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F&SF, 9-10/10.

Asimov’s, 8/10.

Asimov’s, 9/10

Interzone 228.

 

The September/October F&SF makes up into a somewhat weak “All-Star Anniversary Issue,” although there’s some enjoyable stuff. Several of the stories explore the borders of Bradbury Territory, both light and dark, and a number of the stories here feature child protagonists. The most lyrical story here, and perhaps the best, is Fred Chappell’s “Uncle Moon in Raintree Hills,” in which a young girl and her brother wage a secret war of magic against their sinister Uncle Hobart, who they call “Uncle Moon” (unless everything is a product of the girl’s overactive and somewhat fevered imagination, a possibility always left open). Richard Matheson’s “The Window of Time” is also good, a nostalgic and autumnal fantasy about an old man exploring the landscape of his childhood. Ken Liu’s “The Literomancer” is nicely done, with sharply-drawn characters and an interesting background, but the fantastic element is very thin, and for the most part the story might as well be a well-handled mainstream story about a young American girl struggling to adjust to a foreign culture and making some literally fatal mistakes; even considered as a mainstream story, though, it would work better without quite so many historical infodumps. The fantastic element is even thinner, almost subliminal, in fact, in Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario’s well-crafted baseball-nostalgia story “Blind Spot,” about a man working out his relationship with his father after the father’s death through their shared memories of baseball; definitely in Bradbury Territory here. As we are in new writer Alexandra Duncan’s “The Door in the Earth,” perhaps where the darker edge of the October Country Bradbury shares a border with Manly Wade Wellman, a creepy Appalachian fantasy (again with child protagonists)—although the question of why the sinisterly mumbling Things Behind the Door didn’t manifest themselves and pounce long before the children showed up insists on raising itself, and, once raised, is hard to ignore. Richard Chwedyk contributes “Orfy,” another in a long sequence of stories about the abandoned organic toys called “saurs,” which read kind of like Toy Story done with sentient tiny dinosaurs, and which I’m afraid have always been too sentimental and sticky-sweet for my taste.

Nice changes of pace are provided by James L. Cambias’s briskly told Egyptian fantasy “How Seosiris Lost the Favor of the King,” featuring a duel of magic and wits between Ancient Egypt’s most famous sorcerer and an ambitious foreign magician, and by Michael Swanwick’s clever “Steadfast Castle,” the only real SF story in the issue, an ingenious although essentially minor addition to the long roster of SF stories about Sentient Robot Houses (living in one almost always turns out to be a bad idea!). Terry Bisson and David Gerrold contribute lightweight humorous pieces, “About It” and “F&SF Mailbag,” respectively.

The September issue of Asimov’s is a strong one, the twin themes of which seem to be floating cloud-cities and espionage. The kingpiece here is another major novella in a year that has seen a number of them, “The Sultan of the Clouds,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, which takes us to a convincingly worked-out and visualized high-tech floating cloud city adrift in the atmosphere of Venus, for a fast-paced tale of dynastic intrigue and fomenting rebellion, revolving around a Terran scientist, a woman of great genius, who is quite literally being courted by the superrich heir to an aristocratic Venusian family; if the story has a flaw, it’s that the Earth woman, whose story this by rights ought to be, is mostly kept at a distance and plays no really significant part in solving the story’s major problems, that role falling to her rather feckless (but in the end resourceful) male companion, who narrates the story center stage while we only see occasional glimpses of her—still quite an entertaining read, though, a “page-turner,” as they used to say, and unquestionably core science fiction. Also excellent is new writer Benjamin Crowell’s “Wheat Rust,” which takes us to an immense and elderly space colony (another floating city, of sorts) whose inhabitants have slid down the slope a bit from the technological heights they once occupied into, if not quite barbarism, a simpler sort of society that has forgotten at least some of its own past glories; when outsiders still possessed of some of that half-forgotten high-tech intrude into the colony, intricate webs of espionage and intrigue are spun, quite entertainingly (although the ending seems a bit abrupt). New writer Nancy Fulda also tells a fast and violent tale of intrigue and espionage in “Backlash,” as discorporate time-travelers inhabit their younger selves in order to try to prevent a horrific act of terrorism. Intrigue of a more personal but no less consequential sort informs Mary Robinette Kowal’s “For Want of a Nail,” in which a young woman aboard a generation ship newly in charge of wrangling an AI that stores all of her family’s history faces a sticky ethical/moral dilemma. And floating cloud-cities pop up again in a different key in Eugene Mirabelli’s romantic, nostalgic fantasy “The Palace in the Clouds.”

The best, or at least the cleverest, story in the somewhat weaker August Asimov’s is probably Alexander Jablokov’s “Warning Label,” which, if not quite a sequel, at least seems to be set in the same future society as Jablokov’s “Blind Cat Dance,” from the March Asimov’s, where the real world is intricately overlaid with Virtual Reality surrounds, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. This is more satirical and not as substantial or emotionally effective as the earlier story, although still highly inventive, one of several stories we’ve seen recently which depict an intensely wired and interconnected future, where things like Facebook and Twitter have evolved to the next level and more or less swallowed society, and everybody is sharing all possible information about everything with everybody all the time, commenting on the smallest details of each other’s lives, and every product is plastered with virtual tags warning of even the remotest of hazards associated with using it. This seems like a future that’s very likely to actually come to pass, but I must say that none of the stories about it to date have succeeded in making it seem like an attractive place to live to me; I’m sure I would find it smotheringly claustrophobic and intensely annoying—a feeling that I think Jablokov probably shares to one degree or another, given the satiric edge here, although no doubt he’d handle living there a lot better than would an obsolete old dinosaur like me.

Ian Creasey’s “Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love”—again, not quite a sequel to his “Erosion” from last year’s October/November issue, but set in the same future—shows the sad aftermath of the intensively networked society from the perspective of a diminished but sterner and tougher, no-frills Post-Collapse world that looks back scornfully on the time when “the old-timers preserved every tiny moment of their lives, like electric slugs secreting a data-trail everywhere they slithered…a billion bloggers fiddling while the world burned,” leaving their descendants buried under a useless legacy of millions of trivial and banal blog entries and Twitter posts. This isn’t as emotionally powerful as “Erosion,” but does conjure up an effective sense of regret for all that has been lost, both the silly and the profound. New writer Gregory Norman Bossert, who made his debut with “The Union of Soil and Sky” in the April/May issue, returns with another strong tale, “Slow Boat,” a traditionally satisfying problem story where a woman wakes from cold sleep aboard a deserted spaceship and must figure out how she got there, where the ship is going, and why she was shanghaied in the first place—as well as some clever ways to turn the tables on those responsible for her plight.

August also contains a well-crafted straight historical piece by J.M. Sidorova, “The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies,” two stories about time-travel (or time-viewing, anyway) whose logical inconsistencies became too large for me to swallow, and a grim dystopia by Nick Wolven, “On the Horizon.”

The best story in the somewhat weak Interzone 228 is Jason Sanford’s “Plague Birds,” set in a future where genetic tampering has produced werewolves, causing civilization to collapse; humanity is under the stewardship of the surviving AIs, who are attempting to breed them back to pure human stock, and who use “plague birds,” people capable of causing killing plagues by releasing the nanomechanisms that infect their blood, to enforce their rules. This isn’t Sanford’s strongest story, reading a bit like a cross between SF and paranormal romance, and I don’t think too many readers will be surprised by the revelation of what ultimately happens when an ailing plague bird comes to a young woman’s remote village, but it’s good solid entertainment, nevertheless. Another Post-Apocalyptic society is featured in Jon Ingold’s Ursula Le Guinish “Over Water,” in which a dramatic rise in sea-level has splintered our world into dozens of separate islands, each with a small village of isolated and often warlike survivors. David D. Levine pretty much recycles A Night at the Museum in “A Passion for Art,” a lightweight story that starts out to be SF but ends up as unrationalized fantasy instead. “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes, set on a spaceship being sent on what may be a suicide mission to interact with some enigmatic aliens, has some vivid stuff in it, but leaves the rationalization for the backstory—just what do the aliens think they’re playing at? To say nothing of the Chinese government, which sends a load of disaffected political prisoners to represent their nation, and humanity at large, to the stars?—largely unexplored, and creates some interesting characters, particularly the novice boy monk Little Tiger, and then doesn’t really do much with them.