Sense of Wonder

by Gardner Dozois

  Nothing else here is anywhere near as strong as the two novellas. In addition to “Nexus,” which features time-travel, the issue also contains six other time-travel stories, most of them rather slight, which does seem like too much of the same thing on your plate. “Europa’s Survivors,” by Marianne J. Dyson, and “The Human Way,” by Tony Ballantyne are somewhat stronger—at least they’re not time-travel stories, being set on alien worlds instead. “Ecuador vs. The Bug-Eyed Monsters,” by Jay Werkheiser, explores a familiar scenario, a human sports team being forced to play an alien team, with the fate of the world or at least very important things at stake, but at least it handles the familiar material with some style and panache.

  The March/April Asimov’s is also strong. Most substantial story here, and the most ambitious—perhaps a little too ambitious at times—is Damien Broderick’s novella, “Tau Zero.” This complex, densely told novella deals with the attempt by young bohemian scientists to find technological ways to manipulate the Tao, enabling them, among much else, to predict winning lottery numbers. But rivals can also learn how to play the same game, and when one of them uses the Tao to launch a devastating attack on their son Ship, the story’s main protagonist, it’s up to Ship’s childhood “robot dog,” grown into a immensely powerful AI in some distant and perhaps alternative future, to return and attempt to rescue him. Lots of fascinating concepts here, although later on, when Ship and his extended family and his potential girlfriend are cruising around in the family car in and out of dimensional gateways, rescuing isolated family members, it strikes me as being a bit like an updated version of Robert A. Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, with better technobabble, and I’m not at all sure that you can just wave your hand and ignore the paradoxes raised by not making the decisions that lead to the story’s main action in the first place. Still, this is a solidly enjoyable piece, even light-hearted in its way. The only other quibble I had with it was the quotations from the Tao Te Ching, which come along every couple of paragraphs, became for me like speed-bumps, keeping me from becoming fully absorbed in the story on the page; eventually, I just skipped them.

  Also good in the March/April Asimov’s is “Three Can Keep a Secret,” by Bill Johnson and Gregory Frost, a hugely entertaining romp about a freelance con artist and occasional assassin trying to carry out a difficult and contradictory mission, working for more than one master with opposing goals at the same time; this one is not meant to be taken particularly seriously, but is a great deal of fun, something that’s often missing in today’s SF. Suzanne Palmer’s “Number Thirty-Nine Skink” is the poignant tale of a robot tasked with seeding Terran life on an alien planet who comes to have a crisis of conscience about displacing the life-forms native to that world. “Cupido,” by Rich Larson, is a story about a designer of powerful pheromones who almost gets caught in the webs of his own weaving, and then faces a sharp-edged crisis of conscience of his own. “The Wisdom of the Group,” by Ian R. MacLeod, is about a member of a group of “super-predictors” who may not be able to see his own future coming. “After the Atrocity,” by Ian Creasey, teaches us that there’s no technology so benign and life-affirming that it can’t be also put to evil ends.

  The strongest story in the May/June F&SF is “My English Name,” by new writer R.S. Benedict, all the more remarkable in its polished professionalism for being her first published story. This is a creepy yet ultimately moving story about a man with a secret so deeply buried that even he no longer knows what it is, and how everything falls apart at the end in spite of his desperate efforts to hold things together, generating a powerful emotional charge. Also good in the May/June F&SF is Matthew Hughes’s “The Prognosticant,” another adventure of wizard’s henchman Baldemar in a flamboyant Vancian far, far future where magic has replaced science; this one features a guest appearance from another of Hughes’s continuing series characters, Raffalon, and while not as engrossing as Hughes’s “Ten Half-Pennies” from the March/April F&SF, still provides plenty of vivid, highly colored entertainment. Gregor Hartmann involves his continuing character Franden, a scriptwriter for a soap-opera program who lives on a distant colony planet teetering on the brink of Civil War, in a fateful Extreme Combat-like cage match in “What the Hands Know,” a match that turns out to have extreme and possibly deadly political implications and consequences; lots of nice detail here about the advantages and weaknesses to be conferred in close combat by wearing “skarmor,” a fabric that defuses kinetic energy, muffling the damaging effect of blows. Kelly Jennings “The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs” is exactly what it says that it is—a very sad look at the aftermath of a worldwide Apocalypse, using the protagonist’s relationship with his last five dogs as a measuring stick. Keep the tissues handy while reading this one.

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  Lightspeed, January.

  Lightspeed, February

  Lightspeed, March.

  Lightspeed, April.

  Lightspeed, May.

  Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future, January 2017.

  Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Saga Press, 978-1-4814-3501-7, $16.99. 368 pages.) Cover Art by Chris Foss.

  Online magazine Lightspeed got off to a bit of a weak start in 2017, with the reprint stories being stronger than the original stories in both the January issue (reprints by James S.A. Corey and Mary Rosenblum) and the February issue (reprints by Ian R. MacLeod and Seanan McGuire), although there were solid but unexceptional stories such as “Nine-Tenths of the Law,” by Molly Tanzer (January) and “The Last Garden,” by Jack Skillingstead (February).

  The March issue of Lightspeed was much stronger. The best story in March, and one of the best I’ve seen so far this year, is “The Wordless,” by Indrapramit Das, which takes us to a distant planet which serves as a crossover point for interstellar ships, the story told from the perspective of the pariahs who are allowed to run snack and souvenir booths for the tourists but who can never leave on one of the great shining ships themselves—and in particular from the point of view of a man who is so desperate for a new start for his family that he’s willing to try anything, no matter how insanely dangerous, to achieve. Also good in March is “Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes,” by Greg Kurzawa, a dark, grim, brooding story about a man who is declared by the government to be not really human (a similar idea was explored in Robert Reed’s “Dunnage for the Soul” in the January/February F&SF), and the devastating effect this has on his family. I think this one could have used just a slice more backstory, as the father is classified as a “hybrid,” but we’re never told a hybrid of what; it’s also possible that the story would have been less unrelievedly grim if the author had stuck with either the government crackdown and oppression storyline or the lost children storyline rather than trying to combine both at once. (I’m also bewildered as to why this is classified as “Fantasy”—but then, the classifications in Lightspeed often puzzle me.)

  The April Lightspeed is less strong, but still features a good story about a woman searching across multiple timelines for a version of her daughter to replace the one she feels she’s lost, “Seven Permutations of My Daughter,” by Lina Rather, and a story about a hospital worker who gets in trouble for trying to extend health-care services beyond the grave, “Remote Presence,” by Susan Palwick.

  With the May Lightspeed, we’re back to the reprint stories (by Tobias S. Buckell, Seanan McGuire, and Amal El-Mohtar) being stronger than even the best of the issue’s original stories, “This Is For You,” by Bruce McAllister, which starts out as an interesting, somewhat YA-flavored story about a human boy who’d been raised on an alien planet trying to readjust to life in human society and take the first shy steps in courting a girl he likes—and then veers suddenly into horror, utilizing a gimmick that I found extremely unlikely.

  For several years, the people behind MIT’s Technology Review Magazine have been putting out an annual all-fiction issue, usually published as a separate chapb
ook. I haven’t seen one from them so far this year, but now Wired magazine has gotten into the act, with it’s January 2017 issue being dedicated as Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future. I can find no information on the Wired website as to who the editor of the Fiction Issue is, although it may possibly be Robert Capps, who is listed on the masthead as Head of Editorial. Nor can I find any information as to how much it would cost to order just the January issue, without taking out a yearly subscription to the magazine, so you’re on your own there. Fortunately, all the stories in the Fiction Issue are also available on the Wired website, www.wired.com, so if you want to check them out but don’t necessarily want to take out an annual subscription, you can do so.

  The issue contains almost exclusively of near-future stories that deal with the possibilities (or threats) of emerging technologies, much as do the MIT all-fiction issues. Also like the MIT volumes, there are some worthwhile stories here, although some of them come off as rushed and didactic—as though, having come up with an interesting future situation, the author didn’t want to bother with (or wasn’t given to space to do so) an involving human story to tell in it. The best story here, by a good margin, is one in which the author did take the time to craft a compelling human story to go along with the futuristic speculation, “The Hunger After You’re Fed,” by Daniel Abraham. This takes place in a small near-future Mexican village where an acolyte is obsessively trying to discover the true identity of—and ideally to meet—a famous radical writer who publishes only under an impenetrable pseudonym. There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been told as a mainstream story—a historical piece, perhaps, with the acolyte searching for the famously reclusive author B. Traven, who similarly kept his real identity secret—but the very clever details that Abraham works into the background about the benefits and disadvantages of a society where everyone is paid a guaranteed monthly income, and the way those strengths and weaknesses mirror the radical social theorizing of the anonymous writer the obsessed protagonist so admires, puts the story solidly into the ranks of the best of social science fiction. Also good here is “First,” by John Rogers, an unusually sentimental piece for an anthology whose stories tend to slant toward the bleak and uncertain (as the title warned us), about how and why Martian colonists came to celebrate a peculiar historical anniversary. Also with several real human stories in it, “Know Your Enemy,” by Matt Gallagher, is an entertaining bit of military SF, although it takes place a long way from the obvious battlefield, about a group of cynical, disillusioned “war heroes” who are compelled to go on a bond drive, and the price each of them on the tour must pay for being trotted onstage and applauded every night as heroes.

  I don’t think it’s likely that Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, edited by John Joseph Adams, is going to turn out to be the best SF anthology of the year, but it’s a solid middle-ranker with some very entertaining stuff in it, certainly well worth the modest cover price. Only a few stories, most notably those by Karl Schroeder and Charlie Jane Anders, really deliver on the “Sense of Wonder”-inducing “cosmic scale” promised in the editor’s introduction—mostly we get lots of space battles, narrow escapes, warring races, ancient artifacts, chases, daring capers, double-crosses, and political intrigue; the editor specifically mentions that he wanted stories in the spirit of the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy, and that’s a good analogy, and pretty much exactly what you get. It’s a Space Opera anthology, in other words, mostly on the low-end of the probability curve as far as the believability of its science is concerned, but still delivering lots of reading entertainment, amusement, and fun for those who don’t insist on their SF being as rigorous and hard as possible. It’s difficult to do Space Opera at short-story length, and a few of the stories here, almost all short, call out for the greater space for development that would be granted by the novelette or novella form, but most do an adequate job of delivering within the length-constraints they’ve been given to work with.

  The most satisfying story here in some ways is “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” by Tobias S. Buckell, about a philosophically inclined maintenance robot, who spends his time hanging on to the skin of the spaceship he’s charged with repairing, who must wrestle with the problems of free will, when his programming forces him to do something he doesn’t want to do and that he knows is wrong; this is one of the few stories here where you get the feeling that the protagonist has something of real significance to lose, even if the protagonist is a crab-shaped metal creature. Also good, and a bit more serious-minded than many of the other stories, is “Golden Ring,” by Karl Schroeder, in which the avatar of an artificially created sun wanders the ruins of a planet from which all life has seemingly been wiped (much like a more somber Wall-e) and must deal with the guilty knowledge that it was she herself who was responsible for the planet’s civilization being destroyed, when she turned her sunlight away from it in a fit of depression and existential despair; lots of discussion here about the implications of the Big Bang/Big Crunch cycle deliver on the “cosmic scale” promise. Charlie Jane Anders’s “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” is that rare creature, a Space Opera comedy, in which some fairly “sensawunda” concepts, like a living planet, are played broadly for laughs, with characters named things like “the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak” who drink cognac-and-bacon cocktails, and although I did get a few chuckles out of it, I think that on the whole the author was trying too hard. “The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun,” by Aliette de Bodard, is another in her series of “Xuya” stories, this one mostly concerned with racial survivor’s guilt. “The Chameleon’s Gloves,” by Yoon Ha Lee, deals with a caper gone wrong and the price for being forgiven for past sins. In “Diamond and the World Breaker,” by Linda Nagata, a security officer must help her daughter to commit the ultimate crime, one that could destroy their world, in a desperate attempt to ensure that she has a future at all. There’s also good work here by Seanan McGuire and Kameron Hurley, and reprints by Vylar Kaftan, Caroline M. Yoachim, and others.

  100

  Clarkesworld, February.

  Clarkesworld, March

  Clarkesworld, April

  Clarkesworld, May.

  Extrasolar—Postscripts 38, ed. Nick Gevers. (PS Publishing, 978-1-786-171-4, 30 pounds; 313 pages.) Cover art by Tomislav Tikulin.

  The best story in the February Clarkesworld is “Assassins,” by Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier, which makes good use of a clever idea: an assassin who “kills” popular characters in computer games rather than people in real life—something that eventually leads her to be targeted by a rival who wants to do the same thing to her, or, rather, to her avatar. It’s smoothly and expertly told, a nice twist on the usual cyberpunkish assassin story. “How Bees Fly,” by Simone Heller, is one of those stories that tries to make you think it’s a fantasy, only to eventually turn out to be science fiction instead—although there are few experienced genre readers who won’t figure out what the “demons” are almost from the beginning. The story is about a villager in a harsh and unwelcoming post-apocalyptic world who becomes “contaminated by contact” with the demons and so is exiled from the shelter of the village to almost certain death outside, and who must thereafter reluctantly join forces with the demon family in order to have a chance of survival. It ends on a note of hope—perhaps a bit hollow, considering the state of the world as portrayed. “Rain Ship,” by Chi Hui is an odd far-future story, the protagonists of which seem to be some sort of rats who have evolved to human-level intelligence and developed a society of their own millions of years after humans have mysteriously disappeared. Surrounded by immense (to them, as they are still rat-sized—something I find a bit unlikely) remains of human civilization, they have followed the human example by expanding their civilization into space. Now a crashed but still mostly intact human starship has been found on a distant world, and several groups are vying to explore it and exploit it in different ways. Most of the rest of the st
ory is an fairly standard action tale as the groups fight it out for control of the human ship, but the background is intriguing, and the difference in physical scale between rats and humans, as seen from the perspective of the rats, is used to good effect throughout.

  The most affecting story in the March Clarkesworld is Naomi Kritzer’s “Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe,” which is about just what it says it’s about. The fantastic element here is slight, about how society deals with the knowledge that Earth is about to be hit by a dinosaur-killer asteroid that will likely wipe-out all life on the planet. I’ve seen this scenario dealt with before a few times in recent years, and Kritzer doesn’t bring any startling new twists to it, but she’s very good at handling the emotional end, the human reactions and interactions as a random assortment of characters gather in Patty’s Place Cafe in a small town in South Dakota to wait out the clock on the end of the world. By the end, the story is quite moving. “Two Ways of Living,” by Robert Reed, also in March, tells the story of the rather glum life of a man who alternates between long stretches of hibernation and waking periods in which he stuffs himself with food to prepare for the next bout of hibernation. There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason given as to why he lives this way. He doesn’t seem to be trying to extend his life to live long enough for science to have found a cure for a fatal disease, the usual reason given for hibernating in most science fiction stories, nor does he seem to derive any sort of enjoyment from a lifestyle which is portrayed as claustrophobic, dull, and achingly lonely. One can only assume that he does it because he wants to cut himself off from the world to the greatest extent possible without actually dying.