5

F&SF, 1/09

F&SF, 2/09

Asimov’s, 1/09

Asimov’s, 2/09

Subterranean, Winter 2009

Tor.com

The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, Quercus One, Paul Brazier, ed. (Three Legged Fox Books, 978-0-9554783-2-1, no cover price listed, 258 pages). No cover art credited.

Clarkesworld, January

 

With the somewhat dubious exception of a Carol Emshwiller story, there is no science fiction whatsoever in the January 2009 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Best story in the January issue is probably Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Seafarer’s Blood,” which isn’t quite up to Cowdrey’s usual standards, but which still delivers some slyly satiric touches in telling the story of a man who “travels” in time by possessing the bodies of people in the past while they’re both asleep; unfortunately, it turns out that that door swings both ways, and comic confusion and mayhem ensues; it’s the sort of thing I could see Topper author Thorne Smith writing if he’d somehow survived into the 21st Century. Solid reading value is also provided by Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Minuteman’s Witch,” which retells the Battles of Lexington and Concord from a supernatural perspective; this is entertaining, but perhaps too obviously the opening chunk of a novel. Dean Whitlock, who had been a hot new author in the ‘80s and who hasn’t been heard from for many years, makes a welcome return with “Changeling,” which is really a rather sweet mainstream story which doesn’t so much have a fantastic element as a highly unlikely element, as a forlorn young couple “drive” their Volkswagen out into the North Atlantic in search of dreams; I hope actual Volkswagen owners aren’t inspired to try this, since in real life my guess is that the car would either sink or they’d be swept helplessly out to sea. Michael Meddor’s “The Boy Who Sang for Others” is also rather sweet, a difficult trick to pull off, since it’s about demonic possession. Also, you guessed it, sweet (in fact, “sweet” is the defining word for this issue) is Carol Emshwiller’s “The Perfect Infestation” (which can pass for science fiction if you give it a large enough benefit of the doubt), in which alien parasites who have infested the bodies of dogs and cats in preparation for an invasion decide to give up on the conquest plans because they enjoy being pets so much (my immediate thought was, what about all the thousands of feral cats and dogs freezing in alleyways in every large city, to say nothing of all those battered and abused animals you see on Miami Animal Police and other such shows—wouldn’t they be more than glad to go ahead with the subjugation of the human race?). Not sweet at all, rather nasty, in fact, is Jim Aiken’s “An Elvish Sword of Great Antiquity”—but it’s also highly predictable.

There is some SF in the February F&SF, but not a lot; again, the bulk of the contents are fantasy. Charles Coleman Finlay returns with an SF piece this time, perhaps the issue’s strongest story, “The Texas Bake Sale,” which covers much the same kind of semi-comic gonzo After-the-Apocalypse territory that Neal Barrett, Jr. has covered in a number of stories such as “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus”—perhaps a bit less gonzo than Barrett’s stuff, played rather straight, in fact, once you get by the silly Bake Sale gimmick, but still an entertaining read. Mario Milosevic’s “Winding Broomcorn” is another sweet fantasy, this one about benign witchcraft, Eugene Mirabelli’s “Catalog,” more slipstream than fantasy, is just peculiar, and never did make a lot of sense to me, and Fred Chappell’s “Shadow of the Valley” is another in his fantasy “shadow traders” series, which is beginning to wear a bit thin for me. By far the bulk of the issue is devoted to a reprint of Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog”; now this is undoubtedly a classic fantasy, one that won a number of awards on first publication, perhaps the best “ghost car” story ever written, gripping and, yes, rather sweet, at least in a sweetly autumnal way—but since it takes up so many pages here, I think I’d rather have seen the space devoted to new material instead.

The January issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is considerably more substantial, especially if, like me, you prefer the meat-and-potatoes of actual core SF to fantasy. The best story in the January Asimov’s, and one of the best of the year so far, is Mary Rosenblum’s “Lion Walk,” a fast-paced and compelling SF mystery set in a nature reserve where scientists are recreating creatures from the Pleistocene by selective breeding, a story that manages to work both as genuine SF and a genuine mystery, and featuring, as Rosenblum’s work almost always does, a complex and sympathetic viewpoint character. (I find it a little unlikely that the United States would really be willing to devote so much of its territory to a nature reserve, but I’m willing to give Rosenblum a pass on that in the interests of getting a highly entertaining story in return.) The other top story in January is Robert R. Chase’s “Five Thousand Light Years from Birdland,” a clever and well thought-out First Contact story that also functions as a homage to Poul Anderson—and if you don’t know why, you need to read more Anderson (something that’s becoming easier to do, as Baen and NESFA Press are bringing much of his short work back into print). Damien Broderick’s “Uncle Bones” is a high-tech zombie story which sets up an emotionally powerful situation whose consequences it then mostly dodges by veering off into TV-cop-show melodramatics, and Will McIntosh’s “Bridesicle” is another look at a kind of high-tech “life after death,” a rather unlikely one, teetering on the verge of satire without quite falling all the way over into it, although it does provide a somewhat dubious answer to the always-vexed question of who’s going to pay for cryogenically storing all those people and how; like Broderick, McIntosh rather slides away from the most unsettling aspects of his own story, and the subplot about “riders” may actually be more interesting than his actual premise. Nancy Kress does her usual expert job with “Unintended Behavior,” but this one strikes me as rather pro forma, and I could see the “surprise” ending coming a long way away. E. Salih’s “Messiah Excelsa” is opaque and uninvolving, and Larry Niven’s “Passing Perry Crater Base, Time Uncertain,” is very minor.

The big story in the February Asimov’s is Judith Berman’s novella “Pelago,” which starts deep in media res, rather confusingly, and never stops for breath thereafter. Much of the backstory is never explained, although a lot of it can be worked out by implication, which gives some of the story a vaguely fuzzy quality, as though it’s slightly out-of-focus, something which is exacerbated by the way it’s written. Stripped of its stylistic flourishes, and ignoring some of the mysteries of its unexplained backstory, it’s a rather straightforward and headlong New Space Opera adventure, fast-paced, suspenseful, full of inventive detail, rather like something Alastair Reynolds might write—in fact, in plot and setting it reminded me quite a bit of Reynolds’s novella “Nightingale,” from 2006. Berman, though, has chosen to write her dialog in a “creole” form which is occasionally quite hard to parse, especially at first; eventually you get more used to it and it becomes easier to understand, but it does make the story harder to get through, requiring the reader to put more work into reading it, something that can be dangerous—the reader may choose to give up instead. This is obviously the first section of a novel, coming to a logical stopping place rather than actually resolving, and I’m not sure how many readers are going to have the patience to force their way through four hundred pages of creole dialog.

Another strong story in February is Colin P. Davies’s “The Certainty Principle,” which sets up an intriguing situation and poises some hard questions to its characters, but which then also slides away into unlikely TV Cop Show melodramatics at the end; I think it might have been better to set this whole story on Mars, rather than introducing the present-day after-the-fact storyline (or, conversely, vice versa—not both at once, though). Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling offer us a knockabout Cosmological Farce (like a sex farce, but with physics rather than sex) in the typically frenetic “Colliding Branes,” in which two runaway bloggers are faced with the imminent end of the universe. Since they remain throughout much more concerned by continuing to blog than by the fact that the universe is coming to an end, surely one of the jokes, and never show much emotional affect, the catastrophe lacks any real emotional weight for the reader; having painted themselves into a corner, with the universe in the process of being destroyed, Rucker and Sterling then conjure up an ingenious but unlikely (and very Ruceresque) multi-dimensional way to rescue the protagonists at literally the last possible second. Matthew Johnson’s “The Coldest War” is a tense story of two soldiers (or are there two?) playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game on an isolated arctic island during a renewed Cold War between Canada and Denmark. The details of the cold-weather technology needed to function militarily in such an extreme environment are worked out cleverly and convincingly, but the whole situation, having to fire a flare once a day to establish possession of the island, seems rather pointless—which probably is the point, in the final analysis. Speaking of the point, Steven Utley’s “The Point” is expertly cooked gruel, but rather thin gruel for all of that; clever but minor. Carol Emshwiller’s “The Bird Painter in Time of War” is a poignant fabulation about the futility and brutality of war, obviously deeply felt, and will undoubtedly bring a tear to the eye of many a reader—for my taste, though, you could see the author pulling the strings behind the scenes just a little too obviously here.

An odd item is The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, Quercus One (Three Legged Fox Books), edited by Paul Brazier, a British small-press anthology of stories that have supposedly been previously published in electronic form on the members-only Quercus SF site (www.quercus-sf.com—although it doesn’t seem to have been undated for several years). Half of the book is taken up by rather specialized Alternate History stories about alternate fates for the now-destroyed West Pier in Brighton, England, hence the title, and the rest of the book is devoted to more generalized SF, fantasy, and slipstream stories. Best thing here is Liz Williams’s “Who Pays,” a high-tech literalization of Egyptian mythology, but there are also good stories by Geoff Ryman, Lavie Tidhar, Andy W. Robertson, Chris Butler, and others.

Posted up to date on the Winter 2009 issue of Subterranean is a gritty look at a night in a Mean Streets free clinic during the ‘60s, “Clinic,” by Kris Nelscott—no fantastic element, but a fine absorbing read with excellent period detail. The new Tor.com has an elaborate metafictional fantasy by Jeff VanderMeer, “Errata,” clever but not really my cup of tea. The January Clarkesworld has a wistful look at a boy caught quite literally between two worlds, one an alien world as it is and the other the same world as it might have been, “Celadon,” by Desirina Boskovich, and a bittersweet story told in email form about a boy caught in the trap of poverty and desperate circumstances on the Moon, “Teaching Bigfoot to Read,” by Geoffrey W. Cole; it could just as easily have been told with a factory worker in Pittsburgh or Cleveland standing in for the story’s dissolute Moon laborer father, with no really significant changes, which comes close to making it SF only by courtesy—but it’s affecting enough that I’m willing to give it a break. After all, if there ever is a big city on the Moon, no doubt it will contain the poor and marginalized as well as the rich and powerful, and it ought to be valid to write about them as well, even if their lives aren’t all that different from their brethren in grinding poverty on the current-day Earth.