Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  In the issue’s one SF story, Greg Egan tells what ultimately turns into a rather compelling story of what it feels like to realize that you’re trapped as one of the “Bit Players” in a computer game and what you can do to alter your fate while still working within the constraints of the game, but it starts off slowly, and I found it a bit hard to believe that a woman’s first actions upon awakening in a strange place not knowing who she was would be to rigorously work out the physical laws of her surroundings by trial-and-error experimentation, without even first bothering to ask her companion how she’d gotten there or where she was; maybe Greg Egan would react like this, but most of us wouldn’t. The longest story here is Bruce Sterling’s “crusaderpunk” story, “Pilgrims of the Round World,” one of the few Bruce Sterling stories that I’ve ever found a bit dull; it’s clearly supposed to be an arch comedy of manners, but unless you can manage to catch more of the in-jokes than I did and figure out which real-life historical figures the characters are supposed to be (and what happened to them afterward), you might find this a bit slow at this length too. “Hayfever,” by Frances Hardinge, turns out to be an elaborate Shaggy Dog joke; although ostensibly SF as well, it’s too comic-bookish to really take seriously as such.

  Asimov’s starts out its year with an uneven January issue that nevertheless has some strong material in it, The best stories in the January issue are Nancy Kress’s “The Common Good” and Aliette de Bodard’s “Memorials.” The Kress is a sequel to her 2008 story “The Kindness of Strangers,” in which aliens have disappeared 80% of the human race and subsequently set up mysterious compounds, guarded by force fields, into which they accept a few of the surviving human children. “The Common Good” takes us into one of the alien compounds for a look at what the aliens are up to and what their motivations for near-genocide may have been; this is a mature work in which all of the characters, including the aliens, are painted in shades of gray, and there are no easy answers. The de Bodard is another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with a world where refugees from a bitter war have been settled on another world, where they form a despised sub-class and live in ghetto-like enclaves, and with a young woman who becomes embroiled in the risky business of obtaining life-memory recordings from the survivors of the war and smuggling them into a Virtual Reality Monument that recreates life in the vanished civilization, which in turn embroils her in a web of lies and deception where nobody’s motive is quite what it seems to be. Also good in January is “The Extracted Journal Notes for an Ethnography of Bnebene Nomand Culture,” by Ian McHugh, drawn from field notes of an ethnographer studying a tribe of nomadic vegetable people on a distant planet; the aliens are something like Tolkien’s Ents studied through a more-rigorously science fictional perspective, more authentically alien than the humanoid aliens in most SF, and the story effectively demonstrates the gulf of misunderstanding and mistaken cultural assumptions that could exist between sentient species, even those making a good-will effort to bridge the gap.

  The rest of the stories in January are somewhat weaker. Ron Collin’s “Primes” is a clever story of some of the unexpected consequences of a technology that can manipulate the neural interfaces of consumers, placing near-subliminal advertisements directly into their brains—an all-too-likely future development, and one I look forward to with a sinking feeling of dread. William Jablowsky’s “Static” is a melancholy reconfirmation of the idea that it’s probably better not to know what’s going to happen in the future. And Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Carl Paradox” is a time-travel farce, of the sort where future versions of the same person keep knocking on the door, with hilarity ensuing.

  Much the same could be said about the January/February F&SF—an uneven issue, with nevertheless some strong stories in it...although I think that, on balance, the January Asimov’s has the edge.

  The most substantial story in the January/February issue is probably new writer Seth Chambers’s novella “In Her Eyes,” a steamy romance (with a lot more explicit sex than is usual in the genre these days) between an introverted young man and a flamboyant young woman who is revealed to be a shape-changer (this shouldn’t really be a spoiler, since a reference to “Morphlings” is dropped early on, and I doubt it’s going to come as a surprise after that, although the author drags out the reveal long after it’s going to be obvious to most readers what’s going on). This seems to be present-day Chicago (I’ve even eaten in the restaurant they have their first date in) with no real change from our own world except that the existence of “Morphlings” or “Polymorphs” is accepted as a fact by everyone, although not everybody is happy about it. The “science” explaining Polymorphs is on a comic-book level, involving bathing yourself with gamma radiation with a handy device in the bathroom—most younger readers will probably immediately think of the X-Men’s Mystique, and the shapeshifter’s abilities here are on a similar improbable level, although Chambers at least makes a point of emphasizing how difficult, unpleasant, and painful it is to change from one form to another. If the premise can’t really be taken seriously as plausible science fiction, the strength of the story is in the relationship between the hapless human narrator and his shapeshifting lover, which is intriguing, challenging, and ultimately compelling. At the end, the story darkens, and brings up some interesting questions of identity, and ends on a poignant note.

  Another story in the January/February F&SF about a man with a shapeshifting lover, although with considerably less emphasis on the sex itself, is Albert E. Cowdrey’s somewhat autumnal “Out of the Deeps,” which is as much about losing the world of your vanished youth as it is about anything else. This is more somber and less comic than the usual Cowdrey story, a noir thriller that doesn’t really need the supernatural shapeshifter element, and might have been better off without it—without the fantasy element, I could easily see this appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Another story about losing the world of your youth, except that in this case it’s the whole present-day world and modern civilization that is lost, abandoned by having the majority of people flee into Virtual Reality Surrounds, is “For All of Us Down Here,” by Alex Irvine; I still find this now-familiar scenario unlikely, but Irvine avoids most of the problems with it by keeping the focus tightly on a young boy accustomed to living in a diminished world of patched-together and improvised technology resorted to by those left behind, and delivers a satisfying story, although one that perhaps ends a bit abruptly, with important questions left unanswered.

  In “The New Cambrian,” Andy Stewart tells a claustrophobic story about the first expedition to Europa, although I suspect that the harrowing events that bedevil the protagonist are really in his mind, scenarios conjured by guilt and loneliness, since I see no plausible way for them to actually happen in the real world (including the first-person narrator dying at the end, a trope that’s become all too common these days). C.C. Finlay tells an entertaining Weird Western in “The Man Who Hanged Three Times.” Robert Reed delivers one of his rare disappointments in “We Don’t Mean to Be.” Claudio Chillemi and Paul Di Filippo collaborate on an Alternate World War II story that disappointingly turns into an absurd comic-book Steampunk extravaganza, in “The Via Pansiperna Boys in ‘Operation Harmony.’” Weaker stories in the issue include “The Lion Wedding,” by Moria Crone (another human-shapeshifter romance, this one an ambiguous fantasy), Bruce Jay Friedman’s metaficional farce (similar in some respects to Eleanor Arnason’s “The Scrivener,” but less entertaining) “The Story-Teller,” and Oliver Buckram’s too-broad and much too long comedy about shenanigans in a mysterious museum, “The Museum of Error.”

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  Asimov’s, February.

  Clarkesworld, January.

  Clarkesworld, February.

  Lightspeed, January.

  Lightspeed, February.

  Tor.com, January 8.


  Tor.com, January 22.

  Tor.com, February 5.

  The February issue of Asimov’s is a somewhat weak one overall. The most interesting story here is probably new writer Derek Künsken’s “Schools of Clay,” one of a small subgenre of SF stories that have no human characters whatsoever in them; instead, all the characters are robot-like hive-creatures, something like mechanical bees, their origin never explained (although you could speculate that they started out, ages before, as Von Neumann machines, perhaps intended to be used for mining asteroids), who are preparing to abandon the asteroid that serves as their current hive in the face of an imminent attack by predatory wasp-like mechanical creatures. The Queens and their Princes will launch themselves on a migration to establish new hives elsewhere, while the majority of ordinary workers will be left behind to die. One of the oppressed workers starts a revolution against the status quo, and manages to join the migration himself, where he faces danger both from the wasp-like attackers and from opposition to his being there from the aristocracy of his own kind. Künsken manages to generate a fair amount of sympathy for the plight of his downtrodden robot Lenin and a good deal of suspense as to whether he’s going to be able to figure out a way to survive or not, although the story can be ultimately read as suggesting, somewhat dishearteningly, that workers can only liberate themselves from oppression by becoming Bosses themselves. Also good in February is M. Bennardo’s “Last Day at the Ice Man Café,” which examines the problems someone frozen for centuries in a glacier, like the famous √tzi Iceman, might have adapting to the modern world if he somehow came back to life; entertaining, but since there’s no real explanation of how he could have survived being frozen in the first place, let alone counting on doing it again as he seems to be planning, it can’t really be taken seriously as SF. A similar, although unfortunately more plausible, story is new writer Maggie Shen King’s “Ball and Chain,” a Comedy of Manners about the intricate courtship and relationship customs that arise as adaptations to a severe imbalance in the ratio of women to men (a real problem in the making) in a relatively near-future China.

  The rest of the stories in the February issue are somewhat weaker. Jason K. Chapman’s too-long “The Long Happy Death of Oxford Brown” is another story that deals with a Virtual World as a literal Afterlife, somewhere you’re uploaded to when you die, but does less of interest with the theme than Ian R. MacLeod did with a similar theme in “The Discovered Country” in last September’s issue. New writer Sarah Pinsker gives us an intriguing glimpse of “The Transdimensional Horsemaster Rabbis of Mpaumalanca Province” without doing much to answer the questions that immediately arise as to how and why they got to be what they are. Marissa Lingen’s “Ask Citizen Etiquette” is a rather slight joke story about an Ann Lander’s-type advice column for robot owners of the future. And new writer Maurice Broaddus’s “Steppin’ Razor” is a flamboyant but somewhat murky story about strife in a Steampunkish Alternate World Jamaica.

  In the interests of full-disclosure, I should probably say that I’m the Reprints Editor for Clarkesworld, but since I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with selecting the original fiction that appears in each issue, I’m hoping that it won’t be too much of a Conflict-of-Interest to review it, but you can take what I have to say with a grain of salt if you’re suspicious. The best story in the January Clarkesworld is probably “Wine,” by Yoon Ha Lee, a grim, flamboyantly over-the-top Space Opera that teeters on the razor edge between fantasy and science fiction throughout, and contains images that may be too strong for some of the more-squeamish readers; powerful stuff. Ken Liu’s “The Clockwork Soldier” is a Scheherazade-like tale of a prisoner inveigling his Bounty Hunter captor during a long, boring spaceflight into playing a Text Adventure game about the prisoner’s former life and ostensible crime, and the decision she ultimately makes as a result; the truth about his origin that’s hinted at in the game will hardly come as a surprise to the experienced genre reader, but it all makes for a pleasant reading experience. “Grave of the Fireflies,” by Cheng Jingbo, translated by Ken Liu, is a Fairy Tale recast as a Cosmic Space Opera, wildly imaginative although it occasionally verges on incoherence.

  The strongest story in the February Clarkesworld is probably An Owomoyela’s “And Wash Out the Tides of War,” about an estranged daughter working out her difficult relationship with her mother, who has been changed into a cyborg war machine by enigmatic alien technology, adding an additional level of difficulty and interest to the usual prickly mother-daughter relationships you often run into in fiction (and in life). Cat Rambo’s “Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable” expertly tells a rather familiar story about a spouse trying to recreate their dead mate through cloning and being disappointed by the result, but carries it through to an unusual note of reconciliation and acceptance. In fact, both of these stories turn out to be ultimately more hopeful than the usual run of hopeless, nihilistic stuff these days. New writer Natalia Theodoridou’s “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” seems a bit bleaker on the surface, a spacefarer shipwrecked on a hostile alien planet with no hope of rescue and his eventual death almost insured, but manages to make a statement anyway about the indomitability of the human spirit as the castaway continues to make mobile mechanical creatures to keep him company; this all may be more effective if you’ve seen the video of the eerily beautiful wind-propelled assemblages stalking a Danish beach that was on YouTube last year, which I strongly suspect was the inspiration for this story.

  The January Lightspeed contains two stories that feature aliens who offer humankind, for their own different motives and in their own different ways, access to technology that may take us to the stars. The more successful of the two is Anaea Lay’s “Salamander Patterns,” which offers at its core a strong emotional story about two crippled creatures finding and helping each other, and learning how to live with the losses they both have suffered. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape” has a more complex storyline but generates less emotional involvement, and is also a bit murky in places. Matthew Hughes’s “His Elbow, Unkissed: A Kalso Chronicles Tale” continues, as the title indicates, the adventures of former private operative Erm Kaslo in a universe where magic is slowly taking over from science, and where the stories themselves are shifting from SF to fantasy; this is vivid, entertaining stuff, but if you don’t know the elaborate backstory, which mostly appeared in another magazine, this story, which also doesn’t end, but just stops in the middle of the plot, comes across as a chunk of a de facto serialization, rather than a story that stands independently on its own feet. Adam-Troy Castro offers us a too-long surreal comic piece about a future where women give birth to babies who have the shapes of squares, cylinders, or rhombuses in “The Thing About Shapes To Come.”

  There are several strong stories in the February Lightspeed, the strongest of which may be new writer Jessica Barber’s “Coma Kings,” which takes a fairly tired cyberpunk trope, people who become so addicted to gaming in Virtual Reality worlds that they abandon physical reality, and refurbishes it by matching it with a compelling human story and family drama, told by a character with a quirky and interesting voice. Also good in February is “Harry and Marlow and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition,” by Carrie Vaughn, another in her series of tales about the adventures of the rebellious Princess of Wales, Harry, and her swashbuckling pilot companion Marlow in a war-torn Steampunk British Empire that has been transformed by reverse-engineered alien technology; Vaughn manages to avoid the problem suffered by Hughes’s “His Elbow, Unkissed” by providing a satisfactory ending to this particular episode, and providing enough references so that you can pick up setting and circumstances even if you’re not familiar with the backstory from earlier tales in the series, making it seem less obviously a chunk of a novel (although it probably will be in time). In “So Sharp That Blood Must Flow,” new writer Sunny Moraine manages to tell a version of “The Little Mermaid” even grimmer than that originally
told by Hans Christian Anderson; although vivid, this is also violently grotesque in places, so be warned. In “None Owns the Air,” Ken Liu tells an intriguing story of a man charged, on pain of death, with learning the secret of flight in an unspecified Chinese-seeming milieu that might be a fantasy world or an Alternate History; think it would have worked better if he had managed to figure it out without recourse to dissecting and studying fantasy birds who don’t exist in our own reality, which would probably seem like cheating a bit to an Analog writer.

  The first story posted on Tor.com this year is a poignant counterfactual by Harry Turtledove, “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging,” posted on January 8. It won’t take experienced genre readers long to figure out who the old woman they visit in the Alternate Reality was in our reality, most will have tumbled to it long before the actual reveal, but the story is melancholy and powerful in spite of that, sadly compelling.

  Charlie Jane Anders’s “The Cartography of Sudden Death,” posted on Tor.com on January 22, embroils a downtrodden servant girl from a brutally totalitarian future regime in a war of time-traveling assassins; exciting stuff, although it seems to end just as it’s really getting underway, with most of the questions it raises unanswered, which makes me suspect that a sequel is in the works.

  Marie Brennan’s fantasy story from Tor.com for February 5, “Mad Maudlin,” is an entertaining literalization of the old English folk poem “Mad Maudlin’s Search For Her Tom of Bedlam.”

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  Subterranean Online, Spring.

  F&SF, March/April.

  The Time Traveler’s Almanac, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. (Tor, 978-0-7653219, $37.99, 960 pages).

  The Spring issue of electronic magazine Subterranean Online is another strong one; they’re having a good year so far, in what has, unfortunately, been announced as their last year. The best story in this issue is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “The Days of the War, As Red As Blood, As Dark As Bile,” another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one is a direct sequel to her 2013 novella “On a Red Station, Drifting,” taking place on an embattled and somewhat rundown space station whose inhabitants are faced with the prospect of evacuating in the imminent threat of an advancing alien fleet, and centers around a young girl struggling against but finally being forced to accept a peculiar kind of apotheosis; the scene where refugees are trying to escape the station during an attack are quite harrowing, so be warned. Also excellent in the Spring issue is “The Burial of Sir John Mawe At Cassini,” by Chaz Brenchley, a Retro-SF story about a habitable (and inhabited) Mars that has been colonized by a Victorian-era British Empire in a vaguely Steampunkish Alternate World; I would have liked to see a little more backstory here about just how the Empire ended up on Mars, at least a paragraph or two, but the story itself, following the aftermath of the enigmatic death of a Colonial leader, is strong and bitter and melancholy, and, although it wasn’t written for it, would have fit perfectly into my 2013 anthology with George R.R. Martin, Old Mars.