17

Asimov’s, 1/10

Asimov’s, 2/10

F&SF, 1-2/10

Subterranean, Winter 2010

Clarkesworld, 1/10

Tor.com

 

Asimov’s Science Fiction starts off 2010 with a strong January issue after a somewhat weak December 2009 issue. The best story here is probably Robert Reed’s “The Good Hand,” an Alternate History take on a world where a post World War II United States in sole possession of atomic weapons takes its role as Policeman to the World a bit too seriously, a tense and ultimately sad story that crackles with Cold War paranoid tension. Also excellent is new writer Felicity Shoulders’s “Conditional Love,” which explores the human costs of the trial-and-error period which must certainly exist between the present and the shining posthuman future described in much SF, where well-intentioned attempts to create genetically altered and “improved” children leads not to supermen but to bizarrely damaged kids instead, a transitional period rarely discussed in posthuman SF, which usually takes the success of genetic manipulation for granted; this is a moving, compassionate story with a killer twist in its tail.

Also first-rate is Allen M. Steele’s “The Jekyll Island Horror,” which does an excellent job of integrating historical material about Jekyll Island—all of which is true, by the way, as unlikely as it sounds—into the fantastic element, although I’m not entirely sure why the fantastic element is a giant, Godzilla-like monster rather than the more conventionally-sized space-travelling alien that the story seems to suggest it’s going to be. A change of pace is provided by another good story, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “Marya and the Pirate,” a rousing tale of space piracy and hijacking that also functions as a sort of sly postmodern commentary on Tom Godwin’s famous story “The Cold Equations”; the pirate and his victim are forced by unexpected circumstances to work together in order to survive, and the solution they come up with to what seems like an unsolvable problem is ingenious and satisfying in a traditional “hard-science” way. Steve Rasnic Tem also takes us into space for a much-quieter but also satisfying story, in which “A Letter from the Emperor” that an old friend has been waiting for his entire life may or may not have been delivered.

I usually enjoy Chris Roberson’s Alternate History “Celestial Empire” stories, set in a world that’s been ruled by China for thousands of years, but I didn’t warm to his “Wonder House” in the January issue, a rather pointless look at how an equivalent to Superman comics are created in an alternate Chinese-dominated Israel—which raises the question, one probably better not raised at all in this kind of Alternate History story, of how anything even remotely recognizable as even an alternate version of Israel could possibly exist in a world where a Chinese empire had settled North America before the Europeans and all subsequent world history had come out completely different than in the timeline we know. It also raises the unfortunate specter of an endless series of stories in which we discover the origins of alternate-world versions of Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Tarzan, James Bond, Mickey Mouse, and other pop-culture icons. Alternate History ought to do more than that, I think, and Roberson usually does an excellent job of delivering stories that do. The only interesting aspect here is the creation of alternate Israeli superheroes and dime-novel characters, something Lavie Tidhar handles more colorfully in his story “Funny Pages” from Interzone 225.

There’s a lot more Alternate History, some of it rather steampunkish, in the February Asimov’s, which is a bit weaker overall than January. The big story in February is Stephen Baxter’s novella “The Ice Line,” a sequel to Baxter’s “The Ice War” from the September 2009 Asimov’s, depicting a Victorian England that is being invaded by monstrous ice creatures—called “Phoebeans” by the beleaguered Victorians—from the outer reaches of the solar system. Considering these two novellas and other stories Baxter has done with the same background, such as “The Phobean Egg” from Postscripts 20/21, it isn’t a particularly brilliant deduction to surmise that an “Ice War” novel is in the process of being assembled piecemeal here, and will appear in book form somewhere down the line. “The Ice Line” takes place some decades after the initial invasion described in “The Ice War,” when human scientists have had time to experiment on captured Phobeans, and figure out how to use them as a propulsive system—and as weapons. This is still a highly entertaining story, although I miss the headlong narrative drive of the original story, which was essentially one long chase sequence (“The Ice Line” is actually rather slow in the opening section, although it does pick up momentum later on), and I also miss the snarky, impudent voice of the roguish narrator of the original story, a self-involved scoundrel who gets drawn into the battle against the Phobeans totally against his will, a more interesting character than the more earnest and bland narrator of the current piece, whose decision to join a suicide mission never seemed convincingly motivated to me.

Also excellent in February is an evocative ghost story by Bruce McAllister, “The Woman Who Waited Forever,” set in the well-described and convincing milieu of military brats in postwar Italy. Damien Broderick’s “Dead Air,” a Philip K. Dick pastiche, joining pastiches of Cordwainer Smith and Roger Zelazny that Broderick did last year, is also good, full of Dickian conceptualization and weird throwaway bits of business, although it doesn’t get Dick’s tone of voice quite right, and lacks the paranoid narrative drive and hybrid pulp vigor of the best of Dick’s work; it does deliver a suitably unsettling final image, though.

Below this point, the stories in February are weaker. New writer Caroline M. Yoachim delivers a grotesque African-tinged story, “Stone Wall Truth,” whose unexplained fantastic elements seem to make it fantasy, although an unconvincing argument could be made for reading it as science fiction instead. New writer Aliette de Bodard gives us another story set in an Alternate World long dominated by the Chinese, similar to Roberson’s “Celestial Empire” milieu; “The Wind-Blown Man” starts off interesting but gradually loses steam, perhaps because the protagonist doesn’t really have any choices to make that seriously affect the outcome of the story, and little at risk, and remains pretty much a passive observer who ends up where she was at the beginning. New writer David Erik Nelson’s “The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond” is a muddle that tries to pull in too many directions at once.

The big story in the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is Paul Park’s elegantly written, and somewhat enigmatic, “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV),” an intricate structure of nesting narratives told by an Unreliable Narrator who seems meant to be the author himself in an impoverished near-future world, and which ultimately, as far as I can tell (which may not be too far, since this is Park at his trickiest), seems to be about selected people holding the line in dream—and perhaps after death—against sinister creatures from the Other Side. In spite of that description, which makes it sound solidly Lovecraftian, this is much more a slipstream story than a genre fantasy, one with science fiction elements at that, as well as being a memoir and a family history, more slipstreamish than I usually like, but so well-crafted that it’s hard not to admire the skill with which Park has fit the many pieces of this puzzle together to form a mosaic that may be more than the sum of its parts. The thing it reminds me the most closely of in tone is Gene Wolfe’s similarly tricky novel Peace.

Also excellent in January/February is Charles Oberndorf’s wryly titled “Writers of the Future,” which is about just that—writers’s critique groups in a future society where the remnants of humanity live in scattered space habitats under the control and at the sufferance of godlike AIs, one of the only actual SF stories in the issue, and a good one. This is Oberndorf’s second recent story after a silence of some years—the other was last year’s similarly first-rate “Another Life”—and it’s good to see him back and operating on such a high level. Another writer returning after a long absence, Dean Whitlock, contributes “Nanosferatu,” a sly Galaxy-style satire about the pitfalls and unexpected advantages of medical nanotechnology that goes on a little too long.

The rest of the stories in the issue are slipstream or fantasy. Robert Reed’s “The Long Retreat” is more slipstreamish than usual for him, a realistically described story set in an impossible world; Steve Popkes’s “The Secret Lives of Fairy Tales” is a funny demythologizing satire of, naturally, fairy tales; John Langan’s “City of the Dog” is a grim Lovecraftian tale set in the modern world; and Kate Wilhelm’s “The Late Night Train” a bittersweet fantasy about a dysfunctional family that reminds me of the late Manly Wade Wellman’s classic “The Little Black Train.”

Up online on the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean is a compelling and unusual fantasy by Ian R. MacLeod, “Second Journey of the Magus,” about a world where Jesus succumbs to the temptations of Satan and accepts dominion over all the world, with unsettling results. The January 2010 Clarkesworld has a strong story by Peter Watts, “The Things,” which retells the story of John W. Campbell’s classic story “Who Goes There?”—twice filmed as The Thing from Another World and The Thing—from the perspective of the alien “monster” against whom the humans are struggling for survival in an isolated winter encampment in Antarctica. Watts does an excellent job of showing a totally alien way of looking at life, turning our understanding of the alien’s motivations for doing what he does on its head. The only potential weak spot is that that the story seems to be tied specifically to John Carpenter’s 1982 film version; those who have instead seen Christian Nyby’s 1951 version—which scared the piss out of me as a little kid—may be confused. The first story up on Tor.com this year is “Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder,” by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake. Some nice Dickian touches here, like the dapper robot psychiatrist who sports three-fingered white clown gloves and a “plastic grin,” and the story basically is a Phil Dick reality-bending, what-is-real story—but a kinder, gentler one, where the reality-bending drug basically heals the protagonist’s psychological wounds (and leaves a hot willing babe in the formerly empty bed in the next room as a bonus), rather than tearing open the fabric of reality and leaving him plummeting endlessly down into a bottomless well of paranoid uncertainty and fear.