Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The best story in the November issue is Eleanor Arnason’s “Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery,” another story in her long-running series about the alien Hwarhath people, which also includes her critically acclaimed novel A Woman of the Iron People. This one deals in a subtly droll manner with an alien woman who becomes obsessed with a human fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, and in the course of describing the effect that that obsession has on her relationships with her own people, has something to say about human nature as well; ultimately, her fascination with the great detective and the insights provided by employing his methods allows her to solve a baffling mystery on her own world. November also features a nicely done YA story about pyromania, Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s, “Firebugs.”

  The best story in the October issue, and one of the best fantasy stories published all year, is K.J. Parker’s “One Little Room An Everywhere,” a slyly funny story about a young wizard trying to take a magical shortcut to success that leads him down some very strange byways indeed, and who learns that the price of success may be more than he’s willing to pay. Also good in October is Christopher Rowe’s “The Contrary Gardener,” about a disgruntled gardener in a radically Green future dominated by biotechnology who runs afoul of a conspiracy to destroy the “thinking machines” that the conspirators fear are getting a little too smart.

  With 2013 looming as I write these words, let’s take a quick look at some of the worthwhile short-story collections of 2012 that haven’t gotten mentioned yet here this year.

  Elizabeth Bear is one of the most accomplished of all the field’s new (or new-er, anyway, since she’s been publishing since about 2003) writers. Her latest collection, Shoggoths in Bloom, is her best yet, containing her Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winning story “Tideline,” her clever homage to Asimov’s robot stories, “Dolly,” “Gods of the Forge,” “The Something-Dreaming Game,” and her intricate novella of a future India, “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns,” as well as an original story, the somber and moving “The Death of Terrestrial Radio.” This is a mixed SF/fantasy collection, and, for me, the SF generally works better than the fantasy, but also collected here is her Hugo-winning “Shoggoths in Bloom,” which is great fun for any fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, as well as other good fantasy stories such as “Orm the Beautiful,” “Love Among the Talus,” and “The Horrid Glory of Its Wings.”

  One of the greatest of all the field’s Old Masters, Ursula K. Le Guin, had two monumental collections out this year, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands. My tastes being what they are, I thought that the second volume, Outer Space, Inner Lands, which contains most of the SF stories, many of them from her “Hainish” cycle, was the stronger of the two volumes, containing powerful stuff such as “Nine Lives,” “Betrayals,” “The Matter of Seggri,” “The Shobies’ Story,” “Semley’s Necklace,” and the award-winning “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (although at least two of the stories in this volume are fantasies, “The Wild Girls” and “The Rule of Names,” the earliest story here and one of the seeds of her later Earthsea series)...but the first volume, Where On Earth, which mostly concentrates on stories that are closer to slipstream or even straight mainstream, has some great stuff as well, including “Ether, OR,” “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” “The Direction of the Road,” “May’s Lion,” and several of her wonderfully written “Orsinian Tales,” including “Brothers and Sisters,” “A Week in the Country,” and “Unlocking the Air,” which may be among the earliest examples of the now-frequent subgenre that tells realistic stories with no supernatural elements set in totally imaginary countries (this volume also contains a straight SF story, and a good one, “The Diary of the Rose”).

  Another (relatively) Old Master, from the generation just after Le Guin, is Joe Haldeman, who also had a big retrospective collection out this year, The Best of Joe Haldeman. The best story here may be the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella “The Hemingway Hoax,” but there’s plenty of other first-class work here, including “Hero,” the seed that grew into his most famous novel, The Forever War, “For White Hill,” “None So Blind,” “The Mars Girl,” “Sleeping Dogs,” “Anniversary Project,” “Tricentennial,” and “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” as well as stuff a bit removed from his usual science fiction, such as “Manifest Destiny,” a Western, and “Lindsay and the Red City Blues,” a supernatural horror story.

  Another exceptional writer from the generation just a few years after Haldeman (literary generations are often separated by only a few years of real-world time in the science fiction genre) is John Kessel. His 2012 retrospective, The Collected Kessel, is available as an ebook from Baen Books (www.baen.com). Kessel is an eclectic writer with a wide range that covers all sorts of SF, plus fantasy and slipstream and near-mainstream. Unsurprisingly, I like his SF work the best, and this volume collects some of his best SF stories, including the wonderful “The Pure Product,” “Some Like It Cold,” “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue,” “The Juniper Tree,” “Stories For Men,” “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance,” and “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,” but some of his non-SF stuff is first-rate as well, including “Pride and Prometheus” (which was doing the mash-up thing long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and doing it better), “Gulliver At Home,” and the unclassifiable, Nebula-winning “Another Orphan,” but even the near-mainstream stories such as “Every Angel Is Terrifying” and “Buffalo” are riveting.

  Another literary generation down from Kessel is Allen M. Steele, who has made a career primarily out of Heinleinesque novels and stories that explore humankind’s expansion into space. Some of the best of these are collected in Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition, an enlarged version of an earlier collection. The best stories here are probably the poignant “The Emperor of Mars” and the darkly comic “The Death of Captain Future,” both stories Hugo Award-winners, but the book also features strong work such as “The Weight,” “The Exile of Evening Star,” “Zwarte Piet’s Tale,” “Live From the Mars Hotel,” “Working for Mister Chicago,” “The War Memorial,” and “The Return of Weird Frank.”

  Like Elizabeth Bear, Kij Johnson belongs to a more-recent literary generation; she started selling in the late ‘80s, although she didn’t really attract any serious attention in the field until the mid ‘90s. Some of the best of her stories are gathered in her 2012 collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. Johnson’s work is sometimes more slipstreamish than I usually like, and some of that tone slips into even her science fiction, which often inhabits the borderland between SF and fantasy, but there’s a liquid clarity to her voice and a lyrical elegance to her prose that sometimes makes me like stuff I usually wouldn’t. The best story here is the most recent, and the closest thing to a hard SF story that Johnson has yet written, the complex and compelling novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” which won her both Nebula and Hugo Awards in 2012 and in my opinion may have been the best novella of the previous year. There is other strong work here, though, most of it falling on a line somewhere between slipstream and straight genre fantasy, including “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles,” the Sturgeon Award-winner “Fox Magic,” “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” “Story Kit,” her controversial (and harrowing) Nebula Award-winner, “Spar,” “The Horse Raiders,” and “At the Mouth of the River of Bees.”

  2013

  53

  F&SF, January/February.

  Asimov’s, January.

  Eclipse, January.

  Clarkesworld, January.

  The best story in the January/February F&SF is probably Alex Irvine’s clever “Watching the Cow,” about an experimental technique used in a video game that inadvertently causes all the kids of a certain age who happen to be playing the game to go blind...and, it t
urns out, rewires their brains in weirder ways as well. The story deals with the efforts of the father of some of the afflicted children to find some kind of cure, and is a pretty satisfactory read. The only quibble I have with it is that it seems like it takes the FBI an awfully long time to get around to investigating the father, who is the brother of the woman who accidently blinded millions of children and subsequently goes on the run as a fugitive; you’d think her immediate family would be the first people they’d look into in an effort to find her. In “Ten Lights and Darks,” Judith Moffett also manages to make a satisfying human story out of the rather unpromising subject matter of pet whisperers, psychics who make telepathic/emphatic contact with dogs. Robert Reed tells a subtle, complicated tale of alien observers who lurk mostly unnoticed in human society, in “Among Us.” Ken Liu gives us a moving story of the uncounted price of great human endeavors in “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” an engineering project on a sufficiently goshwowish scale...although it seems a bit incautious to build a underground tunnel across the most techtonically active region on Earth, and my guess is that it wouldn’t function for long without disaster.

  The rest of the stuff in the issue is somewhat less successful, although there are few outright failures. F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey contributes another comic adventure of his pair of mismatched ghostbusters, Jimmy and Morrie, as they tackle “A Haunting in Love City.” David Gerrold takes us aboard the “Night Train to Paris” with him for an atmospheric and well-told, if rather predictable, horror story. Matthew Hughes tries a bit too hard in “Devil or Angel,” about the conflict for the human soul that goes on between the good angels who sit on one shoulder and the devils who sit on the other, both whispering advice (yes, just like in all those cartoons), but the humor is labored and it goes on much too long. Dale Bailey tells a glum afterlife story in “This Is How You Disappear,” and new writer Desmond Warzel spins a tale about a haunted car that also goes on much too long, in “The Blue Celeb.”

  After a strong year in 2012, Asimov’s starts 2013 with a rather weak January issue. The two best stories here are probably James Van Pelt’s “The Family Rocket” and Nancy Kress’s “Mithridates, He Died Old.” The Van Pelt is an exercise in Bradburian nostalgia for the glory days of the Space Program (set, rather oddly, in a future where interplanetary travel is common, although it is said to be affordable only by the rich), featuring a possibly delusional father who’s building a spaceship out of scrap in the junkyard out back (much the same idea is used in Lavie Tidhar’s “The Integrity of the Chain,” from 2009, although with considerably less Bradbury mixed in) Whether or not the cobbled-together spaceship actually works is left deliberately ambiguous—although the odds are that it does not. Kress’s story is a sensitively characterized study of a woman in a coma reviewing her life’s mistakes while undergoing an experimental treatment to bring wake her up—one with a bitterly ironic twist at the end; not Kress at the top of her form, but still worthwhile.

  New writer Suzanne Palmer’s “Hotel” is an entertaining knockabout thriller/farce about a rundown, seedy hotel in a remote area where the down-on-their-luck residents, most with secret pasts they want to conceal, turn out to be secret agents or criminals who chase through the corridors shooting at each other or hitting each other over the head in scrambling competition to get the MacGuffin they’re all after. Amiable and amusing, although it’s hard to see what’s really gained by having the hotel be a hotel on Mars, as the plot would not be essentially affected if it was a rundown rural hotel in Utah or Oregon instead. Will McIntosh’s “Over There” is a literalization of the famous Two-Slit Experiment, one which splits the consciousness of its observers into two separate but parallel universes, with the observers experiencing life in both realities at the same time—cataclysmic effects caused by the experiment itself soon cause the realities to begin to diverge, although the observers continue to experience both at the same time, with some interesting and ultimately dire results. New writer Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass” takes us to a future Earth that is being ruled by draconian conquerors called “glassmen”—presumptively aliens, although that’s never made entirely clear—whose main preoccupation seems to be forbidding human women from having abortions; it’s a glum story, and the obsessive focus of the glassmen in forbidding abortion and making it punishable by death comes to seem like a rather heavyhanded political allegory. Kit Reed tells a droll story about feral girl scouts in “The Legend of Troop 13.”

  F. Brett Helmut’s “The Amnesia Helmet,” one of the two stories from the January Eclipse, is another nostalgic story clearly influenced by Ray Bradbury—although there’s an understated, almost subliminal, hint of child abuse and perhaps even child molestation that you certainly wouldn’t find in anything by Bradbury. The main story line is full of fine, evocative details about being a kid whose fantasy life revolves around going to see Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials at a movie house, although the nostalgic stuff is undercut by the presence of a menacing father and the ominous hints of child abuse, not only for the protagonist but for her friends, and there’s the feeling that the story is building toward a climax that it never quite reaches. As in Van Pelt’s story from the January Asimov’s, the fantastic element here—the eponymous “Amnesia Helmet,” inspired by a gadget from the Buck Rogers serial—may or may not be real; that’s left deliberately ambiguous.

  The other story in the January Eclipse, Genevieve Valentine’s “The Advocate,” is somewhat disappointing. I think she was trying for ironic postmodernism here, but the core idea, that a handful of alien microorganisms found on Mars would be named “The Martian Ambassador” and given an embassy building and a staff, although they are totally non-sentient, and that everybody else in the diplomatic community would solemnly go along with the charade, never struck me as anything other than silly. It didn’t help improve my impression of the story that Valentine makes the basic error of having radio conversations taking place between people on Earth and people on Mars without any time-delay lag whatsoever.

  The best story in the January Clarkesworld is probably Ian McDonald’s moody, enigmatic fantasy, “Drifting,” in which a beachcomber collects plastic toys and other plastic refuse washed into the Pacific by the Japanese tsunami and uses them to create strange works of art, collages of found items glued together. He meets a mysterious girl at the seaside, and soon odd, ominous things are happening, including rains of sea water, impenetrable fogs, sugar that turns to salt, and an evil stench that smells like rotting seaweed and dead crabs, all eventually prompting the artist to give his most recent found objects back to the sea. This is a heavily symbolic story, but I think it’s more or less clear what’s going on here for the most part, although McDonald never spells it out—but I must admit that the last paragraph, in which the artist returns to his room and finds it filled with long, rippling, dripping hair, confuses me, and I’m not really sure what its import is.

  Yoon Ha Lee’s “Effigy Nights,” also in the January Clarkesworld, at first seems to be one of her Space Opera stories, but it’s really a fantasy disguised as Space Opera, or at best a science-fantasy story, featuring spaceships and civilizations on other worlds, but also mages who conjure up paper folkhero guardians from out of scrolls of ancient poems and sagas to protect the people of the city from ruthless invaders. This turns out to be maybe not such a good idea.

  The last story in the January Clarkesworld is Helena Bell’s “Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon,” an opaque retelling of the Bluebeard story.

  So, no real science fiction at all in the year’s initial issue of Clarkesworld. I hope this isn’t going to be a trend.

  54

  Asimov’s, February.

  Lightspeed, January.

  Lightspeed, February.

  Eclipse, February.

  F&SF, March/April

  The February Asimov’s is a solidly entertaining issue, although there’s pr
obably nothing here that’s going to end up on next year’s awards ballots. In “And Then Some,” Matthew Hughes spins an fast-paced tale set in his “Ten Thousand Worlds” future—a busy interstellar milieu chockablock with con artists and thieves, admittedly inspired by the work of Jack Vance—following an operative who, in spite of beatings, druggings, and false imprisonment in a hard-labor camp, grimly pursues an investigation into a notorious fraudster’s claim to be able to create a device that will reach into other universes—a claim that, for once, dismayingly, may turn out to be true. The future where global warming has caused the sea-levels to rise and swamp the coastlines has become the go-to default setting for most SF writers, but in “Outbound From Put-In-Bay,” new writer M. Bennardo takes us instead to a future where a new Ice Age is slowly making the northern tier of the United States uninhabitable, for a suspenseful and well-crafted story about a woman forced to become a reluctant smuggler, with dire effects. Vylar Kaftan then shuttles us sideways in “The Weight of the Sunrise” to an alternate world where the Incan Empire survived the onslaught of Pizzaro and the Conquistadors, for a chewy story about a humble farmer who becomes embroiled in the deadly machinations of the highest levels of court society, and comes to hold the secret for preventing that deadliest of scourges, smallpox—a secret that ruthless people will do anything to possess.