell, Solaris Rising 1.5 is available only in a Kindle edition from Amazon. I searched the Solaris website, but could find no information about it there.
Tor.com has published two quirky and excellent fantasy stories in recent weeks, Michael Swanwick’s “The Mongolian Wizard” on July 1, and Pat Murphy’s “About Fairies,” on May 9th. “The Mongolian Wizard” is the start of a series about playing the Great Game of espionage in a vaguely Ruritanian pre-World War I Europe in which magic and magical creatures exist and the operatives have strange powers and abilities, somewhat similar to Charles Stross’s “Laundry” stories, but with a very different tone; like most of Swanwick’s work, it’s vivid and fun and cynical, with lots of double-crosses and double double-crosses on the page, all of which bodes well for future stories. Murphy’s “About Fairies” is a dark, elegant, and ultimately scary tale about the intrusion of fairies—fairies of a very different sort from the usual twinkly, gossamer-winged sort—into modern-day San Francisco, and a woman who comes to recognize the subtle, almost subliminal, signs of their presence.
Another good recent story in Tor.com is “Faster Gun,” by Elizabeth Bear, posted on August 8, an SF/western cross that is everything that the movie Cowboys and Aliens should have been, but was not. Bear does a particularly good job with the protagonist, Doc Holiday, getting inside the head of the consumptive gunslinger well enough to make him a sympathetic character that you come to care about, and even worry for when he runs into danger, even though you know perfectly well all the while that he has an appointment with the O.K. Corral waiting for him in the future.
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F&SF, September/October
Asimov’s, September.
Asimov’s, October/November.
Interzone 241.
The best story in the September/October F&SF is a reprint of Andy Duncan’s “Close Encounters,” which I reviewed in the June Locus, following its original appearance in Duncan’s collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. Next best is recent Hugo and Nebula-winner Ken Liu’s “Arc,” a well-written and sensitive character study (although one which may be a bit slow for some readers) of a woman’s difficult journey through a long life to the point where she’s a respected and effectively immortal artist, when she is faced with the decision whether to go on living or not. This is a story obviously written by someone who’s young, one in which the woman makes the decision that she does based on philosophical musings about symmetry and the idea that “death gives life meaning”; those of us who can see the Grim Reaper coming up all too clearly in the rearview mirror would probably agree with the woman’s daughter instead, whose arguments for living seem a lot more sensible to me. Also good here is Peter Dickinson’s “Troll Blood,” in which a young woman who may have a troll in the genetic woodpile somewhere back in the far past must deal with the potentially fatal consequences of a present-day visitation by one of her distant relatives.
Everything else here is somewhat weaker. “The Goddess,” by F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey, is an antebellum soap-opera about another young person’s long and difficult journey through life to ultimate success, this one a young Hindu trying to make his way in the racist society of pre-Civil War Mississippi; this is entertaining and engagingly written, as is almost everything by Cowdrey, but the fantastic element (other than the idea of a Hindu being able to survive and prosper in pre-Civil War Mississippi) is minimal. Michael Alexander also invokes the Civil War in “A Diary From Deimos,” but this story about a future revolution on Mars suffers from being too much of a one-on-one translation of our own Civil War, down to the mistake of even calling the diarist “Mrs. Chestnut.” Rand B. Lee offers a somewhat murky look at futuristic therapy in “Theobroma Valentine,” which might be a bit hard to parse if you’re not already familiar with his long-running series of stories about the alien Damanakippith/fu. Chet Arthur relates a Weird Western in “The Sheriff.” And Grania Davis takes us back to Old California for a tale about the Trickster contending with a padre in “Father Juniper’s Journey to the North.”
The September Asimov’s is a somewhat weak issue, with some solid work in it, but nothing really exceptional. The strongest story here is undoubtedly Robert Reed’s “Noumenon,” another in his long-running “Great Ship” series, about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. This one is ingenious and inventive, as always, but it sets up an intriguing situation that, to my mind, it doesn’t really resolve, as if it’s actually the opening for a much longer story; perhaps Reed is saving the resolution to feature in another, later Great Ship story. Also good is Matthew Johnson’s “The Last Islander,” a poignant story about people from a tropical island that was swallowed by rising sea-levels putting their memories together to create a virtual reconstruction of their lost home.
At one point, in the 40s and ‘50s, there were quite a few movies with essentially the same plot as Dale Bailey’s “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous”—love triangle develops between a bickering, disenchanted married couple and the Great White Hunter who takes them on an African safari, with the husband often proving himself to be a coward and the wife falling for the macho GWH instead (sometimes the husband ends up getting eaten by a lion, sometimes just slinks away in disgrace and/or becomes a drunk). This is more or less the plot of the Bailey too, except that he adds the twist of the disenchanted couple being tourists who time-travel to a well-descr
ibed Cretaceous, which strengthens the story with some nifty and suspenseful Dino Action. In “Unearthed,” William Preston tells a long, well-crafted story about miners in South America running afoul of subterranean creatures with peculiar (and somewhat unlikely) abilities; you’re supposed to recognize the unnamed hero who arrives to save the day, a huge bronze-skinned man with plenty of unusual physical and mental abilities of his own, but if you don’t (and he’s a pulp hero from long enough ago that many young readers may not), then it may diminish the impact of the story for you, or at least take away a bit of the enjoyment you might otherwise have derived from it. Chris Willrich tells the tale of a Mysterious Stranger who gives encouragement to the downtrodden survivors of a Lost Colony by serving them some “Star Soup.”
The October/November Asimov’s is considerably stronger than the September issue. The best story here, and one of the best stories of the year to date, is Jay Lake’s “The Stars Do Not Lie.” It won’t take any experienced genre reader long to realize that this is another story about a Lost Colony that has forgotten (and, in fact, vehemently denies) their origins, an elegant and somewhat steampunkish take on the subject that is evocatively written and peopled with characters of real psychological complexity, all embroiled on one side or another in a political and religious war between those who want to reveal the truth and those who want to surprises it. Also excellent is Paul McAuley’s “Antarctica Starts Here,” about the “normalization” of an increasingly ice-free Antarctica and attempts to commercially exploit it and turn it into a prime tourist destination, and one (probably doomed) rebel who fights to resist the process. Alan Smale’s “The Mongolian Book of the Dead” is also substantial, although Smale’s look at what happens when China invades and conquers Mongolia is a shrewd and exciting enough near-future political thriller that I was actually sorry to see a fantasy element come along, although it’s pretty well-handled too; I find it hard to believe, though, that the ancient Mongol hordes would stand any kind of real chance against modern troops armed with automatic weapons, especially on the open steppe where there’s no cover and sightlines are practically infinite.
The rest of the stories in October/November don’t come up to the same level of quality, although there’s some good work. Vylar Kaftan’s “Lion Dance” is a near-future, near-mainstream story about how the human spirit is hard to repress even in the most depressing and perilous of times. Ekaterina Sedia’s “A Handsome Fellow” is about a woman trapped in the Seige of Stalingrad during World War II who forms a relationship with a sinister Mysterious Stranger; some very nice historical detail here, although the woman must be particularly dense not to realize early on what the stranger actually is. Eugene Mirabelli’s “This Hologram World” is basically a straight mainstream story with no fantastic element at all, although it does feature a lot of speculation about the nature of reality in the course of telling an engrossing human story about the life of a scientist. Steven Utley’s “Shattering” is a somewhat routine people-going-crazy-in-a-spaceship story. Will Ludwigsen’s “The Ghost Factory” is a well-crafted horror story that seems somewhat out of place in Asimov’s. And Kit Reed’s “Results Guaranteed” is a satirical look at a school for very “special” children.
Interzone 241 is a strong issue after a couple of weak ones. Best story here is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “Ship’s Brother,” another of her Xuya stories, several of which have appeared this year in one venue or another, all set in an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires, and women give birth to children who are prenatally altered in the womb to become the control systems of living spaceships. This one deals with the ultimate sibling rivalry, as a brother traumatized by witnessing the birth of his “sister,” who then becomes the starship The Fisherman’s Song, develops a lifetime enmity for her and eventually an adversarial relationship with her and her kind that has dramatic consequences for the rest of the family (a grave error on the mother’s part to carelessly let her son witness such a traumatic event in the first place, of course—but people, even those with the best of intentions, sometimes do make such mistakes even in real life, often with long-term consequences). Sean McMullen’s “Steamgothic” is an extremely entertaining mainstream story about an investigation of a forgotten past technology, the kind of thing that really would make an interesting BBC documentary, right up until nearly the last page, when a sudden steampunk element swoops in to flamboyantly transform the entire world. Gareth L. Powell’s “Railroad Angel” examines the (perhaps somewhat unlikely) afterlife destiny of Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road—how strongly you react to this depends on how you feel about Cassady in the first place, I suppose. In “One Day in Time City,” David Ira Cleary shows us a romance between young bicycle messengers in a surreal city where you age or grow young as you move uptown or downtown; it’s entertaining, but since no rationale is ever offered for how this all came to pass, it’s certainly not science fiction.
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F&SF, November/December.
Asimov’s, December.
Edge of Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 353 pages.)
Going Interstellar, eds. Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt. (Baen, 978-1-4516-3778-6, $7.99, 434 pages.) Cover art by Sam Kennedy.
Arc 1.3.
The best story in the November/December F&SF, and in fact easily the best science fiction story that F&SF has published all year, is Robert Reed’s novella “Katabasis,” another of his “Great Ship” stories, a long-running series about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans. In this one, bored rich immortals compete to complete a months-long trek across difficult terrain for no particular reason except to gain prestige in the eyes of their peers and perhaps to face a deadly challenge as a change from their over-protected lives; many of them don’t make it, in fact—but death is not quite as permanent a condition in this society as it is in our own. The novella follows the progress of one such party, shepherded on the way by an alien guide, the eponymous Katabasis, whose own story about how she came to be traveling on the Great Ship is told in flashbacks. Reed may be the best in science fiction at taking you step by painful step through a grueling, extended physical process, really making you feel the reserves you have to call upon in order to make it, and here we get two such processes, the almost-unsurvivable trek of the tourist party that Katabasis is guiding, and her own earlier and even more harrowing race across an alien dessert, family and friends falling at her side almost with every step. I sometimes wonder if it’s Reed’s own personal history as a long-distance runner that makes him so good at describing these kinds of limits-testing physical ordeals? At any rate, I felt like putting my feet up after reading this one, and you may too. Also good here is Naomi Kritzer’s “High Stakes,” a direct sequel to her “Liberty’s Daughter” in the May/June issue, part of a YA series which reads sort of like Nancy Drew written by the Heinlein of Podkayne of Mars, set in a floating Libertarian Utopia that becomes more unpleasant the more closely the way it really functions is examined. It’s even more obvious here than it was with the first story that this is a de facto novelization, with major plotlines left unresolved, something that will probably be exacerbated in further chunks as conveying the backstory becomes more of a chore. Entertaining reading, though, with a nice voice.
Nothing else in the issue is as successful. Steven Popkes’s “Breathe” is about a family with the power to steal breath from other people, and the morality of using that gift, and to what degree. Albert E. Cowdrey sends his pair of ghostbusters, Jimmie and Morrey to Mississippi, to an Antebellum mansion where they have to deal with “The Ladies in Waiting.” Chris Willrich gives us a man fighting Alernate Universe versions of himself, in “Waiting for a Me Like You.” New writer Alter S. Reiss’s “If the Stars Reverse Their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea” features a man going back to t
he past to win a current-day battle, although, unusually, the time-travel method is fantasy rather than SF. And Alan Dean Foster spins another Tall Tale about series character Mad Amos Malone, in “Claim Blame.”
The best story in a strong December Asimov’s, capping a strong year overall, is Steven Popkes’s novella “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.” I often don’t like rock ‘n roll stories, which frequently demonstrate little knowledge either of music or the music business, but Popkes does a good job of convincing me that he knows both well, and his performance scenes, which often ring false in this kind of stories, are similarly convincing. The story is also peopled with psychologically complex and real-feeling characters whose fate you come to care about, and is very well-executed.
Also good in December are Ken Liu’s “The Waves,” Robert Reed’s “The Pipes of Pan,” and Chris Beckett’s “The Caramel Forest.” The Liu story begins aboard a generation ship which is in the midst of a long journey to the stars when a message is beamed from Earth telling the people aboard the secret of achieving immortality; like Liu’s “Arc” in the September/October F&SF, this part of the story then becomes a debate about when/whether you should die to make room for new generations if the choice not to die is yours, although here Liu seems to come down on the opposite side of the argument than he did in “Arc.” Just when it seems the story is about to end, though, there’s a scene change, as it turns out that colonists from Earth have arrived at the target planet long before the inhabitants of the generation ship, using Faster-Than-Light travel invented subsequent to their departure, and they offer the crew another choice—whether to stay organically human or to change into a mechanical posthuman form. And there’s another decision yet to come, after a subsequent journey to another star-system, as relentless change continues to crash over the ship’s crew like the waves of the title. Reed’s story is a quiet study of a scientist coming to learn, over the course of a long and turbulent career, the choice every living being must sooner or later make. Beckett’s story, a sequel to his “Day 29” from last year’s July issue, examines colonists, or, in this case, their children, trying to adapt to life on a strange alien planet where, as becomes increasingly obvious with each story in this sequence, they don’t belong and probably shouldn’t be at all.
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