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The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, Mike Ashley, ed. (Robinson Publishing, 978-184901305, 5.99 Pounds Sterling, 512 pages.)

The Immersion Book of SF, Carmelo Rafala, ed. (Immersion Press, 978-0-9563924-1-1, 7.99 Pounds Sterling, 121 pages.) Cover art by Charles Harbour.

Legends of Australian Fantasy, Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Harper Voyager, 978 0 7322 8848 8, 548 pages.)

The Company He Keeps, Postscripts 22/23, Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, eds. (PS Publishing, 978-1-848630-49-9, 394 pages.) Cover art by J.K. Potter.

Lightspeed, July-December/2010.

 

One of the best of the year’s mixed original/reprint anthologies is The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, edited by Mike Ashley, a huge collection of stories about the End of the World (or, occasionally, the End of Absolutely Everything). It would be interesting, if some critic has nothing better to do, to compare this at length with Jeste de Vries’s anthology of “optimistic SF,” Shine, which came out earlier this year (at a quick glance, the Ashley anthology is more dramatic and colorful than the de Vries, perhaps not surprising, since it’s easier to make the End of the World dramatically interesting than it is to make the world not ending dramatically interesting).

The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF features five originals out of its twenty-four stories, a couple of them novellas. The best of the original stories is Alastair Reynolds’s novella “Sleepover,” about a cryogenic sleeper who wakes into an apocalyptic future utterly unlike anything he expected, one so stark—all there is the gray restless ocean, the ceaseless and relentless winds, crying seagulls, and rusting, battered structures similar to oil platforms—that it actually has a bleak beauty all its own…and where he finds a grim purpose in life that he never knew before. Also first-rate is Robert Reed’s novella (one of several excellent novellas he’s had out this year) “Pallbearer,” set in a somewhat less dramatically altered but still severely diminished future where the survivors of an ecological catastrophe mostly scrape by by cannibalizing the ruins of the previous civilizations. Kage Baker’s “The Books” (one of the last stories we’re going to see from this author, alas, who died earlier this year) is a much quieter story set in a similarly diminished future, where children with a travelling theatrical troupe discover the ultimate prize, from their point of view: a library full of books which are full of fascinating stories to be read to them late at night. This story shows us just how much we have lost with Baker’s death—not that it’s one of Baker’s major stories (it’s not, although it’s a charming and pleasant entertainment), but rather that it demonstrates an absolute mastery of that elusive quality known as “voice,” as well as the ability to perfectly control the flow of information, the gifts of a born storyteller who was still maturing into the full extent of her powers when she was cruelly taken from us. Eric Brown contributes a somewhat more melodramatic adventure in “Guardians of the Phoenix,” featuring a chase across dry sea-beds in a somewhat unlikely future where all the world’s oceans have disappeared, and Paul Di Filippo takes us on a frenetic tour through a typically gonzo high-tech high bit-rate future in “Life in the Anthropocene,” with occasional nods made to what’s becoming the standard post-ecological disaster/catastrophic radical climate change future.

Good as some of the originals are, though, the bulk of the anthology is made up of reprint stories, and that section adds substantially to the value of the book. Among the many strong reprint stories here are Fritz Leiber’s “A Pail of Air,” practically the prototype for the modern post-apocalyptic story, James Tiptree’s “The Man Who Walked Home,” Frederik Pohl’s “Fermi and Frost,” Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” Dominic Green’s “The Clockwork Atom Bomb,” Stephen Baxter’s “The Children of Time,” and thirteen others, many of them also strong. As of this writing, only the Kindle edition was available on Amazon.com; if you want the hardcopy paperback edition, you’ll have to mail-order it through the publisher or through Amazon UK.

Another mixed original/reprint anthology is The Immersion Book of SF, edited by Carmelo Rafala, from ultra-small British publisher Immersion Press. At only 121 pages and eleven stories, this makes up into a rather slim volume for the price, nowhere near as good a bargain as the much larger and cheaper Ashley book, but the quality of the stories is pretty good. The best story here is “Lode Stars,” by Lavie Tidhar, something of a departure for him—up until now, he’s mostly done post-cyberpunk work, but “Lode Star” is full-dress widescreen New Space Opera, complete with AIs, downloadable intelligences, faster-than-light travel, and civilizations built around massive black holes. Gord Sellar is also here with a change of pace, turning from his more typical near-future SF to write an absorbing fantasy story set in ancient Korea, “The Broken Pathway.” Chris Butler contributes a clever post-cyberpunk story, “Have Guitar, Will Travel,” which takes piracy of a songwriter’s work to a drastic new extreme, and Aliette de Bodard shows us a young girl working out her Daddy Issues with her recently deceased father on an alien planet, in “Father’s Last Ride.” There are also good reprints by Al Robertson, Colin P. Davies, and Jason Erik Lundberg. This is going to be very difficult to find in bookstores on the American side of the Atlantic, so I’d suggest that if you want it, you either order it from Amazon.com or some other online bookseller or go direct to the publisher’s website at www.immersionpress.com and order it there.

The idea behind Legends of Australian Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, in which (for the most part; there are a few exceptions, where the authors come up with new settings, but not many) eleven bestselling Australian fantasy novelists produce “brand-new short novels set in their most popular “signature” universe,” is at the same time both the anthology’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. Its greatest strength because fans of these very popular series will be delighted to see new stories set in those milieus and eager to read them—its greatest weakness because the authors sometimes assume a prior familiarity with the characters and background history of the “universes” that can make it difficult for the stories to really stand on their own feet for readers who haven’t read any of the earlier volumes in the series. The best story here, and the one that does the best job of being satisfying as a story even if you haven’t read any of the prior novels, is Garth Nix’s “To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Story,” which follows a young boy’s struggle to carve out a new life for himself after his old world is destroyed, and takes him up to the point where he must prove his worth by facing a deadly challenge to the new way of life he’s chosen. It would make an excellent start for a novel, something that may not have escaped Nix, but is sufficiently self-contained to stand as an individual story on its own rights. Also good are “The Spark (A Romance in Four Acts): A Tale of the Change,” by Sean Williams, “The Dark Road: An Obernewtyn Story,” by Isobelle Carmody, “The Corser’s Hinge,” by D.M. Cornish, and “The Enchanted: A Tale of Earth,” by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. And, of course, fans of the other series will probably enjoy the new stories drawn from them.

After several strong issues in recent years, particularly 2008’s Postscripts 15, I must admit to being somewhat disappointed in this year’s Postscripts 22/23, which, now that it’s switched from being a magazine to being an anthology, we’re supposed to refer to as The Company He Keeps, Postscripts 22/23, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers. I have my usual complaint about Postscripts, which I’m sure they’re sick of hearing, that it doesn’t have enough science fiction in it—there are a few SF stories here, as well as a few fantasy stories, but the bulk of the issue seems to be made up of slipstream and soft horror, with a fair number of straight mainstream stories. Leaving questions of genre classification aside, though, although there’s little here that is bad, there’s little that’s really outstanding either; like many of this year’s anthologies, the impression you walk away with is that there’s lots of entertaining and worthwhile reading here, but no potential award-contenders, and nothing that really stands out as one of the year’s best in any of the categories covered. The best story here is probably the title story, “The Company He Keeps,” by Lucius Shepard, which explores the ground between horror and Hollywood satire, territory Shepard visited earlier in the year with “Dreamburgers at the Mouth of Hell,” from another Gevers anthology, “The Book of Dreams”—this one, though, is harder-edged and much less surreal than the other, a straightforward and rather brutal story on the edge between mainstream and mystery that might not have been out of place in Hitchcock’s or Ellery Queen’s. Other good stories include a Lovecraftian fantasy, “The Man Who Scared Lovecraft,” by Don Webb, a fantasy set in a hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters,” by Jack Deighton, three other stories on the edge between mystery and mainstream/horror, “Bully,” by Jack Ketchum, “The Farmer’s Wife,” by James Cooper, and “The Rescue,” by Holly Phillips, as well as SF stories by Robert Edric, Richard Parks, Chris Beckett, and Vandana Singh.

The new online emagazine Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams, has survived its first six issues, and has proven itself to be an interesting and entertaining place to visit. They run two original stories per issue, plus reprint stories, non-fiction articles, author interviews, and podcasts. Some of their original fiction has been only so-so, but they’ve also published their share of good stuff. The best story here so far is “In-Fall,” by Ted Kosmatka, from the December issue, one of several stories in recent months to center—literally!—around black holes, this one a suspenseful battle of wills taking place on a spaceship about to plunge into one. Also excellent is Yoon Ha Lee’s quirky “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain,” from the September issue, about an ancient weapon so potent that to fire it is to destroy the universe—and replace it with another one. In the November issue, Alice Sola Kim gives us a poignant introduction to “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters,” and in the August issue, Catherynne M. Valente has a lot of fun advising us “How To Become a Mars Overlord.” Good reprint stories here have included “Patient Zero,” by Tananarive Due, “The Long Chase,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, “Travelers,” by Robert Silverberg, “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” by Joe Haldeman, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” by Joe R. Lansdale, and others. There have also been non-fiction articles by Gregory Benford, Pamela L. Gay, Carol Pinchefsky, and others, and interviews with Robert Silverberg, Cat Rambo, John Scalzi, and others.

I continue to be disappointed that there are no long stories here. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s any real need for length restrictions in an electronic online magazine, where you’re using pixels instead of paper and ink, and shouldn’t have to worry about the length of the issue making it too expensive to produce. I’d like to see them start to use novellas and long novelettes as well as short stories, since that’s where a good deal of the really substantial work in the genre gets done.