Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  I must admit that I may have been inclined to like Rich Horton’s reprint anthology Space Opera not only because I generally like Space Opera stories, but because I bought and originally published five out of the twenty-two stories here, and have reprinted five others in one or another of my annual Best of the Year anthologies. This naturally inclines me to think that Horton has excellent taste, but I don’t think most readers will disagree—this is a big, meaty book that delivers a lot of good core SF, some of it Space Opera as good as anybody has ever written it, well worth the money. The best story here is probably Ian McDonald’s complex and wonderful novella “The Tear,” but also first-rate are Greg Egan’s “Glory,” Gwyneth Jones’s “Saving Tiamaat,” David Moles’s “Finisterra,” Robert Reed’s “Precious Mental,” Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum,” Ian R. MacLeod’s “Isabel of the Fall,” Aliette de Bodard’s “Two Sisters in Exile,” and Naomi Novik’s “Seven Years From Home.” There’s also good work in Space Opera by Yoon Ha Lee, James Patrick Kelly, Gareth L. Powell, Chris Willrich, Michael F.Flynn, Una McCormack, Kage Baker, Paul Berger, Jay Lake, Justina Robson, Alastair Reynolds, Lavie Tidhar, and Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

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  Asimov’s, April/May.

  Asimov’s, June.

  F&SF, May/June.

  Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, Tom Purdom. (Fantastic Books, 978-1-61720-943-7, $15.99, 355 pages.)

  The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. Gordon Van Gelder. (Tachyon, 9781616921633, $15.95, 432 pages.)

  The April/May and June issues of Asimov’s are uneven, although both have some good stuff, even if probably not anything you’re going to see on next year’s award ballots. The two strongest stories in April/May, one SF and one fantasy, are James Patrick Kelly’s “Someday” and Michael Swanwick’s “Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown.” Kelly’s “Someday,” the SF story, is to me strongly reminiscent in tone and mood of something by Ursula K. Le Guin, no small compliment in my book, examining the peculiar courtship customs and divergent biology that have developed on a Lost Colony that has drifted out of touch with the rest of humanity—with a final clever twist waiting at the end. The fantasy stories in Asimov’s are usually weaker than the SF stories, but Swanwick’s “Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown,” the fantasy story, is one of the good ones, taking us to a deeply cynical and scathingly satiric version of Hell for a variant of the classic Orpheus story, as a young girl struggles to resist the Devil’s sly lures and rescue her father; it even has, for Swanwick, a relatively upbeat ending. Matthew Johnson’s “Rules of Engagement” and Will McIntosh’s “Scout,” two interesting variations on the standard Military SF story, are also good here, as is K.J. Zimring’s “The Talking Cure,” a clever take on the memory-viewing theme where memories of the past turn out to not be quite what the subject thought they were going to be going in to the process.

  The rest of the stories in May/June are weaker, although most are still worth reading. Robert Reed turns in a rare disappointment with “The Principles,” a chunk of a novel where the major interest is in trying to discern (not entirely successfully, I think, in my case) how the world of the story differs from our own timeline, but the story is rather static, mostly Talking Heads talking to each other, with not much of significance actually happening. William Preston’s “Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key” is another in his series about the Old Man, a thinly disguised version of old-time pulp hero Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, and is well-enough crafted, but I’m getting a little tired of them. M. Bennardo’s “Slowly Upward, the Coelancanth” features an ingenious but highly unlikely method of surviving a worldwide Apocalypse. Joe M. McDermott’s “Delores, Big and Strong” is a rather dispiriting story of how bitterly hard farm life can be, thinly rationalized as SF by a medical device that I don’t think could work the way that the story says that it does.

  The most entertaining story in the June Asimov’s is probably Lavie Tidhar’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” a flamboyant Steampunk melodrama related to the author’s “Bookman” series. Also good here, and ultimately rather optimistic and life-affirming in spite of its drastic circumstances, is Kara Dalkey’s “The Philosopher Duck,” which features a novel method of surviving through a deadly typhoon that might actually work; in the end, the family not only survives disaster, but, undaunted, immediately start rebuilding their lives, a lesson all of us might usefully learn in a climate-challenged world. Suzanne Palmer’s “Shatterdown” contains most of the tropes that prospectors-diving-into-Gas Giant stories usually have, but handles them well in service of a tale of vengeance and obsession; this is the second story by Palmer I’ve read recently in which the protagonist destroys her enemies by destroying herself, so we may be seeing something of a theme developing here. James Van Pelt’s “The Turkey Raptor” is a delicious little tale of the revenge of a bullied high-school kid, although I didn’t like the injection of a second fantastic element late in the story; one prehistoric survival in a small mountain town I can swallow, but two stretches credulity. Nancy Kress’s “Sidewalk at 12:00 P.M.” features an oddly specialized and personal use for a time-viewer, and one that the protagonist knows going in is useless—although Kress adroitly dodges a definitive answer to whether it’s had the desired effect or not, leaving the door open for a smidgen of hope that it has.

  A weak May/June issue of F&SF. The most briskly entertaining story here is Naomi Kritzer’s “Containment Zone: A Seastead Story,” but as has become clearer with each installment (and is probably admitted to by the new subtitle, which the others didn’t carry), this is really a de facto novel serialization, and this chunk doesn’t stand particularly well on its own feet without reference to the earlier stories, and if you haven’t read the earlier stories, you won’t get the full measure of enjoinment out of this one—which is too bad, as it’s nicely done near-future stuff, with an engaging spunky and resourceful protagonist somewhat reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne. The most substantial story here is probably Pavel Amnuel’s “White Curtain,” a story which first appeared in Russian in Kiev in 2007, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky, and appearing here for the first time in English; this plays in an intelligent, elegant way with the existence of myriad Alternate Possibility worlds, and a man who can select between them—at a cost.

  Everything else in May/June is weaker. David D. Levine crosses the hard-boiled PI story with a retro-SF story set on a habitable Venus in “The End of the Silk Road”; it’s competently handled, but the problem with it is that the mystery part follows the classic hard-boiled PI story formula in too slavish a point-for-point manner, and the SF part is unimaginative, with a not-terribly-evocative Venus that is pretty much just like Earth, except that they call it “Venus,” something substituting amphibian frogmen for the traditional gunsels doesn’t really help all that much. Tim Sullivan’s “The Memory Cage” is about a man who goes to unlikely technological extremes to have a series of conversations with what amounts to his estranged father’s ghost; would probably have worked better as a fantasy, with the ghost an actual ghost rather than an unconvincing “quantum-entangled signal” that is somehow able to talk and respond to the protagonist in real-time. Katie Boyer’s dystopian drama “Bartleby the Scavenger” is set in a little mountain town that has survived as an autonomous unit after a period of social upheaval has torn the rest of the U.S. apart; it’s well-enough crafted, but I found the whole setup unrealistic, especially that people would stay in town and die when the dictatorial Mayor decides that their time is up, rather than lighting out for someplace else; after all, they’re not the only people left alive in the country, you know there are others elsewhere, probably other communities, and you’d think that heading out to possibly find a place in one of them would be a chance worth taking. The rest of the stories include a somewhat distasteful mermaid story, a Lovecraftian pastiche, a broad and overlong farce, and another in a long-running fantasy series that I’ve never been able to warm to.

 
Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It’s hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom were not even born when Purdom started his professional career, but Purdom’s is. In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and dazzling conceptualization, Tom Purdom not only holds his own with the New Young Turks of the ‘90s and the Oughts, he sometimes surpasses them, especially in stories such as “Fossil Games,” “Canary Land,” and “A Response from EST17,” all featured in what is, amazingly enough after all these decades, his very first short-story collection, Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons. Purdom also specializes in writing his own unique brand of Military SF, in stories such as “Legacies,” “Sheltering,” and “Research Project,” stories much more concerned with tactics and strategy than with the bloody details of combat, with hard moral and ethical choices, and, almost uniquely (although not at all surprisingly, considering that Purdom himself was an Army brat) with the psychological effects and consequences that military service has on families. Just to add some variety, the collection also features a rare fantasy by Purdom, although one still concerned with military tactics, “Dragon Drill,” which introduces living dragons as a complicating tactical feature to the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, and a compelling time-travel story, “The Mists of Time,” which is also concerned with military matters, the British Navy’s campaign against slave ships, and with hard ethical and moral choices; there are rarely any easy or facile choices in Purdom’s work, and everything has consequences. This is a collection that should appeal to anyone who likes core science fiction, and it’s a sad comment on the dwindling of the mid-list that this is appearing from an ultra-small press rather than as a mass-market paperback from Del Ray or Ace or Tor, as it probably would have forty years ago. You won’t find this in bookstores, so if you want it, order it from the publisher at www.fantasticbooks.biz; it’s also available on Amazon.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, usually referred to as F&SF, is the second-longest continually operating genre magazine in the world (Astounding/Analog is the oldest), founded in 1949 and still being published regularly here in 2014. As demonstrated by the stories in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, twenty-seven stories covering a span from 1952 to 2011, throughout all those decades F&SF has frequently been the most reliable place in the genre to find quality speculative work written to a high literary standard. It’s hard to pick favorites here, as nothing in the anthology is bad and most of the stories are memorable, but if pressed to single my favorites out, I’d mention “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight, “‘—All You Zombies—’”, by Robert A. Heinlein, “A Kind of Artistry,” by Brian W. Aldiss, “Green Magic,” by Jack Vance, “Narrow Valley,” by R.A. Lafferty, “Sundance,” by Robert Silverberg, “Salvador,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Lincoln Train,” by Maureen F. McHugh, “Maneki Neko,” by Bruce Sterling, “Winemaster,” by Robert Reed, and “Have Not Have,” by Geoff Ryman. The anthology also contains good work by Jack Finney, C.M. Kornbluth, Zenna Henderson, Robert Sheckley, Kit Reed, Jane Yolen, Harlan Ellison, George Alec Effinger, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, M. John Harrison, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, and Ken Liu—as many of these stories are classics, this is a good reading bargain for $15.95. You may or may not find this in bookstores; it’s available on Amazon, or from the publisher at http://tachyonpublications.com.

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  Reach for Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1781082027, 384 pages).

  Asimov’s, July.

  Asimov’s, August.

  I will be very surprised if Reach for Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, doesn’t turn out to be the strongest original SF anthology of 2014. Like its predecessors in this sequence of similarly themed anthologies, Engineering Infinity (2010) and Edge of Infinity (2012), Reach for Infinity is made up entirely of rock-solid core SF stories, most of them very good, some of them among the best stories of the year to date. If you like SF, believe me, you want this one.

  Appropriately enough, most of the stories here deal with efforts to expand human society into space, to “reach for infinity”. As Strahan says, the idea of the anthology was to examine “how science fiction can address tomorrow, how we can respond to science itself, and how we might be able to retain an element of romance and optimism, without sacrificing the kind of realistic assessment our collective future needs from science fiction in the 21st Century.” In this, I think he succeeds admirably—nothing here is bad, and even the most minor of the stories would probably be the major stories in most other original SF anthologies.

  The best stories here are probably Ian McDonald’s “The Fifth Dragon,” which tells a gripping story of love in the face of the harsh realities of life as immigrant workers on the Moon, and faces its characters with a heartbreaking choice, and Peter Watts’s “Hotshot,” an extended examination of the age-old debate between determinism and free will that attempts to resolve the question once and for all by plunging its protagonist into the face of the Sun.

  Also excellent in Reach for Infinity, are Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dust Queen,” 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 concerned with the morality and consequences of memory editing; Ellen Klages’s “Amicae Aeternum,” as eloquent an argument against setting forth for the stars on a generation ship as I’ve ever seen, one poignant enough to make me want to yell at the young protagonist to run away and hide until it was too late to go on board; Greg Egan’s “Break My Fall,” a classic rescue-in-space story that features both an extremely ingenious method of crossing the solar system and an equally ingenious method of affecting the rescue itself; Alastair Reynolds’s “In Babelsberg,” the tale of a robot/AI, newly returned from deep space, making a promotional tour on the talk-show circuit, who runs afoul of some unexpected competition; Pat Cadigan’s “Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars,” which take a sly look at an unusual form of rebellion against Terran authority brewing amongst the colonists of Mars; Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Wilder Still, the Stars,” an account of a woman’s dangerous struggle to rescue Artificial People who have been abandoned on the street after their usefulness is past, and who just may turn out to be the key to the future (a hint of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Baby Is Three” here; unlike the Klages, Goonan paints leaving on a generation ship as a desirable outcome, the way it’s most typically portrayed in science fiction); and Karl Schroeder’s “Khledyu,” about a superstructure that could help to alleviate some of the effects of global climate change, but which in the wrong hands has the potential to make things disastrously worse. Reach for Infinity also includes strong stories by Adam Roberts, Karen Lord, Linda Nagata, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Ken Macleod, most of which would have been standouts in weaker company.

  Some good stuff in both the July and August issues of Asimov’s, although July is perhaps the strongest overall. The best stories in July are probably Karl Bunker’s melancholy “The Woman from the Ocean,” in which a woman crash-lands back on Earth after a long voyage out to the stars, to find that the human race has changed in subtle but profound ways while she was gone, and Robert Reed’s “Blood Wedding,” in which Reed visits territory that George R.R. Martin made famous with “The Red Wedding” sequence, as guests at a high-profile celebrity wedding in a high-tech future suffer a deadly attack to which they must respond in ways indicative of their various natures, all of which reveal something of the radical changes that have transformed human society. Also good in July is Allen M. Steele’s “The Legion of Tomorrow,” examining a fateful meeting between young fans that takes place at the first World Science Fiction Convention in the ‘30s, and its ultimate conse
quences in the present day. For those interested in the early history of science fiction and science fiction fandom, this will be a fascinating exercise in nostalgia; for those who aren’t interested in such, it may be a bit slow—I myself wondered why the Big Revelation couldn’t have been successfully made to the protagonist during her first meeting with the Legion, rather than dragging it out over a period of months. Although taking science fiction and science fiction writers as its subject matter, it would be possible to argue that “The Legion of Tomorrow” isn’t really SF itself, as it has no real fantastic element; most SF readers will probably enjoy reading it, though. Also fun in July is Sandra McDonald’s “Story of Our Lives,” told in a breezy, entertaining voice, about gag reviews of movies which don’t exist at the time of the review but that later actually come into existence, and the effect this seeming prophetic ability has on a group of friends; M. Bennardo’s “How Do I Get to Last Summer from Here?,” a light-hearted story about a wave of involuntary time-travel, not explained but apparently fueled by nostalgia, that sweeps society and causes people to disappear for brief periods into the past; and Alexander Jablokov’s “The Instructive Tale of the Archeologist and His Wife,” which investigates the courtship and academic career of an archeologist in what presumably is the distant future of our own world, although one from which all traces of our present and past seems to have been erased; how or why or by who is never revealed in the story, and since the archeologist himself only has the dimmest of intuitions that this might be the case, it’s somewhat frustrating that no answers to these questions, or even hints about them, are supplied in the course of the story, which makes it all seem a bit, er, academic.