Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Another good original SF anthology is To Shape the Dark, edited by Athena Andreadis, an anthology of SF stories about women scientists struggling to do “science not-as-usual,” to push the boundaries of the possible, often against considerable resistance and even attempted oppression by the societies in which they function...as well as attempts to deny that they ever did the work at all or to claim credit for it (not too different, in other words, from what happens all-too-often in our own present-day society). There’s a wide range of styles and moods here, with settings ranging from the near-present to the far-future, including stories about women exploring and doing vital scientific work on distant alien worlds. Strongest stories here are probably “Fieldwork,” by Shariann Lewitt, “Crossing the Midday Gate,” by Aliette de Bodard, “Firstborn, Lastborn,” by Melissa Scott, “Of Wind and Fire,” by Vandana Singh, and “Carnivores of Can’t-Go-Home,” by Constance Cooper, but there’s also good work by Gwyneth Jones, Terry Boren, Kristine Landon, and others, all of it science fiction, some of it hard science fiction, and just about all of it worth reading.

  Now We Are Ten—Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press, edited by Ian Whates, is exactly what it says that it is: a compilation of stories by authors who have been published by NewCon Press, in celebration of NewCon Press’s tenth anniversary. This is a mixed (but all original) anthology of SF and fantasy—nothing here is as strong as the best of the stories from the anthologies mentioned above, but most of the stories are enjoyable and worth reading. The best of them is probably “Woman’s Christmas,” by Ian McDonald, but there’s also good stuff by Nina Allan, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Eric Brown, E.J. Swift, and others.

  Asimov’s closes out its year with a few exceptional stories scattered amongst its last few issues. The strongest issue overall out of the three end-of-the-year issues is clearly the September Asimov’s, which features several superior stories. The best of these is probably “The Visitor from Taured,” by Ian R. MacLeod, an exquisitely written and subtly characterized near-mainstream story that justifies its inclusion in a genre magazine with the protagonist’s lifelong obsession with S.E.T.I. and with experimentally proving or disproving the Many Worlds theory of reality—something that the ambiguous ending hints that he may or may not have finally done. Also good here is Rich Larson’s “All That Robot Shit...” (which I’m amused to see is rendered as “All That Robot...” on both the issue’s Table of Contents and the story’s title page. Can you no longer get away with saying “shit” in Asimov’s?) The Larson takes us to an island inhabited entirely by robots, except for one human castaway, and deals with the relationship that gradually evolves between the human and one of the robots. In spite of the fact that none of the backstory here is ever explained (how did all these robots get to the island and set up a tribal civilization of their own? Are they refugees from the collapse of the outside world or remnants of some lost island civilization? Is the human castaway merely the victim of his boat sinking near the island, or is he perhaps the last human left alive after some worldwide catastrophe, as may be being hinted here and there?), the growing empathy between the human and the robot, both of whom have lost someone close to them and are exiles, the human from whatever human world may still exist (if one does) and the robot amongst its own kind, from whom it is growing increasingly estranged, has become quite moving by the story’s melancholy end. Also good in September is Carrie Vaughn’s “The Mind Is Its Own Place,” about the patients in a hospital facility dedicated to trying to find a cure for a strange illness suffered by space travelers who have been too long in contact with a Faster-Than-Light drive, Robert Reed’s “Dome on the Prairie,” which plays in a sly and subtle fashion with reader expectations as to whom the viewpoint characters might be, and Jack Skillingstead’s “The Whole Mess,” which deals with a Lovecraftian Intrustion on a college campus that swallows people up and deposits them in Alternate Worlds.

  The October/November Asimov’s is a “Special Slightly Spooky Issue,” which means that most of the stories in it are fantasy or soft horror, placing them out of my direct purview, although I did enjoy the stories by Alexander Jablokov, Michael Blumlein, and Sandra McDonald, as was pleased to see S.N. Dyer, once a regular at Asimov’s, return to it’s pages after a long absence. There is one SF story in the issue, “Water Scorpions,” by the ubiquitous Rich Larson, which, while not as interesting as “All That Robot Shit...”, does pack a powerful emotional punch in its story of a boy estranged from his adopted alien “brother,” and what brings about a reconciliation of sorts between them.

  The December Asimov’s is weaker than the September Asimov’s overall, but does feature a few good stories. The strongest of them is Karl Bunker’s “They Have All One Breath,” which takes us to a future Utopia created for humans by AIs and robots, and shows us how it becomes claustrophobic for some of its human residents. I also enjoyed “The Cold Side of the Island,” by Kali Wallace, a soft horror story about a strange discovery made in the deep woods by children years before which comes to haunt the rest of their adult lives; the story does an excellent job of setting up an eerie, ominous, threatening atmosphere—although in the final analysis, nothing particularly horrific actually happens.

  95

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

  Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, Alastair Reynolds, ed. By Jonathan Strahan and William Schaffer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-766-0, $45.00. 784 pages.) Cover art by Dominic Harman.

  Not So Much, Said the Cat, Michael Swanwick. (Tachyon, 978-1-61696-228-9, $15.95, 288 pages). Cover art by Elizabeth Story.

  Amaryllis and Other Stories, Carrie Vaughn. (Fairwood Press, 978-1-933846-63-0, $17.00.) Cover art by Elena Vizerskaya.

  The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin. (Saga Press, 978-148145113090, $29.99, 816 pages.)

  2016 was a strong year for short-story collections, by some of the best writers working at shorter lengths in the field.

  I’ve published this review before, last year, when it turned out that the collection wasn’t actually available to be bought—so now that is for sale, I thought I run the review again, as the book I’m about to mention is one of the best collections of the year, perhaps the best, and one that shouldn’t be missed—The Best of Ian McDonald, a selection of some of Ian McDonald’s best work from 1988 to 2013. McDonald is not exactly an obscure name in the field, probably most core SF readers will recognize him, and he did win a Hugo Award in 2007 for “The Djinn’s Wife” (included here), but I’ve always felt that he doesn’t really get the level of recognition that he deserves, either. For my money, Ian McDonald is one of the best SF writers currently working in the field, perhaps one of the three or four top writers, and although he has written critically acclaimed novels, he does much of his best work at shorter lengths—so you have a treat in store for you with this hefty collection, and perhaps a revelation if you haven’t encountered McDonald’s work before. McDonald’s range is wide and varied, and well represented here, from his “Future India” stories to New Space Opera, from stories of an alien invasion of Africa to stories of the sexual interactions of Terrans with their alien conquerors, from sly superhero stories to Retro SF to YA stories set on a terraformed Mars, from high-tech future sports stories to tales of dangerous encounters with the creatures of Faerie. Nothing is weak here, but the best stories include the aforementioned “The Djinn’s Wife,” “Verthandi’s Ring,” “After Kerry,” “[A Ghost Samba],” “Toward Kilimanjaro,” “Winning,” “Digging,” and “The Queen of Night’s Aria.” McDonald has done some of his best work at novella length, and it’s too bad that practical length restrictions didn’t allow the inclusion of stories such as “The Little Goddess” or “The Days of Solomon Gursky,” but at least two of his best novellas are here, “Tendeleo’s Story” and “The Tear.” In my opinion, “The Tear” was the best SF novell
a of 2008, and probably worth the price of admission all by itself.

  Another excellent collection is an enormous volume—784 pages—gathering some of Alastair Reynolds best work. I get the impression that Reynolds’s novels tend to sell better than McDonald’s do (certainly he struck a multi-volume deal last year for a number of novels for a price more than high enough to suggest that his publishers are betting that the novels may become bestsellers), but like McDonald, he also does some of his best work at shorter lengths. Like McDonald (and like contemporary Paul McAuley, whose 2013 collection A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley is another definitive collection that you ought to get if you want an overview of the best today’s SF can offer), Reynold’s often deals with stories that play out over a time-scale of thousands or even millions of years, and that cover immense vistas of time and space, often taking us from one end of universe to the other, and sometimes beyond, but I think it fair to say that Reynolds tends more toward traditional Space Opera of the old Superscience variety, especially in his novels, the kind of thing that once earned Edmond Hamilton the nickname of “Worldbuster” Hamilton or “Sunsmasher” Hamilton, than do McDonald or McAuley. Everything here is worth reading (and some of the stories, like “Zima Blue” or “The Water Thief” or “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter,” show him in a quieter, more personal, less Widescreen but no less effective mode), but the best stories include the three just mentioned above, plus “Troika,” “Beyond the Aquila Rift,” “Minla’s Flowers.” “Great Wall of Mars,” “Weather,” and “Thousandth Night.” Like McDonald and McAuley, Reynolds does some of this best work at novella length, and again, there was limited room for them, even in a book as big as this one. There was room for his wonderful novella “Troika,” though, which was little seen because of its appearance as an expensive small-press volume, but which I consider to have been perhaps the best novella of 2010.

  While it’s moderately safe to say that Reynolds, McDonald, and McAuley are primarily science fiction writers (although all of them occasionally write different kinds of material), Michael Swanwick is a bit harder to pin down as to grouping. More creatively playful than Reynolds, McDonald, or McAuley, he produces a wide range of material, including science fiction (some of it “hard” science fiction), fantasy, the occasional horror story, fabulations, flash fiction, and whimsies and literary curiosities of all sorts, including flash fiction stories about every element in the Periodic Table, stories sealed in bottles, and even stories written on autumn leaves and scattered in parks. Unfortunately, he doesn’t usually write novellas any more, but he may be one of the best writers we have at short story and short novelette length, his stories having grown sparse, economical, and concise, and sharp enough to cut your throat without you even realizing what’s happening until after the fact. Many of the best of his recent stories are gathered in his most recent collection, Not So Much, Said the Cat. The collection features both science fiction and fantasy, but, being who I am, I like the science fiction stories the best, so my favorites here include “Passage of Earth,” “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled,” “The Scarecrow’s Boy,” “The Dala Horse,” “3 a.m. In the Mesozoic Bar,” “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” and “For I Have Laid me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”—in mood ranging from grim and bleak (and few can get bleaker than Swanwick) to stories suffused with Swanwick’s sly, razor-sharp wit.

  Carrie Vaughn is by a considerable length the newest writer here, and has only moderately recently started to produce a lot of short fiction, having made her reputation before that with a series of bestselling Romantic Horror novels about the adventures of Kitty, a young werewolf who doubles as a DJ in the human world, but she already shows an impressive degree of expertise in the stories collected in Amaryllis and Other Stories. Vaughn also writes both science fiction and fantasy, with both collected here, but, again, being who I am, a lifelong science fiction fan, I like the science fiction the best, which means that my favorites here include “The Best We Can,” “Salvage,” “The Art of Homecoming,” “Astrophilia,” “Bannerless,” and “Amaryllis”—several of which have been Hugo finalists and appeared in various Best of the Year anthologies over the past few years.

  A good case could be made, and many have made it, that Ursula K. Le Guin could be considered one of the best writers of the 20th Century, let alone one of the best genre writers. Certainly her impact on the SF and fantasy fields has been incalculable. She was writing seminal SF decades before McDonald, Reynolds, Swanwick, or McAuley started selling fiction, and before Carrie Vaughn was even born. Le Guin has always done much of her best work at novella length, which is what makes the publication of The Found and The Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin so significant. I consider her stories about the slave revolt on the planet Yeowe and its long-term social implications—“Betrayals,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” “A Woman’s Liberation,” and formerly collected in the book Four Ways to Forgiveness—to be Le Guin’s strongest SF work since her classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness reshaped the genre in the ‘70s. They are all included here, as are other fine novellas—some about Le Guin’s interstellar community, the Ekumen, including a few more Yeowe stories, some taking place in the world of her famous fantasy series, Earthsea, some unrelated to either series—such as “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” “Old Music and the Slave Woman,” “The Matter of Seggri,” “On the High Marsh,” and “Paradises Lost.” If you only buy one genre collection this year—and why aren’t you buying more, you cheap bastard? There’s plenty of good ones out there!—it should probably be this one.

  2017

  96

  Asimov’s, January/February.

  Clarkesworld, January.

  Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts, ed. Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law (Laksa Media Group, 978-09939696607, $28.00, 368 pages.) Cover art by Samantha M. Asiko.

  The Big Book of Science Fiction, ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. (Vintage, 978-1101910092, $15.30, 1,216 pages).

  Asimov’s is off to a good start in 2017, with the first of its bi-monthly issues (the magazine was formerly monthly; the new bi-monthly format of fewer but bigger issues starts this year), the January/February issue, featuring a number of very strong stories and a generous helping of less exceptional but still entertaining ones. “The Speed of Belief,” by Robert Reed, set in Reed’s long-running Great Ship series—about a spaceship the size of Jupiter that contains millions of humans and different sorts of aliens as passengers—is one of the strongest Great Ship stories in a couple of years, taking two immortal cyborgs to establish contact with a unprecedentedly bizarre race of living, sentient alien rivers, accompanied by an ordinary human the rivers demand as a “sacrifice,” and who ends up playing a vastly more significant role than anyone could have expected. New writer Ray Nayler’s “Winter Timeshare” is a poignant and ultimately moving look at two lovers who are forced by circumstances (including the fact that one of them is dead) to spend only a few winter weeks together every year in Istanbul—but an Istanbul that is slowly being changed by political and social forces, threatening to interrupt their romantic idyll in an ominous and potentially deadly way. In Fatherbond, veteran SF writer Tom Purdom takes us to a newly settled colony planet whose settlers discover that they are not alone, for a typical Purdomesque blend of shrewd grassroots politics and keen psychological analysis, as one faction of the colonists tries to persuade the majority that decisive action must be taken against the enigmatic alien Custodian who controls their new world. In “Starphone,” Stephen Baxter introduces us to teenage refugees kept segregated from the rest of society who nevertheless figure out an ingenious way to Phone Home in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

  The other stories in January/February are weaker, but still enjoyable. Allen M. Steele takes us “Tagging Bruno” on the colony planet of Coyote (home of Steele’s long-running Coyote series of sto
ries and novels), a task that turns out to be trickier, more surprising, and a lot more dangerous than the scientists doing the tagging initially thought it would be; this is a rousing action piece, with a dislikable although believable villain, and the only difficulty I have with it is that you swapped the ferocious alien “boids” for “alligators,” there’s little reason the story couldn’t have taken place in the Everglades of current-day Earth. Several of the stories here are weakened by similar problems. The autumnal “Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks,” by John Alfred Taylor shows us an elderly couple bidding farewell to the idea of living on a beloved barrier island because global climate change and rising sea levels are making such an existence untenable—but the characters could have made the same decision after Hurricane Sandy, and there’s nothing here that really calls for the story to be SF, or set in the future, at all. Similarly, Sean Monaghan’s “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles” could easily have been told as a mainstream story about a father whose hopes of finding a miracle cure for his fatally ill son are quickly fading, substituting terrestrial wonders for the alien ones the father takes the boy to see; such SF touches as exist here are peripheral. Jim Grimsley’s “Still Life with Abyss” introduces us to a group of time-traveling scientists who are obsessed with observing the most boring man in the universe, one whose dull and mundane life is exactly the same in each of the millions of alternate time-lines they explore, although exactly why they find this so important is a little unclear to me even by the end of the story. In “The Catastrophe of Cities,” by Lisa Goldstein, two young girls discover a enigmatic series of doorways that leads instantly from one far-apart house in San Francisco to another, but soon discover that this network of sinister and seemingly deserted houses may only been the start of a much-more complex and much more dangerous Mystery.