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The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, the 21 Finest Stories of Awesome Science Fiction, Mike Ashley ed. (Running Press Book Publishers, 978-0-76243-723-8, $13.95, 531 pages.) Cover art by Joe Roberts.

F&SF, 8-9/09

Asimov’s, 08/09

Interzone 222

Lone Star Stories, 06/09

Tor.com

 

Going into a bookstore and ordering aloud The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF must be almost as embarrassing as ordering, say, The Rooty-Tooty-Fresh-and-Fruity Book of SF would be, but in spite of the silly title, this is a substantial and entertaining mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of “mindblowing” SF, the concept being to collect stories large of scope and scale and filled with wild new ideas that will generate the elusive “Sense of Wonder” that is one of the fundamental reasons to read SF in the first place. In that, it largely succeeds, and, at over 500 pages for a relatively cheap cover price, is a good reading bargain besides. The best of the original stories is probably Robert Reed’s “Castle in the Sky,” which starts with an initial fantastic premise that will not be unfamiliar to experienced SF readers, whether you reference Clarke or Budrys, but which takes us in unexpected directions and ultimately ends up rather moving on a personal level. The original story that contains the most “mindblowing” Sense-of-Wonder-generating ideas is Eric Brown’s “The Rest Is Speculation,” which takes place two billion years (!) in the future, although it does tend toward being what we used to call “Great Steam Grommet Works” stories, once popular in the ‘30s and ‘40s in the pages of magazines such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing, where the plot, such as it is, is an excuse for a tour past a parade of futuristic wonders, with the tour-guide pausing to point out the awe-inspiring Great Steam Grommet Works, which the tourists all dutifully admire; large-scale ideas here, but not much emotional impact, although there is a certain somber Wellsian lyricism. Paul Di Filippo’s “Waves and Smart Magma” also contains a lot of “far-out” ideas, as we used to say back in the day when it was obligatory to say things like that, and there’s also interesting conceptualization in the originals by Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts. The reprint stories are, if anything, even stronger, including Gregory Benford’s “A Dance to Strange Musics,” Michael Swanwick’s “Mother Grasshopper,” Terry Bisson’s “The Hole in the Hole,” Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Vacuum States,” Alastair Reynolds’s “Tiger Burning,” and others, including James Blish’s classic “Bridge” from all the way back in 1952.

Dragons, and giant creatures of other sorts, seem to be a subtext in the August/September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sean McMullen starts us off in “The Art of the Dragon” with a visitation by one of the most unusual dragons in recent years, a two-mile long metal dragon who eats art, and swoops around the world gobbling up the Louvre and The National Gallery and the Eiffel Tower and other such places. This is entertaining for most of its length, although it gets a little bogged down in a subtext about cultists who worship the dragon toward the end, but I found the rationale for the dragon and the explanation for its existence very unconvincing, which detracts from the story a bit. I could also quibble a bit with the dragon’s rather simplistic definition of “art.” The dragon in Melinda M. Snodgrass’s “A Token of a Better Age” is actually a Lovecraftian invader from another dimension or universe, and, although he’s really only on-stage for a few pages, is a much more convincing menace; this is an extremely enjoyable story, especially for the verve and authenticity with which the author handles the Ancient Roman milieu. The reanimated skeletons of giants, one of them possibly a dragon in life, feature as magic versions of Robo-Tech warriors or Heinlein/Haldeman armored battle-suits in Yoon Ha Lee’s creepily atmospheric “The Bones of Giants”—this is a vivid and effective fantasy, although, like her science fiction, she leaves the obviously complex backstory here completely unexplained. Giant dinosaur-like creatures, perhaps a bit too much like T. Rex., chase the human characters back and forth across an alien planet in Lawrence C. Connolly’s “The Others,” to such an extent that I found myself thinking that it was too bad one of the humans hadn’t brought a gun or a blaster so that they could just shoot the damn things and let us get back to the subplot about copies of the same human woman developing intramural conflicts and competitions amongst themselves, which struck me as intrinsically more interesting.

Another subtext in August/September is stories about psychic poker players, which feature in both Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Private Eye” and Matthew Hughes’s “Hunchster.” These are both slob comedies, with the Cowdrey the funnier of the two, and with the more convincing grasp of redneck/trailer trash parlance.

The best story in the issue is probably Bruce Sterling’s “Esoteric City,” a fantasy about a businessman going literally to Hell to try to renegotiate the terms of his damnation, accompanied by his spirit guide, the ghost of an Egyptian mummy. Sterling, the veteran cyberpunk author, is usually thought of as a science fiction author rather than a fantasy author, but the truth is that he’s actually written a fair amount of fantasy at short lengths, and is quite good at it. In spite of the fantasy trappings, this is instantly recognizable as a Bruce Sterling story, suffused with cynical deadpan humor and inventive detail, and with the main characters deeply embroiled with power politics and the art of the double-cross, a game they continue to play even in Hell. Also excellent is Rand B. Lee’s “Three Leaves of Aloe,” a quiet but subtly compelling story about a mother faced with the choice of whether or not to comply with school authorities and get her obstreperous teen daughter, who’s always in trouble, surgically fitted with a “nannychip” to modify her rebellious behavior—a choice I fear many of us will be faced with in reality all too soon; in fact, I wonder how many of our readers would have been fitted with such a chip already if such technology had been available during their high-school years.

The best story in the August Asimov’s is probably Damien Broderick’s “The Qualia Engine,” a worthy addition to the long line of supermen-in-hiding stories that stretches all the way back to Olaf Stapledon, with notable stops along the way at A.E. Van Vogt and Henry Kuttner, among others. The Broderick is a dense story, made chewy by many infodumps, but with a rich nougat vein of well-observed human emotion to keep us gnawing away at it. The main subplot, and the protagonist’s obsession, learning by technological means to see through another person’s eyes—and, more importantly, feel the world as they feel it—also is a science fiction motif with a long tradition, but Broderick handles it well, bringing it into the 21st Century with some updated science. Also first-rate, although deliberately ambiguous, with no definite or clear-cut answers ever arrived at, is Michael Blumlein’s “California Burning,” a story about a man who discovers that his father may or may not have been an alien, and Robert Reed’s “Creatures of Well-Defined Habits,” an elegant story about a future whose rich immortals are bored enough to resort to playing decades-long games of status and one-upmanship with each other, even if they have to go to the far side of the solar system to win.

The two characters in Derek Zumsteg’s “Blue” are pretty much doomed from before the start of the story, and although they go through the motions of trying to increase their odds, their struggle for survival isn’t really the main focus here. Atypically, it’s an expertly handled hard science story where most of the space is devoted to the characters—a man and a woman, the last survivors of a spaceship crew—working out their prickly and yet oddly close relationship with each other. Thankfully, Zumsteg doesn’t have them have sex, which most other writers would have, and they’re still bickering and sparring with each other as they plunge toward almost certain death in a black hole—the story also doesn’t spell out whether they manage to successfully pull off their very thin chance of survival or are killed, leaving them before they actually get to the ultimate crisis point, also unusual for this kind of story; most hard SF would have had them work out an ingenious last-minute way to survive, and would have shown you them doing it.  Steven Popkes’s “Two Boys,” a sensitive and nicely handled story of recreated Neanderthals trying to deal with the rest of human civilization, reminds me strongly of Ted Kosmatka’s “N-Words” from last year, although Popkes’s Neanderthals are a lot quirkier psychologically than Kosmatka’s, more different from modern humans (the scene where they all break into riotous laughter at the assassination of one of their own is a nice touch), and the story gains a certain perspective by being told through human eyes rather than from the Point of View of the Neanderthals. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Consciousness Problem” paints a compelling picture of a woman who thinks that she’s a clone, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Turbulence” is a relatively minor piece about another woman who may or not be bad luck to everyone around her.

Ambiguity, especially as to an experience’s authenticity, may be this issue’s subtext, in fact, and shows up in one key or another in almost every story—was the father in Blumlein’s story an alien or wasn’t he? is the simulacrum in Reed’s story really synonymous with the dead man he’s replaced? is the woman in Kowal’s story a clone or is she not? will the astronauts in Zumsteg’s story survive or won’t they? And so on.

The best story in Interzone 222 is Sarah L. Edwards’s “Lady of the White-Spired City,” a quiet, understated, but also subtly powerful story about an emissary of an interstellar civilization returning to the land of her birth after a span of generations away, and having to struggle with all the myriad of ghosts of the past that are raised by her return. In “Unexpected Outcomes,” Tim Pratt spins an ingenious tale in which people react to the news that their world is actually a computer simulation—being run as part of an elaborate social experiment in some Uber-universe—with defiance rather than despair, and decide to alter the outcome of the experiment by altering their behavior within it. In “Mother of Champions,” Sean McMullen exposes a worldwide conspiracy by superintelligent cheetahs who use their powers to manipulate the human race to their own advantage—entertaining and audacious, but I find the cheetah cabal almost as unlikely as his two-mile-long art-eating dragon. Aliette de Bodard delivers “Ys,” an atmospheric fantasy about the magical raising from the sea of the long-drowned land of Ys, a story that reminds me strongly of Fritz Leiber’s classic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story “The Sunken Land.” Kim Lakin-Smith contributes another satirical “Comic Inferno” story, this one blessedly short at least, “Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married,” which takes place in a Grease-like world (cue the Teenage Death Songs in the background, particularly, say, “Leader of the Pack” or “Dead Man’s Curve”) where society is ruled by warring hot-rod gangs. The issue is closed out by Nina Allan’s well-written but enigmatic “Microcosm,” which not only has a subliminal fantastic element, but very nearly a subliminal plot as well, with all sorts of hints about mysterious past doings that are never really revealed or resolved, leaving me wondering what in the world was supposed to have been going on; this fells much more like a Black Static story than an Interzone story.

The June 1st issue of Lone Star Stories is the last one, as the ezine is pulling the plug and calling it quits—a shame, as they were one of the most interesting electronic magazines out there, and had published some excellent material in the past. The June 1st issue has no real science fiction in it, but it does feature a nice bit of metaphorical metafiction by Jo Walton, “Parable Lost,” a Halloween fantasy about a Trickster figure on the loose among the trick-or-treaters by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Pranks,” and a story by Leah Bobet, “The Parable of the Shower,” about a modern woman trying to deal with Old Testament-like Divine Visitations in the modern world—slyly amusing, although it goes on a little too long.

Recent postings on Tor.com include a quiet but intriguing Alternate History story about baseball by Harry Turtledove, “The House That George Built,” which imagines a reality in which Babe Ruth missed his opportunity and never became the titan of the sport that he became in our timeline, but where other men, passed over in our world, get their time at bat instead; nicely ironic, demonstrating how much the course of our lives are determined by the smallest of details, and a good portrait of the Babe, who, in spite of his flaws, possesses a certain grandeur and dignity even in ruin. Tor.com also recently featured a really evocative Japanese fantasy by Kij Johnson, narrated by a lost cat trying to find her way home across an alien and hostile landscape, “The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles.” Johnson handles the cat’s viewpoint expertly, anthropomorphizing her just enough to make us sympathize with her travails and the loss of her little world, but not so much so that she becomes a little human being in a furry cat suit; throughout, you never forget that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of a cat, and the fact that you understand more about the world she’s trying to deal with than she does adds a certain poignancy. Her adventures are quite exciting in places and ultimately rather moving, and this is certainly one of the best fantasy stories of the year so far.