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Subterranean, Winter 2011.

Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change, Gordon van Gelder, ed. (OR Books, 348 pages).

Lightspeed, 1/11-3/11.

Brave New Worlds, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-221-5. $15.99, 496 pages). Cover art by Cody Tilson.

 

The Winter 2011 issue of online magazine Subterranean is a strong one. There are a number of very good stories here, but my favorite may be “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” by K.J. Parker, who was very impressive at short lengths last year with stories such as “Amor Vincit Omnia” and “A Rich Full Week.” This one comes across as a subtler and ultimately more cruel version of Amadeus, as two competing musicians work through a complicated relationship of envy, ambition, admiration, and betrayal, with a dash of murder thrown in. I suppose you’d have to call it a fantasy, as it takes place in a totally created imaginary society, although there’s no magic or any supernatural element to be found—whatever it is, the cheeky but ruefully honest voice of the protagonist, a man all too aware of his faults but actually rather comfortable with them, makes this a fun story to read. Also first-rate is “A Long Walk Home,” by Jay Lake, an effective and ultimately rather harrowing story about an immortal who comes up to the surface from exploring an underground cave to find himself the only one left alive on a once-bustling colony planet (the rest of the population isn’t dead, the buildings aren’t destroyed, everybody is just gone, in a scenario reminiscent of the TV show Life After People), and who spends the next several hundred years alone, trying to figure out what happened. Since he never really succeeds, the story shouldn’t be satisfying, but once again that all-important element of a story, the voice—here it’s calm, methodical, rational, gradually growing more ragged as time goes by—somehow makes it all work.

The Winter issue also contains a major new Majipoor novella by Robert Silverberg, “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn.” Nothing much actually happens here in terms of plot, except that two rival academics disagree over how to explore (and ultimately exploit) a newly discovered tomb of vast antiquity, but Silverberg’s lifelong love of archeology comes across clearly and strongly, and he manages to make the opening of the Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn as exciting and significant as the opening of King Tut’s Tomb, so that we really care about exploring it (no mean feat, since, of course, there never was a Pontifex Dvorn in the first place). In “The Melusine (1898),” Caitlin R. Kiernan gives us a steampunk version of one of Ray Bradbury’s sinister travelling carnivals, as Othiniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels show comes to a small town, carried by mechanical prairie schooners and preceded by a clanking, rattling herd of “automaton mastodonts.” Sadly, after all this build-up, nothing of any real significance happens thereafter, except that a lonely but extremely intelligent girl sees through a rather unlikely scheme intended to defraud her (for no easily discernable purpose), which collapses all in an instant, as if the author was worried about running out of space. There’s an entertaining but essentially minor addition to the long-running Draco’s Tavern series by Larry Niven, “The Artists,” about the unexpected consequences of an interstellar art exhibition sponsored by the alien Chirpsithra. And Marc Laidlaw tells us of the bitter outcome of a boy’s fascination with the work of H.P. Lovecraft in “The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft,” basically a straight mainstream story except for the associational value of having Lovecraft in it, and one which may or may not be fair to Lovecraft, who certainly held similar views at one point, but who seems to have mellowed a bit toward the end of his life. There’s also a podcast by Elizabeth Bear of a fantasy story in her New Amsterdam series, “The Tricks of London.”

Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change, an original anthology edited by Gordon Van Gelder, is full of good solid work, but nothing really outstanding. Since stories set in an ecologically devastated future have become the most common settings for dystopias over the last ten years or so, there’s mostly nothing here that you haven’t seen before, although a few authors like Matthew Hughes find a way to play it for laughs, and a few premises, such as the Messiah in Jeff Carlson’s story who can make the Earth revolve any way he wants to at any speed or Michael Alexander’s vision of curing climate change by sending bad weather to the past, seem a bit too silly to be taken seriously as part of a dialogue about climate change; Alan Dean Foster’s extermination crew who battle giant insects teeters on the verge of coming across as silly too, although at least he offers a scientific rationale—rising oxygen levels, returning the planet’s atmosphere to the way it was in the Carboniferous Era—for the insect gigantism. The best story here is probably Bruce Sterling’s “The Master of the Aviary,” about intense political in-fighting and intrigue in an embattled future society thousands of years after ecological disaster has caused the collapse of our own now only partially remembered civilization. Gregory Benford gives us a tense thriller about ecological sabotage in “Eagle,” although, interestingly, what the terrorists are trying to sabotage is an attempt to apply a technological fix to some of our problems (on the theory that things hadn’t gotten bad enough yet to bring about a really widespread change of attitude, so any attempt to make conditions better should be violently opposed); Benford paints a fairly complex and sympathetic portrait of the chief ecological saboteur, although it’s pretty clear on which side the author’s own sympathies lie. Judith Moffett’s “The Middle of Somewhere” is a very well-crafted and sensitively characterized look at an older woman and an impressionable young girl surviving through a tornado in a storm shelter and coming to have a mutual respect for each other as a result, but except for an almost subliminal message on a radio in the background about how there’s more tornadoes these days, it really doesn’t have a fantastic element—it could be happening right now, in almost any state in the country. Joseph Green diminishes an otherwise interesting study of people struggling to deal with rising sea-levels in Florida, in “Turtle Love,” by throwing an unnecessary gun-waving religious fanatic into the mix. M.J. Locke’s “True North” is about a survivalist who reluctantly becomes involved with a group of refugees, mostly children, after an ecological catastrophe, and ends up taking charge of them; it’s pretty entertaining, although it begins to feel a bit like an episode of The A-Team towards its improbable guns-blazing action climax. Pat MacEwen’s “The California Queen Comes A-Calling” is another recovery-after-an-environmental-disaster story, less fast-paced than the Locke, with a paddlewheeler full of lawyers bringing The Law back to drowned California communities.

The most depressing stories here are also among the best, including Brian W. Aldiss’s “Benkoelen,” George Guthridge’s “The Bridge,” and Chris Lawson’s “Sundown.”  The Guthridge manages to be even bleaker and more hopeless than the Aldiss, something that’s hard to do with Aldiss when he’s in his bleak and hopeless mode. Chris Lawson wins the prize for coming up with the most unusual environmental catastrophe here, although, unlike almost every other one in the book, it’s not caused by humanity—an unexplained precipitous drop in the solar constant that within hours plunges the Earth into a deep-freeze worse than any Ice Age. A few people survive in Hawaii, kept warm by geothermal energy from the volcanoes, and by the end they’re looking for other survivors elsewhere (although nobody thinks of looking in Iceland, which already largely runs on geothermal energy, and where you’d think a respectable number of people would make it through). The most optimistic story here that takes the theme seriously is Paul Di Filippo’s “Farmearth,” where technological society has survived and even made considerable progress in spite of ongoing environmental problems; the plot involves a naïve young boy getting unwittingly involved in a conspiracy by eco-terrorists to initiate a risky technological fix for Global Warming—the Pinaubo Option, setting off a supervolcano to pump cooling ash into the atmosphere (ironically, in the Benford, the eco-terrorists are trying to prevent a technological fix, rather than implement one).

The new online magazine Lightspeed had a good year last year, and so far they’re shaping up to have a good year in 2011 as well. The best story there so far is Robert Reed’s “Woman Leaves Room,” from the March issue, a poignant story about a computer simulation who only slowly becomes aware that he is a simulation; it reminds me a bit of David Marusek’s well-known “The Wedding Album,” but has an intriguing voice of its own. Simulations also feature centrally in Ken Liu’s “Simulacrum,” from the February issue, which revolves around what amounts to a complicated, thorny three-way relationship between a father, the simulacrum of his young daughter that he’s created, and the daughter herself, now grown into a young woman who’s jealous and resentful of the frozen-in-time simulation of her younger self. This is another emotionally powerful story—Lightspeed doesn’t seem afraid of such stories; in fact, most of its stories seem to have a high emotional content and complicated relationships among the main characters—although it’s soured a little by the grown daughter’s stubborn refusal to reconcile at all with her father over the father’s past “infidelity” (sex with other simulacrums), even though her mother has gotten past it years before. Another complicated and thorny three-pronged relationship is at the heart of Cat Rambo’s “Long Enough and Just So Long,” from the February issue, in which two female space colony-dwellers become embroiled a triangle with a newly emancipated AI who had been constructed to be a sexbot, both women misunderstanding the relationship—and the AI—in different ways. The January issue is a bit weaker, but does feature Tanith Lee’s “Black Fire,” a Rashomon-like vision of a Close Encounter where an alien visitor takes hundreds of human women as lovers in the same night, each woman telling slightly different stories about the experience. The three issues also feature strong reprints such as “Gossamer,” by Stephen Baxter, “Cucumber Gravy,” by Susan Palwick, “Breakaway, Backdown,” by James Patrick Kelly, and “Spider the Artist,” by Nnedi Okorafor.

Nobody should really complain about the sameness of emotional tone in the stories in Brave New Worlds, a reprint anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, since it says right on the cover that it’s an anthology of dystopian stories, and, well, you ought to know enough to realize going in that dystopian stories are usually pretty depressing. And so they prove to be, although some of them are also pretty powerful. Best of the reprint stories here include “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, “Dead Space for the Unexpected,” by Geoff Ryman, “The Funeral,” by Kate Wilhelm, “The Lunatics,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, “Peter Skilling,” by Alex Irvine, “The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away,” by Cory Doctorow, and ““Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman,” by Harlan Ellison, but there are also twenty-six other good stories here, making up into a rather strong anthology. Don’t try to read it all in one sitting, though, unless you want to get really bummed out!