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Interzone 223

Analog, 10/09

Talebones, Summer

Weird Tales, August

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-78-8, $29, 576 pages). Cover art by Michael Whelan.

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon, Roger Zelazny. (NESFA Press, 978-1-886778-79-5, $29, 576 pages). Cover art by Michael Whelan.

The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness, Poul Anderson. (NESFA Press, $29). Cover art by Tom Canty.

Wireless, Charles Stross. (Ace, 978-0-4410-1719-5, $24.95, 368 pages).

 

Dominic Green is a little-known and under-rated writer, on this side of the Atlantic at least, whose almost entire output of short fiction, about twenty stories between 1996 and 2009, has appeared in the British magazine Interzone. Interezone has rewarded him for his loyalty by providing a welcome showcase for his work in Interzone 223, which features three very strong original stories by Green, and in effect functions as a “Special Dominic Green Issue.” Green’s voice reminds me of that of the late James Tiptree, Jr.—his stories are often narrated by a world-weary Insider who has become alienated from the goals he’s supposed to be working toward, a cynical but compassionate (although worn-out) expert who still hopes for better days but realizes that there’s little realistic chance that The System isn’t going to win in the end—and for all the world-weariness, the stories are told with élan and verve, and a fondness for wordplay that sometimes errs on the side of enthusiasm. These qualities are the most strongly in evidence here in “Coat of Many Colors”—about a psychologist examining a genetically created animal who may be demonstrating signs of intelligence, and her efforts to keep government officials from breeding and slaughtering it anyway for its iridescent chameleonic skin—which could easily have been a Tiptree story, except that I suspect that Tiptree would have been even more cynical, as Green allows a note of cautious hope to creep in at the end, as Tiptree probably would not have. Also first-rate is “Butterfly Bomb,” about an old man raising a child by himself on an otherwise totally deserted planet, a clever story where nobody and nothing turns out to be even remotely what they seem. Another way in which Green is like Tiptree is his fondness for wild new ideas, the wilder the better, and his lack of fear or hesitation about painting in broad strokes with bright primary colors, qualities which “Butterfly Bomb” features in abundance. My least favorite of the three Green stories, although still good, is “Glister,” which still has lots of bizarre conceptualization, but which is even more cynical than the other stories, dark and downbeat and literally hope-less in a way that seems to be a specialty of one kind of British SF. I suspect Tiptree would have approved of that one too.

In spite of his many short story sales to Interzone, Green has been unable to sell a novel, and has finally given up and posted several of his novels to be read for free up on his website, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/lumfylomax/, and those of you who enjoyed his stories here might want to check them out. Those book editors who are bemoaning the lack of quirky novels by new writers to publish should check them out too.

In the rest of Interzone 223, Suzanne Palmer, in “Silence and Roses,” gives us a story that manages to balance on the razor-edge of mawkish sentimentality without quite falling all the way in, an impressive job of tightrope-walking. (This, by the way is another robots-struggling-to-adjust-after-all-the-humans ((or most of them, anyway))-are-dead story, of which there have been several so far this year, with several published last year as well.)  Eric Gregory’s “The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai” also contains some intriguing conceptualization, but is a bit murky and opaque in a way that Green is not.

The best story in the October Analog is Michael F. Flynn’s novella “Where the Winds Are All Asleep.” Like Tolkien before him with the Mines of Moria, Flynn takes us down to “the deep places of the Earth” where monsters dwell unsuspected by surface dwellers, far enough underground that his characters blunder across and rouse the strange and dangerous beings that live there, with dire consequences—although rather than Balrogs, in Flynn they’re living lava creatures of several different sorts. Once it really gets underway, the story is fast-paced and compelling, and manages to generate some genuine suspense, especially in the final chase sequence (although you know that the protagonist is going to escape, because you meet her first in the initial frame scene—which does blunt the suspense a bit). My biggest problem with the story is with that framing device, couching the story as a tale being told after the fact in a bar, which seemed to me not only unnecessary but a bit detrimental to the pacing, since the opening bar scene reads slow and a bit too arch to me. I also found it hard to believe that the woman was actually telling all this to the patrons in a bar in the very literary way that she’s telling it, or that all those patrons are sitting there in polite silence listening to this very long yarn unfold, without talking amongst themselves or cutting across the narrative with requests for refills. I’d have liked the story a smidgen better if the framing sequences had been done away with altogether—although even with them, it’s certainly one of the better stories to appear in Analog so far this year. Also good in the October Analog is “Cold Words,” by new writer Juliette Wade, a story about a diplomatic mission to an alien planet that’s in danger of foundering on the rocks of cultural misunderstandings. Wade does a really good job of creating alien aliens, with their own distinctly non-human psychology and cultural values, and showing how language, the words themselves, can both create barriers and help to tear them down. Robert Grossbach gives us “An Idea Whose Time Had Come,” a somewhat ponderously arch story about an effort to elect a robot/AI to the office of President of the United States; perhaps Grossbach is right about it being an idea whose time has come, since we’ve seen several other stories with similar plotlines in recent months. A hangover from the unpopular Bush Administration, perhaps?

The semiprozine Talebones was a lively little magazine that had been publishing interestingly quirky stuff since 1995—but now they’re throwing in the towel and ceasing publication, and issue 38, the Summer issue, will be their last. I for one will be sorry to see them go; they didn’t do a lot of center core SF, running more slipstream and soft horror than I would ideally like to see, but almost everything they did was of professional-level quality, and some of it was quite good. Unfortunately, the Summer Talebones is not a particularly strong issue to go out on, with little that could be called either SF or really exceptional, although the issue does feature interesting fantasy stories by Mary Robinette Kowal and Scott Edelman, and a time-travel tale of sorts by Marshall Payne.

As one magazine dies, another, already counted among the fallen and deeply mourned, returns to life, as new publisher Tir Na Nog Press, headed up by Warren Lapine, former honcho of the now-defunct DNA Publishing Group, brings out the first issue of their revivified Realms of Fantasy magazine, dated August 2009. The long-running Realms of Fantasy had been announced as having died earlier in the year, occasioning much grief in the genre audience, before it was bought by Tir Na Nog and given a new lease on life. The new incarnation of Realms of Fantasy is a whisker smaller than the previous version, and not quite as slickly produced, but it’s still a good-looking magazine, quite handsome in fact. More importantly, it’s still being edited by long-time editor Shawna McCarthy, who has edited the magazine since its very beginnings, which ought to guarantee a continuity of quality and literary tone and of types of story chosen—and so it seems to be, since there’s nothing here in the new incarnation that would have been shockingly out-of-place in any issue of the old Realms. Best story in the issue is Tanith Lee’s chilling “Our Lady of Scarlet,” in which a young student magician trapped in a plague-ridden city and in a quarantined boarded-up inn must use all of his fledgling skills to fight off a sinister Deity taking shape across the hall who is trying to absorb him—with mixed success. Ian Creasey’s “Digging for Paradise” is also good, a story balanced between science fiction and fantasy, with a bit of the flavor of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, as a powerful wizard travels to the far-future, to the final days of Earth, to recover magical talismans he buried ages before. Dennis Danvers’s “Healing Benjamin” has an intriguing initial set-up, with a boy bringing his cat back from the dead, but goes off-track when the cat suddenly begins to talk, one complication too many.

This is shaping up to be another good year for short-story collections. We’ve already had Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald, Crystal Nights and Other Stories, by Greg Egan, and The Best of Gene Wolfe, by Gene Wolfe, all of which will certainly be in the running for the title of Best Collection of 2009, which could make that competition quite a horse-race. Early in the year, NESFA Press brought out the first two volumes—The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume One: Threshold and The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Two: Power and Light—in a projected six-volume series designed to collect all of Zelazny’s short fiction (some of it never before published), and also issued the first volume in a similar series designed to do the same for the short work of Poul Anderson, The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 1: Call Me Joe. Now both of these series have produced new volumes, which will certainly put a few more horses in the race.

The Zelazny series has brought out two new volumes, both huge collections with evocative Michael Whelan covers: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Three: This Mortal Mountain and The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon, while the Anderson series has issued The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 2: The Queen of Air and Darkness, with a handsome Tom Canty cover.

Volumes Three and Four probably contain fewer of Zelazny’s signature pieces than Volumes One and Two did, being already up to the period where Zelazny switched his career emphasis from short fiction to novels, and although there are many minor stories in the book, there is also still a wealth of good short fiction (some of it not so short, there are several novellas and long novelettes) here, including “This Mortal Mountain,” “The Man Who Loved the Faioli,” “Damnation Alley” (upon which the execrable film was loosely based), “The Game of Blood and Dust,” “The Engine at Heartspring Center,” “The Eve of RUMOKO,” “‘kjwall’kje’koothaill’kje’k,” “Home Is the Hangman,” “Halfjack,” “The Last Defender of Camelot,” and “Unicorn Variation.” The Anderson volume 2 might even be slightly stronger than the strong volume 1, containing “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” “Brave to be a King,” “The Pirate,” “A Little Knowledge,” and what is perhaps my single favorite Anderson story, “The Longest Voyage.”

Ideally, you should buy all of these volumes. The Zelazny volumes may have a slight edge in value—supposing that you like Zelazny, which, of course, not everyone does—because they are much richer in empheria and ancillary material than the Anderson, containing an amazing amount of biographic and autobiographic material, including much stuff that very few readers will have seen: Guest Of Honor speeches by Zelazny, family trees of his fictional characters, outlines of his novels, letters, deleted sex scenes, as well as much critical work about Zelazny by other hands. The stories in the Anderson collection are mostly major stories, but in an exhaustive effort to actually collect almost everything that Zelazny wrote, the Zelazny volumes are also stuffed with stories that have not been reprinted anywhere since their initial appearance, and a good deal of stuff that has never been published before. Most of this is pretty minor, and some of it is downright bad—but Zelazny completists will want to read it all, and a fair amount of it is interesting and entertaining even for the rest of us.

Both the Zelazny and the Anderson collections also contain a lot of their respective author’s poetry—most of it, frankly, pretty bad.

A younger master, not quite in the Zelazny/Anderson league yet, but still one of the most important new writers to come to prominence in SF in the ‘90s, Charles Stross, has had some of his best work collected in Wireless, another collection that is sure to be in at the hunt for the Best Collection of the Year title. The bulk of Stross’s best recent work is here, some marvelously inventive stuff that’s helped to reinvent the genre’s ideas of what the future is going to look like, including “Missile Gap,” “A Colder War,” “Rogue Farm,” “Trunk and Disorderly,” and others. The collection also includes a huge original novella, “Palimpsest,” which is sort of a grittier and more cynical version of one of Poul Anderson’s “Time Patrol” stories, played out across an even larger canvas.