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The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three, George Mann ed. (Solaris, 987-1-84416-599-5, $7.99, 406 pages). Cover art by Hardy Fowler.

Clockwork Phoenix 2, Mike Allen ed. (Norilana Books, 1-60762-027-8, $11.95, 292 pages.) Cover art by Gustav Klimt.

Strange Horizons, 1/09

Strange Horizons, 2/09

Strange Horizons, 3/09

Abyss & Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction, issue 29, 1st Quarter 2009

Abyss & Apex: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction, issue 30, 2nd Quarter 2009

Interzone 221

The New Yorker, 5/09

 

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three, edited by George Mann, is full of good solid stuff, although, with a couple of exceptions, nothing really first-rate. Almost everything here is at least nominally science fiction, no straightforward fantasy, although many of the stories have a decided steampunk edge, taking place in Victorian-flavored futures or alternate worlds which occasionally seem to have supernatural elements—this being the most noticeable in John Meaney’s “Necroflux Day,” which is set in his Bone Song universe, and in Tim Akers’s steampunk zombie story “A Soul Stitched to Iron.” The best stories here, by a good margin, are Paul Cornell’s “One of Our Bastards Is Missing,” which comes across like a Ruritanian romance written by Charles Stross, with lots of clever detail and fast action, and Daniel Abraham’s “The Best Monkey,” an ingenious futuristic elaboration of the old saw about how Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Alastair Reynolds’s “The Fixation” tells the somewhat abstract story of how one universe/reality causes another one to fade out of existence by adding miniscule amounts of entropy to it from many different universes, and Stephen Baxter tells a complex cosmological tale, also somewhat abstract, in “Artifacts.” Warren Hammond tells a solidly entertaining mystery/SF cross-genre story set on an impoverished frontier planet in “Carnival Night,” Scott Edelman shows us robot perverts who want to make love to each other the way the long-extinct humans used to do in “Glitch,” and Paul Di Filippo has a different take on the “machines building their own society after all the humans are gone” motif in “Providence,” with sentient construction machinery rather than humanoid robots, sort of like a grimmer WALL-E, or what Thomas the Tank Engine might be like if he had a flamethrower and wanted to score drugs; it’s also reminiscent of Brian Stableford’s story from Peter Crowther’s I Think, Therefore I Am, which also featured sentient heavy machinery. Ken MacLeod offers us a sharp satirical look at machine intelligence that could also have fit easily into I Think, Therefore I Am, cleaning crews doggedly battle sinister robot infestations in Ian Whates’s “The Assistant,” Gaia takes a belated hand in human destiny in Adam Roberts’s “Woodpunk,” Jack Skillingstead provides a “Rescue Mission” that the protagonists have to battle through a morass of hallucinations on an alien planet in order to accomplish, and in “Long Stay,” Ian Watson takes twenty pages to tell essentially the same story that Thomas M. Disch told in a few in “Descending.”

Like last year’s Seeds of Change, one of the stated aims of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three is to feature more upbeat stories that offer a more positive alternative to the gloomy and hopeless dystopian futures that have become standard in the field, and George Mann delivers an eloquent Introduction to that effect, urging writers to craft stories full of the sense of wonder again, stories that “have fun getting there” on the way to their fictional future. I agree entirely with this; although I like a well-crafted dystopian story as well as anyone else, the balance has swung too far in that direction, and nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future have become so standard in the genre that it’s almost become stylized, an automatic default setting, with few writers bothering to try to imagine viable human futures that somebody might actually want to live in. Unfortunately, also like Seeds of Change, the anthology doesn’t really do that good a job of actually delivering such stories—the Baxter, the Meaney, the Reynolds, the Akers, and the Abraham are actually rather gloomy (with Baxter in particular painting a depressing picture of what the future of our society is going to be), humans are on the way out in the Roberts story, and in the Edleman and the Di Filippo stories, humans are already extinct, which makes it a bit difficult to create viable human futures. Only the Cornell, with its brisk cosmic-powered Great Game intrigue, provides any real sense of fun.

Latest word in the field is that Solaris the imprint is being discontinued, which presumably will make this the last volume in the Solaris original anthology series, unless the imprint is sold and gains a new lease on life elsewhere. That makes it the first of the hopeful new anthology series founded in the last couple of years to die, and although it was never quite in the same class as Eclipse and Fast Forward, it was always full of solid, substantial entertainment, well worth reading, and will be missed.

Another good but not exceptional collection, perhaps a bit weaker overall than The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three, is Clockwork Phoenix 2, edited by Mike Allen. Last year’s Clockwork Phoenix was divided between science fiction and fantasy/slipstream, but there’s little science fiction in Clockwork Phoenix 2, which has more fantasy, and a lot more slipstream, which, for me, makes it less substantial than its predecessor. Science fiction is limited to two nicely done but not really major stories, Leah Bobet’s “Six,” a post-Apocalyptic story set in a ruined urban future but with a nicely hopeful ending to cut the gloom (this actually would have been a good fit with the stated goals of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three), and “The Endangered Camp,” by Ann Leckie, in which velociraptors set off on a Heroic Quest and are faced with a difficult choice that may decide whether their race survives or not—Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer’s technohorror piece “each thing I show you is a piece of my death,” sort of a computer age version of Fritz Leiber’s “Midnight in the Mirror World,” could be considered to be SF, I guess, but since there’s no non-supernatural explanation ultimately offered for the phenomenon described in the story, I think it falls more into the horror camp instead, in spite of all the computer-graphics expertise. The best of the fantasy stories is Tanith Lee’s bitterly melancholy “The Pain of Glass,” which ends happily for no one, but Marie Brennan’s “Once a Goddess”(sort of a fantasy version of Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess”) is also good, as is Mary Robinette Kowal’s tale of dueling wizards, “At the Edge of Dying,” and two Bradburyesque stories of subtle translations between life and death, Kelly Barnhill’s “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through” and Barbara Krasnoff’s “Rosemary, That’s for Remembrance.”

Highlight of the January Strange Horizons is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Shangri-La Affair”, a post-cyberpunk drama about espionage and biological warfare, set in a gritty but surreal future Asia, that reads like a mix of Lucius Shepard and Bruce Sterling, with perhaps a dash of early Greg Egan or Geoff Ryman thrown in; a bit over-the-top at times, for instance when the living airplanes come out (what’s propelling them?), but a compelling read nevertheless. Strange Horizons for February 2nd features a strong story by Elliott Bangs, “This Must Be the Place.” I was surprised to see that this was Bangs’s first sale—hell, you should’ve seen my first sale, which didn’t even come close to operating on this level… as, indeed, most first sales do not. There’s nothing startlingly new in conceptualization here, but the intricate maze of potential time-travel paradoxes is navigated expertly, with a deftness and confidence that you wouldn’t expect to see in a novice writer—all of which, along with the attractive voice and the deceptively light tone, mark Bangs as a writer to watch. The rest of Strange Horizons for February was less interesting: a zombie story (which I’m really getting tired of) by Bronna Vovanhoff, “Obedience,” an odd story by Maria Deira, “The First Time We Met,” about a girl whose superpower is to make wounds close by licking them, and her boyfriend who becomes addicted to the rush this provides, and an enigmatic piece by K. Bird Lincoln, “Sometimes We Arrive Home.” Strange Horizons for March provides a more substantial and entertaining piece by Sandra McDonald, “Diana Comet,” which starts in March 2 and finishes up in March 9th. This one is reminiscent in some ways of Ellen Kushner’s Swordpoint series, with an evocatively-drawn Secondary World that in most ways, other than naming, is not that different from our own world a couple of hundred years back, in this case perhaps India or Asia in the days of the Raj and the East Indian Company—but in mood and tone, in its intrigue and action, it reminds me more of Joanna Russ’s Alyx stories, no small praise in my book. The only thing I found vaguely disappointing is that when her shameful secret is revealed, the “dirty parts” that she keeps carefully wrapped away from sight—*SPOILER WARNING*—it turns out, as far as I can tell, that her secret is that she’s a transvestite. I was hoping for something a little more fantastical, strange extra body parts, perhaps, or extra arms like Doctor Octopus that she’d have to keep strapped down. Most of the rest of March is slipstream or horror, except for Tina Connolly’s “Turning the Apples,” an earnest but a bit overheated story about an impoverished slum kid with an exploitable wild talent.

The first quarter issue, issue 29, of Abyss & Apex features several strong stories. In Samantha Henderson’s somber, regretful “East of Chula Vista,” the dead come visiting every night at a remote ranch where a lonely old man almost relishes the company they bring. Marie Brennan’s “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis De Montseraille, Following the Death of That Worthy Individual,” in the running for longest title of the year so far, is an elegant steampunk tale of time-crossed lovers, while Karl Bunker’s “Murder” is a well-crafted offworld mystery story. There’s some good stuff in issue 30 of Abyss & Apex too. Ruth Nestvold’s “In the Middle of Nowhere With Company” has a very slender fantastic element, almost subjective, in fact, but is a heartfelt and well-crafted story of a grieving woman being coaxed reluctantly into starting a new life, with something of the flavor of television’s Northern Exposure. In “Dancing for the Monsoon,” Aliette de Bodard shows us the price of sacrifice, and of not sacrificing as well. And Bud Sparhawk gives us a somewhat peculiar space-age version of Hamlet in “No Cord or Cable.”

The best story in Interzone 221, by a considerable margin, is “Black Swan,” by veteran cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, which expertly spins us through a gyre of Alternate Worlds, all featuring well-thought out and plausible alternate Europes; this is politically savvy, bitingly cynical, and infused with Sterling’s trademark deadpan wit—a lot of fun. The rest of the issue is weaker. Interzone seems to be making something of a specialty of what Kingley Amis once referred to as the “Comic Inferno” story, the kind of satirical SF featured in the ‘50s in H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, what somebody once described as looking at a rise in the number of garbagemen and projecting that to a future where everybody is a garbageman. This is not my favorite kind of SF, but at least the examples of it that Interzone has been running are pretty well-crafted. In issue 220, we had Jason Stoddard’s “Monetized,” and in this issue, we have Will McIntosh’s “A Clown Escapes from Circustown,” in which a future society has been divided up into various specialized theme parks, the characters therein genetically grown to order, so that we have towns where everyone’s a clown, towns where everyone’s a superhero, and so forth. Stoddard’s story is the superior one, since his intensively plugged-in and networked future, although exaggerated, is at least superficially plausible, while I don’t for a second believe that a world like McIntosh’s could exist (even manipulated and maintained by the sinister offstage Management)—its satirical intent outweighs its plausibility, and the more you think about it, the more logic holes you can poke in it. Nevertheless, if you can suspend your disbelief enough to get past all that, McIntosh tells a satisfying and even rather traditional story of a naif’s journey to self-discovery and self-realization, changing his world in the process. Matthew Kressel’s “Saving Diego” is a familiar junkie-struggling-with-relapse story that doesn’t gain a tremendous amount by being set on an superficially described alien world. And the island culture in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Far and Deep” is much too obviously just a direct one-to-one translation of Hawaii’s.

And just to demonstrate that Hell has not only frozen over, but that you can go there to chip some ice for your drink, the May 7th issue of The New Yorker not only features an actual honest-to-gosh SF story that wouldn’t look out of place in Asimov’s, but quite a good one, Gail Hareven’s “The Slows”—something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.