27

F&SF, November/December.

Asimov’s, October/November.

Asimov’s, December.

Stories, Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, eds. (William Morrow, 978-0-06-123092-9, $27.99, 414 pages.)

 

The best story in the November/December F&SF, and very probably the strongest SF story to appear in this magazine all year, is Robert Reed’s novella “Dead Man’s Run.” Reed does an excellent job of making this simultaneously a murder mystery and a valid core science fiction story where the SF element is essential to both the resolution of the plot and the solving of the mystery; it also functions in a valid way as a sports story, since the sport of running is integral to the plot, and Reed’s obvious familiarity with runners and running—he’s used the sport before in other stories, although this is his most successful utilization of it—shows through to good effect, helping to ground the story in a believable reality. The story overall must be considered one of the best stories of the year and one of Reed’s best, even in a year that has seen several other strong Reed stories. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one show up on next year’s awards ballots.

Ghosts seem to be a theme in this issue of F&SF. A high-tech “ghost” of sorts, a sentient electronic avatar of a dead man that persists after his death, features in “Dead Man’s Run,” and a ghost of another sort, or at least the suggestion of one (it’s never made clear whether there’s a “real” ghost or not) features in Alexander Jablokov’s elegantly written near-mainstream story “Plinth Without Figure”… and old-fashioned no-doubt-about it ghosts of the sort that go bump (or “whoooo!”) in the night show up in Albert E. Cowdrey’s richly amusing “Death Must Die,” about an attempt to fight fire with fire, or at least a haunting with a haunting. New writer Michael Alexander shows us that a good way to destroy civilization is to give everybody everything he wants, in “Ware of the Worlds,” while new writer Alexandra Duncan takes us to a not very well thought-out or logically consistent post-apocalyptic future for a fairy tale-like “Swamp City Lament.” Michaela Roessner gives us a grisly version of Hansel and Gretel in “Crumbs,” Alan Dean Foster spins a tall tale in “Free Elections,” and Richard Bowes relates a bit of metafiction packed with in-jokes in “Venures,” while Bruce Sterling reprints a sly vision of a non-cash based society from the Shareable Futures website, “The Exterminator’s Want Ad.”

Next to the Robert Reed novella, the strongest piece in November/December is John Kessel’s “The Closet,” an incisive and sharp-edged little story which, although it was written to commemorate Ursula K. Le Guin, reminds me stylistically much more of a cross between Damon Knight’s “The Handler” and Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Other Celia” than it does of anything by Le Guin.

Over at Asimov’s, their Double Issue, the October/November issue, has a lot of good, solid, entertaining stuff in it, mostly SF, but, I think, no award contenders. The lead story here is “Becoming One with the Ghosts,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of her popular “Diving into the Wreck” stories, this one initially beginning thousands of years before the other stories in the series, although a time-travel twist brings the heroine of those stories into the plot before the end. There’s some interesting stuff here, as usual with Rusch, but this one is rather slow, with nearly a third of the story gone by and days passed by the time the exaggeratedly cautious crew even leaves the spaceship to investigate, even though they can see strangers standing in the hanger outside; almost makes you wish that Captain Kirk was in charge, as he would have gotten things underway in a lot brisker fashion (sending your linguist to bed just after the said strangers show up is probably not the brightest command-decision either). The strongest of the issue’s novellas is “Several Items of Interest,” by Rick Wilber, the most recent (after a gap of several years) of Wilbur’s long “S’huddonni” series, about a future Earth that has been subjugated militarily and economically by a squid-like alien race. This one stands on its own feet pretty well without you needing to have read the other S’huddonni stories, and is a fun read, managing to generate a fair amount of tension with matching stories of sibling rivalry on both the human and the alien sides, although the major interest of the piece is generated by the nicely complicated inter-relationships of the characters.

Most of the rest of the stories in October/November are somewhat weaker, although all are entertaining. In “No Distance Too Great,” Don D’Ammassa takes us on a journey through hyperspace by what amounts to a bus ride; I really enjoyed D’Ammassa’s vision of hyperspace as a physical landscape that must be driven across, but, somewhat disappointingly, the story turns into a rather predictable fantasy by the end. Will McIntosh tells an enjoyable tale of life in a travelling side-show in the Nineteenth Century in “Frankenstein, Frankenstein,” a story that comes very close to mainstream, with only a slight fantastic element added (especially as the protagonist actually existed, although McIntosh pretty much makes up the rest of his life). Mike Resnick does a version of the movie K-Pax in “The Incarceration of Captain Nebula,” in which the question is whether a patient in a mental institution is delusional or really is the space hero that he claims to be (although there’s little doubt from the beginning which side Resnick is going to come down on), and Tanith Lee plays a similar Schroedinger’s Cat game with a immensely valuable sculpture that nobody has ever seen, in “Torhec the Sculptor.” Kate Wilhelm shows us that it’s better not to start something that you don’t know you can stop, in “Changing the World,” Kij Johnson spins a lyrical fabulation in “Names For Water,” R.Neube tells a competent but rather routine adventure story in “Dummy Tricks,” and new writer Felicity Shoulders comes up with an extremely unlikely use for time-travel, in “The Termite Queen of Tallulah County.”

There’s some strong stuff in the December Asimov’s, the year’s final issue. In a sequel to last year’s YA-ish “Going Deep,” James Patrick Kelly’s “Plus or Minus” takes his young heroine into deep space in what amounts to a rusty tramp steamer, one of the more unglamorous and unromantic ships in the corpus of science fiction, where her job mostly consists of scrubbing mold off the walls. Kelly handles the Analog-ish hard science space stuff well (although the motives of the Captain for his strange actions, veering from perverse to heroic, never quite made sense), and the story’s a fast and engrossing read, but the protagonist is rather passive throughout and doesn’t really contribute much to the solving of the overall problem, and the inconclusive ending makes it clear that this is probably a chunk of an upcoming novel. Michael Swanwick takes us to a depopulated future Russia that’s been through a semi-apocalypse in “Libertarian Russia,” a hard-edged look at a young man learning the hard way that his political ideals are unrealistic in the real world. Tom Purdom contributes “Warfriends,” a sequel to his novel from all the way back in 1966, The Tree Lord of Imetan, in which a human forges an unlikely alliance between warring alien races and natural enemies on a distant planet. Fortunately, you don’t have to have read the novel to appreciate the current story (the human protagonist of the novel barely appears here, only for a paragraph or two, with the rest of the story told from the Point of View of representatives from the reluctant alien allies), which is a vigorous and violent straightforward pulp adventure of a type almost never seen anymore, which once would have been called a “sword-and-planet” story—Purdom does an excellent job of giving each alien race a distinct set of psychological traits and characteristics, without succumbing to the temptation to anthropomorphize either of them too much.

Robert Reed gives us “Excellence,” a tricksy story with almost too many double-crosses and double double-crosses to keep track of. In “Freia in the Sunlight,” Gregory Norman Bossert tells the story of the sentient war machine engaged on a deadly mission of self-destruction, a story that goes back at least as far as Murry Leinster’s “The Wabbler” in 1942; Bossert doesn’t do much new with it, although he does update the technology a bit. Ian Creasey also tells a somewhat familiar story, in “The Prize Beyond Gold,” centering around the debate over technological “enhancements” in the sports world—but it’s only a step away from the debate that is going on right now in the newspapers about blood-doping and steroid use. New writer Ian Werkheiser makes an interesting although somber debut in the music-centered “Variations.”

I was less impressed overall by Stories, a big cross-genre anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, than I expected to be, although there were some good bits. It should be said upfront that it was disappointing, to me, at least, that there was little science fiction here, and not even much fantasy. But considerations of genre classification aside, I didn’t think that, on the whole, the book really delivered the kind of page-turning adventurous story stories that it promised it was going to, which I would have been happier with, whatever the genre, even mainstream. Instead, there’s a great deal of tricky metafiction here, slipstream, pastiches, roman a clefs, fabulisms, abstractions, and not that many real page-turners. The best story here, by a good margin, is Neil Gaiman’s own fantasy “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains.” Other good stories, mostly on the edge between mainstream and mystery/horror, are Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Stars Are Falling,” Lawrence Block’s “Catch and Release,” and Jeffrey Deaver’s “The Therapist.” Also excellent, with background hints of SF and fantasy that never quite break all the way through to the story’s surface, is Elizabeth Hand’s long, intricate, and lyrical “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.”

Interzone 231 is a “Jason Sanford Special Issue,” which contains three stories by Jason Sanford, the best of which is “Memoria,” a quirky story in which the protagonist uses the ghost of Andy Kaufman to shield himself against malignant alien ghosts who are attacking the spaceship he’s been set to guard during a voyage through a strange hyperspace, a story that echoes Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” The other two are “Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Beep,” pretty much a Zombie Apocalypse story, except that the zombies are called “trillers” instead, and “Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime,” a peculiar mixture of pseudo-medieval fantasy and economic theory. The best story in the issue, though, is Aliette de Bodard’s “The Shipmaker,” an engrossing SF story in which a scientist is responsible for engineering the literal birth of a sentient starship. Also good is new writer Matthew Cook’s “The Shoe Factory,” a well-executed take on the story of the man who becomes “unstuck in time,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous phrase.