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Subterranean, Winter 2010

The Book of Dreams, Nick Gevers, ed. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-284-9, 117 pages).

Clarkesworld, 2/10

Tor.com

Shine: An Anthology of Near-Future Optimistic Science Fiction, Jeste de Vries, ed. (Solaris, 978-1-906735-66-1, 453 pages).

 

“The Bohemian Astrobleme,” a novella up on the Winter 2010 issue of online magazine Subterranean, is, alas, one of the last stories we’re going to see from the late Kage Baker, who died only a few weeks ago as I’m typing these words. It’s part of a new sequence of stories she’d started recently, dealing with the adventures of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, the Victorian predecessor of her most-famous fictional creation, the time-travelling Company, and a partial sequel to last year’s “The Women of Neil Gwynne’s,” a novella that’s up on the 2010 Final Nebula Ballot. Like almost all of Baker’s work, it’s a great deal of fun; she was a natural storyteller, and one thing you could count on with a Kage Baker story, no matter what it was about, was that she was going to tell you an engrossing story, one that grabbed you and involved you from the very first page, and this one is no exception. The most intriguing character in “The Bohemian Astrobleme,” although she plays a supporting role here rather than being the main character, is Lady Beatrice, the high-class prostitute and hyper-efficient agent who was the protagonist of “The Women of Neil Gwynne’s,” and I strongly suspect that there would have been more stories about Lady Beatrice, perhaps a book’s worth of them, if Baker had survived to write them. Like most Company stories, the general mood of “The Bohemian Astrobleme” is easy-going, even affable, a Ruritanian travelog, but Company agents are capable of acting with surprisingly cold-blooded ruthlessness when it becomes necessary to do so, and this novella too has a glint of steel buried beneath its near-pastoral surface.

Also up recently on the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean are K.J. Bishop’s “The Heart of a Mouse,” a surreal piece which hints at some bizarre transformational plague without ever actually explaining it, but which does deliver a surface story full of suspense, escapes, and rather bloody violence, and an ingenious slipstream story by Michael Bishop, “The Library of Babble.”

As if to drive home just how much we’ve lost with her death, Kage Baker has the best story, “Rex Nemorensis,” in The Book of Dreams, a collection of five novellas edited by Nick Gevers. The fantastic element in Baker’s story is a bit slender, but the voice is wonderful, supple and colloquial, able to handle lyrical and even mystical passages equally as well as gritty straightforward narrative, and she does an impressive job of making a few acres of swamp and scrubland seem like a fully realized fantasy world. All of the novellas in The Book of Dreams are fantasy or slipstream, no science fiction here, and although Baker’s story impressed me the most, Lucius Shepard delivers a strange mixture of horror and Hollywood satire in “Dreamburgers at the Mouth of Hell,” and Robert Silverberg contributes a long Twilight Zoneish vision of a man participating a little more fully in his dreams than he’s really comfortable with, “The Prisoner”; there are also elegant and intricate slipstream pieces by Jay Lake and Jeffery Ford.

It’s interesting that the genre went for years without a novella anthology, and now, within the last six months or so, we’ve had three of them (X6 and Panverse One last year, The Book of Dreams this year).

The online magazine Clarkesworld has been having a good year so far, with a strong issue last month, and another one this month. The February 2010 Clarkesworld features Jay Lake’s “Torquing Vacuum,” a vivid SF piece, set on a space station busy with the comings and goings of interstellar traffic, in which a lowly drive tech inadvertently gets involved in the internal affairs of the richest and most powerful elements of his society—putting his career and even his life at risk. February also contains Lavie Tidhar’s “The Language of the Whirlwind,” an intense and surreal vision of a nightmarish future Tel Aviv after an unexplained and perhaps unexplainable Apocalypse, a harsh story, full of disturbing images.

Jay Lake is also up on Tor.com with a story in collaboration with Ken Scholes, “The Starship Mechanic,” an inventive but slightly tongue-in-cheek vision of a strange alien visitor and an even stranger alien “invasion” that follows, full of sly Inside Jokes not quite intrusive enough to spoil the story. Harry Turtledove returns to Tor.com with a grim story, with no discernable trace of humor, of an alien invasion of quite a different sort, in “Vilcambamba”; since it’s clearly intended to be symbolic of the dire consequences of the contact between Native American societies and the technologically superior Europeans, which, after all, didn’t turn out very well for the native tribes, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that this is as relentlessly grim and uncompromisingly depressing as it is, but the odds are stacked so heavily against the Earthmen in their struggle with the ruthless godlike aliens, with never a hint that there might be the slightest chance for them to prevail, that it doesn’t have much in the way of tension or suspense as a result.

There’s been some discussion in the field recently, including right here in this column, about how nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future somehow became the default setting in SF during the ‘90s and (especially) the Oughts, and how SF writers at least occasionally ought to devote some ingenuity and energy into coming up with viable human futures that people would actually want to live in, rather than taking the easy way out and portraying yet another desolate and decaying dystopia where all hope has been lost and the future promises nothing but more of the same or worse. The tricky part, of course, is to write “optimistic” SF without becoming superficial, bland, and sappy, to write about viable human futures that are complex enough to still have some darkness and difficulty in them. Utopias are notoriously hard to make dramatically interesting. After all, there’s a reason why the headlines in our newspapers or on CNN don’t say Nothing happened today! there were no plane crashes, no murders, and everybody’s getting along fine! or The Brooklyn bridge didn’t crash into the river again today! Drama to a large extent feeds on things going wrong, not right. Balancing these elements, trying to write believable “optimistic” SF in a near-future world that still wrestles with all the problems we have today (and perhaps even suggests some solutions to the problems), and still keeps the stories dramatic and interesting, is not an easy task.

Jeste de Vries takes a crack at it with his anthology Shine: An Anthology of Near-Future Optimistic Science Fiction, and although not all the stories work, a fair number of them do a credible job of successfully balancing drama and optimism without sacrificing cultural complexity. The stories here that probably do the best job with this complex balancing act are “The Solnet Ascendancy,” by Lavie Tidhar, “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic),” by Gord Sellar, and “The Earth of Yunhe,” by Eric Gregory. The state of society in general gets grimmer and grimmer throughout “Overhead,” by Jason Stoddard, but the main characters remain optimistic and determined to succeed in the face of daunting odds; the story doesn’t tell you whether they succeed and survive or not, but it certainly seems that they’re going to give it their strongest try, without letting setbacks and disappointments discourage them, which seems to qualify the story as “optimistic.” Similarly, circumstances are pretty grim, and get grimmer, throughout Kay Kenyon’s “Castoff World,” but the protagonist maintains a childlike innocence and optimism no matter how bad things get, which is endearing. Alastair Reynolds’s “At Budokan” seems a bit peripheral to the main thrust of the anthology, but since it’s about how biotechnology can be used to produce Art, I suppose it would qualify as upbeat too. The anthology also contains good work by Jacques Barcia, Ken Edgett, Madeline Ashby, and others.

This idea of “optimistic SF” has some points of similarity with the “Mundane SF” movement that surfaced a few years back, both eschewing superscientific gadgets and Space Opera tropes, focused on the near future rather than on the far future, although Mundane SF has so far tended to be darker, more concerned with problems than solutions. In a way, then, Shine could be considered to be a Mundane anthology, and so it’s interesting to compare it to last year’s Mundane SF anthology When It Changed, Science into Fiction: An Anthology, edited by Geoff Ryman, a comparison that leads me to wonder if the difference between the two movements is primarily one of mood. Perhaps Optimistic SF is just more upbeat Mundane SF?

March is another strong issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, with several good stories. The best of the lot—although nothing here is really bad—may be Alexander Jablokov’s “Blind Cat Dance,” set in a future society that has developed a novel way of integrating the human and natural worlds, making the animals unable to perceive the human society around them, so that they think they’re in the middle of a forest when actually they’re in the middle of a crowded café; the irony here, of course, is that the protagonist, one of the technicians programming the animals’s selective blindness is herself blind to the ways that she’s being controlled and manipulated. New writer William Preston spins an entertaining pulp homage with unexpectedly somber and serious undertones in “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” although I wonder how many readers below a certain age will have any idea which pulp character, once famous, now obscure, is being drawn upon here for inspiration? New writer Derek Zumsteg delivers a clever look at the roots of rebellion, “Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising”; the backstory here is perhaps a bit superficially sketched in, but is enough to carry a fairly short story.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch brings her typical professional skill-set to bear on “The Tower,” a well-executed tale about a team of time-traveling scholars going back to investigate the mysterious death of the Princes in the Tower, but part way through a caper/jewel heist story takes over the story we started out with, which I found somewhat disappointing. I was more interested in the original investigation (which is abandoned with the question of who killed the Princes still unresolved as soon as the jewel heist plot kicks in) and would rather have stuck with that—although I must say that in a future where time-travel is in its infancy, still considered to be prohibitively expensive and extremely dangerous, I find it very unlikely that the Who-Killed-the-Princes thing is going to be the question they devote one of the first time-travel journeys to; seems unlikely that the answer would be of interest enough to anyone other than a few scholars to be worth the risk of altering all subsequent history. Rusch does do a good job of bringing home how dirty, squalid, and, above all, smelly the past would seem to people used to today’s standards of hygiene.

New writer Benjamin Crowell takes us out to the orbit of Neptune for a study of teenaged dating in the future, in “Centaurs.” This is essentially a YA story, very similar in mood and tone to the YA stories that Heinlein used to write, like, say, “The Menace from Earth,” complete with a life-threatening Heinleinian problem that must be solved by the pluck and ingenuity of the teenagers. It’s well-executed, but the teenagers are suspiciously like today’s teenagers psychologically and culturally for a society far enough in the future for space colonies near Neptune to be taken for granted, and the story sort of dribbles away rather than coming to any sort of real resolution. New writer Will Ludwigsen contributes a speculation about “The Speed of Dreams,” another YA—or younger—piece which is charming and funny until it suddenly swerves into an inappropriately black ending which not only doesn’t fit with what’s gone before, but retroactively spoils it.