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Gateways, Elizabeth Ann Hull, ed. (Tor, 978-0-7653-2662-1, $24.99, 416 pages.)

Subterranean, Summer 2010.

Wings of Fire, Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon, eds. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-187-4, $15.95, 512 pages). Cover art by Todd Lockward.

Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, Mike Allen, ed. (Norilana Books, 978-1-60762-062-4, $11.95, 314 pages.) Cover art, “Light of the Harem,” by Sir Frederic Leighton.

Tor.com.

 

Frederik Pohl is a seminal figure in the development of modern science fiction; in the course of his astounding seventy-plus-year career, he’s left an indelible mark on the genre as a writer (he’s produced some of the key works of science fiction, including The Space Merchants with C.M. Kornbluth and Gateway, and has won multiple awards for his writing, including the SFWA Grand Master Award), as an anthologist (he edited the first original anthology series, Star), as an editor (as editor of both Galaxy and Worlds of If magazines, I consider him to be one of the two most important magazine editors in genre history), as one of the field’s first agents, and as one of the founders of the whole basic tradition of SF fandom. Therefore, it’s not at all surprising that Pohl’s wife and fellow professional Elizabeth Anne Hull has been able to persuade thirty of Pohl’s peers—including some whose parents probably weren’t alive yet when Pohl began his professional career—to contribute work of some kind, stories (mostly original, with a few reprints), poems, appreciations, to Gateways, a festschrift (as we intellectuals call it) or tribute anthology (as the rest of you can call it) honoring Pohl’s work. Unlike the Jack Vance tribute anthology from last year, Songs of the Dying Earth, or the Isaac Asimov memorial anthology from a couple of decades back, Foundation’s Friends, Gateways doesn’t let the authors play with the worlds or characters invented by the author being honored—instead, it takes the somewhat more subjective course of encouraging authors to contribute stuff that has been “inspired by” Pohl’s work, which inspiration may on occasion be clearer to the authors themselves than it’s going to be to the reader (the most emotionally moving story here, for instance, Greg Bear’s “Warm Seas,” one of the reprints, reads to me much more like a homage to Arthur C. Clarke than a homage to Pohl, whose influence on the story is not, to me, immediately apparent, although I’m sure it is to Bear).

This is a substantial anthology, good value for the money, seventeen stories from top authors, the bulk of them original (although one of the reprints, David Brin’s “Shoresteading,” takes up almost a fourth of the book!). The stories are almost all solidly entertaining, although, with one or two possible exceptions, I don’t think there are any award-winners here. The best story in the book, by a good margin, and also the one that gives the strongest impression of also having been centrally influenced by and in dialog with Pohl’s own work, is Cory Doctorow’s novella “Chicken Little,” which does an excellent job of updating and commenting on some of the themes that informed Pohl and Kornbluth’s classic novel The Space Merchants; Doctorow’s updated high-tech take on Pohl’s take on Jonathan Swift’s “struldbrugs,” creatures who have immortality but not eternal youth, continuing to age through their extended lives, is particularly ingenious; I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one show up on an award ballot next year. Also good is Joe Haldeman’s “Sleeping Dogs,” a deeply cynical study of ways in which future governments could manipulate the flow of information reaching their citizens even more effectively than they do today. Frank M. Robinson tells a grittier variant of James Tiptree, Jr’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” in a hard-eyed look at “The Errand Boy,” Vernor Vinge grapples with the Fermi Paradox in “A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee,” and Gene Wolfe takes us to an unusual setting for a compelling (although, as usual, somewhat enigmatic; I still don’t understand why there was a parade of elephants going into the spaceship in the first place) tale of what you may have to do to survive under extreme circumstances, in “King Rat.” Plus a “Stainless Steel Rat” story by Harry Harrison, and work by Ben Bova, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, and others. In addition to Afterwords about their relationships with Pohl contributed by each story author, the anthology also features Appreciations by Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, Robert Silverberg, Brian W. Aldiss, and others, plus poems by Neil Gaiman and David Lunde.

The rest (presumably) of the Summer 2010 issue of the online magazine Subterranean, guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan, has gone up, and there’s some excellent stuff there, such as Damien Broderick’s “Under the Moons of Venus.” Broderick has done homages in the last couple of years to Cordwainer Smith, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick, and although those stories each had much to recommend them, I think that “Under the Moons of Venus,” Broderick’s homage to J.G. Ballard, is by a fair margin the best one yet. Here, Broderick has managed to internalize Ballard’s influence on him and make this into its own story with its own strengths and an organic voice and sensibility of its own, rather than just being a pastiche of Ballard. Ballard would not have written this—but it’s clear that Broderick wouldn’t have written it without reading Ballard. The story also does a good job of walking the tightrope between the view that the events of the story are “real” and that they’re all the delusions of a disturbed mind, even-handedly scattering clues in support of either proposition through the text.

Also first-rate in the Summer issue is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Elegy for a Young Elk.” Rajamiemi is a writer who cranks the bit-rate up about as high as it can go and still remain comprehensible (although there will almost certainly be some who think that this doesn’t remain comprehensible), said by some to out-Charles Stross Charles Stross, and this slender story, set in a post-Apocalyptic future society where posthumans with godlike powers are at war, manages to jam enough high-concept into a few pages to fuel a 400-page novel. Another high-bit-rate, high-concept story, although not quite as jam-packed as the Rajaniemi, is new writer Gord Sellar’s “The Bodhisattvas,” in which an order of monks, care-takers of an Earth devastated by ecological disasters (such as the one taking place along the Gulf Coast as I type these words), debate the morality of risky experiments designed to create entire new universes. For a change of pace, Peter S. Beagle’s “Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story” takes us to an evocative fantasy world of sinister magic where implacable assassins chase their victims down no matter how far away they run or how long it takes—and your one chance of escape is to face them down on their own home ground. The one story here I didn’t warm to was new writer Daryl Gregory’s “What We Take When We Take What We Need,” an unsettling rural horror story that was a bit too icky for my taste—although really, there’s nothing bad in this issue, and readers who like horror better than I do will no doubt respond positively to Gregory’s piece, which is very well-executed.

Considering that the issue also features Maureen McHugh’s “The Naturalist” and Tim Holt’s “Brownian Emotion,” reviewed here last month, I’d have to say that the Summer issue of Subterranean is the strongest single issue of any magazine, print or electronic, that I’ve seen so far this year.

The ubiquitous Jonathan Strahan, in collaboration with co-editor Marianne S. Jablon, also brings us Wings of Fire, a mixed original and reprint (mostly) fantasy anthology of stories about dragons. The two original stories, “Sobek,” by Holly Black and “The Miracle Aquilina,” by Margo Lanagan, are good, but the real strength of the anthology lies in its reprints, which include such classics as “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” by Lucius Shepard, “The Rule of Names,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Draco, Draco,” by Tanith Lee, “King Dragon,” by Michael Swanwick, “Paper Dragons,” by James P. Blaylock, and nineteen other stories by the likes of George R.R. Martin, Roger Zelazny, Elizabeth Bear, Anne McCaffrey, Naomi Novik, and others—all of which makes this a strong anthology, and well worth the money.

Also on the shelves is Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, edited by Mike Allen, a mixed slipstream/fantasy/science fiction anthology of original stories. The stories here are elegantly written, as usual, but, somewhat disappointingly for me, the ratio of SF to slipstream/fantasy continues to slip; the original Clockwork Phoenix was divided almost equally between SF and the other genres, but, as was also true of Clockwork Phoenix 2, there’s not much science fiction here anymore, and not even really that much fantasy, slipstream having pretty much taken over. The three SF stories include John C. Wright’s “Murder in Metachronopolis,” a hugely complex time-paradox tale, the best SF story in the book, a stealth far-future story, John Grant’s “Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight,” and Cat Rambo’s “Surrogates,” a satirical piece about the mores of the future that reminds me a bit of the “Urban Monad” stories that Robert Silverberg used to write in the ‘70s. The best of the fantasy stories are “Hell Friend,” by Gemma Files, and “Braiding the Ghosts,” by C.S. E. Cooney. The strongest story in the anthology overall is Gregory Frost’s “Lucyna’s Gaze,” a disquieting story of future genocide that dances on the razor-edge between science fiction and fantasy.

Recent stories posted on Tor.com include a surreal joke story by Terry Bisson, “The Cockroach Hat,” a literally Post-Apocalyptic metaphysical fantasy by Richard Parks, “Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure,” a beautifully crafted and sensitively characterized borderline mainstream story about a young boy’s peculiar obsession, “The Courtship of the Queen,” by Bruce McAllister, and an ingenious Alternate World War II piece, “What Doctor Gottlieb Saw,” by Ian Tregillis. The best of these is probably the Tregillis, which takes place in a facility that suggests what Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children would be like if it was run by brutal Nazis who got the X-Men to refine their abilities by torturing them, and killing them if they ddn’t develop at sufficient speed. Tregillis somehow manages to generate suspense about the looming fate of his at least somewhat-reluctant Mengele, Dr. Gottlieb, who is in danger of being shot for failure at any moment throughout the story, even though Gottlieb, if looked at closely, isn’t really a very sympathetic character and we probably shouldn’t care whether he gets a bullet in the back of the head or not. The most interesting character here, though, and one whose presence elevates the story as a whole, is the sinister girl-child Gretel, one of the “talented” prisoners, who turns out to be far more intelligent than anyone else involved, and at least as dangerous and scary as the Nazis. This story apparently shares the same background and at least some of the same characters with Tregillis’s first novel, Bitter Seeds, so if you like one, you might like the other.