23

Strange Horizons

Fantasy Magazine

F&SF, 7/8.

Mammoths of the Great Plains, Eleanor Arnason. (PM Press, 978-1-60486-075-7, $12.00, 145 pages). Cover art by John Yates.

The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 3: The Saturn Game, Poul Anderson. (NESFA Press, 13: 978-1-886778-89-4, $29.00, 511 pages). Cover art by Bob Eggleton.

Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, Peter S. Beagle. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-291-7, $40.00, 454 pages). Cover art by Michael William Kaluta.

The Secret History of Fantasy, Peter S. Beagle, ed. (Tachyon Publications,978-1-892391-99-5, $15.95, 432 pages).

The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, Walter Jon Williams. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-177-5, $24.95, 306 pages). Cover art by Andrew Kim.

The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-184-3, $27.95, 387 pages). Cover art by Eugene Wang.

 

New(ish) writer Lavie Tidhar is red-hot these days, and has perhaps the best stories of the year in two of the field’s major online venues. He has the best story to appear so far this year in Strange Horizons, somewhat atypically for this market an SF story, “The Night Train,” from the June 14th issue, a violent and vivid post-cyberpunk story that reads like a mix of Lucius Shepard and early Greg Egan, with perhaps a dash of Bruce Sterling thrown in. Tidhar has an even-better story in Fantasy Magazine, again SF in spite of the magazine’s title, and again perhaps the best story they’ve published this year, “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” in the May 17th issue—this is a quieter, more lyrical, deeply compassionate story, reminiscent perhaps of some of Ian McDonald’s Future India stories in its vision of how high-tech gadgets interact with ancient cultures and traditions, each modifying the other. Tidhar has been producing good work for several years now, mostly for online magazines and small-press anthologies, but this stuff is a quantum jump better than anything he’s done before.

Other good stories in Strange Horizons so far this year include two enjoyable metafiction pieces, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” by Theodora Goss, from the January 18th through January 25th issues and “Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions,” by Saladin Ahmed, from the February 15th issue; the borderline SF/fabulations “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” by Vandana Singh, in the March 29th issue and “The Red Bride,” by Samantha Henderson, in the May 7th issue; a clever story on the borderline between mainstream and fantasy, depending on how you interpret events, “We Heart Vampires!!!,” by Meghan McCarron, in the May 3rd through May 10th issues; a steampunk tale, “Small Burdens,” by Paul M. Berger, in the March 11th issue; slipstreamish superhero stories, “Merrythoughts,” by Bill Kte’pi, in the March 3rd issue and “The Blue Wonder,” by Chris Kammerud, in the January 11th issue; and more traditional fantasies such as “Worlds Apart,” by Marlaina Gray, in the May 17th issue, “Waiting,” by Eilis O’Neal, from the May 31st issue, and “The Duke of Vertumn’s Fingerling,” by Elizabeth Carroll, from the April 5th issue.

Fantasy Magazine, appropriately enough, tends to run more traditional fantasy and less slipstream than Strange Horizons, and there’s been other good stories there this year such as “Enter the Dragon,” by Sarah Monette, from the January 25th issue; “In the Emperor’s Gardens,” by Jay Lake and Shannon Page, from the March 15th issue; “The Sometimes Child,” by Caroline Yoachim, from the May 3rd issue; “Wishes and Feathers,” by Patricia Russo, from the May 18th issue; “Sterogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory,” by Paul M. Berger, from the June 21st issue; “The Seal of Sulaymaan,” by Tracy Canfield, in the July 12th issue, and “The Stable Master’s Tale,” by Rachel Swirsky, in the July 5th issue. There was also another good SF story, “Abandonware,” by An Owomoyela, in the June 28th issue.

The best story in the July/August F&SF, by a good margin, is Ian R. MacLeod’s “Recrossing the Styx,” yet another good zombie story (will wonders never cease?), although this time there’s a strong scientific rationale for the zombieism, in a future where the rich are making ever-greater and more extreme attempts to avoid their own mortality—a depressingly convincing scenario in spite of the fact that their efforts result in only partial success at best. Grim and ultimately rather sad, the story concerns the efforts of a social climber to claw and scramble his way into the privileged class, no matter what he has to do. Much as I hate to admit it, the other really good story in July/August is also a zombie story, a funny one this time, with traditional supernatural zombies, Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Mister Sweetpants and the Living Dead”—a mixture of zombies with the comic lowlife crime tale that reads much like a zombie story might if Carl Hiaasen had taken a crack at one.

Most of the rest of the stories in the issue are weak to one degree or another. Sean McMullen’s “The Precedent” is a Galaxy-style social satire about a future controlled by environmental extremists bent on revenge for even the most trivial of ecological offenses, like buying their kid a battery-powered Buzz Lightyear toy. John Langan’s “The Revel” is an interesting but ultimately over-elaborate werewolf story. Ken Atabef’s “The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha” tries for a twist ending that it can’t quite pull off. The fantastic element in Michael Alexander’s “Advances in Modern Chemotherapy” is a bit slight, but the story does a convincing job of effectively conveying what the life of a terminal cancer patient on chemotherapy might be like.

Eleanor Arnason is a grossly underappreciated author who has more or less been frozen out of the book market since the early ‘90s, so it’s good to see her back, even if it’s with a chapbook from a small press rather than a trade book. The chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, features the eponymous novella, “Mammoths of the Great Plains,” a sequence of embedded narratives covering the lives of three generations of Native American women, told by a grandmother to her grandchild on a hot summer’s day, and relayed to us across time by that child grown up. Set in an Alternate History not dissimilar to our own timeline except that mammoths survived in the American West into historical times before finally being wiped out by white hunters, the main plotline deals with efforts across several generations to first preserve the mammoths and then bring them back from extinction after the last one has been killed; very well-crafted, as is usually the case with Arnason, it’s contemplative and autumnal in tone, although there is a steely core of anger at the treatment of the Indians and of the continuing destruction of the environment that we can see in progress around us as I write these words in the shadow of the Gulf oil-spill disaster. The chapbook also contains an essay by Arnason, “Writing Science Fiction During World War Three,” an interview with her, “At the Edge of the Future,” and a bibliography.

2009 was a good year for single-author collections, and so far 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year as well. Poul Anderson was one of the giants of the field, unparalleled in his ability to deliver intelligent, colorful, science-based, center-core adventure SF, and the year sees the latest volume in a projected series designed to gather together all of Anderson’s short fiction, The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Volume 3: The Saturn Game. This volume contains eighteen stories and a number of short poems, ranging in publication date from all the way back in 1953 to 1981. Readers are most likely to be familiar with the award-winners here, such as “The Saturn Game” and “No Truce with Kings,” although my favorite of the book is “The Only Game in Town,” one of the best of Anderson’s famous Time Patrol stories, and the volume also contains excellent work such as “Supernova,” “Sunjammer,” and “Hiding Place.”

Another master, this time of fantasy, Peter S. Beagle’s career, which started in the early ‘60s, hasn’t quite been as long as Anderson’s yet, but he’s in his seventies and still going strong; in fact, in some ways, he’s more prolific than ever, particularly at shorter lengths—which fact is demonstrated in Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, where most of the stories were written in the last twenty years…many of them in the last five. The book includes early stories that have become recognized staples of modern fantasy, such as “Come Lady Death” and “Lila the Werewolf,” although the best-known story here is probably the Hugo and Nebula-winning “Two Hearts,” a sequel to the classic fantasy novel The Last Unicorn. There’s lots of other strong work on hand, though, including stories set in the evocative milieu of Beagle’s 1993 novel The Innkeeper’s Song such as “The Last Song of Sirit Byar” and the powerful novella “Giant Bones.” My favorite stuff here, though, are the recent stories where the fantastic mixes with a contemporary, often Jewish, milieu that is quite probably autobiographical to one extent or another—“Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel,” “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,” “We Never Talk About My Brother,” and, especially, “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” which may be the best story here. Beagle comes across in these stories like an updated Isaac Bashevis Singer, or perhaps, even more so, a less flamboyant and discursive Avram Davidson—high praise, in my book. Beagle is also on hand as the editor of the reprint anthology The Secret History of Fantasy. This is a good collection, but although there’s a dragon on the cover, it leans heavily toward the slipstream end of the fantasy spectrum, and it would have been nice to see some other types of fantasy as well, some more Secondary World stuff, or perhaps even some sword & sorcery. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of good work here. My favorites are Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood,” Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” Maureen McHugh’s “Ancestor Money,” T.C. Boyle’s “We Are Norsemen,” and Stephen King’s “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” but there’s also good stories by Kij Johnson, Patricia A. McKillip, Michael Swanwick, Neil Gaiman, Beagle himself, and others. The anthology also contains two major critical essays about fantasy, David Hartwell’s “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists.”

Two recent collections from younger masters are The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, by Walter Jon Williams, and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Williams is one of today’s most consistently ingenious and inventive SF writers; the best known story here is probably, “The Green Leopard Plague,” Williams’s Nebula-winning novella about genetic engineering as a tool for social change, but the book also features good stuff, mostly set in intricately worked-out posthuman futures, such as “Incarnation Day,” “Lethe,” “Send Them Flowers,” and “Daddy’s World,” one of the most unsettling Virtual Reality stories ever written. Kim Stanley Robinson writes very little if any short fiction these days, but once he was quite adroit at it, and, appropriately enough, most of his best stories are to be found in The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. Probably his best-known stories here are his award-winners, “Black Air” and “The Blind Geometer,” and his controversial Alternate History piece, “The Lucky Strike,” but my favorites are the aptly-named and moving “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations,” and the little-known “Glacier,” in which an Ice Age comes to a future Boston. A humorous side to the usually somber and serious-minded Robinson is to be found in “Escape from Kathmandu,” in which mountain trekkers in Nepal get involved with Yetis.