Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  The strongest stories here are Ken Liu’s “The Regular,” also the longest story in the book, and Peter Watts’s “Collateral.” “The Regular” is a tightly told and suspenseful futuristic crime drama, featuring a cyborg detective whose emotions are tightly controlled by a regulating device, who is on the trail of a creepy serial killer; “Collateral” is a bleak and uncompromising look at the consequences of taking humans out of the loop and letting autonomous robot systems make their own decisions as to when to fire in combat situations (something Philip K. Dick warned us about decades ago, but a warning which the real-world military is largely ignoring), which reads like a high-tech modern updating of Lucius Shepard’s well-known story “Salvador,” with much the same moral outrage bubbling not too far under the surface. Also good here are Elizabeth Bear’s “No Place to Dream, But a Place to Die,” a grim look at the lives of miners who have had their bodies radically redesigned to enable them to function in mines in a hostile offworld environment, and who in spite of their high-tech augmentations can look forward only to lives that are nasty, brutal, and short, and Greg Egan’s “Seventh Sight,” a typically clever examination of how an augmentation designed to enable those in danger of losing their sight to see better can have unexpected and profound wider social consequences over time. Oddly, there’s only one story here dealing with cyborg augmentations for sports, the field where extreme augmentations are likely to appear first in the real world, but it’s a powerful one about the cost of getting to be better at everything than everyone else, “God Decay,” by Rich Larson. Robert Reed offers another Great Ship story, “The Sarcophagus,” and since almost everyone in the long-running Great Ship series is a cyborg of one sort or another, it’s a valid inclusion—but somehow it doesn’t seem to quite belong; if everyone in the universe is a cyborg, then that becomes the new baseline reality, and exploring the distinction between cyborgs and unaltered humanity becomes difficult to do; much the same applies to Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Synedoche Oracles,” set in a bizarre future where everyone has been transformed in strange and grotesque ways. On the other hand, back in the near-future, Madeline Ashby tells a tense school-shooting story in “Come From Away” which really could have been told with little change whether the protagonist was a cyborg or not, and Mari Ness’s poignant “Memories and Wires” would have played out in much the same ways if the protagonist was an unhappy woman cutting herself rather than a cyborg unraveling her wires. Upgraded also features good work by Yoon Ha Lee, Chen Qiufan, Tobias S. Buckell, Xia Jia, Seth Dickinson, and others.

  IEEE is self-described as the “world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences,” and in honor of their 50th Anniversary they have put out a special all-SF ebook edition of their magazine, IEEE Spectrum, called Coming Soon Enough, Six Tales of Technology’s Future, edited by Stephen Cass, who used to edit similar original SF magazine / anthologies for MIT Technology Review. These are meant to be “about a plausible future, one that we may find ourselves living in before too long” (hence the title, Coming Soon Enough, drawn from a quote by Albert Einstein: “I never think of the future—it comes soon enough”), and which deal with the problems and potentialities of living in a world featuring “cybernetic implants, autonomous drones, wearable computers, renewable energy, 3-D printing,” a future that also figures in most of the other anthologies reviewed here and in several earlier ones this year, and which is quickly becoming science fiction’s new consensus future. There’s plenty of ingenious ideas here, as in the other futurology-oriented anthology, Twelve Tomorrows, that we reviewed here a couple of months back, and as is also true of Hieroglyph, which we’ll get to below, but it shares a weakness with Upgraded, in that many of the stories here are very short, having time to set up an interesting idea or situation, but not the time to do much with it in terms of dramatic elaboration or creating human interest. (Is this a prejudice of those who work with internet-published fiction? On the whole, the internet is hostile to or at least resistant to long fiction, which always strikes me as odd, since ezines shouldn’t have to worry about the practical word-length limitations that affect print publications.)

  The best story here, by a good margin (and, coincidentally or not, also I believe the longest), is “Shadow Flock,” by Greg Egan, an ingenious and suspenseful story about an intricately timed caper pulled off using fly-sized remote-controlled drones, one with a sting in the tail at the very end which should make us all a bit uneasy. Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Incoming” proposes a clever answer to the Fermi Paradox (“Where Is Everybody?”), but as far as I can tell has nothing whatsoever to do with the anthology’s ostensible theme, seeming to have wandered in from some other anthology altogether (Ian Whates Paradox anthology, perhaps). The protagonist of Nancy Kress’s “Someone To Watch Over Me” is so unlikeable, and what she’s willing to do in the service of jealousy so unconscionable, that it’s hard not to read this not only as a Cautionary Tale but as a horror story as well. Brenda Cooper’s “A Heart of Power and Oil” has something of the air of a YA story, as do several of the others here, and really doesn’t tell you a lot about the future it’s projecting, but does manage to mate the abstract idea to an engaging human story. There are also stories here by Mary Robinette Kowal and Cheryl Rydborn. As far as I can tell, Coming Soon Enough is available only in ebook form, and can be ordered from Amazon or iTunes.

  Of the year’s three similar futurology-oriented, near-future SF anthologies, Twelve Tomorrows, Coming Soon Now, and Hieroglyph, Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, Hieroglyph is the most successful; not all of the stories here are exceptional, but the anthology does feature several of the year’s best stories and much other good stuff as well, making it one of the year’s best original SF anthologies, seriously rivaled only by Jonathan Strahan’s Reach for Infinity. Produced in conjunction with the Hieroglyph Project of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and Technology, this self-described book of “Aspirational SF” carries a heavy didactical freight, claiming to be “an anthology of new SF that will be a conscious throwback to the practical techo-optimism of the Golden Age,” one which will help to “reignite innovation in science, technology, and how they’re used,” and “rekindle grand technological ambitions through the power of storytelling,” in the way that SF once inspired young dreamers to create the Space Program that landed humans on the Moon. In some ways, this may be the most ambitious anthology of the year, featuring non-fiction essays and commentary on the stories by the authors as well as the fiction, and links to places on the Center for Science and Technology website (csi.asu.edu) where you can read extended discussions of the subject matter of the stories (and evaluations of its feasibility) by SF writers, scientists, engineers, and futurologists.

  All of those elements are beyond my purview here, so let’s stick to the fiction, which on the whole does a good job of balancing this formidable weight of polemic with entertainment values and readability (although a few of them do flounder and sink). On the whole, I agree with the sentiment behind the Hieroglyph Project, that the pendulum has swung too far and SF as a whole has become too bleak and pessimistic—a future where you crouch in a ruined car during a blizzard toasting a poodle on a stick over a trash fire is unlikely to inspire any societal-changing Big Dreams, and really doesn’t offer too many dramatic possibilities except whether the ax-wielding feral street gangs catch you or not.

  Not even all the stories here manage to toe the Techno-Optimism Party Line—the “Utopia” in Madeline Ashby’s “By the Time We Get to Arizona” strikes me as a horrifying dystopia instead, one I’d want to get out of as soon as possible (as indeed do the characters in the story), and the future in Lee Konstantinou’s “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA” is rather a bleak one as well, and in spite of a note of somewhat forced optimism at the end, strikes me as a rather hopeless one that’s unlikely to change. But most of the stories do manage to create hopeful futures that we might ac
tually be able to obtain and might actually want to live in, without the author strapping on the rose-colored glasses and ignoring the problems of the present—which is not an easy thing to do. The strongest stories here are also (coincidentally or not) the two longest ones, Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” a fascinating examination of how one small technological innovation can, over the course of a lifetime, end up building a significant stepping-stone for the future, and Vandana Singh’s “Entanglement,” which shows the hidden connections between several people in a near-future world who are struggling—and to at least a small extent, succeeding—to combat the worst ravages of global climate change. Also first-rate are “Covenent,” by Elizabeth Bear—a story with some points of similarity with Ken Liu’s “The Regulars” from Upgraded, except that this story, which becomes extremely gripping and suspenseful, is told from the point of view of a serial killer who has been conditioned against killing even when put into a life-or-death situation—and Geoffrey A. Landis’s “A Hotel in Antarctica,” about the difficulties faced in creating such a place, and a story which manages to strike a hopeful note, with the characters resolving not to give up, even in the face of a sudden environmental catastrophe. Hieroglyph also features strong original work by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling, Brenda Cooper, James L. Cambias, and others, as well as strong reprint stories by Neal Stephenson and Gregory Benford.

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  Asimov’s, December.

  F&SF, November/December.

  Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ian Whates. (Solaris Books, 978-1-78108-209-6, $7.99, 448 pages.) Cover art by Pye Parr.

  Paradox, Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox, ed. Ian Whates. (NewCon Press, 978-1-907069-72-7, $22.99, 231 pages.) Cover art by Sarah Anne Langton. Back cover art by Storm Constantine.

  Asimov’s brings its year to a close with a rather weak December issue. The best story here is probably Tim Sullivan’s novella “Anomaly Station,” which manages to generate considerable psychological tension in a tale of mismatched crewmates who begin feuding with each other while crewing a power-relay space station that (perilously) orbits the Anomaly of the title, drawing power from it. I have my doubts about the feasibility of this system, where power is somehow beamed hundreds of light-years away to the energy-hungry civilized planets that receive it, but I’m willing to give him that as his One Impossible Thing (every SF writer is allowed one, per story). What damages the story more, though, to my mind, is one, the fact that there are only two crewmen aboard, and two, that for one of those crewmen, the Authorities would choose to send a sullen, uneducated, street thug and convicted felon out to run the crucial satellite upon which the continued functioning of their entire civilization and their economy depends. Compared to that, beaming power across the interstellar gulfs is easy to swallow. Also good is Robert Reed’s “The Cryptic Age,” another in his long-running Great Ship series; this one is neither the weakest of the series or anywhere near the best, falling somewhere in the middle, but for those who have been following the sequence for years, it does shed some interesting light on the origins of one of the main characters, the ninety-thousand-year-old Miocene, and of the Great Ship itself. It will come as no surprise to any experienced genre reader that Christopher East’s “Videoville” is an intervention-by-time-travel story, but although the tropes are familiar, he handles them expertly, and the characters are likeable.

  The November/December F&SF brings that magazine’s year to an even weaker close. The idea behind this issue seems to have been to deliberately publish “transgressive” stories, stories meant to shock that “deal with touchy themes or go beyond the bounds of Political Correctness.” I have nothing against transgressive stories—look at Dangerous Visions—and personally think that much of the best art should make you uncomfortable rather than comfortable, safe, and warm, but the key to getting away with deliberately transgressive stories is that the stories themselves have to be of high quality, putting the transgressive or shocking element to one side...and most of the stories here are rather weak. The best story here is Tim Sullivan’s mildly sacrilegious but good-humored “Yeshua’s Dog” (how sacrilegious you find it will depend on how religious you are, I suppose, but anyone who sat through Life of Brian without storming angrily out of the theater can certainly get through this one without reaching for the lynching rope, and derive a fair amount of amusement from it). Also entertaining here is Justin Barbeau’s “Nanabojou at the World’s Fair,” the story of Coyote inadvertently getting a job portraying a Wild Indian with Apache Bill’s Wild West Show at the World’s Fair of 1904; the story is full of bitter humor, all the more cutting for being dry.

  Solaris Rising 3, The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates, is certainly one of the best SF original anthologies of the year, although I’d rank it somewhat behind Jonathan Strahan’s Reach for Infinity and Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer’s Hieroglyph. I don’t think there’s anything here exceptional enough that it’s likely to reach next year’s award ballots, but the anthology is packed with good solid core-SF stories, little that’s really bad, and at 448 pages for only $7.99, one of the year’s best reading bargains for those interested in original SF anthologies. The best stories here are probably Aliette de Bodard’s “The Frost on Jade Buds,” 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 featuring one sister trying to dissuade another sister from committing a horrifying act of revenge, and Gareth L. Powell’s vigorous and violent Red Lights, and Rain, which features a bloody battle being fought throughout present-day Amsterdam by time-travelling super-powered genetically enhanced agents, each almost impossible to kill; this is gritty and action-packed. Also good are Chris Beckett’s mournful take on genocide, “The Goblin Hunter,” and Alex Dally MacFarlane’s snapshot glimpses of the rousing Chinese space propaganda of the future, provided in “Popular Images from the First Manned Mission to Enceladus.” There’s also strong work here by Adam Roberts, Ken Liu, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Ian R. MacLeod and Martin Sketchley, Nina Allan, Rachel Swirsky, and others.

  Ian Whates’s other original SF anthology this year, Paradox, Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox, is less successful than Solaris Rising 3 overall. The Fermi Paradox is one of the central—and most controversial—mysteries of modern science. Simply stated: Where is everybody? If the galaxy is swarming with alien civilizations, how come we don’t see any evidence of them, how come they haven’t visited us? Is there anybody out there at all, or are we completely alone in the universe? Science fiction writers have provided many ingenious explanations for Fermi’s Paradox—this year, for instance, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Incoming” in the anthology Coming Soon Enough, or Adam Roberts’s “Thing and Sick” from Whates’s own Solaris Rising 3—but you’ll find few of those explanations in Paradox. David L. Clements takes the anthology’s best shot at providing an ingenious explanation in “Catching Rays,” but most of the other stories ignore solving the Paradox altogether, starting instead with the aliens arriving at the beginning of the story or already in hiding among us—all of which is somewhat disappointing, since none of that really provides much explanation of why we don’t see any trace of them now. The failure of the anthology to really get to grips with its own theme is frustrating, but, theme aside, there are good solid SF stories here by Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, Tricia Sullivan, Robert Reed, Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, Mercurio D. Rivera, and others, although most of them could have appeared in any market and didn’t need to be preserved for a specialized Fermi Paradox anthology.

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  War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, ed. Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. (Apex Publications, 978-1-937009-26-7, 277 pages.) Cover art by Galen Dara.

  The End Is Nigh, ed. by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 978-1495471179, $17.95, 660 pages.) Cover art b
y Julian Faylona.

  Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction, ed. Ben Bova and Eric Choi. (Tor Books, 978-0-7653-3430, 400 pages.)

  Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural, ed. Rick Wilber. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-548-3, $15.99, 311 pages.) Cover design by Rain Saukas.

  Last Plane to Heaven—The Final Collection, by Jay Lake. (Tor Books, 978-0-7653-778-2, $27.99, 320 pages.)

  Black Gods Kiss, by Lavie Tidhar. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848638-01-3, 174 pages.) Cover art by Pedro Marques.

  Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories, by Ysabeau S. Wilce. (Small Beer Press, 978-161873089-3, $16.00, 272 pages.)

  Questionable Practices, by Eileen Gunn. (Small Beer Press, 978-161873075-6, $16.00, 276 pages.) Cover illustration by Fu Wenchao/Xinhua Press/Corbis.

  With a new year looming up only a few days away as I type these words, let’s do a round-up of some of the things I haven’t gotten a chance to mention before. For instance, there were a lot of original SF anthologies this year, many of them from small-press publishers or Kickstarter projects, and I’ve reviewed the major ones—Reach for Infinity, Hieroglyph, Solaris Rising 3, Upgraded, Twelve Tomorrows—but there are a number of anthologies left that, although more minor than the frontrunners overall, still feature some good stories and make for worthwhile reading.