Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Mike Resnick’s “The Wizard of West 34th Street” is not in the same league as the above stories, but then, it doesn’t intend to be, and works fine as what it is: a funny story that adapts a classic fantasy trope to a modern urban setting. As a humorous piece, it’s more successful and less heavy-handed than the issue’s other attempt at humor, Sandra McDonald’s “The Black Feminist’s Guide to +Science Fiction Film Editing.”

  Easily the best original science fiction anthology of the year, by a good margin, is Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan—true, original SF anthologies have been light on the ground this year, but Edge of Infinity would be a standout in any year. Unusually, in these days when it seems almost de rigueur for editors to sneak some slipstream or fantasy stories into even ostensibly “All SF” anthologies, everything here actually is pure-quill core SF, some of it hard SF at that, and the literary quality is uniformly excellent across the board. There’s nothing that’s bad here, again unlike most anthologies, which makes it difficult to pick favorites, but among the strongest stories are Pat Cadigan’s “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” about a worker injured in an accident in orbit around Jupiter dealing with the problems and benefits of changing your species, Paul McAuley’s linked quintet of five small stories “Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden,” which provides a picturesque tour of the outer solar system in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Gwyneth Jones’s “Bricks, Sticks, Straw,” in which software agents struggle to reassemble their identities after suffering a solar storm on Callisto, Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Tyche and the Ants,” which tells a tale of political warfare and cyberattack through the focus of a child’s whimsical fantasy world, and Bruce Sterling’s “The Peak of Eternal Light,” a comedy of manners about intricate sexual mores on Mercury that reveals one of Sterling’s influences to be P.G. Wodehouse, something that might come as a surprise to someone who never read earlier stories like his “The Beautiful and the Sublime.” In addition, Edge of Infinity contains excellent work by Elizabeth Bear, James S.A. Corey, Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey, John Barnes, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and An Owomoyela, any of which would have been among the standout stories in any other SF anthology of the year. If you like core SF, this is the anthology to buy this year.

  Going Interstellar, edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt, is another of the year’s rare original SF anthologies—it’s nowhere near as good overall as Edge of Infinity, but it does contain an excellent novella by Michael Bishop, “Twenty Lights “to The Land of Snow””, in which Tibetan dissidents and refuges flee to the stars in a generation ship in company with the Dali Lama, the first core SF story Bishop has told in some years, and a welcome return to the days when he was turning out SF novellas such as “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” and “The House of Compassionate Sharers.” Going Interstellar also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Ben Bova, and others, as well as non-fiction essays about possible designs for interstellar spaceships by Dr. Gregory Maloff, Dr. Richard Obousy, and Les Johnson himself.

  After two strong issues, the latest edition of Arc, Arc 1.3, is somewhat disappointing. Put together by the makers of Scientific American magazine, and described as “a new digital magazine about the future,” Arc, edited by Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury, exists mainly as various downloadable formats for the Kindle, the iPad, iPhones, Windows PC and Mac computers, orderable either from Amazon or directly from www.newscientist.com/arc (although they will send you a perfect-bound 152-page print version for $29.95). Each issue contains a mix of non-fiction essays and fiction, and while the essays in this issue remain eclectic and interesting—Samuel Arbesman speculates on the kinds of relationships we might form with machines that are smarter than we are, Christina Agapakis explores biotechnology, Justin Pickard examines the implications of a future rise of Luddite movements—the fiction is overall somewhat weak. The best story here by a good margin is Lavie Tidhar’s “Chosing Faces,” a look at the plasticity of identity granted by future technology so wildly imaginative that it actually tumbles over the edge into Galaxy-style satire. The other two stories, Dave Gullen’s “All Your Futures” and Nan Craig’s “Scrapmetal,” are solid, competent efforts, but nothing exceptional, and although the editors boast about how new and exciting the core ideas explored in each story are, in fact, they’re nothing new; in fact, Ken Liu’s “Waves,” from the December Asimov’s, uses the same core idea as “All Your Futures,” colonists on a generation ship being beaten to their destination by spaceships using Faster-Than-Light drives developed after the colonists left—and Liu wasn’t the first one to explore this idea either.

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  Robots: The Recent A.I. eds Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-318-1, $14.95, 406 pages). Cover art by Vladislav Ociacia.

  War and Space: Recent Combat, eds Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-337-2, 380 pages). Cover art by Brian Christensen.

  Armored, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Baen, 978-1-4516-3817-2, $7.99, 576 pages). Cover art by Kurt Miller.

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-315-0, $15.95, 401 pages). Cover art by Scott Grimando.

  Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Random House Children’s Books, 978-0-3758-6830-6, $16.99, 432 pages).

  Epic: Legends of Fantasy, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-084-1, $17.95, 612 pages). Cover design by John Coulthart.

  Robots: The Recent A.I., edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, is a strong mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, recent stories about robots and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ‘50s). The one original story is a fine one, Lavie Tidhar’s “Under the Eaves,” a bittersweet romance between a human girl and a “robotnik,” part organic/part mechanical soldiers created to fight in a recent war and then abandoned to beg on the streets. This is one of a series of stories that Tidhar has been writing in the last couple of years about “Central Station,” an immense spaceport built near present-day Tel Aviv where spaceships to the Moon, Mars, and the Outer Solar System come and go, and the passengers, some altered in strange ways, mingle in the ancient neighborhoods below with the locals—many of whom are immigrants themselves from waves of migration decades or centuries past. It’s been clear for awhile now that Tidhar was strongly influenced by the late Cordwainer Smith, and that’s nowhere clearer than in these “Central Station” stories, that layer in references to other locations, characters, and stories from Tidhar’s busy interplanetary future, and often throw in poems and songs as well; the towering, cloud-piercing Central Station itself is clearly a homage to Smith’s own Earthport, from Smith’s Instrumentality stories, with an updated, gritty, multi-cultural ambience all its own. Of the reprint stories in Robots: The Recent A.I., the best are probably Catherynne M. Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast,” Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline,” Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot,” Ian McDonald’s “The Djinn’s Wife,” Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape,” Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Droplet,” and Aliette de Bodard’s “The Shipmaker,” but there are also good stories here from Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year.

  Another good mixed reprint (mostly) and original SF anthology, by the same editorial team, is War and Space: Recent Combat, edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace, an anthology of recent Military SF, although their definition of “Military SF” seems a bit broader than it sometimes is. As with Robots: The Recent A.I., there is one original story here, Sandra McDonald’s “Mehra and Jiun,” which isn’t as strong as the Tidhar story in Robots, but which does an effective job of depicting the uneasy alliance of two warring enemy soldier stranded together on the hostile surface of Europa. Of the reprint stories
, the best are Ken MacLeod’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?,” David Moles’s “A Soldier of the City,” Charles Coleman Finlay’s memorable novella “The Political Officer,” Yoon Ha Lee’s “Between Two Dragons,” Paul McAuley’s “Rats of the System,” and Tom Purdom’s “Palace Resolution,” but there’s also strong stories by Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Geoffrey A. Landis, Cat Rambo, and others. Another good value for the money.

  Armored, an all-original SF anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, is a bit more traditional an assemblage of Military SF—although even here, some of the stories, like those by Carrie Vaughn and David D. Levine (although they’re among the best in the book), stray somewhat from the ostensible theme: stories about armored Fighting Suits, more or less mobile, personal, wearable tanks, probably first popularized by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Starship Troopers, seen subsequently in lots of SF, including movies such as Avatar, and currently hovering right on the edge of becoming an actuality; certainly it won’t be more than ten or fifteen years at most before we have them prowling the battlefields in the real world. The best stories here are David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell’s “Jungle Walkers,” Alastair Reynolds’s “Trauma Pod,” Ian Douglas’s “The Johnson Maneuver,” Simon R. Green’s “Find Heaven and Hell in the Smallest Things,” Karin Lowachee’s “Nomad,” and Sean Williams’s “The N-Body Solution,” as well as, although they stray a bit far from the theme, Carrie Vaughn’s “Don Quixote” and David D. Levine’s “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang”—but the book also contains solid work by Jack McDevitt, Genevieve Valentine, Michael A. Stackpole, Tanya Huff, David Sherman, and others.

  I tried to sell my own version of the next anthology for over a decade, only to have publisher after publisher turn it down on the grounds that nobody would buy it because “science fiction fans weren’t interested in rock ‘n roll, and rock ‘n roll fans weren’t interested in science fiction”—so it’s with a certain amount of jealousy that I congratulate Paula Guran for managing to sell her own version and actually get it into print: Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy. Some of the best stories here were even slated to appear in my own unsold version: Howard Waldrop’s “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” Michael Swanwick’s “The Feast of Saint Janis,” Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On,” Norman Spinrad’s “The Big Flash,” Edward Bryant’s “Stone,” Lewis Shiner’s “Jeff Beck,” Lucius Shepard’s “...How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song...”, Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently”—classics all, and all stories that still hold up well even after the twenty or thirty years or more (the oldest story here is Spinrad’s, from 1969) that have passed since their initial publication. Rock On, however, in addition to the oldies, also contains more recent hits by Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Denton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly.

  My favorite original fantasy anthology of the year is Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology about witches, Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, which means that Strahan has pulled off, in my own estimation, anyway, the difficult task of editing both the best fantasy anthology and the best science fiction anthology (Strahan’s Edge of Infinity, reviewed here last month) of 2012. Not surprisingly, since it’s aimed at a YA audience, Under My Hat is not as substantial and chewy as Edge of Infinity, but it has a very pleasing wit and lightness of tone about it (for the most part, there are a few darker stories) that ought to appeal to the adult fantasy-reading audience as well. The best stories here include Peter S. Beagle’s “Great-Grandmother in the Cellar,” Margo Lanagan’s “Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow,” Ellen Klages’s “The Education of a Witch,” Garth Nix’s “A Handful of Ashes,” Jane Yolen’s “Andersen’s Witch,” and Holly Black’s “Little Gods,” although there are also fine stories here by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Jim Butcher, M. Rickert, Patricia A. McKillip, Isobelle Carmody, Tim Pratt, Tanith Lee, Charles De Lint, Frances Hardinge, and Diana Peterfreund, as well as a poem by Neil Gaiman.

  Another substantial fantasy anthology, this one all reprint, is Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. This makes an interesting companion volume to David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, which I reviewed earlier this year, although Epic is pitched as being an anthology of “Epic Fantasy” stories rather than as a “Sword & Sorcery” anthology. It’s sometimes difficult to make a distinction between “Epic Fantasy” and “Sword & Sorcery”—both are set in invented fantasy worlds, both have thieves and sword-wielding adventurers, both take place in worlds in which magic exists and there are sorcerers of greater or lesser potency, both feature fantasy creatures such as dragons and giants and monsters...and yet, it seems to me as if there is a subtle distinction to be made between the two, although it will need a more astute critic than me to articulate it in a satisfactory way. If that line does exist, it’s subtle enough that it’s easy to make mistakes in classification, and this anthology makes a couple of them: it seems to me that Michael Moorcock’s Elric story “While the Gods Laugh” can hardly not be a Sword & Sorcery story, call it what you will instead, considering that Elric’s roots go all the way back to the creation of S&S as an identifiable subgenre and Moorcock himself has long been considered one of its founding fathers. Similarly, Melanie Rawn’s “Mother of All Russiya” is neither Epic Fantasy nor Sword & Sorcery, but rather a well-crafted historical fantasy (with a minimal fantasy element at that) set in 10th Century Russia (or a proto-Russia, still in the process of assembling).

  Quibbles about classification aside, this is a meaty, solid anthology that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fantasy styles, enabling them to decide which worlds and authors they like best; having gotten a taste of that author’s work, they can then go on to seek out more of it—and in most cases here, there’s a lot of similar work to be found, since most of these authors are very prolific. The best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is clearly George R.R. Martin’s “The Mystery Knight,” an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but also excellent are Robin Hobb’s “Homecoming,” Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Road to Levinshir,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word of Unbinding,” Tad Williams’s “The Burning Man,” Orson Scott Card’s “Sandmagic,” and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Alchemist,” and the book also features good work by Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N.K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, Mary Robinette Kowal, and the aforementioned Michael Moorcock and Melanie Rawn.

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  Eclipse Online, October

  Eclipse Online, November

  Eclipse Online, December

  Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-361-7, $15.95, 332 pages.) Cover art by Chris Martin.

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-618-73034, $24.00, 246 pages).

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-618-73035-0, $24.00, 286 pages.)

  The Best of Joe Haldeman, edited by Jonathan Strahan. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-526-0, $45.00, 504 pages.)

  Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition, Allen Steele. (Fantastic Books, 978-1-61720-358-9, $19.99. 514 pages.) Cover art by Ron Miller.

  At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson. (Small Beer Press, 978-1-93152-080-5, $16.00, 304 pages.)

  Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse series, which started with Eclipse One in 2007 and ran through Eclipse Four in 2011, was one of the most important annual (more or less) original SF anthology series of our day. Late in the year, in one of the more interesting developments of 2012, Strahan announced that
Eclipse was transforming itself from a print anthology to an online magazine, Eclipse Online, accessible at www.nightshadebooks.com, which would release two stories every month throughout the year. Three issues of Eclipse Online appeared in 2012, the October, November, and December issues, and so far the literary quality here has been very high, with several of the stories having already been picked up by one or another of the Year’s Best anthology series. My favorite Eclipse story to date, from the December issue, is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Memcordist,” another of his “Central Station” stories, set in a busy interplanetary and multicultural future swarming with robots, cyborgs, rogue A.I.s, and bizarrely bioengineered creatures of every description, all of whom mix and mingle and interact in the gritty back streets of Old Tel Aviv, along with earlier waves of immigrants and refugees. This one, which also takes us to the colonies of the Outer Solar System and back, features a protagonist whose entire life, from birth to death, is being broadcast, with millions of viewers watching every moment of his existence. Also good in December is Christopher Barzak’s “Invisible Men,” which takes an ultimately rather touching look at the events of one of H.G. Wells most famous novels from an entirely different perspective.