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F&SF, 1-2/11.

Asimov’s, 1/11.

Asimov’s, 2/11.

People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, eds. (Prime Books, 978-1-60701-238-2, 318 pages.)

Sleight of Hand, by Peter S. Beagle. (Tachyon Publications, 978-1-61696-004-9, $14.95, 326 pages). Cover by Ann Monn.

 

Another year begins with the January/February issue of F&SF. The best story here is probably Chris Lawson’s “Canterbury Hollow,” a quietly moving story set on a colony world whose immensely hostile environment has called forth the harsh and inflexible social customs the colony must employ in order to survive, and what complying with those customs means to a young couple in love. Also good is Kate Wilhelm’s “The Bird Cage,” where seemingly harmless experiments by a typically Wilhelm-like ruthless corporation have wide and unexpected consequences. “Long Time,” by Rick Norwood, gives us an unusual take on the Gilgamesh legends, told in an engagingly colloquial and anachronistic voice by someone on the sidelines of the tale, a shrewd and hard-headed ordinary foot soldier who may be a lot more than he seems to be at first. “The Bogle” is an untypically somber tale by Albert E. Cowdrey, who often writes comic fantasies, dealing with the shadow cast over a family by the death of a son, and the sinister problems that arise from a parent’s refusal to let go. Jim Young tells a Virtual Reality story, sort of, in “The Whirlwind,” Pat MacEwen does a variation on the Living House story in “Home Sweet Bi’ome,” and Richard A. Lupoff returns to revisit the story about the man living through the same day over and over again, in “12:02 P.M.”

Most of the rest of the stories in the issue are somewhat lackluster, including a comic zombie love story, “Paradise Last,” by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, a Paul Bunyan-like tall tale, “Ghost Wind,” by Alan Dean Foster, and a somewhat awkwardly executed sword & sorcery story, “The Ghiling Blade,” by Matthew Corradi.

The feature story in the January Asimov’s is a strong SF mystery by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Killer Advice,” a sequel of sorts to her story in my anthology with Jonathan Strahan, The New Space Opera 2, “Defect,” featuring the son of the protagonist in that story. This one features a sabotaged spaceship that limps into a rundown second-rate space-station after several murders on board, only to have the killing spree continue on the station. It’s up to the inhabitants of the space-station, including a once-important hotel manager at the end of a ruined career, an alcoholic doctor, and the son from “Defect,” a man on the run from a mysterious and sinister past bequeathed to him by his sinister mother, to overcome their weaknesses and combine what strengths they have in order to track the killer down. It’s an effective combination of SF and mystery by a writer practiced in each form, where the complex character inter-actions are as important, or more so, than the resolution of the mystery itself. SF/mystery hybrids seem to be something of a theme here, since this issue also brings us another strong example, “Dolly,” by Elizabeth Bear. In one way, there’s not really much of a mystery here, since it’s obvious from the opening page of the story that the victim was killed by his robot sex-toy—the question is, why? And the meat of the story lies in investigating the reasons for the attack, and in how those reasons resonate unexpectedly with the investigator’s personal life, as well as having wider implications for society at large. The element of homage to Isaac Asimov’s robot stories here is obvious, and the story also acts as a commentary on the assumptions behind those stories, but “Dolly” will be enjoyable in its own right even to those who’ve never read one of them.

The Rusch and the Bear stories are probably the strongest pieces in the issue, but there is also good work elsewhere here, with the element of mystery or at least crime running in a minor key through most of them. Chris Beckett—who, to his credit, seems to be exploring new types of story lately, rather than stuff set in his more-typical near-future England—takes us along with the eponymous “Two Thieves,” who have been exiled to an isolated penal colony in a diminished future world built—literally—on the ruins of a more technologically advanced civilization. Although set in the far-future, the story has something of the air of sword & sorcery to it, and its protagonists are unrepentant rogues, unimpressed with the efforts of the prison authorities to morally improve them through Good Works, who soon discover an artifact of the old high-tech civilization, a dimensional gateway, and instantly are off through it on a series of picaresque adventures, eager to resume their thieving ways; although they receive a sobering comeuppance, it’s also pretty clear by the end of the story that they have no intention of letting the experience reform them, either. New writer Gwendolyn Clare introduces us in “Ashes on the Water” to a young girl whose “crime” is to want to scatter the ashes of her dead sister in a river so that they’ll be borne to the sea, something that’s against the law (not unreasonably, actually) in a future India in the grip of a years-long climate-change induced drought, where the water in the rivers is intensely managed and controlled; the girl is a sympathetic and interesting character, but the solution to her problem is obvious practically from the first page, which reduces the story’s impact a bit. The crime is in the past in Steve Rasnic Tem’s melancholy “Visitors,” in which parents visit the criminal, their son, who is kept as punishment in a suspended animation facility, occasionally revived so that scientists can experiment on him. The crime theme breaks down a little in Ian McHugh’s “Interloper,” although a mass-murder is committed in the course of the story by an Interloper who is breaking through into our dimension from some other alien reality, much like an Elder God from an H.P. Lovecraft story; this is vivid and exciting, but so little of the backstory is explained that it’s also occasionally hard to parse.

The best story in the February Asimov’s is also the best story I’ve seen so far this year, Paul McAuley’s “The Choice.” This is a powerful and deceptively quiet story set in an ingeniously described future England that has been transformed by climate change and a rise in sea-level, a setting that in McAuley’s expert hands has the feel of a real place, both pastoral and shabby, where people get on with their ordinary lives in a world which is both dramatically altered and in some ways nearly the same as our own. Everything here is seen through the close and intimate lens of Family, families of different kinds, related or joined by friendship, families both positive and negative, getting by as best they can—until the Unknown suddenly intrudes into this world in the form of a giant, mournfully bellowing, enigmatic alien ship that grounds itself on the bank of a river, and changes everything forever. The young protagonist and his closest friend are faced with the choice of the title, and what they choose will shape the entire rest of their lives, and affect everyone around them. I would not be at all surprised to see this one on some award ballots next year. The cover this issue, illustrating “The Choice,” is more than usually evocative, too.

Nothing in the rest of the issue comes up to the quality level of the McAuley, although there’s some nice stuff. The next best story in February is probably Aliette de Bodard’s “Shipbirth,” which shares some elements in common with her story from Interzone last year, “The Shipmaker,” both taking place in the far future of an Alternate World in which China discovered the New World before Columbus and annexed it as a colony, and both dealing with the creation of living starships which are a weird mixture of flesh and machine; in this one, a troubleshooter heads out to deal with the literal birth of a starship, where things have gone terribly wrong. New writer Jeff Carlson gives us Planet of the Sealies, which loses points for giving us a storyline in which the actions of the protagonist do little to affect the outcome, but which gains a lot of points for the nice idea of the survivors of an ecologically ruined future literally mining the strata of discarded diapers laid down by past civilizations for useful genetic material, a perfectly logical idea that I don’t think anybody has ever thought of before. In “Brother Sleep,” new writer Tim McDaniel explores the social pressures and class distinctions faced by a college student in a future where people who can afford it have been genetically altered to need almost no sleep—a story that might have been more affecting if the protagonist wasn’t such an asshat. David Ira Cleary shows us a dysfunctional posthuman family in the very far future, in “Out of the Dream Closet,” and in “Water Mercy,” new writer Sara Genge gives us another of her stories about a domed Paris in a post-Apocalyptic Earth, the behind-the-scenes logic of which have never quite made sense to me.

I was hanging out a lot with Jack Dann when he put together the first anthology of Jewish-themed science fiction and fantasy, Wandering Stars, in 1974. Now, thirty-six years later, there’s another one, The People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace. Unlike Wandering Stars, which was all-original, this is a reprint anthology, and a very strong one. Also unlike Wandering Stars, which leaned toward science fiction, it’s mostly fantasy, except for Matthew Kressel’s “The History Within Us” and the Steampunk classic “Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,”” by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The best story here is probably “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angle,” by Peter S. Beagle, but there’s really little that’s weak, and other highlights include “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” by Theodora Goss, “The Tsar’s Dragons,” by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, “Semaphore,” by Alex Irvine,” “The Problem with Susan,” by Neil Gaiman, and “Golems I Have Known, or, Why my Elder Son’s Middle Name is Napoleon: a Trickster’s Memoir,” by Michael Chabon.

Speaking of Peter S. Beagle, as I was above, he has a new collection out, Sleight of Hand, which demonstrates yet again why he’s perhaps the finest fantasy writer at short lengths working today. The best story here may be “The Rabbi’s Holiday,” but there’s also wonderful stories such as “What Tune the Enchantress Plays,” “La Lune T’Attend,” “Children of the Shark God,” and six others. There’s also uncollected stories here, published for the first time, including a prequel to Beagle’s famous novel The Last Unicorn, an early tale featuring Schmendrick the Magician called “The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon,” the charming children’s fable “The Best Worst Monster,” and just to show he can be as chilling as anybody in the business when he wants to, the sinister story of “The Bridge Partner.”