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Godlike Machines, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Science Fiction Book Club, 563 pages).

Seven Cities of Gold, by David Moles. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848630-83-3, 74 pages). Cover art by Tomislav Tikolin.

Asimov’s, 07/10.

Interzone 277.

Subterranean, Summer 2010.

 

I’m on record as saying that the novella may be the perfect length for a science fiction story: long enough to enable you to flesh out the details of a strange alien world or a bizarre future society, to give such a setting some depth, complexity, and heft…and yet, still short enough for the story to pack a real punch, some power and elegance and bite, unblunted and unobscured by padding—unlike many of today’s bloated novels, some of which are hundreds of pages longer than they really need to be. Publishing novellas was becoming a bit problematical at one point, as printing costs rose, length restrictions became more stringent, and magazines dropped pages for economic reasons—although Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF continue to print many novellas every year, in spite of these challenges—but the last few years have seen (in addition to internet ezines, where length restrictions are less of a problem) a rise in novellas published as individual chapbooks, and in all-novella anthologies.

There were several good all-novella anthologies last year, and now, after being postponed several times by the publisher, 2010 sees at last the publication of a very good one, Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan. This contains six novellas, all SF, all original (sort of. Publication of the book was delayed long enough that Greg Egan’s novella “Hot Rock” came out first in Egan’s collection last year, rather than debuting in Godlike Machines, as it was supposed to). This is SF about as Cutting Edge as SF can get, all unambiguous center-core science fiction, mostly dealing with humanity’s encounters with and relationships to the Godlike Machines of the title, no slipstream, no fantasy, no steampunk; for a science fiction fan, after working through all the slipstream one encounters these days, this is like a shot of whiskey after an afternoon spent drinking fizzy lemonade, and Godlike Machines will certainly be in the running for the title of Best Science Fiction anthology of the year—in fact, at this point, it’s the front-runner by a good margin.

There’s really nothing here that’s less than first-rate. If pressed to name my favorites, I guess I would name Alastair Reynolds’s “Troika”—a story about a beleaguered astronaut in a revived Soviet Union who is forever changed by coming in contact with an immensely ancient Matryoska brain that is penetrating the solar system, a brilliant novella that reads like a combination of Gorky Park and Rendezvous With Rama—and the before-mentioned “Hot Rock,” by Greg Egan, in which posthuman explorers struggle to safely investigate a mysterious “orphan planet” that has functioned like a tar-pit for several previous waves of colonizers. But the book also contains a Great Ship story by Robert Reed, “Alone,” which not only reveals a key secret about the Great Ship itself but features an immortal, protean, and totally inhuman protagonist who nevertheless manages to be poignant and affecting; one of Stephen Baxter’s long sequence of stories about astronaut Harry Poole, “Return to Titan,” this one exposing the hero’s feet of clay, including a ruthless willingness to commit genocide if that’s what it takes to meet his goals; an intricate story about the enigmatic, time-spanning construct known as the Structure, “A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails),” by Sean Williams; and, perhaps a bit peripheral to the theme of the anthology, but still vivid and exciting, a post-cyberpunk story (reading at times a bit like it’s taking place inside a Video Game world) about society falling apart under the strain of ever-accelerating Future Shock, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life,” by Cory Doctorow.

Every year there are also a number of novellas published as individual chapbooks, usually by small presses. Last year there were several significant novellas published that way, including Kage Baker’s The Women of Neil Gwynne’s, Dave Hutchinson’s The Push, John Scalzi’s The God Engines, and Jay Lake’s Death of a Starship, and the best one I’ve seen so far this year is The Seven Cities of Gold, by David Moles. This is a masterfully done work of Alternate History, which succeeds in creating a world that seems lived-in and all-too-real, down to the smallest details. It’s a Heart-of-Darkness journey undertaken by a haunted and conflicted woman, down a river that runs right through the middle of a vividly described warzone, with physical details that feel real and yet surreal at the same time, and scenes so grotesquely horrible that they almost rise through it to a hallucinatory beauty. The Seven Cities of Gold is one of the best novellas of the year so far, but be warned—there is stuff here that is almost painful to read, and this is definitely not for the squeamish or faint of heart. “Optimistic SF” it’s not.

Another really first-rate novella is to be found in the July Asimov’s, the issue’s lead story, Robert Reed’s “A History of Terraforming.” This sprawling, vividly imaginative story follows the protagonist, Simon, from his childhood on a newly-settled Mars hundreds of years into an increasingly strange future. Simon is an “atum,” a terraformer, and each step in his career as he grows in knowledge and abilities showcases the strengths and weaknesses, the ethical as well as physical pros and cons, of terraforming, as the terraformers create new worlds—and sometimes destroy old ones. Simon is an engaging character, who somehow retains an essential humanity no matter how strange his external form and his life become—at one point, he falls in love with a parrot—and always keeps the childlike wonder of a young boy watching a living Mars being created around him. Also excellent in July is Tom Purdom’s “Haggle Chips,” an ingenious and well-thought-out story about a very civilized kidnapping where the victim is treated well and held hostage under the most luxurious conditions imaginable—but captivity, no matter how comfortable, is still captivity, and the protagonist’s attempts to escape demonstrate that there’s a steel fist inside the velvet glove.

New writer Aliette de Bodard delivers another strong Alternate History story—she’s produced several of them in the last couple of years—in “The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” taking us to a world where the Chinese colonized the New World before Columbus for a tense story of friendships betrayed that tests where the protagonist’s loyalties ultimately lie. Also good is “The Other Graces,” by new writer Alice Sola Kim, in which a beleaguered Asian girl receives much-needed help and encouragement from a very unexpected source. Kristine Kathryn Rusch offers a sly preview of the etiquette guides of the future in “Amelia Pillar’s Etiquette for the Space Traveler,” and new writer D.T. Mitenko spins a funny and inventive story about a peculiar sort of romantic rivalry, in “Eddie’s Ants.” (Although how they “do it,” as one character asks, remains unclear by story’s end.)

The best story in Interzone 227 is “Chimbwi,” by “new writer” Jim Hawkins, whose previous sale was forty years ago to New Worlds. This takes us to a near-future where, in an ironic twist, the overall fates of Africa and Europe have been reversed, so that it’s Europe that is impoverished and war-torn, riddled with famine and disease, while Africa has grown prosperous and technologically advanced beyond anything known in Europe. The storyline follows a European refugee, a physicist, on his harrowing flight from ruined Europe to Africa, through enslavement and forced labor, and finally to a position of trust in scientific circles in Zambia, the African superpower of the day. This is clearly one of the best stories of the year to date. The only quibble I have with it is that it ends so abruptly that I actually turned the page, expecting the story to continue. Also first-rate in Interzone 227 is “Flying in the Face of God,” by Nina Allan, a poignant and excellently crafted character study of a woman whose best friend/lover (it’s never made explicit which) is being transformed into a strange posthuman creature in order to survive a journey to the stars, a journey from which she’ll never return, from the point of view of the woman left behind.

Also in Interzone 227, Jon Ingold gives us a subtler and much less flamboyant version of R.A. Lafferty’s “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” in “The History of Poly-V,” a story in which experimenters are unaware of the changes in reality produced by their every experiment with a memory-enhancing drug. Mercurio D. Rivera offers us “Dance of the Kawkawroons,” a clever story in which ruthless Earthmen think that they’re exploiting hapless aliens—but who’s really exploiting whom? Entertaining and enjoyable, although the aliens are a little too much like albatrosses to be really convincing as an alien race. The usually excellent Chris Beckett disappoints somewhat with “Johnny’s New Job,” in which he vents his bitterness over his former job as a social worker with a heavyhanded satire that has “Author’s Message” written all over it in bright neon letters. And Steve Rasnic Tem contributes “The Glare and the Glow,” a story that might have been more comfortable in companion magazine Black Static.

In what would be further proof that the Millennium was at hand (if the Millennium hadn’t already passed), I liked another zombie story this time out (I liked Steven Popkes’s “The Crocodiles” last month), Maureen McHugh’s “The Naturalist,” from the Summer issue of Subterranean, guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan, that is just beginning to be posted up on the Subterranean online magazine. McHugh’s protagonist, stranded in a “zombie enclave” where condemned prisoners are sent and left to fend for themselves, really does use the scientific method to study the nature and “life”ways (deathways?) of zombies, experimenting with them to the best of his abilities given his limited means, learning what attracts them and repeals them, and how to avoid being noticed by them, although the methods he uses in his experiments are ruthless enough to make him seem almost more cold-blooded than the zombies themselves. Tom Holt is also on hand for the Summer issue of Subterranean that’s been posted so far, offering us a screwball comedy of Quantum Physics in “Brownian Emotion.”