2

Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders, ed. (Pyr 978-1-59102-692-1. 359pp, tp). Cover by John Picacio.

Eclipse Two, Jonathan Strahan, ed.

F&SF 10/11

Transhuman, Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf, eds. (Baen 1-4165-5523-4, $22.00, 287pp, hc). Cover by Dave Jeely.

Interzone 217

Clockwork Phoenix, Mike Allen, ed. (Norilana Books 978-1-934169-98-8, $10.95, 285pp, tp). Cover by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

Fast Ships, Black Sails, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-094-5, $14.95, 241pp, tp). Cover by Scott Altmann.

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, William Schafer, ed. (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-183-5, $40.00, 225pp, hc). June 2008. Cover by Dave McKean.

 

This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe in the ‘70s. All of the new annual original series launched last year—Lou Anders’s Fast Forward, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse, and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction—produced second volumes stronger than the initial volumes had been, a good sign.

It may be premature to speak of a renaissance or “New Golden Age” of original anthologies as some have been doing—none of these anthology series have firmly established themselves financially as yet, and in fact a few are rumored to not be selling so hot. Still, even if it’s just for this year, it’s nice to have so many good anthologies to hand to choose from.

Although they’re all within shouting distance of each other as far as quality is concerned, I’d have to say that the three strongest original SF anthologies of the year were Lou Anders’s Fast Forward 2, Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Two, and Strahan’s The Starry Rift (Strahan is having a good year, and deserves to be in at the hunt at Hugo time), with Lou Anders’s Sideways in Crime and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2 only a half-step below. Of these, I think I’d give a very slight edge to Fast Forward 2. The best stories here are probably Paolo Bacigalupi’s savvy look at the power of media in a future not too much further down the line, “The Gambler,” which reads like Bug Jack Barron for the 21st Century, and another of Ian McDonald’s wonderful Future India stories, this one about the intricacies of courtship in McDonald’s future, “An Eligible Boy”; McDonald must surely be working at the top of his powers these days, and these Future India stories are among the best work he’s ever done, which is saying quite a lot. Dominating the book for length, though, at over 32,000 words, and rivaling Bacigalupi and McDonald for quality, is Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow’s novella “True Names,” a Space Opera that manages to feel like a windscreen galaxy-spanner in spite of almost all the action taking place within a small asteroid, worlds within worlds within a grain of sand, and which piles almost too many High Concepts one atop the other to keep up with. Less idea-packed but perhaps more powerful on a human scale is Nancy Kress’s “The Kindness of Strangers,” which details a woman’s struggle to survive through and come to terms with an enigmatic but apocalyptic alien invasion. Jack Skillingstead’s “Alone with an Inconvenient Companion” sweeps you expertly through the story of a lonely man’s one-night-stand, although the Twilight Zoneish ending raises more questions than it settles, as Twilight Zoneish stories often do. Chris Nakashima-Brown’s visit to a future artist colony, “The Sun Also Explodes,” is full of what Bruce Sterling would have referred to as “eyeball clicks,” has a high bit-rate, and, as befits a postcyberpunk story of this sort, is seriously cool (perhaps almost too self-consciously cool, in fact), but ultimately seems rather pointless, less a story than a slice-of-life sketch. Paul Cornell’s “Catherine Drewe” also has a ferociously high bit-rate, the plot hurtling by, to the point where by the end, although I read it twice, I wasn’t entirely sure just what had happened or why. Paul McAuley’s “Adventure” makes the point that a far planet can be just as mundane and drab and unadventurous as the most drab and mundane parts of Earth (and that a loser’s a loser, no matter where he goes), but in the very act of making that point drains all the Sense of Wonder and exoticism out of the story, which seems a Pyretic victory. There are also good stories here by Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kay Kenyon, and others.

Several reviewers, including me, criticized Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse last year for not having enough real science fiction in it, but this isn’t a complaint that can be leveled at his Eclipse Two. There are still a couple of fantasy stories here, and some borderline slipstreamish stuff, but the bulk of the stuff in the book is good solid no foolin’ core science fiction. My favorite stories are Stephen Baxter’s autumnal look at the dangers of SETI, “Turing’s Apples,” Alastair Reynold’s “Fury,” about a robot prime minister struggling with intrigue and conspiracy in an all-powerful and corrupt future empire, and Karl Schroeder’s “The Hero,” an adventure through Schroeder’s complex “Virga” milieu, one of SF’s oddest cosmologies—although Ted Chiang comes up with an odder cosmology without breaking a sweat in “Exhalation,” which takes place in an all-robot world (lots of robots in Eclipse Two, for some reason!) of surpassing strangeness whose existence or origin is never explained in the slightest. By rights, I shouldn’t like Daryl Gregory’s “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm,” a strange, slipstreamish mixture of comic book superhero stuff and political suffering and endurance set in a rather Eastern European-like country, something like what you might get if you took Doctor Doom’s home country of Latveria seriously as a real country in the real world and got Solzhenitsyn to script the comic, but the images here are so riveting, and the mixture of the two discordant elements so striking and sometimes surprising, that I find that I can’t get it out of my mind; this is one of a couple of stories this year (Dominic Green’s “Shining Armour” from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2 is the other) that, to my mind, have been strongly influenced by anime (and they both feature giant robots, come to think of it!). David Moles’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” on the other hand, is clearly influenced by MMORPGs like World of Warcraft rather than by anime; there’s some great stuff here, but after awhile I began to get a bit tired of slogging through the gameworld, and think this would have been better served if it was only half as long as it is. Tony Daniel (who should write more short fiction) tackles the ultimate building project in the inventive “Ex Cathedra,” and Terry Dowling takes us to an alien-dominated future Earth in “Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose,” although the backstory is complex enough here that I was never entirely sure that I completely understood what was going on in the foreground. Paul Cornell puts a clever twist on the old idea of downloading a human mind into a computer, one of several this year, in “Michael Laurtis is Drowning,” a more satisfying turn than his one in Fast Forward 2. And Nancy Kress delivers a predictable and somewhat disappointing tale, much too Twilight Zonish, in “Elevator.” The best of the fantasy stories, by a good margin, is Peter S. Beagle’s bittersweet “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” although Richard Parks turns in a good pseudo-medieval fantasy in “Skin Deep,” and Margo Lanagan tells a curious folksy version of the Biblical story of the first Passover in “Night of the First Lines.”

The best story in the October/November Double Issue of F&SF is Geoff Ryman’s “Days of Wonder,” a tale of strange portmanteau creatures in the far future struggling to reassemble the knowledge of the Ancients, which has been hidden in their genes and distributed among several warring tribes, each with a different piece. It features a traditionally satisfying SF protagonist (not the narrator—the protagonist), a loner and outcast despised because she’s Different, and feared and resented because of the changes she’d like to make in the way Things Have Always Been Done (a nerd, basically, like most SF writers and many fans), and a traditionally satisfying ending where, after many trials and after losing everything she holds dear, she eventually triumphs. Also first-rate is Michael Swanwick’s “The Scarecrow’s Boy,” a rather grim tale told in the deceptively simple tone of a children’s book about an obsolete and abandoned robot who takes it on himself to try to protect a human boy against the consequences of human politics. Albert E. Cowdrey offers us another of his evocative tales about New Orleans, drenched in local color, although “Inside Story” is SF rather than the more usual fantasy. Steven Utley contributes a bleak and airless, but powerful, story about a man trapped inside a rather nasty high-tech hell, “Sleepless Years,” and Terry Bisson tells a tale of online voyeurs watching voyeurs watching, “Private Eye.” Stephen King whips us through a story of telephone calls from the dead with his usual expert ease in “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates,” without taking us to anyplace particularly new, Robert Reed spins a rather dull writer’s fantasy in “The Visionaries,” Scott Bradfield takes too long to tell us how “Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter’s Guild,” although there are some amusing satirical bits along the way, and Tim Sullivan tells an at first somewhat familiar story of survival on an airless planet that spins off in some bizarre and unexpected directions, in “Planetestimal Dawn.”

There are probably no award-winners in Transhuman, edited by Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf (title makes the subject matter self-explanatory, surely), but there is a respectable amount of good solid core SF. Best story here is by David D. Levine, but there are also good stories by Mark L. Van Name, Paul Chafe, Sarah A. Hoyt, Wen Spenser, and others.

I liked Interzone 217 more than the previous issue, the Mundane issue. The most striking story here, although I’m not sure that it’s science fiction, is Jason Sanford’s “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain.” Elegantly written, this story dances on the borderline between SF and surrealism, and features one of the more peculiar and intricate cosmologies you’re likely to see, none of which is ever explained or rationalized—which inclines me toward the surrealism side of the scale. In another first-rate story, Paul McAuley entertainingly tells a Beserker story from the Beserker’s point of view, in “Little Lost Robot.” In “Africa,” Karen Fishler gives us an absorbing character study of a man faced with some hard choices, the guardian of an embargoed and quarantined Earth who must decide if anything can justify bending the rules (found the idea that the embargo of Earth would be left to be enforced by only one man a bit hard to believe, though).

Clockwork Phoenix, edited by Mike Allen, is a mixed science fiction/fantasy anthology, with a few slipstream stories thrown in for good measure. In an exceptional year for original anthologies, it doesn’t come in at the top of the heap, but there is a lot of good stuff here, and the cover, an effective use of an old painting, is lovely. The best story in Clockwork Phoenix, by a considerable margin, is Vandana Singh’s “Oblivion: A Journey”—an obsessive, decades-long hunt for revenge through interstellar space that reminds me in a way of Roger Zelazny, although perhaps a bit more somber and less flamboyant—although there are also solid SF stories here by John C. Wright, Cat Sparks, C.S. MacCath, and others. The best of the fantasy stories is “The Woman,” by Tanith Lee, but there is also unusual fantasy work here by Marie Brennan, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Ekaterina Sedia, and others.

Playful and a lot of fun, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Fast Ships, Black Sails is an anthology of original pirate story/fantasy crosses, pirate/slipstream crosses, and even a few pirate/SF crosses. If some authors here give the impression that the whole of their research into pirates consisted of watching a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean, others clearly know their stuff, and, for the most part, even the stories that are the sketchiest on the pirate stuff make up for it with the colorful fantasy element. The best stories here are Garth Nix’s “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe,” another of his hugely entertaining Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories (a series that is clearly one of the modern heirs of Fritz Leiber’s “Gray Mouser” stories, along with Michael Swanwick’s “Darger and Surplus” stories), Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s SF story “Boojum” (one of several deliberately retro-pulp SF Space Pirates stories this year, another being Alastair Reynolds’s “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice,” from Strahan’s The Starry Rift), which features a rapacious living spaceship, and Kage Baker’s “I Begyn as I Mean to Go On,” the third pirate story that Kage—who clearly does know her pirates—has produced in the last couple of years (the others being 2006’s “The Maid on the Shore” and this year’s Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key), and the closest thing to a straightforward pirate story here, although there is some creepy stuff on the island where the pirates go in search of treasure. The anthology also contains good work by Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Naomi Novik, Howard Waldrop, Carrie Vaughn, and others. The stories in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, edited by William Schafer, are fairly representative of the kind of stories usually to be found on the Subterranean website, although none of them actually appeared there, being published for the first time here instead: fantasy, dark fantasy sometimes shading into horror, a smattering of science fiction, all extremely well-crafted. The best stories here are the playfully bleak “Penguins of the Apocalypse,” a sort of sinister version of the movie Harvey, by William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers’s bizarre and complex SF story, “The Hour of Babel,” Patrick Rothfuss’s gripping sword & sorcery tale, “The Road to Levinshir,” and Kage Baker’s nostalgic but chilling seaside fantasy, “Caverns of Mystery.” There are also good stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Carey, and others.