30

Engineering Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris, 978-1907519512, 337 pages).

Asimov’s, 3/11.

F&SF, 3-4/11.

Clarkesworld, 1/11.

Clarkesworld, 2/11.

Interzone 232.

 

The best science fiction anthology of the year to date is certainly Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Admittedly, the year isn’t very old yet, but I’ll be surprised if Engineering Infinity isn’t still among the top three SF anthologies by year’s end, and I suspect that it’ll probably still be Number One. It’s a no-fooling, honest-to-gosh SF anthology, of the sort that have become rare in recent years, with no admixture of fantasy or slipstream, a treat for unreconstructed old fans like me who occasionally get grumpy about trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to find the science fiction stories in a “science fiction anthology.” No such problem here—although there are various sorts of SF here, from hard to soft, near-future to far future, everything can make a legitimate claim for being actual core science fiction.

With so much good stuff, it’s hard to pick favorites, but I’d say that, for my money, the two best stories here, both award-contender level, are David Moles’s “A Soldier of the City,” featuring a war between spacefaring civilizations in a future where humans serve literal gods, whom they love and worship, and which comes across a bit like an updated version of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and Stephen Baxter’s “The Invasion of Venus,” in which humans are bystanders to an immense cosmic battle between forces that ignore them completely. Also excellent, though, are Gwyneth Jones’s “The Ki-anna,” an intricate game of political and racial intrigue set against the background of her complex “Buonarotti” future, Hannu Rajaniemi’s “The Server and the Dragon,” about the birth and subsequent growth of a godlike intelligence, Karl Schroeder’s “Laika’s Ghost,” a sequel to his earlier “The Dragon of Pripyat,” set in a desolate future Russia haunted by ghosts of the Soviet past, and Peter Watts’s “Malak (or, It’s Not Easy Being Green),” which chronicles the slow growth of something like a conscience in a deadly semi-sentient war machine, with disturbing results. There’s really nothing bad here, though, and the anthology also features strong stories by Charles Stross, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamarr, Robert Reed, John C. Wright, Gregory Benford, and John Barnes, many of which would have been the best story in a lesser anthology.

So, all you anthologists out there, so far this is the one to beat if you want to claim the title of best SF anthology of 2011.

A strong March issue of Asimov’s has three award-contender quality stories that I wouldn’t be surprised to see on next year’s ballots. Robert Reed’s “Purple” tells the poignant story of an abused and mutilated boy who is taken to what amounts to an animal shelter for mistreated humans, run by invisible godlike aliens, and follows him in his struggle to somehow get back home to a life on Earth, in spite of the odds against him. John Kessel’s “Clean” introduces us to a troubled family who face the bitter choice of saving one of their own from a life-threatening disease by the expedient of wiping out his memories of them, a story related to Kessel’s earlier “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,” which predates the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in its postulation of memory-altering technology (technology which we seem to be on the brink of actually developing, by the way). New writer Nancy Fulda’s “Movement” echoes Kessel’s story in some ways, in a thoughtful and sensitively written exploration of the question of just how much you should be willing to give up in order to lead “a normal life.”

Nothing else in the March issue quite reaches this level of quality, but there’s some good stuff. New writer An Owomoyela shows us how human society could be deeply shaken, in different ways, by the appearance of an unexplainable phenomenon, in “God in the Sky.” Veteran writer Neal Barrett, Jr. gives us a robust and funny look at a really strange future (?) world in “Where,” a story that’s like the kind of dream whose dream-logic you understand while you’re dreaming it, but which makes little sense when you awake. In ““I Was Nearly Your Mother,”“ Ian Creasey tells an overlong story of a young girl being visited by a variant of her dead mother from another reality, a story that might have been more effective if the girl, who’s obviously supposed to be a sympathetic figure, wasn’t so petulant, self-pitying, and annoying, new writer Steve Bein spins an unlikely and overcomplicated story about a man who finds a device that enables him to freeze time, and who eventually learns the lesson we were expecting him to learn from the beginning, in “The Most Important Thing in the World,” and Nick Wolven gives us a fast-paced cyberpunk take on memory-altering, clearly the issue’s theme, in “Lost in the Memory Palace, I Found You.”

There’s more SF than usual in the March/April issue of F&SF, including a long novella in the long-running “lingster” series, “The Evening and the Morning,” by Sheila Finch—Finch has been writing lingster stories for more than twenty years now, and this one, taking place in the far future, could in some ways be considered the capstone of the series—and a satirical, Philip K. Dick-ish look at identity theft taken to an extreme, “A Pocketful of Faces,” by Paul Di Filippo, which demonstrates that there’s no new technology that won’t quickly generate its own crop of fetishists and perverts. The best SF story here, though, and, in fact, the strongest story of any sort in the whole issue, is Karl Bunker’s “Bodyguard.” Bunker made a bit of a splash with his story “Under the Shouting Sky” last year, winning the first Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story contest, and “Bodyguard” reconfirms the impression that he’s a writer to watch, taking a traditional SF theme, a Terran ambassador struggling to deal with alien customs on another world, and treating it with subtlety, compassion, and a good deal of emotional depth.

The rest of the stories in the March/April issue are all fantasy of one sort or another. The best of them is probably new writer Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie,” one of several very well-written stories that Liu has published in the last couple of years that deal sensitively with the clash of Chinese and Western culture, and especially the difficulties faced by Chinese immigrants in adapting to American life; like them, “The Paper Menagerie” has a minimal fantastic element, and could easily have been published as a mainstream story with the stuff about the living origami animals omitted by a few surgical cuts.

Prolific F&SF regular Albert E. Cowdrey returns with “Scatter My Ashes.” Cowdrey seems to be trying to move beyond his more usual funny supernatural fantasy stories of late, and this story about a family cursed and blighted by a terrible secret is somber if not particularly grim, but you can sense the more lighthearted Cowdrey bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to break out, and indeed, the story abruptly swerves away from the tragic ending it was obviously building toward and ends up with a much more upbeat, sunnier one instead, with everything working out well for the two main characters (who may or may not deserve it). In some ways, James Patrick Kelly’s “Happy Ending” is the inverse of the Cowdrey—the protagonist ends up in a situation that ought to be a Bradburyian wish-fulfillment, getting a chance to start over with his wife, who has magically been made young again, but the ending comes across as faintly sinister instead, and the story registers in the “creepy New England fantasy” category instead of the “hopeful or life-affirming” category (quite a deliberate choice on Kelly’s part, I’m sure). New writer Kali Wallace delivers an absorbing but enigmatic slipstream story with a suggested but not made explicit SF element, “Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls,” James Stoddard delivers a fantasy, “The Ifs of Time,” which contains a nested sequence of other stories, there’s a rather distasteful Arabian Nights-like story in which several women are tortured and mutilated, “The Second Kalandar’s Tale,” by Francis Marion Soty, and a round-robin horror story, “Night Gauntlet,” by too many writers to individually mention.

Ken Liu also shows up in a strong January issue of the online magazine Clarkesworld, with another good story, “Tying Knots.” Liu pushes the boundaries of his usual envelope a bit with this one, which is primarily narrated, in an effective and authentic-sounding voice, by the Headman of a tiny isolated village high in the mountains of Myanmar, to which a well-meaning American scientist comes, offering a hand of friendship that unfortunately conceals a hidden hook. The speculative element here, deriving algorithms for protein-folding from the millennia-old knot-writing of the village people, is stronger than usual for Liu, although the technology trap that Headman Soe-bo unwittingly leads his people into is one that’s being sprung for real all over the world at the moment. Oragami, the subtheme of Liu’s story in the March/April F&SF, also shows up in this issue of Clarkesworld, in Yoon Ha Lee’s wild and exotic space opera (with an appropriately operatic revenge plot), “Ghostweight,” although in Lee’s hands, origami becomes a weapon and even a form of transportation. Lee’s paper spaceships may seem a bit unlikely if you stop to think about them, but Lee doesn’t give you that luxury, and the deadly origami war-kite becomes one of the story’s most vivid characters, along with the ruthless and predatory “ghost” who whispers in the protagonist’s ear throughout.

The February issue of Clarkesworld is nowhere near as strong as January. The lead story, “Diving at the Moon,” by Rachel Swirsky, is an uneasy mixture of fabulation and science fiction, neither of which really work in their conjoined context, and “Three Oranges,” by new writer D. Elizabeth Wasden, is a grim and rather violent fantasy set in the days of Stalinist Russia. Since this is the first issue to appear after editor Sean Wallace stepped down, I hope this doesn’t represent the direction in which Clarkesworld is going to go in the future—there’s plenty of slipstream to be found, all over the internet, but good science fiction is much rarer and harder to find.

The year opens for Interzone with a rather weak issue, Interzone 232, the January-February issue. The best story here is “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise,” by new writer Sue Burke, a story about a young woman being manipulated, ostensibly for her own good, by her guardian AI program. Like Cowdrey’s F&SF story, this story seems to be building toward a sinister ending, or at least a warning about well-meaning AIs determining what’s best for us, but takes a sudden swerve into a sunny ending (rare for Interzone) where it turns out that the meddling AI was right after all and everything turns out for the best and everyone, humans and machines, are all the best of friends by the end. There’s a rather unlikely fantasy, “Plucking Her Petals,” by Sarah L. Edwards, based on the dubious proposition that beauty is a physical property that can be drained from someone, like blood, a satirical time-paradox tangle, “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box,” by Douglas Lain, a post-cyberpunk caper by Michael R. Fletcher, “Intellectual Property,” and a first sale, the 2010 James White Award winner, “Flock, Shoal, Herd,” by James Bloomer, about a man seeking to reunite with his bizarrely transformed lover.