14

F&SF, 12/09

Asimov’s, 10-11/09

Subterranean, Summer

Tor.com

The Push, Dave Hutchinson (NewCon Press)

 

As Jonathan Strahan and others have mentioned, there’s clearly a new wave of interesting second-generation Sword & Sorcery work building in the field, as demonstrated by the existence of new(ish) markets dedicated to S&S such as print magazine Black Gate and ezine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, occasional anthologies such as last year’s Fast Ships, Black Sails and Strahan and Lou Anders’s upcoming Swords and Dark Magic, by the isolated S&S stories that pop up from time to time in both online and in print mediums, even in markets theoretically dedicated to science fiction, and by novels by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Steve Erikson, and others. One of the biggest influences on this work is obviously the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber (perhaps most clearly seen in Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories and in Michael Swanwick’s ostensible science fiction—really stealth S&S—stories about the adventures of Darger and Surplus), but there are also traces of Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, and even Ursula K. Le Guin there too, as well as influences from a wide spectrum of mainstream authors, as the new Sword & Sorcery stories are noticeably more literary than Conan the Barbarian. One of the strongest examples of this new work to date was Alex Irvine’s “Wizard’s Six,” from the June 2007 issue of F&SF, and the best story in the December 2009 F&SF, by a good margin, is another story by Irvine set in the same milieu, “Dragon’s Teeth.” The story of a shrewd, tough, weatherbeaten old veteran setting off reluctantly on a quest to kill a dragon that he knows is a fool’s errand that will probably cost him his life, the clear-eyed protagonist holds no illusions about life, the nature of society and his place within it, or even of love, giving it a resigned, fatalistic tang, strong, black, and bitter; at the same time, the characterization is deeper and more subtle here, especially in the relationship that grows between the soldier and a peasant woman he meets, than you’d usually expect to find in a Sword & Sorcery tale. I’m looking forward to more of these stories, as I think that Irvine is into a rich vein of material.

The rest of December is more uneven. New writer Alexandra Duncan turns in a strong and thoughtful story, very reminiscent of Le Guin, about cultural misunderstandings between an Earthwoman and the tribe of spacegoing nomads that her father had once lived amongst, “Bad Matter.” Matthew Hughes contributes a story, “Hell of a Fix,” which wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an issue of Unknown, complete with demons who talk in comic 1930’s slang, about the escalating complications caused by a man accidentally summoning a demon; entertaining, although it goes on too long. In “Inside Time,” Tim Sullivan gives us a love-triangle set in a rather unlikely location, a high-tech prison station that floats between branes (why they’d go to these enormously expensive and complicated lengths just to incarcerate a couple of people is an issue that the story never really adequately addresses). Richard Bowes’s “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said” is the creepy story of a surgery patient who is haunted in dreams and waking hallucinations by the relentless ghost of a policeman, particularly disquieting for anyone who’s ever spent any serious amount of time in the hospital, the ambience of which Bowes captures very well. Nancy Springer’s “Iris” is a poignant and well-told Christmas ghost story. Terry Bisson’s “Farewell Atlantis” and Harvey Jacobs’s “The Man Who Did Something About It” are minor, innocuous stories by authors capable of better.

Two of the stories, by Brendan DuBois and Sarah Thomas, are devoted to demythologizing the dream of space exploration and colonization. DuBois’s “Illusions of Tranquillity” is much the better crafted of the two, and so, as a result, does a particularly effective job of draining the last of the glamour and any possible Sense of Wonder from the theme, showing us a Moon colony where life is so squalid and unpleasant that the inhabitants will do anything to get away from there and back to Earth—the whole idea of humans moving into space has clearly been a misguided, dead-end mistake. Why a science fiction magazine would want to demythologize the dream of space exploration, one of the things that theoretically entices people to buy it in the first place, is another matter.

There are several good stories in the October/November issue of Asimov’s, as well as a few ambitious failures, making it a much stronger issue overall than the September issue had been. The best stories are Robert Reed’s “Before My Last Breath,” which unravels a fascinating archeological mystery involving an abortive alien colonization of Earth millions of years ago, and Ian Creasey’s “Erosion,” in which a recently created posthuman, reveling in his newfound powers and abilities, says a nostalgic farewell to ordinary life on the planet before heading out forever to the stars—and learns a few sharp lessons in the process.

Another mystery, this one biological, is explored in Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore’s “Blood Dauber,” which is frequently fascinating, although it pulls in a few too many different directions at once, and there’s too much in there about the protagonist’s unhappy home life, a little of which goes a long way. Nancy Kress contributes an excellent bit of flash fiction (or a vignette, as we old farts defiantly continue to call them) in “Deadly Sins,” about a bit of industrial espionage with long-term consequences for the rest of the world. R. Garcia y Robertson takes us back to the faux Barsoom of his recent “SinBad the Sand Sailor” for one of his typical adventurous, mildly risqué, fast-paced romps, detailing what goes on during “Wife-Stealing Time”; this one doesn’t have a serious bone in its body, but it’s fun. In the issue’s only real fantasy story, Christopher Barzak’s “The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter” takes us through familiar Ghost Whisperer territory, but works in a couple of elegant twists of its own.

In the ambitious failures category, reluctantly, I must list Damien Broderick’s “Flowers of Asphodel” and William Barton’s “The Sea of Dreams,” both still worth reading, but neither of which really worked for me. Broderick did a pastiche/homage to Cordwainer Smith a couple of months ago at Tor.com, and here he tackles a pastiche/homage to Roger Zelazny. “Flowers of Asphodel” actually contains some of the most intriguing conceptualization of the entire issue, but I had trouble with the deliberately opaque, highly mannered prose style. Zelazny was known for breaking into passages of highly ornamented prose, especially in his early work, but he always kept them short, and he never let them obscure the plot or interfere with the forward momentum of the storyline; here, there are whole pages that are so “poetic” that it’s hard to parse them, and it takes a real effort even to figure out what’s happening; as some bewildered fan comments have shown, many readers never could. Zelazny knew better than that. “The Sea of Dreams” is one of a number of adolescent wish-fulfillment stories that Barton has written, but the wishes being fulfilled here have become so specific to a young boy who grew up in a particular part of the country during a particular historical period and who had particular sets of interests and particular friends and who read particular types of fiction—in other words, to Barton himself—that it’s hard to maintain interest through a story as long as this if you’re not Barton. Where a story such as Barton’s “Off on a Spaceship” touched upon near-universal adolescent dreams, in “The Sea of Dreams” it’s his dreams being realized, not necessarily yours.

Alex Irvine is having a good month, since, appropriately enough, the best story in the Summer issue of Subterranean, referred to as the “Special Alexander C. Irvine Issue,” is Irvine’s “Seventh Fall.” This is a Post-Holocaust story (although the disaster is natural—an asteroid strike—rather than a nuclear war), set in a fragmented society that is slowly fading into barbarism, in spite of the efforts of a few isolated people and groups here and there to hang on to some of the learning and culture of the Old Days—there’s nothing particularly unique about the conceptualization here, but it’s very nicely executed, and manages to work up a real emotional charge: by the end, you really care about the travails of the hapless protagonist, and want to see him come to a safe harbor. There’s another Irvine story here too, a satirical Galaxy-style look at a beleaguered rancher defending his lawn against Green activists, “Eagleburger’s Lawn,” but although it’s entertaining, it lacks the emotional power of the previous story.

This is a strong issue of Subterranean, though, and contains several other good stories. One of the best is Garth Nix’s “The Heart of the City,” a swashbuckling and highly entertaining historical fantasy which features dueling angels and demons, the machinations of the sinister Cardinal Richlieu, and lots of swordplay. Also robustly entertaining is Kim Newman’s “Moon, Moon, Moon,” about white magicians investigating a deadly cult in Victorian England, similar in its matching of Lovecraftian fantasy and detective or spy fiction to Charles Stross’s “Laundry” series, but with an atmosphere closer to Sherlock Holmes than Len Deighton. Elizabeth Bear contributes a lyrical though enigmatic slipstream/fantasy with “Snow Dragon,” and Neal Barrett, Jr. delivers a semi-comic horror story, although one with lots of violence, in “Limo.”

Over at Tor.com this month, the website serves up a freewheeling steampunk extravaganza by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, set in a sideways version of 1930s Manhattan, “Zeppelin City,” which comes complete with daredevil girl autogyro pilots, aerial combat, plummeting zeppelins, zealous socialist agitators, plucky girl inventors, and Naked Brains in jars; this is a lot of fun, sort of what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow should have been like. There’s also a slipstream story by Tim Pratt, “Silver Linings,” that tries to marry a rather trivial, somewhat silly idea, solid, motionless clouds that you can literally mine silver linings out of, with a more serious story about a prince fleeing his inheritance for moral reasons and the fear of what he might do if he had the power, but it’s a somewhat uneasy marriage, and I think that the prince-in-hiding story really should have been saved for a fantasy setting that matched it in ethical gravitas.

Most of Dave Hutchinson’s work that I’ve seen, most of it in British anthologies, has been fantasy, but he turns to science fiction with admirable results in “The Push,” a long novella that has been published as a chapbook by British small press NewCon Press, who have published a couple of good anthologies such as disLOCATIONS and Subterfuge in the past few years. This is the story of the colonization of a planet, looked at from the perspective of one of the original founders, who returns two hundred years down the line to find that history has turned him into a hero and even a god, titles he distinctly does not want—and that there’s an unexpected new threat, based on supposedly non-sentient animals suddenly becoming intelligent, that threatens the existence of the colony and that he must reluctantly deal with. This is breezily ironic, reminiscent of Zelazny in some of his more relaxed modes, and the writing is loose and jazzy—and if it’s not terrifically deep or profound, it’s a distinct pleasure to read, and reads very quickly for a story of this size. (The only real criticism I could make is that Hutchinson doesn’t seem to provide an explanation for the story’s core problem, how and why the aliens suddenly became intelligent in the first place; if he did, I missed it.) From the perspective of the American audience, and perhaps even from the British, this is going to be very obscurely published, by an ultra-small small press, almost certainly not available in bookstores, probably not even specialty SF bookstores, so if you’d like to read it, your best bet may be to go to the NewCon Press website, neweconpress.com, and order it. It should eventually be available through Amazon, although it isn’t at the moment.