20

F&SF, 5-6/09.

Asimov’s, 6/09.

Lightspeed, 6/09.

Conflicts, Ian Whates, ed. (NewCon Press, 978-1-907069-10-9, 296 pages). Cover art by Andy Bigwood.

Digital Domains, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-208-5, $14.95, 312 pages). Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

 

The best story in a somewhat weak May/June F&SF is Steven Popkes’s “The Crocodiles.” I surprised myself by deciding this, since it’s a zombie story (no real spoiler here, since you know it very early on), and over the last couple of years, which has seen a glut of them, I’ve become pretty sick of zombie stories. This is a good one, though—ingenious, clever, emotionally powerful, with a twist on the theme I’ve never seen before. Also good in May/June is Michael Libling’s “Why That Crazy Old Lady Goes Up The Mountain,” which deals with the intricate interactions of the living and the dead, set against the background of a well-described rural Maine. Also good, and with a similar theme, is Rachel Pollack’s “Forever,” in which Death goes to dwell among mortals and loses herself in the mortal world—for a while. Aaron Schutz returns with one of his rare stories, “Dr. Death vs. the Vampire,” which entertainingly pits a second-string superhero, an outcast from The League of Almost-Superheroes, against a vampire who he’s trapped with during a long trans-continental bus trip. Alex Irvine takes an atypical metaphysical bent in the somewhat abstract “Remotest Mansions of the Blood,” which reads like a Lucius Shepard story without the violence and sex. Hilary Goldstein gives us another demythologizing satire of fairy stories, “Seven Sins for Seven Dwarves,” similar to the one by Steven Popkes in the January/February issue, and there’s another in a lengthy fantasy series by Fred Chappell, “Thief of Shadows.” The rest of the stories are mostly Bradburyesque fantasies, most a bit weak, although there’s nice work by Elizabeth Bourne and by the late John Sladek, who contributes a mean-spirited but funny satire of The Martian Chronicles.

With the exception of Dale Bailey’s “Silence,” which can be interpreted as science fiction (although it could also be interpreted as fantasy), and the somewhat dubious exception of “The Crocodiles,” which offers a “scientific” rationale for its zombieism, everything in the issue is fantasy.

There’s some strong stories and some weak ones in the June Asimov’s. With one possible exception, everything in the issue is science fiction, the strong stories and the weak stories alike.

The best story here is probably Allen M. Steele’s “The Emperor of Mars,” which does a nice job of creating a valid science fiction story that also functions as an exercise in retro Barsoom nostalgia and as an interesting psychological study. Also very good is Chris Beckett’s “The Peacock Cloak”—Beckett usually writes about near-future England, but here he moves effectively into Roger Zelazny territory, with superpowered individuals facing off in a Virtual Reality world created by one of them; as is usual with Beckett, there’s a moral question raised, and an ethical resolution proposed. The only minor criticism I have is that having hung something like the Peacock Cloak on the wall, as it were, it really should have been fired off before the end of the story. Also good is the issue’s lead story, Stephen Baxter’s novella “Earth III,” a loose sequel of sorts to his “Earth II” from the July 2009 issue, following the fate of refugees fleeing a devastated Earth who establish offworld colonies and then largely forget their origins. This one is largely a science fictional retelling of the story of Helen of Troy, with an ill-advised seduction (although who is seducing who is one of the novella’s most interesting questions) leading to a planet-wide war. “Earth III” showcases Baxter’s considerable strengths: intricate and evocative world-building, family conflicts resulting in a web of betrayal and double-crosses that ultimately drive societal change, and a headlong chase into the planet’s unexplored Darkside that not only moves the plot but gives the characters an excuse to take a picaresque tour of areas of the planet they otherwise probably wouldn’t have any reason to see; there’s also a clever religion based on the idea that they’re all living in a Virtual Reality simulation, which resonates nicely with Beckett’s “The Peacock Cloak.” If it has a serious weakness, it’s that Khilli, one of the major characters, is a cartoon figure, totally unconvincing, who might as well be wearing an Evil Military Man tee-shirt while munching on babies throughout. Many of the mysteries surrounding the Substrate structures, remains of a former civilization from millions of years before, are left unexplained, and I assume we’ll have to wait for further stories in this sequence to explain them, as there’s clearly a novel being put together piecemeal here, assembled from accreting novellas, like cratons slamming together to form California.

Peter Friend’s “Voyage to the Moon” is a steampunk vision of, well, voyaging to the moon, much like Brian Stableford’s “A Plurality of Worlds” and the other Victorian steampunk stories he’s been writing recently—except that all the characters are aliens, not humans, and the universe the intrepid aeronauts are exploring is a bizarre one, reminiscent of the cosmology in Karl Schroeder’s “Virga” novels or in Jay Lake’s “Clockwork Earth” sequence. Some very nice stuff here, but the story ends much too abruptly, just stopping without really resolving anything at all; I assume that there’ll be Sequels. The fantastic element in Benjamin Crowell’s “Petopia” is a bit thin, but the Third World setting in which the characters scramble to get by on less than Western civilization routinely throws away, is very nicely done, as are the complex and sympathetically portrayed characters themselves. I found both the motivations of the characters and the situation itself in Anna Tambour’s “Dreadnought Neptune” very unconvincing (would have served them right if the “spaceship” turned out to be the human equivalent of a roach motel, which is where I thought she was going at first), and Kit Reed’s satirical “Monkey Do” (the possible fantasy in the issue, since no technical explanation for the monkey’s intelligence is ever offered) tries too hard to be funny.

June will see the launch of a very promising new online magazine, Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, the former associate editor of F&SF and an experienced anthologist in his own right. The best story in the June issue of Lightspeed is Carrie Vaughn’s “Amarylliss,” a quiet but powerful tale of multi-generational family relations and personal redemption against the odds. This pulls off the difficult trick of managing to show a diminished, ecologically distressed near-future without being bleak or despairing—people are adapting and getting by, and, more importantly, they have each other. It may not always be easy to cope, but life goes on. If you lose your family, you can, with luck, make another one for yourself. Jack McDevitt’s “The Cassandra Project” is a Fermi Project Where-Is-Everybody? story with a powerful sting in its tail that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Analog—although the logical but bleak conclusion the story reaches may have been too dark for them. Vylar Kaftan’s “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” covers some fairly familiar time-dilation territory, but does it in a pleasing manner, and the human interactions are interesting. The only one here I didn’t warm to was David Barr Kirtley’s “Cats in Victory,” a kind of prose magna, with catmen fighting dogmen in a Post-Apocalyptic wasteland.

With Jim Baen’s Universe dying, I’m particularly pleased to see a new online magazine starting up and attracting professional talent, with a canny editor at the helm; let’s hope it does well, as the genre can use all the short-fiction markets it can get, particularly those oriented toward SF, as Lightspeed seems to be (the default setting for most ezines and websites seems to be slipstream, fantasy, and soft horror). The only thing I found a bit disappointing here is that the stories are all quite short. As pixels are cheap, I hope they end up using some longer stuff in future issues, especially as many writers I know are complaining that there aren’t many markets left to sell their novellas to anymore. Running long stories is something the internet—where you don’t have the stringent length-restrictions that you do in the print world—seems ideally suited for to me.

Ultra-small British publisher NewCon Press has been active in the anthology market in the last couple of years, publishing books of surprising quality considering that editorial budgets must be small, and they’ve just come out with another one, Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates. Unlike their previous anthologies, which mixed fantasy and science fiction, this is their first all-SF anthology, a parfait offering up stripes of different-flavored SF: some Military SF, some Alternate History, some Space Opera, some Post-Cyberpunk, some Steampunk. Almost everything here is solidly enjoyable—although nothing, I think, is really exceptional. The best stories are “War Without End,” by Una McCormack, a story about an old solider refusing to fade away without telling his side of the story, “One Land,” by Chris Beckett, an Alternate History tale that doubles as sharp political allegory, “Proper Little Soldier,” by Martin McGrath, which more or less re-envisions The War of the Worlds, and “Sussed,” by Keith Brooke, about a fugitive pressed into reluctant service as a soldier during an interstellar war, but there is also good work here by Eric Brown, Neal Asher, Gareth L. Powell, David L. Clements, and others. This is going to be hard enough to find on the American side of the Atlantic that I’d recommend going directly to the NewCon Press website, www.newconpress.co.uk, and mail-ordering it.

Ellen Datlow was one of the first major genre editors to specialize in buying short fiction for online-only electronic publication, first at OMNI Online from September 1996 to March 1998, then at Event Horizon from August 1988 to July 1999, and most recently at Scifiction, from May 2000 to December 2005—a stint that won her a Best Editor Hugo. All of these sites are dead now, taking their achieves into electronic limbo, but Prime Books has given Datlow the chance to give some of the stories she bought the (relative) permanence of print, by allowing her to pick her favorites for an anthology called Digital Domains, A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy. There are a lot of good stories here. The best-known stories in the book are probably Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” and Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective,” but I think my favorites here are James P. Blaylock’s “Thirteen Phantasms,” Severna Park’s “Harbingers,” Simon Ings’s “Russian Vine,” and Andy Duncan’s “The Pottawatomie Giant,” although there’s also good work here by Paul Park, Howard Waldrop, Maureen McHugh, Nathan Ballingrud, and others.