Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  If you can get in a mood to allow yourself to rollick, these are rollicking good fun, and all of them are at least a touch above the standard work you can pull out of moldering stacks of the pulp magazines of the day.

  78

  Clarkesworld, January.

  Clarkesworld, February.

  Lightspeed, January.

  Lightspeed, February.

  Asimov’s, February.

  Electronic magazine Clarkesworld is off to a good start in 2015, with strong January and February issues. (In the interests of Full Disclosure, I am the reprints editor for Clarkesworld—but since I have nothing whatsoever to do with the selection of the original stories, I figure I can get away with reviewing them without too much of a semblance of Conflict of Interest.)

  The best story in the January Clarkesworld is “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight,” by Aliette de Bodard, 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. All of the “Xuya” stories have been of high literary quality, and this one is no exception, dealing with the death of a scientist whose work is considered important enough by the government that they deny her children her mem-implants, consisting of her recorded memories, which tradition dictates should have been given to her family to maintain family continuity; the story focuses on the ways her children and close associates deal with their grief over this double bereavement, including one sister who’s become a living starship, The Tiger in the Banyan. Also good in January is “Cat Pictures, Please,” by Naomi Kritzer, a more light-hearted than usual take on a familiar science fiction trope, an AI becoming sentient; Kritzer’s AI is more easy-going than most such in fiction (it loves cat pictures, for instance, which it considers the best thing about the Internet), and rather than plotting world domination, it only wants to help people—although it finds that doing that is more complex and problematical than it would at first appear to be. An amusing and warm-hearted tale. Also amusing here is Kij Johnson’s clever “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary,” a description of the various odd creatures who haunt the apartments of lonely people who have failed at establishing fulfilling relationships; the sly wit and quirkiness of tone here keep this from becoming too bitter, although if you stop to analyze it, the underlying message about the human condition is rather bleak.

  The January Clarkesworld also features what will probably (alas!) be one of the late Jay Lake’s last published stories, “An Exile of the Heart.” There are flashes of Lake’s ingenuity and invention here, but the story reads more like the hastily sketched-in synopsis of a story rather than the more filled-in, more fully realized version that the author might have produced if he’d lived long enough to do so. The issue also features two translated stories by Chinese SF authors, “A Universal Elegy,” by Tang Fei, and “Ether,” by Zhang Ran. Of these, the Zhang Ran for me is the most successful, dealing with a man suffering from extreme ennui whose boredom leads him to involvement with a secret society and then into a dangerous Adventure. The worldbuilding in the Fei story seems unlikely and unconvincing (although that may be a function of the translation), and since it will be clear to most readers from the beginning that the thinly characterized protagonist should not get involved with her new lover, there’s little point in going all the way along for the ride to ultimately reach the same conclusion.

  The best story in the February Clarkesworld is “Meshed,” by new writer Rich Larson. This is the second story by Larson I’ve seen dealing with the high-tech future of sports, when cyborg enhancements make athletes capable of superhuman performance (the other was “God Decay,” from last year’s cyborg anthology Upgraded), and it’s an area he handles very well, with a real understanding of both the advantages and the costs for the individual athletes so enhanced. The high-tech sports technology at the center of this story, a system that allows paying customers to experience playing the game along with a basketball superstar, is convincing and plausible, and the potential drawbacks to it raised are chilling, but what makes the story superior is the complex and very human way the three main characters are handled, with nobody clearly right or wrong, and even the somewhat venal protagonist, who mostly just wants the phenomenally talented young prospect to sign, no matter what the consequences, has second-thoughts and mixed feelings about what he’s trying to talk him into. Also good in February is “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill,” by new writer Kelly Robson, about the desperate attempts by aliens to repair the wounds and save the life of a young woman who has suffered a horrific attack, one which she keeps dying from, only to be brought back to life again by the aliens—and about how the woman gradually comes to question whether she should let them save her or not. This is compelling stuff...although I’m not quite sure what the significance is supposed to be of the association of the date of the attack with the 9/ll attack on the World Trade Towers.

  “The Last Surviving Gondola Widow,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, also in the February Clarkesworld, is an odd blend of fantasy and Alternate History, featuring an airborne attack (by “gondolas,” which seem to be living magical dirigibles of some sort) on Chicago by resurgent Confederate forces who refuse to accept that the Civil War has been lost. This is smoothly and professionally crafted, as is all of Rusch’s stuff, and entertaining, but I think that it might have worked better as a straight Alternate History story, replacing the gondolas with a fleet of bomb-dropping hot-air balloons or even unmagical dirigibles, which it fairly easily could be told as; I don’t think that the rather unlikely fantasy element adds any significant value, and the story might even have worked better without it. “Indelible,” by new writer Gwendolyn Clare, rounds off the issue, a story about a woman caught painfully between two worlds, although the choice she must ultimately make between them is drained of some of its tension by how benign all the aliens she knows are and what assholes all the humans are. Guess what side she chooses?

  Electronic magazine Lightspeed, on the other hand, is off to a shakier start in 2015, producing weak January and February issues. The most entertaining story in the January issue is probably Matthew Hughes’s “The Archon,” another adventure of continuing character Erm Kaslo in a world where science is fading and magic is resurging; colorful stuff, although it has the drawback of being just another chunk in what by this point is clearly a de facto novel serialization (now being called “The Kaslo Chronicles”) and therefore can’t really reach any sort of resolution as a standalone story. The best of the rest of the stories in the January Lightspeed is probably Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Men of Unborrowed Vision,” about a woman who discovers a conspiracy by Evil Corporations to destroy an anti-corporation grassroots movement, similar to the “Occupy” movement of a couple of years ago, by spraying the demonstrators with a compound that makes them so anti-social and paranoid that they refuse to leave their houses. I don’t much like corporations either, but the deck is rather obviously loaded here, making the story preachy enough that it practically calls for a flashing “Author’s Message!” sign to accompany the text. Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “He Came from a Place of Openness and Truth” is a romance about a boy fighting his attraction for a male friend, rationalized as science fiction by a thin fantastic element that is going to come as a surprise to practically nobody. The February Lightspeed is even weaker. Best story here is probably Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Red Planet,” about a blind woman who is forced to accept the gift of sight as a prerequisite to being allowed to emigrate to Mars, and who spends the rest of the story sulking and whining about that, rather than trying to adapt to her new sense or explore any positive potentials it might have; this is the second Yoachim story that I’ve read in two months where I’m supposed to find the protagonist sympathetic, but find her annoying and self-absorbed instead. Brooke Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” is a fast-paced but standard cyberpunk story, with a plot rather reminiscent of one of Liam Neeson’s “T
aken” movies. With both issues, the reprint stories are stronger than the original stories.

  After managing a pretty good January issue, the February Asimov’s is somewhat weak as well. The strongest story here is Elizabeth Bear’s “No Decent Patrimony,” the first appearance in print of a story that first appeared in the audio anthology Rip-Off! that I edited back in 2013. Next best is probably new writer Eneasz Brodski’s first published story, “Red Legacy,” set in a Soviet Union where Lysenkoism actually works, and concerning a scientist who keeps cloning her dead child, only to have it die again after a few months; this should be the heart of the story, but Brodski keeps distracting from it with overly melodramatic scenes where foreign spies crash into the secret Russian base and shoot the place up, which aren’t really necessary, and a push-the-button-and-blow-everything-up ending which isn’t either; these are beginner’s mistakes that Brodski might grow out of, though, as he shows some real talent. Derek Künsken tells a story with a rather minimal fantastic element, unlike last year’s “Schools of Clay,” in “Ghost Colors,” which deals with a world otherwise identical to our own in which it’s apparently commonplace for people to be haunted by ghosts who drone endlessly on in the background, more irritating and boring than scary, like having a roommate who won’t shut up or go away. Michael Bishop takes the cult of snake-handling to an ultimate extent, in the broadly satiric “Rattlesnakes and Men,” and Leah Cypess tells a rather perverse story about a young girl who goads and manipulates her boyfriend into assaulting her again, even though he’s been equipped with a behavior-modifying chip that’s supposed to prevent him from being able to do that. The issue’s novella, “On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers,” by Nick Wolven, paints an exaggerated and satirical picture of the future, the sort of story that used to be called a “Galaxy-style” story, back when Galaxy magazine was known for publishing stuff such as the magazine version of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, and many similar stories. Unfortunately, this is a style of story I never much cared for, and I didn’t warm to Wolven’s version either. Your own mileage may vary, and for those who like Galaxy-style satire, this may well be their favorite story in the issue. Different strokes for different folks, as they used to say back in the ‘60s.

  79

  Asimov’s, March.

  F&SF, March/April.

  The Best of Ian McDonald, Ian McDonald. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848638-90-7, 536 pages.) Cover art by Jim Burns.

  After a weak February issue, Asimov’s produces a stronger March issue—there’s nothing exceptional here, but it does contain some good solid work. Best story in the issue is also the longest, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Inhuman Garbage.” This is a nicely done murder mystery/police procedural set on the Moon, when a dead body shows up in the recycling system of a domed Lunar city. Rusch here shows the chops she developed wearing her other hat of mystery writer, and expertly handles the investigation, told from several different points of view, into the body dump, an investigation which reveals a pattern of similar corpses disposed of in the same way in the past, and eventually suggests a sinister conspiracy with wide-reaching political implications. In a nicely modern touch, although who committed the crime and why it was done is discovered by the investigating detective, there’s no proof, and the political conspiracy behind it, although revealed to her eyes, is not brought crashing down by the last page; instead, it would be possible to imagine someone shrugging and saying to the disillusioned detective, “It’s Chinatown—except on the Moon.”

  Also good in March is “Pareidolia,” a posthumous collaboration between the late Kage Baker and her sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, who completed the story from notes left behind by Baker after her tragically early death. Baker, of course, was famous for her long sequence of stories about the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company, many of which appeared in Asimov’s during her lifetime, and this is a worthy addition to the Company canon, colorful and entertaining and ingenious, although it really needs to start in Sixth Century Constantinople rather than several pages and many centuries earlier in Ancient Egypt as it does; those pages are mostly a recap of the concept behind the Company, which experienced Baker readers will already know, and which is easy enough to pick up interstitially from context even if you’ve never read anything by her before. Also entertaining in March is “Tuesdays,” by Suzanne Palmer—nothing much actually happens here except that the customers in an all-night diner out on the highway describe to investigating cops the nearby landing of a huge UFO, which had disappeared again by the time the cops show up, but there’s a sprightly, quirky tone here that makes what could have been routine and boring enjoyable, and the eyewitnesses, each of whom gets their own segment of testimony, are an entertainingly varied and interesting bunch.

  Gregory Norman Bossert’s “Twelve and Tag” is a variation of the tale-told-in-a-bar story, except that this bar is on Europa, where undersea miners who work the ice-covered deep oceans of Europa are playing a bar game where they have to tell their worst, stupidest, most painful, or kindest personal stories, as part of an effort to integrate two new members into their crew as replacement for those who have died on the job. This is nicely handled, and the stories are intrinsically interesting, although the sorting-out as to which category they belong in seems sometimes a bit arbitrary, and the stakes involved in the game turn out to be higher than they may at first appear. “Holding the Ghosts,” by new writer Gwendolyn Clare Williams, concerns a process where brain-dead bodies are leased to carry the recorded memories—the “ghosts”—of deceased relatives, so that for the duration of the lease the host body believes itself to be the dead loved one, and interacts with the family as if it actually is that person. No memories are supposed to be carried over from one lease to another, but here they linger instead, gradually building up something like an integrated Multiple Personality, a new personality made up of combinations of traces of the others that that host as carried. Intriguing, although I’m not sure that the whole rental thing really makes much sense if you squint at it hard enough. Veteran writer Kit Reed closes out the issue with “Military Secrets,” a creepy Twilight Zoneish story about kids who have lost their fathers in war endlessly riding a bus to some unknown destination they never get to, probably in the Afterlife.

  The March/April issue of F&SF is the first official issue to appear under the editorship new editor C.C. Finlay, who replaced long-time editor Gordon Van Gelder (who remains as the magazine’s publisher) at the beginning of the year. Like the issue guest-edited by Finlay back in 2014 (widely—and correctly, as it turns out—regarded at the time by genre insiders as a trial run preparatory to Van Gelder turning the editorial reins over to a new editor), Finlay does a respectable job with this one. Much the same could be said about it, in fact, as I said about the March Asimov’s above—there’s nothing exceptional here, but the issue does contain a lot of good solid work, although unlike Asimov’s, where almost everything was science fiction of one degree or another of rigor and plausibility (with the exception of the Kit Read story), here you get a mixed bag of SF, fantasy, horror, and what I suppose could be called “slipstream,” which Finlay seems to lean toward a bit more than Van Gelder did.

  The best story here is Paul M. Berger’s “The Mantis Tattoo,” about a prehistoric tribe coming into conflict with another tribe that is attempting to move into their territory, and a young man who is reluctantly pressed into service as an emissary of the trickster god of his tribe and delegated to make contact with the encroaching enemy. From internal clues, I’d guess that this is supposed to be set 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, perhaps during an interglacial period, at a time when several subspecies of hominids still existed in close proximity, and I’d guess that the protagonist’s tribe are supposed to be the ancestors of the Bushmen, considering their smaller physical stature compared to the enemy tribe and their dependency on poisoned arrows as their ultimate defense. The story is suspenseful and ente
rtaining enough to take a worthy place in the long roster of “prehistoric” stories, and may or may not contain a fantasy element, depending on how literally you take the visions of the Mantis god who appears to the protagonist throughout. From the distant past, new writer Brian Dolton takes us about as far into the future as it’s possible to get, to the very end of the universe, in fact, in “This Is The Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang,” which shows us that even creatures so far evolved from humanity that they might as well be gods still engage in deadly squabbles over territory.