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Life on Mars, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Viking, 336 pages).

Asimov’s, April/May

Angel of Europa, by Allen Steele. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-412-6, $35.00, 96 pages). Cover art by Ron Miller.

 

Life on Mars, edited by the indefatigable Jonathan Strahan, is another excellent all-science-fiction original anthology (something hard to find these days, when most “SF anthologies” have at least equal amounts of slipstream and fantasy mixed in), like his Engineering Infinity from earlier in the year. It’s not quite as strong as Engineering Infinity; the fact that it’s a YA anthology about the colonization of Mars produces a certain similarity of tone from story to story, especially as almost all of the protagonists are young teens or preteens (there are three stories here, for instance, about disaffected young teens running away from home, with perilous consequences resulting), but don’t let the fact that it’s a YA anthology put you off—there is plenty of grappling with serious, mature themes here, and a good deal of grit. You might want to read the stories one at a time, rather than swallow the book all in a gulp—always good advice with anthologies anyway.

It becomes clear early on here that this is not your father’s Mars. These are not stories set on the nostalgic Old Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and other pulp writers, the Mars of miles-long canals, dead sea bottoms, and dying alien civilizations first dreamed into being by Perceval Lowell. This is the Mars discovered by the Mariner mission and subsequent space probes: dry, cold, imitable, with barely any air, pocked with craters and creased by immense gullies and ravines, some of them thousands of miles long, constantly raked by howling winds that lash blinding sand-storms into existence—and the authors do a very credible job, with only a minimum of handwaving about technological capabilities we don’t quite have yet, of showing how colonists could adapt to and survive, even thrive, under those conditions. One interesting note is that several of the stories feature the playing of MMORPGs or Dungeons & Dragons-like role-playing games on Mars as an important plot-element (most prominently in Cory Doctorow’s story “Martian Chronicles”, to which the idea is central), which certainly wouldn’t have been true of Mars colonization stories written twenty years ago. Another story—Ellen Klages’s “Goodnight Moons”—features a member of the first Mars expedition unexpectedly discovering in route that she’s pregnant, something you probably wouldn’t have seen back then either.

The best story here is probably Ian McDonald’s “Digging,” concerning a really massive terraforming effort that has stretched over generations; the project itself, which involves digging a really big hole in the crust of Mars, may seem a bit unlikely, but McDonald does such an evocative job of describing what it would be like to live in a society devoted to such an immense task, particularly from the perspective of a young person who has grown up in it and knows no other kind of life. Also first-rate is the late Kage Baker’s “Attlee and the Long Walk,” set on a Mars that’s somehow still evocative in spite of—or maybe because of—how seedy and run-down and marginalized the human presence there is, the most ingenious of the troubled-young-person-running-away-from-home stories, which succeeds because it narrows the focus to the fears inside the young protagonist’s head—she’s never really in much physical danger, although the story, seen through her eyes, is haunted by menace and terror at every step. Fortunately, she’s tough, resourceful, and smart, as most of Baker’s heroines are, and as I suspect she herself was. Alastair Reynolds’s “The Old Man and the Martian Sea” also features a young girl who runs away from home, although she survives not so much by her own efforts as by a series of fortunate happenstances; an absorbing story anyway, though. Several of the stories here, including the McDonald and the Baker, feature a plot-element about young people stranded out in the wilderness of Mars having to struggle to survive on their wits and ingenuity until they can be rescued or rescue themselves, something that you probably would have seen in a Mars colonization anthology from twenty years ago; this traditional theme is best handled by Stephen Baxter in “On Chryse Plain,” and by John Barnes in “Martian Heart,” who also throws in an affecting element of doomed love. The most complex characters in the anthology, and the most interesting psychological motivations, are to be found in Nancy Kress’s “First Principle,” which also does a good job of examining how the philosophical mind-set of Martian colonists would of necessity have to evolve to be different from that of Terran societies, if the colony was going to have any chance of surviving.

There’s nothing really bad here, though, and the anthology also features strong stories by Nnedi Okorafor, Chris Roberson, and Rachel Swirsky, as well as a reprint by Kim Stanley Robinson. Another solid success for Strahan, who’s having a really good year so far.

The April/May Double Issue of Asimov’s features less science fiction and more slipstream/fantasy than usual for Asimov’s, but there are still some strong stories, of both types. The best story here, bursting with new ideas, is by veteran author Tom Purdom, who was writing stories years (if not decades) before most of the other contributors to the issue were even born; in his “A Response from EST17,” Purdom takes a look at a First Contact scenario, mostly from the perspective of the aliens being contacted, as two competing probes from Earth enter into a complicated series of negotiations with the natives as to whom they’re ultimately going to be in contact with, eventually progressing into open warfare between both Terran camps; there’s a lot at stake here, including possibly the future survival of both the alien and the Terran civilization, and Purdom ratchets up the tension nicely in spite of a minimum of physical action, mostly involving insect-sized robots. Also first-rate is Michael Swanwick’s “An Empty House with Many Doors,” which features a bereft widower grasping desperately at another chance at happiness, thanks to the Many Worlds theory. Mike Resnick’s “The Homecoming” is an affecting story of the prickly relationship between a father and his genetically transformed son as they circle each other in a painful attempt at reconciliation; essentially the same story could have been told with a conservative father and a gay son, but it works fine as science fiction as well, especially as the gulf between father and son is even deeper here than it would have been in the other scenario. Kristine Kathryn Rusch gives us another SF/mystery cross in “Becalmed,” about a woman who must reclaim her memories of traumatic events on a planet’s surface before she can rescue her ship from being “becalmed” in hyperspace; Rusch does her usual workmanlike job here, although the protagonist’s amnesia is a bit too conveniently specific in spots, and the process of her recovering it takes a bit too long. Another crippled spaceship features in Jack Skillingstead’s bleak “The Flow and Dream,” where the guardian of a colony ship must pass the torch on to a younger crew member—seemingly to no real purpose, since the colonization effort has failed, and they’re all doomed anyway.

Alexander Jablokov gives us what I suppose could be characterized as a steampunk story in “The Day the Wires Came Down”, although there are no zeppelins or clanking steam-driven automatons in evidence, but rather a somewhat Victorian-feeling cable-car system that stretches in an intricate network from rooftop to rooftop across an unnamed city, and which is about to be decommissioned and dismantled. The human story here is a tissue of unlikely coincidences, and actually rather uninteresting, but the rooftop cable-car system is fascinating, and described with convincing detail; it seems such an integral part of the life of the city, though, that I wondered throughout what they were going to replace it with, about which Jablokov says nothing. William Preston’s “Clockworks” is a follow-up of sorts to his earlier “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” also featuring an unnamed crime-fighting pulp hero who is clearly supposed to be Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze; this one is also very well-crafted, but it lacks the autumnal, regretful air that distinguished the earlier story, being pretty much a straightforward adventure of The Hero—although made a bit different by being told from the perspective of the villain (or the former villain, anyway, since, rather distastefully, he’s been “reformed” by kidnapping him and performing brain surgery on him, conveniently giving him amnesia, as in the Rusch story, for long stretches of the plot, as he seeks to help thwart his own now-forgotten Master Plan). Christopher Barzak gives us an elegant slipstream take on the Persephone legend in “Smoke City,” about a woman who lives two separate lives, with two separate families, one in the world above and one in an infernal city Below, where a night can seem to take years to pass. Esther M. Friesner involves a hardheaded King Kong survivor with a group of C’thulhu worshippers to comic effect in “The One That Got Away.” Rudy Rucker indulges in his usual freewheeling cosmic japery in “The Fnoor Hen,” and Nick Mamatas tells an interesting story in what is perhaps an unnecessarily complex way in “North Shore Friday.”

Angel of Europa is a chapbook novella by Hugo-winning author Allen Steele. It would seem to fit into his Near-Space series, taking place during one of the first expeditions to the moons of Jupiter, and specifically to Europa, where the explorers drill a hole through the thick crust of ice and lower a bathyscaphe into the unknown global ocean below. This is an SF/mystery cross, the bulk of the text devoted to determining whether the subsequent destruction of the bathyscaphe was due to an attack by a mysterious alien creature or was premeditated murder on the part of one of the crew-members. Somewhat unusually, the protagonist and chief investigator is killed on the first page of the book, but eventually perseveres to carry out his investigation anyway. There’ll be no real surprises here for the experienced genre reader (especially as Steele tips his hand with a literary reference early on), but it’s a fast-paced and suspenseful story, solid core science fiction entertainment.