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Interzone 229.

Interzone 230

Panverse Two, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dario Ciriello, ed. (Panverse Publishing, 978-0-615-37736-0, $15.95, 302 pages.) Cover art by Susan McGivergan.

Subterranean, Summer 2010.

The Dragon and the Stars, Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, eds. (DAW, 978-0-7564-0618-9. $7.99, 312 pages.) Cover art uncredited.

 

The strongest story in Interzone 229 is “new writer” (his first sale—this is his second—was forty years ago) Jim Hawkins’s “Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark Matter,” which follows an interstellar orchestral tour by Terran musicians who double as secret agents and assassins, destabilizing and overthrowing local political structures on the planets that the orchestra visits. This is a complex and chewy story, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some readers had trouble parsing it, particularly in the early going; for about the first third of the story, I myself thought that it was about musicians who were fighting a war in a Virtual Reality surround between engagements (a possibility specifically referenced in the text), and only slowly came to realize that that wasn’t really what was going on here at all. Stick with it, though, and you’ll ultimately be rewarded. Alice Sheldon, more widely known as James Tiptree, Jr., once described her “basic narrative instinct” as being “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” Tiptree would have liked this story—in fact, Hawkins’s whole tone and mode of attack reminds me a lot of Tiptree, one of two Interzone authors who have reminded me strongly of Tiptree recently (the other being Dominic Green).

The only other real core science fiction story here is Toby Litt’s “The Melancholy,” which deals with an existential crisis undergone by a robot Application used to remotely explore various locations throughout the solar system where humans could not survive, and who itself eventually loses the will to survive. The rest of the stories in Interzone 229 are less substantial, but do include some worthwhile reading, including a steampunk tale, “Mannikin,” by Paul Evanby, a Philip K. Dickish story about a sinister memory-altering organization, “Candy Moments,” by Antony Mann, and an eloquent slipstream story, “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life,” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz.

The strongest story in Interzone 230 is “The Insurance Agent,” by Lavie Tidhar, a writer who’s having a good year so far, with several excellent stories published. “The Insurance Agent” is a vivid and violent post-cyberpunk story, coming across, with its combination of Third World milieus, high-tech gadgetry, and lowlife hustlers, like one of Greg Egan’s early stories such as “Chaff” or “Silver Fire” or “Tap,” or perhaps as a more science-fictional version of one of Lucius Shepard’s haunted voyages through the jungle to a Third World Heart of Darkness. 230 is stronger overall than the previous issue. There are two good near-future stories about a Britain taken over by Orwellian regimes who repress dissent (and, eventually, most art and public discourse that doesn’t hew strictly to Party-line doctrine), probably inspired by Britain’s Draconian censorship law that theoretically makes saying anything that can be taken as “supporting terrorism” a crime: “The Upstairs Window,” by Nina Allan, and “Love and War,” by Tim Lees. Both are good, although the Allan is the better, or at least the more subtle, of the two. Patrick Samphire offers an updated Arthurian fantasy, an elegantly crafted modern-day take on the Matter of Britain, in “Camelot.” And Aliette de Bodard contributes a violent and somewhat lurid fantasy, loaded with sado/masochistic elements, set in an Aztec-flavored world that might be either past or future, in “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders.”

Some good science fiction stories in recent issues, but a lot of fantasy/slipstream/horror is slipping in as well, which I’m less pleased to see, as that’s the default setting for virtually every ezine and semi-prozine in existence, and it would be nice to see Interzone reserved mostly for SF of various sorts.

Ambitious small-press Panverse Publishing has brought out another all-novella anthology, Panverse Two, Five Original Novellas of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Dario Ciriello, the follow-up to last year’s well-received Panverse One.

This one doesn’t strike me as quite as strong as its predecessor, probably no award-winners here, although there’s still a lot of good stuff, and it certainly delivers its money’s worth in entertainment value—especially as all-novella anthologies are still fairly rare. The strongest novella here, by a decent margin, is an ingenious and fast-moving Alternate History story by Alan Smale, “A Clash of Eagles,” in which the author has a lot of fun playing with the idea of Roman Legions fighting American Indians, in a world where the New World was discovered by Romans instead of Norsemen, who—quite believably, considering their track record of conquest in the real world—have sent an expeditionary force across the Atlantic to subdue and colonize it. Smale does a good job of depicting the ruthlessness and almost inhuman discipline and efficiency of the Legions, even as they come to realize that they may have bitten off more than they can chew this time, and there’s enough bloodshed, internal politicking, and cross-cultural contrasts here to make quite an entertaining read. (As a minor quibble, I find it hard to believe that the Romans would call the Indians “redskins”—they’re not really red, after all, being actually brown-skinned, and Smale’s Romans would certainly have been quite accustomed to dealing with brown-skinned people by this point, especially as there are many of them in the Legion’s own ranks, which includes auxiliaries from conquered nations such as Magyar and Scythia.)

Also strong is the anthology’s only other real SF story (if you count Alternate History as science fiction, as some do not, a can of worms I don’t intend to open here—I think it is, for what that’s worth), a romp centering around cryptozoology’s silliest monster, the Jersey Devil, as well as rains of frogs, teleportation, and other Fortean phenomena, “The Curious Adventure of the Jersey Devil,” by Michael D. Winkle. Like the Smale, this one is also a lot of fun, and is probably more enjoyable the more you know about Charles Fort’s curious life, so that you can have the pleasure of recognizing all the biographical tidbits that Winkle has sprinkled throughout the text. (If you don’t know anything about Charles Fort, I’d recommend reading Damon Knight’s little-known and under-appreciated biography of the man, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, if you can find a copy—which might be difficult.)

The rest of the stories in the book are somewhat weaker, including two fantasies exploring the interaction of Faerie and the mortal world, “Snow Comes to Hawk’s Folly,” by J. Kathleen Cheney, and “Dangerous Creatures,” by J. Michael Shell. The Cheney, which is about the investigation of the kidnapping of a puca, a young were-horse, is notably the better of the two, the Shell being much too twee, for my taste, anyway. There’s also a futuristic comedy by Amy Sterling Casil, “To Love the Difficult,” which tries much too hard to be funny.

The cover is very attractive, featuring a well-rendered Fairy Princess dancing around a campfire with some enchanted mice, and there’s even a subliminal hint of nipple.

The Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online has been posted, and features several first-rate fantasies. Two of them are novellas. Lucius Shepard’s “The Taborin Scale,” is the most recent (and perhaps the final?) in Shepard’s long series of dark and disturbing stories about the Dragon Griaule, an immense mile-long dragon, paralyzed in some wizardly combat so long ago that a city has grown up around and on him; in this one, we get to see both what would be referred to in comics terminology as Griaule’s “origin story” and his cataclysmic and disastrous death—which may in fact be part of the dragon’s hidden, sinister, and immeasurably subtle plan. Rachel Swirsky’s novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” follows a powerful sorceress who is bound by magic to return after her death to offer advice and magical assistance to those who summon her, and whose servitude stretches on for thousands of years, as the world around her and the people she serves grow increasingly alien and strange. Equally impressive is K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia,” a enjoyable tale of an inexperienced wizard who must somehow find a way to defeat a magical opponent who is quite literally undefeatable; the magical system used here is ingenious, and quite different from those usually found in fantasy stories.

The two science fiction stories here are not quite as memorable, but are still substantial. Mike Resnick’s novella “Six Blindmen and an Alien” takes us along with an expedition who stumble upon the frozen body of an alien while searching for Ernest Hemingway’s famous dead leopard on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and offers a Roshamon-like variety of explanations for how it got there. Cory Doctorow’s “Ghosts in my Head” is a Dickian story with a somewhat unconvincing twist ending about technology that allows advertising to be placed inescapably inside your head.

One of the best stories in the issue, though, is a straight mainstream story, “Dream of the Arrow,” by Jay Lake, a look at a troubled boy at boarding school and his painful struggle toward maturity, a story good enough to suggest that Lake’s talents may be wasted working in the genre, as he has the literary chops to make it as a significant mainstream author instead. Another straight mainstream story is “A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed,” by Lawrence Block, a plotless vignette that’s wryly amusing in spite of the fact that it’s not a story so much as the said burglar’s thoughts on the given subject, just as it said it was going to be.

The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and is more substantial than the usual DAW anthology; there are probably no award-contenders here, but the fact that all the stories draw upon “the rich cultural heritage of China” to tell stories of the fantastic makes it interesting, and gives us some milieus not commonly used, making almost all of the stories worth reading. Most of the stories here are fantasy, unsurprisingly enough, with Alternate History stuff perhaps the next most common. Considering what’s been done with Chinese-influenced futures by writers from Cordwainer Smith to Chris Roberson to Yoon Ha Lee, I found the relative scarcity of science fiction to be faintly disappointing, and many of the SF stories here, rather than being lush and exotic and wildly imaginative, are near-future or Alternate History stories that rely for impact on things like the simple reversal of Caucasians being restricted to “Anglotowns.” The best stories here are by Tony Pi, Emily Mah, Brenda Clough, Eugie Foster, Shelly Li, and Eric Choi himself.