Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  In the little space that we have left, let’s take a quick look at some of the anthologies that didn’t get covered earlier in the year.

  With one possible exception, there’s nothing really exceptional in Mission: Tomorrow, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, but it’s a good solid core SF anthology, filled with solid work, and well-worth the cover price. The one standout story here is Michael F. Flynn’s “In Panic Town, On the Backward Moon,” which is great fun if not terribly profound, taking us to the brawling lawless frontier of the Solar System, to Mars and its Backward Moon, Phobos, for a robust and slyly amusing tale of lowlifes, lawmen, heists, con-jobs, double-dealing, double-crosses, and skullduggery. Mission: Tomorrow also features good work by Jack Skillingstead, Christopher McKitterick, Brenda Cooper, David D. Levine, Angus McIntyre, Robin Wayne Bailey, Jack McDevitt, and others.

  Original fantasy anthologies were surprisingly light on the ground this year. The best of them (possibly the only one of them) was probably an anthology of “Military Fantasy” called Operation Arcana, edited by John Joseph Adams. The military story and the fantasy story seem like they might mix a bit uneasily, but, as the editor points out in his introduction, there’s a long tradition in fantasy literature of descriptions of wars and battles, from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin, and the mix works well enough here to produce some good work. The best stories are probably “The Way Home,” by Linda Nagata, “Bomber’s Moon,” by Simon R. Green, and “In Skeleton Leaves,” by Seanan McGuire, but there’s also good stuff by Carrie Vaughn, Glen Cook, Yoon Ha Lee, David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, and others.

  An odd addition to the year’s roster of anthologies, popping up practically at the last minute, was a reprint SF anthology which seems to be mostly available in various ebook and downloadable formats, for a range of voluntary donations, Pwing Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier, edited by “the Electronic Frontier Foundation” (although Dave Maass is mentioned in an editorial capacity in the inside copy). This is a good solid collection of SF stories about the wired, intensively networked future that’s become one of the standard futures in SF in the last few years; most substantial stories here are probably “The Gambler,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, “Slippage,” by Lauren Beukes, “His Master’s Voice,” by Hannu Rajaniemi, and “Business As Usual,” by Pat Cadigan, but there are also strong reprint stories here by Cory Doctorow, Madeline Ashby, Neil Gaiman, James Patrick Kelly, Bruce Sterling, and others. If you want this, your best bet is probably to download it, for a range of voluntary donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation from https://supporters-eff.org/donate/pwningtomorrow.

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  Asimov’s, January.

  F&SF, January/February.

  Tor.com, January 12.

  Lightspeed, January.

  Asimov’s heads into 2016 with a fairly average January issue, one filled with lots of entertaining stuff, but where nothing is particularly exceptional and probably nothing is going to end up on Hugo or Nebula ballots. The most entertaining piece here is probably Allen M. Steele’s novella “Einstein’s Shadow,” an Alternate World story set just before the outbreak of this timeline’s version of World War II (taking place in a reality where Gregor Strasser has succeeded Adolf Hitler—a turn for the worst, not the better—and immense luxury Nazi airliners shepherd passengers back and forth across the Atlantic), featuring a hardboiled American PI who is press-ganged into acting as a bodyguard for Albert Einstein, whose life is being threatened by the mistakes of his past come back to haunt him, as well as by anti-Semitic Nazis. This is great fun, and my only quibble is that if the plan is to smuggle the PI into the ocean-crossing airliner as a secret bodyguard for Einstein, since nobody would suspect an American as being such, it would seem to be counter-productive to have him escort Einstein up the gangplank and into the airplane, obviously serving as a bodyguard; shouldn’t be hard for anyone to figure it out after that.

  Also good here is Ian McHugh’s “The Baby Eaters,” one of two stories this issue about the disastrous social consequences of humans misunderstanding and misinterpreting alien customs and lifeways (the other is Genevieve Williams’s “The Singing Bowl,” which is less visceral and powerful, but also not without its points of interest). “Chasing Ivory,” by Ted Kosmatka, follows a scientist who, at some risk to herself, is monitoring a herd of resurrected mammoths in the Canadian wilderness; once the story gets her in place, which takes a number of pages, nothing much in particular happens thereafter, but the story does deliver some nice sensory impressions of what it would be like to be in close proximity to living mammoths. “White Dust,” by new writer Nathan Hillstrom, whether the young author consciously realizes it or not (and I suspect that he does not, considering his age), is channeling Algis Budrys’s once-famous (now, sadly, mostly forgotten) novella “Rogue Moon,” with resurrected versions of the same protagonist being teleported into a deadly environment to complete a task that kills him before he can finish it, so they send the next version of him in; for a first-sale writer, though, he handles the story elements promisingly. “Conscience,” by Robert R. Chase, is near-future Military SF, but I find it unconvincing that the military would give the protagonist a second chance after deliberately choosing to disobey orders during wartime operations; she would have been immediately grounded, arrested, or kicked out of the service. In “Atheism and Flight,” by Dominica Phetteplace, an amputee regrows his lost arm, with no particular explanation for this happening other than that he really, really wants his arm back.

  The January/February F&SF perhaps has a slight edge over the January Asimov’s, and, unusually for F&SF, its science fiction stories are stronger than most of its fantasy stories; usually, it’s the other way around. Best story here is Gregory Benford’s “Vortex,” which takes us to Mars for a really ingenious and inventive look at some of the life we might really find there, life that’s light-years removed from old Martian favorites such as Dejah Thoris or Tars Tarkas, but still capable of delivering a real old-fashioned Sense of Wonder kick in spite of the fact that you can’t make love to it or have swordfights with it. Also very good is “Number Nine Moon,” by Alex Irvine. Running with the Martian subtheme of the issue, inspired by a Bob Eggleton cover, Irvine takes us to a Mars that’s being abandoned in the face of a shift in the political climate back home on Earth, and follows three mildly larcenous types who plan to get in some last-minute looting before having to leave—only to run afoul of an accident that may mean they won’t be able to leave at all, which is tantamount to being sentenced to death. How they work against the clock to try to save themselves is suspenseful, and in the spirit of the novel and the film The Martian (which obviously hovers over the issue), both scientifically plausible and inventive. We’re back to Mars again in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Rockets Red,” where a fireworks expert struggles to put on a fireworks display on the Red Planet in spite of the well-meaning “assistance” of his aging mother, but this one was a little too sentimental to be as successful for me as the other two Martian stories.

  As a change of pace, Terry Bisson introduces us to a time-traveling robot (sort of) with a bewilderingly obscure but ostensibly very important mission in the offbeat and pleasantly wacky “Robot from the Future.” In the best of the issue’s fantasy stories, Matthew Hughes gives us another story of Raffalon the Thief in “Telltale,” as Raffalon tries to reason his way out of another of the complex and very sticky magical situations he’s always getting himself entangled in, this one even more difficult to extricate yourself from than usual. Albert E. Cowdrey gives us a (to me) somewhat unconvincing reason why a patch of Appalachian forest has been haunted for thousands of years, in “The Visionaries” (I’d have preferred the forthcoming asteroid strike, myself). Nick Wolven’s “Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going To Do?” gives us another satiric story of a man’s life being destroyed by the relentless hounding of computers and social media for no particular reason ever explained, not unlike his “We’re So Very Sorry For Your R
ecent Tragic Loss,” from last year; clearly this is an obsessive theme for Wolven, and I must say that he does a good job of making the wired and extensively networked future where everything is monitoring you and reporting on you to advertisers and/or the government, a future that’s always seemed like a terrible place to live to me, even though it’s sometimes put forth as a Utopia, seem even more unpleasant than it usually does. David Gerrold tells a rather sweet and loving ghost story, a combination you don’t see all that often, in “The White Piano”; the only problem I have here is that the story that the grandmother tells the kids is far too adult, with far too many adult terms and concepts, to have made any real sense to kids the age of the kids she’s supposedly telling it to. I know that E. Lily Yu’s “Braid of Days and Wake of Nights,” about a woman in New York City trying to catch a unicorn so that she can use it to cure her friend who’s dying of cancer, is supposed to be deeply poignant, but with all the best will in the world I can’t help but find it a bit silly instead.

  Tor.com launches into the new year with a superior fantasy story, posted on January 12, “Two’s Company,” by Joe Abercrombie, in which the ferocious warrior woman Jarve, Lioness of Hoskopp, one of Abercrombie’s continuing characters, meets an equally formidable (but male) warrior coming in the other direction as she crosses a narrow rope suspension bridge. Since neither will give way to the other, these two mighty warriors must fight it out for the privilege of pride-of-place, much like Robin Hood and Little John meeting on the log across the stream, although in most versions of that story I’m familiar with, Robin Hood and Little John don’t end up extending their dominancy contest into the sexual arena as well. This is listed as “Epic Fantasy,” and it is that, with plenty of sword-swinging action and at least ten or twelve bodies left not only scattered around but chopped into little pieces by the end of the story, but (as shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those familiar with Abercrombie’s work) it is also a very funny story as well, richly comic in a dark, robust, bloody way that might be too crude or cruel for those of a delicate sensibility, but which is nevertheless, well—funny. It certainly gave me a good laugh in several places, slyly satirizing Sword & Sorcery conventions while at the same time vigorously celebrating them.

  There’s also good stuff in the January Lightspeed. Best story in the January issue is “Beyond the Heliopause,” by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, which takes a journalist out on a mysterious mission to meet her estranged husband in a space station beyond the heliopause, past the outermost edge of the Solar System, where a cosmic secret is waiting to be revealed that will forever change everything the human race thinks it knows about the universe. Brooke and Brown tie this in neatly with a subplot about the journalist’s once-religious father, and how he came to lose his Faith. J.V. Yang offers us a biter bit story about an unpleasant, selfish, and shallow rich woman who wants to buy a new body, and how she becomes involved with the poor person who needs to sell her own body on the black market, in “Secondhand Bodies,” all of which is wrapped up in a satisfyingly ironic fashion. In “The Savannah Liars Tour,” Will McIntosh takes us to a future where people can take daytrips into the Afterlife to visit with their departed loved ones, sort of a literalization of Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday, where people go to graveyards to picnic with and ostensibly visit with dead friends and family members. One man becomes obsessed with returning to the Savannah, Georgia of his youth to visit the spirit of his dead wife and recreate the happy days they’d spent together—and again the story leads to a twist ending, one that I saw coming, but which functions in a traditionally satisfying fashion anyway. There’s yet another unicorn story, the second this month, “Maiden, Hunter, Beast,” by Kat Howard, which takes the whole complex of unicorn mythology seriously, but which again I found mildly silly. Two unicorn stories this month! Is somebody putting a unicorn anthology together?

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  Clarkesworld, January.

  Clarkesworld, February.

  Asimov’s, February.

  Interzone 262.

  Clarkesworld is off to a good start in 2016, with two strong issues, the January and February issues. (As a Conflict-of-Interest disclaimer, I’m the reprints editor for Clarkesworld—but since I have absolutely nothing to do with the selection of the original fiction, it seems like I ought to be able to get away with reviewing it as I would stuff from any other source.) The best story in the January Clarkesworld is Rich Larson’s “Extraction Request,” a viscerally powerful, disturbing, at times even horrific, bit of Military SF, about soldiers crashed in hostile territory on an alien planet, and the protean alien creatures they struggle desperately to fight off...creatures that cannibalize the bodies of their fallen comrades in order to further attack them. The SF details of the future military tech that the soldiers use are ingenious and well worked-out, but what the story really delivers is gut-churning emotion, and, in fact, the story is nightmarish enough to qualify as Technohorror. Also in January, Robert Reed’s “The Algorithms of Value” shows us that no matter how perfect a future Utopia is, there’s always going to be somebody who’s dissatisfied with it. In “The Abduction of Europa,” E. Catherine Tobler takes us to the outer Solar System to follow two stranded humans trudging across the endless icefields of Europa in a desperate attempt to get back to the station they came from before they freeze to death or run out of food and water. For much of its length, this is a people-struggling-to-survive-and-reach-safety-in-a-hostile-alien-environment story, an Endurance Slog Story, a form that goes all the way back to stories such as H.B. Fyfe’s “Moonwalk” from 1952, but a transformational aspect eventually enters the story, and takes it in odd directions. It’s a bit foggy at times (I never did see a clear explanation of what the Lost Station was supposed to be, for instance), but rewards persistence. “Everyone Loves Charles,” by Chinese writer Bao Shu, translated by Ken Liu, is a novella, a rare form for Clarkesworld, which usually tends to publish short stories and short novelettes instead. It’s well-written line-by-line, as is to be expected by something translated by as good a stylist as Liu, but takes much too long to cover pretty familiar ground, the man who prefers his illusionary cyber-fantasy life to the more disappointing reality of everyday life.

  The February Clarkesworld is another strong issue. Best story here is probably “The Fixer,” by Paul McAuley, which shows us an AI that has set itself up as a god over the deliberately degenerated population of a Lost Colony world, and the unexpected interrogation to justify his actions he suddenly comes under—all told from the point of view of the AI, who proves quite human in the levels of rationalization and self-serving justifications it’s capable of coming up with. Clever stuff. Also excellent is “In the Midst of Life,” by Nick Wolven, in which a corporate fixer runs into a big problem evicting squatters from an abandoned building which is about to be torn down to make room for a new building, problems that grow exponentially when he learns that the squatters have turned into a cult with a charismatic guru, and grow even worse when he himself begins to be swayed by some of the guru’s teachings. This one is somewhat longer than usual too, a long novelette if not a novella, and if this represents a trend for Clarkesworld to use longer stories, it’s one I heartily approve of, as long stories, particularly novellas, have long been the form best suited for the genre. “Between Dragons and Their Wrath,” by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky is a surreal fantasy in which the dragons are not much like the dragons usually encountered in fantasy literature, but rather beings who spread malign influences all around them, so that even coming near to where one has been can cause sickness and death—not too difficult a metaphor to figure out.