Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Many of the other stories on Tor.com so far this year seem also to be caught between fantasy and SF, neither fish nor fowl. Kali Wallace’s “Last Train to Jubilee Bay,” posted on February 6th, is another story that’s ostensibly SF but whose background makes very little sense, drug-dealing by aliens in one of those cities caught perpetually in the midst of a bizarre Apocalypse that seem beloved by slipstream; a similar background figures in the beautifully written “Rag and Bone,” by Priya Sharma, from April 10th, which is theoretically taking place in the future, but features elements hard to reconcile with an actual possible future society. Christopher Rowe’s “Jack of Coins,” from May 1st, does away with the ostensible SF façade and just presents a tale set in a straightforwardly surreal setting, although it’s entertaining and well-crafted. Harry Turtledove’s “Running of the Bulls,” from March 27th, is a Hemingway pastiche of sorts, set in a parallel world where the humans have been replaced by intelligent humanoid dinosaurs and the bulls they’re running with through the city streets are triceratopses, entertaining enough, although weakened a bit, I think, by the Bizarro-world touch of having all the place names be place names from our own world spelled backward, so that, for instance, “Paris” comes out as “Sirap,” something that annoyed me throughout. “Terrain,” by Genevieve Valentine, from March 6th, is a steampunk Western about a communal group trying to set up a Pony Express-like service using mechanical “dogs.”

  The best stories at Tor.com so far this year have all been fantasy stories. “Fire Above, Fire Below,” by Garth Nix, posted on May 8th, follows firefighters and a mysterious “Dragonborn,” a hybrid of human and dragon, trying to deal with a dying dragon buried beneath the city who has the potential to destroy the entire metropolis. “Shall We Gather,” by Alex Bledsoe, posted on May 14th, examines the interactions between a rural Appalachian community and what’s clearly Faerie, or at least an outlier of it. “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket,” by Thomas Olde Heuvect, posted on April 24th, a slyly amusing story about what happens to the wishes floated down the Mae Ping River during a Buddhist ceremony in Thailand.

  58

  Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, eds. John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. (47North, 978-61099041, 365 pages.) Cover art and interior illustrations by Galen Dara.

  Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, eds. Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin. (Jurassic London, 978-0-9571696-9-2, 351 pages.) Cover art by Joey Hi-Fi. Interior illustrations from the National Maritime Musuem.

  Interzone 246.

  Ever since L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz in 1900, and followed it up with more than a dozen sequels, the enchanted land of Oz has established itself as one of the most potent Dreamlands in fantasy, rivaled only by Neverland, Narnia, and Middle Earth. The classic 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland, shown every year on television for decades, has established the mythology of Oz (or at least the film’s version of that mythology) so firmly that there’s hardly a child anywhere who hasn’t heard of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Ruby Slippers (silver in the book), Toto, the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, and Dorothy—but there has been no shortage of stories by other hands that adapt and reinterpret what might be called The Matter of Oz, including another long series of Oz sequels by Ruth Plumly Thompson, revisionist takes on the canon like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and Philip Jose Farmer’s A Barnstormer of Oz, and stories obviously deeply informed by the mythology of Oz, although they use it in their own ways, such as Geoff Ryman’s Was and Gene Wolfe’s “The Eyeflash Miracles.”

  Now we get an original anthology made up of the latest crop of Oz reinterpretations, Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. The stories here can be sorted out into three main categories: stories that take the mythology of Oz seriously and treat it with respect even while tweaking it in various clever ways; stories that reinvent the Oz mythology in the language of another genre or another culture, such as Ken Liu’s “The Veiled Shanghai,” which translates the Oz tropes to Chinese mythology and sets the tale in Hong Kong, or David Farland’s “Dead Blue,” where the Tin Man becomes a cyborg, the Wicked Witch a mechmage, and a wormhole replaces the tornado; or stories that set out to deliberately demythify Oz, giving us a cynical, hard-edged, revisionist modern take on it instead, demonstrating that the Dream has died, if it ever existed in the first place. Some of this demythification is a bit mean-spirited, considering that it’s applied to a beloved children’s classic. The book does come with a warning label, but you have to wonder how a youngish child in love with the Judy Garland movie is going to feel if they pick this up and see stories that cast Dorothy as a lesbian or a suicidal mental patient or a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer, or show an Emerald City full of squalid slums and drug pushers, or portray the Land of Oz itself as a brutal genocidal dystopia? The problem with demythifying stories is that you then can no longer call on the power of the myth.

  The best stories here are probably Tad Williams’s “The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherworld Story,” which translates Oz into a Virtual Reality World where a bizarre crime is being investigated by a network troubleshooter, and Jane Yolen’s “Blown Away,” which, somewhat in the fashion of Ryman’s Was, retells the Oz story as a determinedly mundane mainstream story, but one in which it is possible to see the marvelous and the wonderful shimmering just under the surface, as if under the thinnest of curtains. There’s also good work in Oz Reimagined by Orson Scott Card, Seanan McGuire, Simon R. Green, Theodora Goss, Dale Bailey, Jonathan Maberry, and others, and although some of the bleaker revisionist takes on Oz seemed pointlessly and rather gleefully nihilistic to me, on the whole this is a solidly entertaining anthology, and worth a read.

  Another eccentric small press anthology is Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin, an original SF anthology produced to coincide with the Exhibition Visions of the Universe at Royal Museums Greenwich; each story is illustrated with a picture from the Exhibition, which used over a hundred astronomical photographs and drawings to show “how advances in imaging technology have repeatedly transformed our understanding of the Universe and our own place within it.” The idea behind The Lowest Heaven was to demonstrate “what happens when a group of today’s most imaginative writers are let loose in the gigantic playground of the Solar System,” which sounds great—the result, however, is not as impressive as it might have been, as the anthology produced is extremely uneven in literary quality, with some excellent material nestled in amongst a number of noticeably weaker stories. For an anthology with close ties to astronomy and technological progress, it’s somewhat disappointing that the science in some of the stories is as non-rigorous as it is, occasionally verging on very non-rigorous indeed, and that there are a number of what we used to call “Bat Durston” stories here, where the story is ostensibly set on Venus but Venus is just like Earth, complete with motels and gas-stations. I would have liked to have seen more core science fiction used, since many of the stories here are fantasy, some are slipstream, and some are straight mainstream, with only the faint traces of a connection to the anthology’s supposed theme. On the whole, although there is worthwhile material here, some of it quite good, I felt that overall Jonathan Strahan did a much better job of exploring a similar theme in last year’s Edge of Infinity.

  The best stories here are “A Map of Mercury,” by Alastair Reynolds, in which an emissary must deal with groups of artists who are in the process of renouncing and abandoning their organic human existence, and “Only Human,” by Lavie Tidhar, a story set out on the edges of his Central Station universe which also deals with the temptation to abandon ordinary human life for technologically-generated transcendence, and the price that might have to be paid for doing so. Both of these are superior stories, well above the genre average. Also in The Lowest Heaven: Adam Roberts’s “An Account of a Voyage From World to World Again, by way of the Moon, 1726, in the commission of Georgius Rex
Primus, Monarch of Northern Europe and Lord of Selenic Territories, Defender of the Faith. Undertaken by Captain Wm Chetwin aboard the Cometes Georgius,” related to his 2012 story “An Account of a Voyage...” (etc.), takes an 18th Century explorer to the Moon by balloon for a sequence of hairsbreadth adventures, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood first tells a Philip K. Dick-like story and then deconstructs it, in “The Jupiter Files.” Also good here are stories by Simon Morden, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley, and Matt Jones.

  This is going to be very hard to find in the United States, even Amazon doesn’t have it available for sale yet, so if you want it, you’d probably be best advised to order it direct from the publisher at www.pandemonium-fiction.com.

  Fantasy outweighs SF in Interzone 246, where five out of the eight stories could be considered to be fantasy of one sort or another. The best story here is certainly Lavie Tidhar’s “The Core,” another of his recent sequence of Central Station stories and undoubtedly SF; all the Central Station stories are meant to fit into a larger mosaic pattern, and draw strength from their associations with other stories even if they don’t conventionally resolve, but you might have trouble understanding “The Core” if you haven’t read Tidhar’s earlier “The Bookseller,” in Interzone 245, to which it is a direct sequel. Also good is the James White Award winner, “You First Meet the Devil,” by new writer Shannon Fay, a poignant Deal With The Devil fantasy where the Devil travels to Liverpool to try to inveigle the so-called Fifth Beatle. “Cat World,” by new writer Georgina Bruce is set in a near-future society that could be ours only a few years down the road, a society where abandoned, homeless children in constant danger of being forced into a life of prostitution gain momentary relief from their desperate existence by chewing psychedelic gum that transports them to an illusionary Virtual Reality world, a trope that reminds me of the use of Chew-Z in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; the story is strong and well-crafted, although extremely bleak—although at least there is a touch of hope allowed at the very end, as the child protagonist vows to keep fighting against her fate. Aliette de Bodard’s beautifully written “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” is a near-mainstream story about the refugee experience, with a touch of allegorical fantasy added.

  The rest of the stories in the issue are weaker. Nigel Brown’s “Sentry Duty” is also undoubtedly SF, but a story where I could see the twist ending coming a mile away. Priya Sharma’s “Thesea and Astaurius” is a slipstream retelling of the Minotaur myth, with occasional anachronistic elements thrown in. Steven J. Dines’s “The Machinehouse Worker’s Song” is another allegorical fantasy (so called by me because the physical setup here could not possibly work in the real world) about a man trapped for his entire life inside a claustrophobic Kafkaesque factory, doing mind-numbingly repetitious tasks the purpose of which he doesn’t understand (we get it, really!). Jess Hyslop’s “Triolet” takes place in a fantasy world where flowers are grown to recite poetry aloud, and uses that framework to tell a fairly conventional tale of a couple falling out of love with each other.

  I must say that I’m not happy to see all of the fantasy that has been creeping into Interzone in recent issues, although some of it has been well-executed; I’d like to see more core SF and perhaps even some harder science fiction in the magazine, which, after all, was once the natural home of writers such as Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, and Iain Banks.

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  Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, eds. J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett. (Tor, 978-0-7653-3458-9, $25.99, 416 pages.)

  F&SF, July/August.

  Asimov’s, April/May.

  Tor.com, June 19.

  Tor.com, July 3.

  Tor.com, July 10.

  Tor.com, July 11.

  Tor.com, July 17.

  Gene Wolfe was recently named as a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and few would argue with that evaluation. Wolfe is certainly one of the best writers to enter the science fiction/fantasy fields in the last half of the 20th Century, and some critics have argued that he’s one of the best writers in American letters in that period, never mind restricting it to science fiction. One has gone as far as to call Wolfe “the greatest writer in the English language alive today.”

  Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett, is a tribute anthology in which various of his colleagues attempt to write stories reminiscent of Wolfe’s work in style and substance and even provide their own takes on his worlds and characters. Unfortunately, Wolfe’s own work has set that bar very high, and many of the writers here aren’t really up to clearing it, with the result that Shadows of the New Sun is overall rather weak—although there are good to excellent stories here—and generally somewhat disappointing; even the two stories by Wolfe himself that are included are minor Wolfe.

  The best story in Shadows of the New Sun, by a fair margin, is “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” by Michael Swanwick, in which Swanwick spins off of my favorite Wolfe story, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” to produce one of the few stories in the anthology that feels like it actually might have been written by Wolfe himself. David Drake also does a good job of producing a stylistically credible sequel to Wolfe’s little-known story “Straw” in his “Bedding,” Neil Gaiman is suitably lyrical and enigmatic in “A Lunar Labyrinth,” and Aaron Allston in “Epistoleros” produces one of the few stories here that approaches a Wolfean level of slyness and literary trickery. Other stories here, such as Jack Dann’s “The Island of Time” and Nancy Kress’s “...And Other Stories,” are perfectly satisfactory as stories, but don’t strike me as convincingly Wolfean. Much the same could be said about stories by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, and Jody Lynn Nye.

  (If you’re interested, The Book of the New Sun is the setting from Wolfe’s work most drawn upon here, unsurprisingly enough, and Severian is the Wolfe character most frequently represented, although “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” gets used a lot too, and there are stories drawing upon Soldier in the Mist, Peace, and other Wolfe works as well.)

  The strongest story in an uneven July/August issue of F&SF is Eleanor Arnason’s long novelette “Kormak the Lucky,” which traces the journey of the eponymous protagonist from being a slave of an embittered Norse patriarch in Iceland to being a slave of the Elves in Iceland, and then tells how he eventually gains his freedom after a dangerous mission to the Irish Fairyland. I thought that the sequences in the Fairy Subway System that takes Kormak from Iceland to Ireland dragged a bit, but other than that, this is a strong story, and one of the more interesting fantasy stories of the year so far, drawing on mythological traditions we don’t often see employed. Ken Atabef also draws upon rarely-tapped mythological traditions in “The Woman Who Married the Snow,” a zombie story of sorts set among the Inuit, and where the dominant mood is not one of horror but rather of sadness and regret.

  “The Year of the Rat,” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu, is a compelling, if somewhat fuzzy, story of failed students in a near-future China impressed into military service against an invasion of rats. The military stuff, detailing the relationships that work themselves out between the soldiers in the unit, is familiar from other such stories but well-handled and traditionally satisfying, but the story’s “fuzzy” because I was never entirely sure what the “rats” were actually supposed to be; at times, they seemed like artificially created chimeras of some sort, at other times perhaps clones or even foreigners, at other times actual rats whose intelligence had been biologically enhanced, at other times just rats; what happens and why at the end of the story is a bit unclear as well. New writer Adam Rakunas’s first sale, “Oh Give Me a Home,” also tells a story about genetically modified animals, mini-bison, in this case, and an interfering government that wants to seize and destroy them; it’s quite entertaining, but Rakuna really only tells half a story here, stopping just when problems are multiplying for the embattled hero and
things are just starting to get really interesting. Tim Sullivan’s “The Nambu Egg” tells an engaging story about an elaborately plotted—and perhaps somewhat unlikely—revenge, set in an interstellar society, the only story in the issue that takes us off Earth. KJ Kabza and Harry R. Campion tell fairy-tale-like fabulations, Harvey Jacobs and Oliver Buckram are here with short joke stories, and Rus Wornom is here with a long joke story, too long, in fact, a jokey Lovecraft pastiche called “In the Mountains of Frozen Fire.”

  The lead story in the April/May Asimov’s, “The Other Gun,” by Neal Asher, is a typical Asher story: fast-paced, ultraviolent, grim, sometimes gruesome, and thoroughly entertaining, although the backstory here is complex enough that you might have difficulty following the action if you’re not already familiar with recent novels set in Asher’s “Owner” universe. Karl Bunker’s “Gray Wings” is a quiet but poignant demonstration that we are likely to be divided into the Haves and Have-Nots even in an opulent high-tech future. Colin P. Davies’s “Julian of Earth” takes us to a distant planet for an intriguing study of the relationship between myth and reality, expectation and actuality. Tom Purdom’s “Warlord” is a direct sequel to last year’s “Golva’s Ascent,” which, along with 2010’s “Warfriends,” continues the story begun in Purdom’s 1966 novel Tree Lord of Imaten—this is intelligent, old-fashioned pulp adventure SF of a sort rarely seen these days, with a human leading a struggle between warring races of aliens, one group allied with a group of ruthless human renegades, and although there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of combat here, Purdom, typically, is actually more interested in the strategy and tactics employed in the battle than in the details of the combat itself, and also does an excellent job of giving us a feeling for the confusion and chaos involved in even a small-scale battle, let alone one featuring masses of troops.